Robert Harris - Lustrum

Cicero therefore decided not to raise his voice against Clodius's bills, and for one last brief moment – like the final flare of a guttering candle – he enjoyed something of his old popularity. He told Quadratus to do nothing, refused himself to condemn Clodius's plans, and was cheered in the street when he announced that he would not challenge the proposed laws. On the first day of January, when the senate met under the new consuls, he was awarded third place in the order of speaking after Pompey and Crassus – a signal honour. And when the presiding consul, Caesar's father-in-law, Calpurnius Piso, called on him to give his opinions, he used the occasion to make one of his great appeals for unity and reconciliation. 'I shall not oppose, or obstruct, or seek to frustrate,' he said, 'the laws that have been placed before us by our colleague Clodius, and I pray that out of difficult times, a new concord between senate and people may be forged.'

These words were met with a great ovation, and when the time came for Clodius to respond, he made an equally fulsome reply. 'It is not so long ago that Marcus Cicero and I enjoyed the friendliest of relations,' he said, with tears of sincere emotion in his eyes. 'I believe that mischief was made between us by a certain person close to him' – this was generally taken as a reference to Terentia's rumoured jealousy of Clodia – 'and I applaud his statesmanlike attitude to the people's just demands.'

Two days later, when Clodius's bills became law, the hills and valleys of Rome echoed with excitement as the neighbourhood clubs met to celebrate their restoration. It was not a spontaneous demonstration, but carefully organised by Clodius's man of affairs, a scribe named Cloelius. Poor men, freedmen and slaves alike chased pigs through the streets and sacrificed them without any priests to supervise the rites, then roasted the meat on the street corners. They did not stop their revels as night fell, but lit torches and braziers and continued to sing and dance. (It was unseasonably warm, and that always swells a crowd.) They drank until they vomited. They fornicated in the alleyways. They formed gangs and fought one another till blood ran in the gutters. In the smarter neighbourhoods, especially on the Palatine, the well-to-do cowered in their houses and waited for these Dionysian convulsions to pass. Cicero watched from his terrace, and I could see he was already wondering if he had made a mistake. But when Quadratus came to him and asked if he should gather some of the other magistrates from around the city and try to disperse the crowds, he replied that it was too late – the water was well and truly boiling now, and the lid would no longer fit back on the cooking pot.

Around midnight the racket began to subside. The streets became quiet, apart from some loud snoring in odd parts of the forum, which rose from the darkness like the noise of bullfrogs in a swamp. I went gratefully to my bed. But an hour or two later, something woke me. The sound was very distant, and in the daytime one would never have paid it any attention: it was only the hour and the surrounding silence that made it ominous. It was the noise of hammers being swung against brick.

I took a lamp and climbed the steps to the ground floor, unlocked the back door and went out on to the terrace. The city was still very dark, the air mild. I could see nothing. But the noise, which was coming from the eastern end of the forum, was more distinct outside, and when I listened hard I could pick out individual hammers being wielded – sometimes isolated, more often falling in a kind of peal, metal on stone, that rang out across the sleeping city. It was so continuous, I reckoned there must be at least a dozen teams labouring away. Occasionally there were shouts, and suddenly the sound of rubble being tipped. That was when I realised this was not building work I was hearing; it was demolition.

Cicero rose soon after dawn, as was his habit, and as usual I went to him in his library to see if he needed anything. 'Did you hear that hammering noise in the night?' he asked me. I replied that I had. He cocked his head, listening. 'Yet now it's silent. I wonder what mischief has been happening. Let's go down and see what the rogues have been up to.'

It was too early even for Cicero's clients to have begun assembling, and the street was empty. We went down to the forum accompanied by one of his burly attendants, and at first all seemed normal, apart from the heaps of rubbish left after the previous night's carousing, and the odd body sprawled in a drunken stupor. But as we approached the Temple of Castor, Cicero stopped and cried out in horror. It had been quite hideously disfigured. The steps leading up to the pillared facade had been taken down, so that anyone wishing to enter the building was now confronted by a ragged wall, twice the height of a man. The rubble had been formed into a parapet, and the only access to the temple was via a couple of ladders, each of which was guarded by men with sledgehammers. The newly exposed red brickwork was ugly and raw and naked, like an amputation. Various large placards were nailed to it. One read: 'P. CLODIUS PROMISES THE PEOPLE FREE BREAD.' A second proclaimed: 'DEATH TO THE ENEMIES OF THE ROMAN PEOPLE.' A third said: 'BREAD amp; LIBERTY.' There were other more detailed notices posted lower down at eye level that looked from a distance to be draft bills, and three or four dozen citizens were milling around reading them. Up above their heads on the podium of the temple was a line of men, motionless, like figures in a frieze. As we came closer, I recognised various of Clodius's lieutenants – Cloelius, Patina, Scato, Pola Servius: a lot of the rogues who had run with Catilina back in the old times. Further along I glimpsed Mark Antony and Caelius Rufus, and then Clodius himself.

'This is a monstrosity,' said Cicero, shaking with anger, 'a sacrilege, an outrage…'

Suddenly I realised that if we could see the men who had done this, they most assuredly could see us. I touched Cicero on the arm. 'Why don't you wait here, Senator,' I suggested, 'and let me go and see what those bills say? It might be unwise for you to stray too close. They are a rough-looking lot.'

I made my way quickly across to the wall, beneath the gaze of Clodius and his associates. On either side, men with heavily tattooed arms and close-cropped heads leaned on their sledgehammers and stared at me belligerently. I quickly scanned the notices on the wall. As I guessed, they were new bills, a pair of them in fact. One was concerned with the allocation of consular provinces for the following year, and awarded Macedonia to Calpurnius Piso, and Syria (I think it was) to Aulus Gabinius. The other bill was very short, no more than a line: 'It shall be a capital offence to offer fire and water to any person who has put Roman citizens to death without a trial.'

I stared at it stupidly, not grasping its significance at first. That it was directed against Cicero was obvious enough. But it did not name him. It seemed more designed to frighten and harass his supporters than to threaten him directly. But then, like a great turning inside-out of my heart, I saw the devilish cunning in it, and felt the gorge rise into my mouth, so that I had to swallow the bitter taste to stop myself from vomiting. I stepped back from that wall as if the jaws of Hades had opened before me, and I kept stumbling backwards, unable to take my eyes from the words, increasing the distance and willing them to disappear. When I glanced up, I saw Clodius very plainly looking down at me, a smile on his face, enjoying every moment, and then I turned and hurried back to Cicero.

He saw at once in my expression that it was bad. 'Well?' he said anxiously. 'What is it?'

'Clodius has published a bill about Catilina.'

'Aimed at me?'