The Grandeur That Was Rome

As is well known good books and good friends go well together, and one of my oldest friends recently put me onto some really good books.  The old friend is a Sewanee classmate from the class of 1958—meaning a friend of more than six decades.  Not everyone likes to see his name even in distinguished public places, but I can with semi-discretion identify him as Maurice and tell you that, like me, he spent a long career as a professor of literature.  He is a highly cultivated and well-read man.  The books are a set of historical novels by the English writer Robert Harris.  Harris’s titles have sold millions and received just and widespread praise, but I had never heard of him.  Too deeply immersed in medieval arcana, no doubt.  His fiction has an extraordinary range, but a favorite subject is ancient Rome.  After a somewhat febrile start in which I began in scattershot fashion reading episodically in four or five of his books, I’ve settled into a reasonably logical plan: working through Imperium, the first volume of a trilogy devoted to an imaginary biography of the Roman politician and writer Cicero.  Harris’s brilliant idea is to present the book as the biography written by Tiro, one of the roughly fifty slaves in Cicero’s household.  It is a known fact that this man became Cicero’s tutor, friend, and amanuensis; but there is still a lot for Harris to imagine and exploit.

 Marcus Tullius Cicero

            Imperium in its broad Latin sense means “the supreme administrative power, in Rome exercised by…certain magistrates and provincial governors.”  Cicero was aiming for the consulship, and he got there.  The first section of Imperium deals with the historical incident that really put him on the Roman political map—his prosecution of Gaius Verres, the governor of Sicily.  Our current crop of “tough prosecutors” running for the Presidency might learn a trick or two here.  Then again our contemporary corrupt politicians, even in some of the more sensational kleptocracies of Africa, are pikers when compared with the more accomplished despots of Antiquity.  Verres was cruel and ruthless.  He was a thief, a liar, an extortionist, and a mass murderer.  Lecherous as a goat, he simply took any woman he wanted.  He was a connoisseur of fine art, which he plundered shamelessly both from private individuals and from temples and civic buildings.  Nor were all of this man’s evil deeds primarily of a private nature.  Sicily was the breadbasket of proletarian Rome.  Through his avarice he managed to reduce wheat shipments from the island roughly by half.  Yet since he was liberal in dispensing bribes from his vast fortune, and since most of the noble Romans were all too bribable, Cicero looked forward to no slam-dunk.  He triumphed on the basis of an amazingly thorough criminal investigation, brilliant courtroom strategy, and his usual unmatched speaking ability.  I should also mention his eye for the main chance.  We are not dealing with Atticus Finch here.

            Harris’s gripping presentation of this trial emboldened me to do something rash.  I actually went to my bookshelves, where I have a pretty complete set of the Mondadori edition of Cicero’s short individual works, and have been reading around in the fifth book of second part of Cicero’s address as supposedly prepared for his flaky jurors.  Yes, in major Roman trials, the prosecutor usually had an opening statement a few days long followed by the real stuff, which could take rather longer.   Those parts were called the first and second actiones.  Verres indeed hoped to run out the clock and get a new judge, but Cicero outsmarted him.  Ordinarily you don’t simply pick up a forensic gem by Cicero and start reading it as though it were a true crime novel, but I almost felt I could do so after reading Imperium.

            I also felt I needed a broader context, and for that I turned to the relevant volume of my English translation of Theodor Mommsen’s classic History of Rome.  I try to forgive myself for failing to keep up with current books on the basis of having read some very good old ones.  Mommsen was an extraordinary scholar and a great writer, one of very few non-fiction writers to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1902).  The translator of my edition, William Dickson, was a Presbyterian divine, classicist and librarian with the sonorous English chops of Mommsen himself.

Mommsen loved his subject, and he knew, as all good historians do, that the past must first be judged by the standards of its own creation.  Indeed, a proper and objective understanding of those standards is among the historian’s most difficult tasks.  But the cruelty of the ancient world was hardly less notable than its grandeur.  It was necessary for the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to foster a fantasy of the ancient Roman state, which was built actually upon the grossest forms of oppression and slavery.  The word “republic” has for us a noble ring, but it has generally proved a grotesquely hollow one from Cicero to Nicolae Ceaușescu.  Harris the novelist gets inside this system, neither masking nor sensationalizing it.  His hero, which is to say the hero of the slave-savant Tiro, Cicero, is fully of it.  Here is Mommsen’s summary of the moral state of Roman society roughly around the time of Cicero’s march to the consulship:  “…morality and family life were treated as antiquated things among all ranks of society.  To be poor was not merely the sorest disgrace and the worst crime, but the only disgrace and the only crime: for money the statesman sold the state, and the burgess sold his freedom; the post of the office and the vote of the juryman were to be had for money; for money the lady of quality surrendered her person as well as the common courtesan; falsifying of documents and perjuries had become so common that in a popular poet of this age an oath is called ‘the plaster for debts.’  Men had forgotten what honesty was; a person who refused a bribe was regarded not as an upright man but as a personal foe.”*

Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903)

The view of most of us about the fall of Rome, supposing that we had one, is probably some form of the thesis of the great work of Gibbon in the eighteenth century.  Gibbon was not unaware of the internal corruption, but for him the real villains were external barbarism and the rise of Christianity, for him symbiotic plagues.  But there is another, and from my own historical perspective, a sounder one, summarized in an obscure technical essay I came across years ago.  One of the problems of aging, alas,  is the dulling of memory.  I often remember something I have read, but forget where I read it.  In any event believe it was the great Dominican classicist André-Jean  Festugière who pointed out that the doctrine of radical Christian love “revolutionized a world that Socrates and Cicero had barely touched”.  Be this as it may, the period of acute imperial decay chronicled in Gibbon’s own brilliant prose antedates that period.  That it can be so brilliantly reimagined by Robert Harris is rather thrilling.  Even for a principled historical novelist, who tries to honor established fact, the heart of invention remains imagination.  So I am on to further volumes.

*Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome, trans. W. P. Dickson (London, 1894), vol. v, 390.