TOGAED PEOPLE
ROBERT HARRIS
CLASSICAL ASSOCIATION
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 2008
togaed people
Robert Harris
CLASSICAL ASSOCIATION
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 2008
Published by the Classical Association, the largest classical
organisation in Great Britain. It has a world-wide membership,
and unites the interest of all who value the study of the languages,
literature and civilisations of Ancient Greece and Rome. Annual fee
for membership (which carries with it many benefits) is currently
only £10, or £105 for Life Membership after the age of 65. For
further information contact The Secretary, Classical Association
Office, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, or visit
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Cover illustration by Neil Barrett, from a black-figure cup by
Exekias showing the god Dionysus sailing triumphant in his ship.
Robert Harris has asserted his right under
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work.
© Robert Harris 2008
Printed in Great Britain
By Remous Ltd.
Sherborne
DT9 5EP
Togaed People
Ladies and gentlemen,
I have mixed feelings about this tradition of yours, of having the after
dinner speech before dinner. The advantage is that I am sober; the
disadvantage is that so are you.
In any case, I would like to begin by thanking you for the honour
you’ve done me by asking me to serve as President of the Classical
Association, especially as this has required me to do absolutely nothing
until this moment. I have attended no meetings. I have read no papers.
I have no clue what’s been going on during my term of office. As a
president, I have made Ronald Reagan look like a workaholic.
But then I rather took my cue from the committee member who
explained to me at the start your principle of alternating the office
between an academic and a non-academic: “One year we have
someone as president who knows what they’re talking about, and the
next year we don’t.”
So I can’t pretend that I don’t feel intimidated, in the way of all
we so-called popularisers confronted by specialists. I still tremble
when I remember the savage academic review in the TLS in 2004
of Wolfgang Petersen’s movie Troy – it may well have been written
by someone here, in fact: “Historical thigh-slappers begin with the
opening map, and continue with the startling revelation that Thessaly
is populated with Thessalonians (a little like staffing Jamaica Inn with
rastafarians).”
I am fifty-one years old, and at no stage in any of the first fortythree of those years would there have seemed any reason why I might
end up as President of the Classical Association. I have no Latin,
and less Greek. My degree is in English. My career was in the media.
My speciality was British politics. I published three thrillers with a
firmly 20th century background: Fatherland (1992), Enigma (1995) and
Archangel (1998). We reach the beginning of this millennium with no
indication of even a scintilla of interest in the ancient world on my
part.
But then, on Thursday 15th June 2000, all this changes.
I should explain the background that leads to this annus mirabilis.
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Having written novels set in Germany, England and Russia, I had
decided at the beginning of 1999 – quite arbitrarily – that I would set
one in America. And having set them in the near-past, I had decided
I would set one in the near-future. And having a love of creating
imaginary worlds, my idea was to write about a giant American
entertainment conglomerate which has its own vision of utopia which
it seeks to export globally. Essentially, it was Mickey Mouse Conquers
the World, and I spent eighteen happy months working on this,
visiting California and Florida, for “research”, including a solo visit
to Walt Disney World, on which I refused to take my children – for
which they have never forgiven me.
But it was one of those books which for some reason would not gel.
I couldn’t find the characters, and when I did find them I couldn’t
make them come alive. I wanted to write some kind of clever allegory
about America, but all my points seemed trite. So a utopia run by an
unelected global conglomerate turn outs to be unpleasant? I realised it
would be much more original to write a novel suggesting the opposite.
My problems reached a climax when I was checking into the Grand
Floridian Hotel in Disney World, and I saw a couple crossing the
lobby – he in a black tuxedo wearing Mickey Mouse ears, she in a
white silk wedding dress, also wearing Micky Mouse ears. “Where are
they going?” I asked the receptionist. “They’re going to get married,”
she replied, “on the special marriage platform overlooking Sleeping
Beauty’s Castle.” At that point I realised I could not satirise this place.
Nothing I could hope to invent could be more outlandish than real
life – a problem I have often found, incidentally, with writing fiction,
especially about politics.
