This book in many respects seems to have been written with
Hollywood already in mind. It is vivid, action-packed, and the episodes often
almost beg to be filmed as scenes.
All the characters are carefully drawn and differ
convincingly and memorably from one another. In particular, Pompey is the
larger-than-life type, so that reading his “scenes” one can feel him as almost
physically present. The episode of the pirates – the sudden menace that made it
“necessary” to grant Pompey extra powers to deal with them, which he then did
with literally incredible rapidity – was strongly reminiscent of Tony Blair and
Saddam Hussein’s WMDs in 2003.
Robert Harris has clearly done a lot of research. He refers
to this briefly at the end of this book, and in more detail at the end of the
third book in the series, Dictator.
His chosen approach is to present, and to some extent fictionalise, Cicero’s
life and the events that ended the Roman Republic, as a modern-day political
thriller. The book is easy and compelling reading. This means that people who
have no idea about and perhaps minimal interest in history as a subject
(including some of us, who weren’t sure whether the book was set in the fifth
century BC, fifth century AD, or somewhere in between), can read about it and acquire
a fair picture of what went on.
This approach, of course, has its problems. Anachronisms are
not altogether absent: references to a “drawing-room”, and others.
There is also the risk of being carried away by enjoyment of
the story and suspending critical judgement.
Another problem is that some of the episodes that Harris
does invent are totally unbelievable from start to finish – especially where he
has Tiro (Cicero’s private secretary) taking copious notes of a top-secret
meeting of Cicero’s enemies while hiding in a hole behind a tapestry.
The choice of Tiro as first-person narrator seemed in some
ways rather laboured, in that it involves inventing more or less likely reasons
why he was present at all the episodes he describes, and how it is that he
remembers them or has all his notes of them. N.B. notes were normally made by
scratching on wax tablets – not a method that really lent itself to extensive
long-term preservation, particularly not through the various exiles and escapes
that Tiro experienced in his life.
There are some wonderful quotations. “If it’s gratitude you
want, get a dog.” “The ability to listen to bores requires stamina…” “Gossip is
a trade…” “There can never have been anyone quite so worldly in their pursuit
of unworldliness as Titus Pomponius Atticus.” “Since when has idiocy been a bar
to advancement in politics?” “The trouble with Lucius is that he thinks
politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.”
What the book brings home is the sheer
brutality of the ancient world, which it is not, unfortunately, impossible to
parallel in today’s world. Worst of all of these, in many ways, was Verres’
hideous underground prison in Sicily. All of Verres’ crimes as discovered and
detailed by Cicero are fact.
