Imperium by Robert Harris

Imperium by Robert Harris, 2006, 2009

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.