I returned home in some despair, not knowing what to do. And
then, on Thursday 15th June 2000, reading the Daily Telegraph, I saw a
small story on the foreign news pages headlined “New research on the
destruction of Pompeii”. It reported the launch, in Pompeii, of Antonio
Varone’s latest book on the destruction of the city, and described
how it hadn’t all been over in an hour or two, as I’d always assumed,
but that there had been several days of warnings of the eruption
beforehand, and that the eruption had gone on for almost 24 hours
before most people were killed, and – and this struck me most vividly
– the two thousand or so known fatalities were all people walking at
roof level, because the streets had been filled with pumice, and they
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were struck by a hurricane-force wall of hot gas. I mentioned the story
in my diary that evening: “Made me wonder if there might not be a
novel in it. Would certainly make a hell of a film.”
It’s a long way to Liverpool, and rather like Lady Gwendoline in
The Importance of Being Earnest, “I never travel without my diary. One
must always have something sensational to read in the train.” I’ve
been keeping this record ever since I started writing novels, which
is of necessity a solitary activity, and I’ve found a diary in which I
can talk to myself about work very useful. So perhaps, if it’s not too
solipsistic, I might quote from it again (hell, I’m the president – who’s
going to stop me?) just to show how the novel began to germinate that
summer:
“Monday 3 July 2000: I’ve had this Daily Telegraph clipping about
Pompeii on my desk for more than two weeks, and over the weekend
I suddenly thought, well, why don’t I take a look at it. So I began
yesterday and continued today researching and making notes. And,
like an archaeologist, the more I dig into it, the more fascinated I
become. It’s clear, after spending only a morning on the Internet, that
great strides have been made over the past five years in explaining
exactly what happened when Vesuvius erupted: there is now a fairly
detailed chronology of a disaster which took almost 24 hours to run
its course. Yet no one (as far as I can see) has thought of writing it
as a fictional narrative since Bulwer-Lytton, back in the 1830s. What
appeals to me first and foremost – obviously – is the drama of the
story, its intensity, and the tightness of the location. It is historically
remote, and yet the story continues to exert a hold on the imagination,
rather as the Titanic disaster does, because of its universality… I veer
between thinking I’m mad to contemplate a novel on such a subject
(the Romans??) and a steadily growing conviction that it has enormous
potential. It would certainly be a big book. Do I have the nerve for it?
What would people say?”
“Wednesday 2 August: Returned, after an interval of more than
three weeks, to my Pompeii research. Sometimes I feel so utterly
daunted by the whole idea I think I must be mad even to contemplate
it. Then I find myself being sucked in again by the sheer scale and
power of the story… The Gulf of Naples 2,000 years ago was the
Riviera of the Roman world – Strabo called it “The Wine Bowl” – an
arc of luxury and civilisation extending, unbroken, around the bay,
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from Misenum to Surrentum. Complacent, rich, peaceful, hedonistic,
secure, convinced that they were the centre of the world and that
life would go on in this way forever (“the end of history”) – and all
the while, beneath their feet, the earth preparing to explode. I am
beginning to see that the research I did last year in California and
Florida isn’t wasted after all, and that I have simply transferred my
Utopia from 21st century America to 1st century Rome.”
“Friday 18 August Pompeii… I came out to Italy frankly expecting
to bury the idea of this novel. Everything seemed to be against it. But
now it’s gnawing away at me again. A couple of things hit home in
particular. One was the drama of the climb to the top of Vesuvius…
The second thing was yesterday evening [in Pompeii], walking up
the hill to the Vesuvian Gate, past the water reservoir and out into
the vineyards and fields beyond. I could sense a character doing this.
He would have walked towards Vesuvius, as I did, seen the slate-blue
shape of the mountain against the sky, smelled the water on the stone,
felt the heat, looked back at a town that was then the pinnacle of
civilisation. The sheer scale of the story pulls at me, and the audacity
of it…”
Many of you will recognize the symptoms of what was happening
here. I was falling in love. I was experiencing that mysterious, haunting,
exotic, melancholy allure of the ancient world which I guess is what, by
the circuitous routes of life, has brought most of us here to Liverpool
tonight. And for me, as for so many others, especially those who come
to the subject late, that love affair’s first date was in Pompeii.
The atmosphere of Pompeii has been getting under the skin of
visitors for two centuries, and I don’t think I ever found a description to
improve on this, published in 1899 by the great German archaeologist,
August Mau: “Winter at Pompeii is mild and short; spring and autumn
are long. The heat of summer, moreover, is not extreme. In the early
morning, it is true, the heat is at times oppressive. No breath of air
stirs; and we look longingly off upon the expanse of sea where, far
away on the horizon, in the direction of Capri, a dark line of rippling
waves becomes visible. Nearer it comes, and nearer. About ten o’clock
it reaches the shore. The leaves begin to rustle, and in a few moments
the sea breeze sweeps over the city, strong, cool and invigorating.
The wind blows till just before sunset. The early hours of the evening
are still; the pavements and the walls of the houses give out the heat
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which they have absorbed during the day. But soon – perhaps by nine
o’clock – the tree tops again begin to murmur, and all night long, from
the mountains of the interior, a gentle, refreshing stream of air flows
down through the gardens, the room atriums and colonnades of the
houses, the silent streets, and the buildings about the Forum, with an
effect indescribably soothing.”
It was to be another three years before my novel about Pompeii
was actually published. The problem was finding that main character
– that man – walking northwards up the hill, out of the city, towards
Vesuvius. The clue was in the smell of water on stone that I detected
as I passed that reservoir on that hot August evening.
“Wednesday 20 December: It struck me that [the] main character…
might be [a] water engineer. He is dispatched to Pompeii on Pliny’s
authority to find out why the water pressure is so low, and when
he gets there discovers that the town’s engineer is missing on an
expedition to check on the aqueduct. The advantages of this are:
(1) the natural involvement of Pliny right at the start, (2) the use of
water as a metaphor for the general luxury and sophistication and
wastefulness of civilisation, (3) the narrative strength of putting an
outsider into a strange location, (4) the procedural aspect, and (5) the
opportunity to set up a plausible escape at the end….The material is
(to me) fascinating: the great aqueduct built by the divine Augustus
running from the mountains above Sorrento all the way to Misenum,
with a spur coming off to supply Pompeii; the pipework, the filter
beds, the water towers – all of it the detail that makes a novel come
alive.”
Like all non-experts coming into a field such as this, I benefited
enormously from the encouragement and hard work of academic
specialists – which is one of the reasons why I’m so pleased to be here
today, to be able to say thank you. It was Jasper Griffin of Oxford
University who took me to the Ashmolean Library, and vouched for
me so that I could work there. (I made the mistake of asking him how
long he had been teaching classics at Balliol. “Oh, just the forty years,”
he said. “No longer young and promising.”) He prepared me a short
reading list, and I remember asking him how he would describe the
Roman system of clients and patronage which I found baffling. He
described a visit to India, where he’d been in a village, and seen the
local people clustering outside the house of the local rich man, and
5
how they’d all run after him with petitions when he appeared. I’d seen
something similar at the house of doctor in the northwest frontier
of Pakistan when I was a journalist. And after a while in Pompeii, I
realised that the best model for what the town might have been like was
probably not entirely to be found in Europe, but perhaps Marrakech
would be a better analogy – with its noisy outdoor souks, the traffic in
the streets, the jostling together of beggars and millionaires, and then,
when you step into one of those cool private courtyards, the surprising
peace, even in the middle of a big town.
This is what one has to try to find as a novelist – stimuli to your
imagination, to make a place become real to you.
In the Ashmolean, I came across Roman Aqueducts and Water Systems
by Trevor Hodge. All my novels have had somewhat unlikely heroes.
In Fatherland it was a major in the SS, working as an investigator in
the Kriminalpolizei. In Enigma it was a codebreaker who had suffered
a nervous breakdown. In Archangel it was a drunken, down-at-heel
historian of the Soviet Union, who some identified as being modelled
on Professor Norman Stone – not least Norman Stone himself. In
Pompeii it was a Roman water engineer. There were two obvious
attractions in making a hero out of an aquarius. First, I could make
him an individual immediately accessible to a modern mind: an
engineer is an engineer, in whatever period he lives. I imagined him as
a practical fellow with an immensely important job – maintaining and
repairing this great aqueduct, which was already 100 years old at the
time of the eruption. The second advantage was originality: here was
a character from antiquity who was not an emperor or a gladiator or
a legionary, but an engineer – central to Roman civilisation, but almost
entirely overlooked, certainly in fiction, and even, for the most part,
until recently, in non-fiction.
Gradually I became fascinated by aqueducts. In fact, I became
something of an aqueduct bore. The Aqua Augusta, for example,
which brought water to Pompeii, among nine other towns around the
Bay of Naples, was 60 miles long, with a mean drop along its entire
length of just 2 inches per 100 yards. It was built by Marcus Agrippa,
who seems to have been the Concrete King of the Augustan era. (And
incidentally, why doesn’t someone – perhaps someone here tonight
– write a good book about Agrippa? There’s a huge amount to say,
and nobody seems to have said it.) Agrippa and his engineers were the
6
first to make use of hydraulic cement on a huge scale – utilising the
qualities of Puteolanum, the volcanic sand of the Bay of Naples – and
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this one, unglamorous
discovery transformed civilisation. The great Roman naval base of
Misenum – with little fresh water and a population of 20,000 citizens
– was only made possible by the aqueduct on the Bay of Naples, which
was in turn only rendered possible (no pun intended) by waterproof
cement.
Agrippa famously also built the Pantheon, again making extensive
use of cement. I found a wonderful book, privately printed, by a
retired American civil engineer named David Moore, who wrote a
whole book on the subject. Dragged reluctantly into the Pantheon
by his culture-vulture wife on the last day of their Roman holiday,
Moore found himself stunned by that astonishing structure with
its concrete dome 143 feet across. “I turned to my wife,” he writes,
“and instinctively said, ‘If I gave the task of designing a building
like this to our engineers, they could not do it. There is not one steel
reinforcing rod in the building.’ During the flight home to America
I was constantly disturbed about the strength and durability of this
ancient building. After all, I hold three engineering degrees, and with
a lifetime of experience in the design and construction fields. Perhaps
I had missed something.”
Mr Moore eventually discovered that the Romans mixed their
cement using very little water, and pounded it extremely hard. This
altered the molecular structure of the compound and literally made it
harder than rock. Not until the construction of the Hoover Dam in the
1920s was the modern equivalent invented.
It was Trevor Hodge, the author of Roman Aqueducts and Water
Systems, who provided the epigraph for the book: “How can we
withhold our respect from a water system that, in the first century
AD, supplied the city of Rome with substantially more water than was
supplied in 1985 to New York City?”
I overcame the technical problem of explaining what was happening
inside Vesuvius by prefacing each chapter with some dry volcanological
detail. To start with, I wrote the book without bothering to put those
in, then I went back and added them. To my surprise, it completely
altered the feel of each of the scenes, casting them in an ironic light.
I mentioned this to a friend, who pointed out that of course this was
7
dramatic irony, as old as the ancient Greeks, and that the science
acted as a kind of chorus, lamenting what was about to happen to the
mortals.
As my way into this shows, for me writing about past is really a way
of writing about present. My search is always for points of similarity
rather than difference. Of course one could stress the differences
between the ancient world and our own – their system of slavery, their
concept of religion, their cruelty, their attitude to sex (and here what is
shocking and alienating to the modern audience is not, of course, the
occasional orgy or even incest, so lovingly depicted in the movies, but
the casual approach to what we would consider paedophilia – with,
for example, Pompey the Great marrying Caesar’s fourteen year-old
daughter, Julia; or Cicero, at the age of sixty, marrying his fourteen
year-old ward, Publilia).
One could also write a kind of cod-Petronius, in which the text itself
becomes a pastiche of what might have been written in ancient times. I
certainly became aware of a self-defeating formula when I was writing
Pompeii: that the more readable my manuscript was, the less authentic;
and, conversely, the more authentic, the less readable.
In the end, to be honest, I just thought: to hell with it. I don’t see the
point of either exercise. My premise as a novelist who writes novels set
in the past – my whole raison d’etre as a writer – is that human beings
don’t really change very much, that we need to see our generation
in proportion, and that the same patterns of human behaviour recur
from century to century. I believe in a kind of Quantity Theory of
history, which is why I see such value in writing about the ancient
world. The ancients were very similar to us. We have nothing to feel
superior about. Are we producing better philosophy? Or poetry? Or
sculpture? Or political speeches? Or drama? Are we making funnier
jokes? Or more beautiful buildings? Perhaps only in music can one say
there was a huge discrepancy in the artistic experience available, and
that is because of technology – which of course has made our lives
immeasurably more pleasant than it was then. But no one who has
seen the Nimes aqueduct, or the Pantheon can doubt that the men
who made those, born today, given the benefit of modern technology,
would be equally brilliant engineers.
One therefore has all sorts of benefits in writing about the Romans.
One describes something exotic, and yet at the same time uncannily
8
familiar. One deals with quite complex themes – science and
technology and the sense of threat from Nature, say, in Pompeii – but
because the times were simpler, even if the people were as clever, one
can get to the heart of it. The failure of the aqueduct in Pompeii is an
allegory for the failure of technology today, and the beauty is I don’t
have to write about the complexities of the electricity grid and nuclear
power plants – a tunnel carrying water will suffice. And then there is
the language. I would find it hard to write a novel set in Elizabethan
England because of the vocabulary of the period, which we know from
Shakespeare. But Latin is infinitely flexible in this regard, because
nobody today speaks it. So my water engineers going out to fix the
aqueduct can talk and grumble and swear like any other group of
working men, sweating and straining in the heat of August to get the
power running again.
The same is true with politics – or at any rate the politics of the
Roman republic, from which so much of our own political culture and
vocabulary is derived.
As I said at the outset, I began my career as a political journalist.
Therefore, on the principle that one writes about what one knows, I
had naturally always wanted to write a political novel. But time and
again I had been put off. For a start, I hated the idea of a Westminster
novel: the scheming chief whip, the MP for Loamshire, the rising
young junior minister who compromises his career by having an
affair. You know the kind of thing: there’s something irredeemably
cliché-ridden and parochial about British political fiction. And besides
– a touch of the Walt Disney problem here – the actual characters
one encounters on television and in the newspapers each day are too
bizarre to be fictionalised. How could I improve on such inherently
satirical individuals as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown? Which in turn
leads on to the third problem: how could one create a plausible fictional
prime minister or chancellor of the exchequer, and not immediately
be accused of writing a roman a clef? I therefore vowed never to write
a contemporary political novel – a vow I naturally broke, and if any
of you noticed the controversy which surrounded the publication of
my last novel, you will have seen how amply many of my fears were
justified.
But then, as I came to the end of writing Pompeii, the idea occurred
to me of writing a political novel set not in London or Washington but
9
in the Roman republic. The man to blame for putting the notion in my
head is the man who so generously introduced me this evening, Tom
Holland. Back to the diary:
“Friday 18 April 2003 (Good Friday) I sat in the garden and read a
proof copy of a marvelous new book called Rubicon, by Tom Holland,
and wondered whether there might not be a big, saga-type novel
tracing the interlinked lives of Cicero, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, etc,
with Cicero as the linking figure. Not a thriller. Wonderful to do, but I
suppose if Pompeii is a flop I might be put off the Romans for life.”
“Monday 7 July To Oxford, to buy the complete works of Cicero
and Quintilian in the Loeb edition.”
I find it interesting that from the outset I fixed on Cicero as the
main protagonist. I knew I didn’t want to write a novel about Caesar
and the legions, which is the staple of popular Roman fiction these
days; I wanted specifically to concentrate on politics. And for that,
Cicero was perfect. First, he stayed in Rome, and famously didn’t like
to leave the city. “Urbem, urbem, mi Rufe, cole et in ista luce vive!” “Rome!
Stick to Rome, my dear fellow, and live in the limelight!” (I was at a
fund-raising meeting recently for the excavation of the Roman town
of Silchester, and the host tried to draw me into the discussion by
asking what I thought Cicero would have made of the place. I’m afraid
blurted out he would have absolutely hated it.)
Secondly, we have so much detail about Cicero – often his daily
existence, sometimes his hourly existence. That last quote, for
example, is from a letter to Caelius written on 26 June 50 BC. Yet
despite this, the general reader (as opposed to the classical expert)
knows very little about him, unlike Caesar. Another attraction is
that Cicero succeeded purely on his talent as an orator – the power
of his words and the way that he delivered them raised him to the
summit of politics. (I was struck, watching Barack Obama speak the
other day, that he might have studied with Apolonius Molon himself
– in particular his use of gestures: the stillness of his upper body, the
outstretched fingers, the eyes following the gesture, except when he
wishes to convey rejection.) Despite his political eminence, however,
Cicero remained essentially an outsider – always a useful place to
situate the protagonist of a novel. Finally, and partly for that reason,
Cicero, like the water engineer in Pompeii, is a figure readily accessible
to the modern mind – and, for me, a hero.
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Cicero can with some justice be described as the world’s first
professional politician. He is homo politicus, a fact recognised by our
greatest political novelist, Anthony Trollope, who wrote this about
Cicero 127 years ago:
“What a man he would have been for London life! How he would
have enjoyed his club, picking up the news of the day from all lips,
while he seemed to give it to all ears. How popular he would have
been at the Carlton, and how men would have listened to him while
every great or little crisis was discussed! How supreme he would have
sat on the Treasury bench – or how unanswerable, how fatal, how
joyous when attacking the government from the opposite seats! How
crowded would have been his rack with invitations to dinner! How
delighted would have been the middle-aged Countesses of the time to
hold with him mild intellectual flirtations – and the girls of the period,
how proud to get his autograph, how much prouder to have touched
the lips of the great orator with theirs! How the pages of the magazines
would have run over with little essays from his pen!”
This is a remarkable passage, I think, and shows how recognisable
a type Cicero is to anyone who revels in politics, be they Victorian or
Blairite. Shackleton Bailey, in his biography, cleverly compares Cicero
to Disraeli: the ambitious outsider who enters politics in search of
fame, who rises as an orator, who is taken up by the aristocrats, who
has a reputation for being too clever by half, and makes risqué jokes.
When he was dying, Disraeli was asked if he would like the Queen to
visit him one last time. “No thank you,” he replied. “She would only
ask me to take a message to Albert.” That is exactly the sort of line
Cicero would have delivered, and which would no doubt have got into
circulation and added to his reputation for feline cynicism. He felt
modern to a Victorian, and he feels modern to us. Take this passage,
from a letter written in December 54 BC: “Unchanging consistency
of standpoint has never been considered a virtue in great statesmen.
At sea it is good sailing to run before the gale, even if the ship cannot
make harbour; but if she can make harbour by changing tack, only a
fool would risk shipwreck by holding to the original course… It is our
aim, not our language, which must always be the same.”
Or, as Tony Blair would say: “Traditional values in a modern
setting.”
Yet Cicero has got a poor deal from popular culture. I cannot name
11
a film, a play or a novel in which he is the central, rather than merely a
supporting, character – although that doesn’t mean there isn’t one, of
course. He simply doesn’t translate well to the heroic – even his own
epic poem about his consulship was a literary and political disaster.
He’s given just nine lines in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (when Cassius
suggests involving Cicero in the plot to assassinate the dictator, Brutus
briskly dismisses the idea: “He will never follow any thing/That other
men begin”).
In the 19th century, Mommsen wrote idolatrously about Caesar (“the
entire and perfect man”) while sneering at Cicero as “a weakling”,
and “a journalist in the worst sense of the word”. In the 20th, he was
mostly a figure of tedium for teachers and pupils alike. You may
remember the scene in Kinglsey Amis’s Take A Girl Like You, when the
schoolteacher collects the books at the end of the Latin lesson: “The
last forty minutes had been spent in taking, or rather hauling, the
Junior Sixth through not nearly enough of In Marcum Antonium II. For
a man so long and so thoroughly dead it was remarkable how much
boredom, and also how precise an image of nasty silliness Cicero could
generate. ‘Antony was worth ten of you, you bastard,’ Patrick said.”
And it’s true, that Cicero on occasions is often very hard to like –
boastful, duplicitous, grasping, hypocritical (or should that be simply
privately truthful – such as when he shows off to Atticus that he’s
been elected to the college of augurs without actually believing in
augury: “What an irresponsible fellow I am!”)
There’s a similar ambiguity about his cowardice. Yes, he fears death:
he flees Clodius when he would have done better to have stood up and
faced him down, he allows himself to be humiliated by Caesar and
Pompey and Crassus when he returns from exile. But he also often
proves himself brave in the end – the most attractive kind of bravery,
to face danger, flinch, and then stand firm.
I like him for the same reason I always secretly rather liked Harold
Wilson: a clever, devious player of the political game, but a decent man
at heart, a compromising pragmatist surrounded by uncompromising
ideologues. Roy Jenkins wrote of Wilson in the DNB that as a
statesmen “he kept the train on the track over difficult stretches of
country”. Cicero couldn’t in the end quite keep the Roman republic on
track – I’m fairly sure Harold Wilson couldn’t either – but there was
a kind of heroism in the effort.
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It soon became obvious to me that one novel wouldn’t be enough
to encompass the story I wanted to tell. There is simply too much
material. The action of Pompeii took place over four days, with a very
limited cast of characters, in a very specific location. This sprawls
across 26 years, from 79 to 43 BC, and encompasses all the places
Cicero visited, from Sicily to Cilicia. The political complexities are
labyrinthine – not just the structures of the Roman state, but the laws,
and the intrigues. The cast of characters is huge. The problem is what
to leave out. In this, the most useful maxim I was given came from
Tom Stoppard, who has also specialised in weaving fiction out of fact.
I have put his motto above my desk, and commend it to all historical
novelists: “Just because it’s true doesn’t mean it’s interesting.”
For there is no doubt that eagerness to display research is the curse
of the historical novelist. I’m very fond of a sentence by Colleen
McCullough in her novel, Caesar’s Women. Caesar and Crassus have
gone out for a walk. Ms McCullough describes the scene: “Neither
man did what most men would have done, namely to go over to a
famous snack bar and buy spiced minced pork encased in a deliciously
light and flaky pastry made by covering flour dough with cold lard,
folding it and rolling it, then more lard, and repeating the process
many times… Instead, they found a wall to lean on.”
(This reminds me of an interview I once did with Stephen King, who
told me that his favourite sentence in contemporary fiction was by
Robert Ludlum: “His eyes slid down the front of her dress.”)
There are, in my view, three key differences between the work of a
non-fiction writer of history and the author of historical fiction. The
first is not to use your research, or at any rate to use only a tenth of
it. This means doing an immense amount of background work, and
then throwing it away. That way, the temptation to stick in facts just
because you’ve discovered them is much diminished, and somehow the
reader senses the presence of the research that isn’t being used, out
there in the shadows. This holds true, whether it’s Bletchley Park in
the blackout, or Rome in 63 BC.
The second is that the novelist’s function is to take that research
and convey impressions – to go beyond the bare facts. Ten thousand
people worked at Bletchley, in three shifts, one of which changed at
midnight. I tried to imagine that: more than three thousand weary
souls clocking off, and three thousand clocking on, in the freezing
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darkness of midwinter England. Meeting retired codebreakers – a
number of whom were classicists, incidentally – they were surprised
to find that I didn’t want to ask them about the grand strategy, but
rather about the mundane details: “Where did you hang your hat?”
There are no witnesses to talk to from Republican Rome. There’s
no one who can describe a senate debate, for example. But there are
a few straws from which one can try to make bricks. I remember in
particular coming across two words which stimulated my imagination.
One was senaculum – “the little senate” – that area outside the main
chamber where the senators would gather before a debate, until the
presiding consul had consulted the auguries and declared there was a
quorum. I’m sure this must have been where much of the business of
the republic was done, just as it is in the Smoking Room in the House
of Commons, or the Senate Cloakroom in Washington. The other was
pedarii – those who vote with their feet – the ordinary backbench
senators who shuffled from one side of the chamber to the other to
register their feelings on a particular motion. Again, I recognise these
types, and I guess they haven’t changed much over two millennia. This
is the detail that is the stuff of historical fiction: how were the benches
arranged inside the senate? What was it like on a winter’s afternoon
with the light fading? And so one starts to build up a picture: the open
windows beneath the roof, the pigeons from one side to the other, the
senators sitting on their hard wooden benches, the curious crowd at
the door. And then the magistrates going out to the rostra to address
the people – the indifferent crowd, the poor weather...
The third great difference between my work and scholarship is
that I must always bear in mind that, in my business, an ounce of
emotion is worth a ton of fact. Or, to paraphrase the old estate agents’
dictum about location: only three things count in fiction – character,
character and character. To open a novel with a panoramic description
of, say, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake would be less interesting
to a reader than describing a man shaving first thing in the morning.
Who is he, this man? What is he going to do on this day? Why is his
hand shaking? So it is with the Romans. What were they like, these
people? These men whose names echo down history, who all know one
another, and who all came to such violent ends: Pompey the Great.
Crassus. Cato. Caesar. Cicero.
I sat down to begin writing my trilogy in the autumn of 2005, just
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as the BBC/HBO Rome series started to be screened. It had been my
intention to use multiple points of view, but I realised that that was
their approach, and although the period covered was different – the
TV series started just before the civil war, whereas at least threequarters of what I intend to write about occurs before that – I felt it
had been done, somehow. I therefore decided to use the classic method
of writing about the ancient world, the first person memoir. And, of
course, I had the perfect narrator, sitting right there beside Cicero’s
desk for 35 years – his secretary, Tiro.
That there was such a person as Tiro is well known. “Your services
to me are beyond count,” Cicero wrote to him in 50 BC, when he was
recovering from a serious illness, “in my home and out of it, in Rome
and abroad, in private affairs and public, in my studies and literary
work…” He may well have been with Cicero when he died, and was
probably entrusted with safeguarding his letters and papers. He lived
for perhaps 40 years after his master’s death – according to Saint
Jerome, until he reached his hundredth year – and was the author of
several works on the development of the Latin language. He was the
first man to record a speech in the senate verbatim, and his shorthand
system was still in use in the Church in the sixth century. His multivolume life of Cicero is referred to as a source by Asconius in his
commentary on Cicero’s speeches, and is cited twice by Plutarch.
But, like all Tiro’s other works, it’s now lost. Elizabeth Rawson
speculated in her book on intellectual life in the Roman republic that
it must have been in the Hellenistic tradition of biography – a literary
form “written in an unpretentious, unrhetorical style; it might quote
documents, but it liked apophthegms by its subject, and it could be
gossipy and irresponsible… It delighted in a subject’s idiosyncrasies…
Such biography was written not for statesmen and generals, but for
what the Romans called curiosi.”
As I wrote in my diary: “He’s almost too good to be true: you
couldn’t, as they say, make him up.” And once I found that voice, I was
able to write the first novel in the trilogy, Imperium, very quickly. To
quote myself one last time, from an entry for 21 September 2005: “I
feel as though I’ve been dropped into the Roman world as an explorer
with a torch might be lowered into a network of caves, and every time
I shine my light on something I know what it is but I’m surprised by
it. The realisation that I have this whole teeming universe to pick my
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way through – all those characters, all those incidents, spread over
all those years – using this one voice makes me feel almost sick with
anticipation.”
And that is where I am at the moment – with Cicero and Tiro as
they inch their way through the years of the Roman republic towards
their fate. The writing is not always easy, and the end result, I know,
falls far below the standard of events. But I must say, Cicero is a
congenial companion to come down to every morning: obviously much
cleverer than I am, and much funnier, and in a peculiar way more
alive. Like most of the men and women who have written about him
– Trollope, for example, and Elizabeth Rawson – I have come to love
the pompous old rogue, and can’t really improve on what that great
translator of his letters, Shackleton Bailey, wrote about him in 1971.
Acknowledging all the familiar flaws, Shackleton Bailey went on:
“Is it not time to value Cicero by other standards than his own?
Not as statesman, moralist and author, but as the vivid, versatile, gay,
infinitely conversable human being who captivated his society and
has preserved so much of himself and it in his correspondence. Alive,
Cicero enhanced life. So can his letters do, if only for a student here
and there, taking time away from belittling despairs to live among
Virgil’s Togaed People, desperate masters of a larger world.”
That is a wonderful phrase, is it not? “Desperate masters of a larger
world...” They were desperate, the Romans. Their lives were shorter,
and infinitely more intense, both physically and mentally. They lived,
for the most part, without the consolations of a belief in the afterlife,
which makes them seem braver than most of the generations which
followed. They lived within a narrow space of lust and cruelty, squalor
and luxury. But their world was larger – not geographically, but in
terms of its boundless scope and opportunity for action. Intensity and
largeness of human scope – that is what the past eight years or so have
taught me about the ancient world. Studying them and writing about
them and trying to convey that excitement to a general readership has
been perhaps the happiest experience of my professional life. I thank
that news story in the Daily Telegraph in the summer of 2000, and I
thank you, the generous association of classicists, from the depths
of my ignorance, for firing my imagination and keeping alive this
connection with the past, through language and scholarship, which so
enriches our own blander, smaller world.
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