How should democracies respond to terrorist attacks? In particular, How much violence, secrecy and violations of human rights should a Western government deploy in order to safeguard a democratic state which, ironically, claims to deplore violence, secrecy and loudly promotes human rights?
How far can a democracy resort to these means without undermining and to some extent damaging the very values it claims to be defending?
How far can it go to deploy the lesser evil of abrogating some people’s human rights in order to ensure the greater good of ensuring the security and safety of the majority? These are the questions Ignatieff sets out to address in this book.
The book is based on a series of six lectures Ignatieff gave at the University of Edinburgh in 2003. Obviously the context for the lectures and their starting point was the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America.
Historical context – the War on Terror
It’s difficult now to recreate the mood of hysteria which gripped so much public discourse in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. US President George W. Bush declared a War on Terror (18 September 2001) which justified major military attacks on Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom starting 7 October 2001), then Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom starting 20 March 2003), alongside combat operations in a number of other Muslim countries (the Philippines, Sudan et al). The US Congress passed a law allowing the President to declare war on anyone he thought was a threat. In his State of the Union speech, 29 January 2002, Bush singled out three likely contenders as the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’, being Iran, Iraq and North Korea.
Apart from the mismanagement of the two major wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the most contentious aspect of the so-called War on Terror became what many perceived to be the egregious breaches of human rights which a newly bullish America began to practice. Critics claimed the so-called war was in reality an excuse for creating a hi-tech surveillance state, for reducing civil liberties and infringing human rights.
Within a month of the 9/11 attacks the US government passed the Patriot Act which included three main provisions:
- expanded surveillance abilities of law enforcement, including by tapping domestic and international phones
- easier inter-agency communication to allow federal agencies to more effectively use all available resources in counter-terrorism efforts
- increased penalties for terrorism crimes and an expanded list of activities which would qualify for terrorism charges
The law upset human rights groups on various grounds, for example, the powers given law enforcement agencies to search property and records without a warrant, consent, or even knowledge of the targets. But the single most contentious provision was its authorisation of indefinite detention without trial, which became associated with the notorious detention centre at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba,
Ignatieff’s approach
The lectures were given at the heart of this period (2003), 18 months into the War on Terror, as the Patriot Act was still being rolled out, just after the US government launched its invasion of Iraq (March 2003).
In his introduction Ignatieff makes the point that already, by 2003, there was a well-developed legalistic literature on all these issues. He is not going to add to that (he isn’t a lawyer). He wants to take a broader moral point of view, bringing in philosophical and even literary writers from the whole Western tradition, to try and set the present moment in a much broader cultural context.
My purpose is…to articulate what values we are trying to save from attack. (p.xvii)
It’s worth noting that at the time he wrote and delivered these lectures, Ignatieff was the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I.e. he didn’t have an amateur, journalistic interest in these issues, but was a senior academic expert in them.
Contents
The text is full of Ignatieff’s trademark complex, subtle and often agonised moral reflections, mixing reportage on contemporary politics with references to writers of the past, continually teasing out subtle and often very illuminating insights. At the same time, as I worked my way through the rather laborious networks of arguments, I began to have less and less confidence in his arguments. Fine words butter no parsnips and seminars on moral philosophy can go on forever. What were his practical conclusions and recommendations?
Chapter 1. Democracy and the Lesser Evil
Democracies have often deployed coercive measures, seeing them as the lesser evil deployed to avert the greater evil of terrorism, civil conflict and so on. But it requires that the measures can be justified publicly, subject to judicial review, and have sunset clauses i.e. fixed lengths so they don’t become permanent features of the society.
Government infringement of its citizens’ rights must be tested under adversarial review. This idea recurs again and again in the text. The defining feature of democracies is intricate sets of checks and balances. If some rights have to be abrogated during emergencies, these suspensions can still be independently tested, by judges, by independent advisers, and they will eventually have to be revealed to the citizens for ultimate approval.
There is a spectrum of opinions on suspending civil liberties. At one end, pure civil libertarians maintain that no violations of rights can ever be justified. At the other end, pragmatists eschew moral principles and judge restrictive legislation purely on practical outcomes. Ignatieff is somewhere in the middle, confident that actions which breach ‘foundational commitments to justice and dignity – torture, illegal detention, unlawful assassination’ – should be beyond the pale. But defining precisely what constitutes torture, which detentions are or are not legal, where killing is or is not justified, that’s the problem area.
If lawyers and politicians and intellectuals are going to bicker about these issues forever i.e. there will never be fixed and agreed definitions, the one thing all good democrats can rally round is ‘to strengthen the process of adversarial review‘ i.e. to put in place independent review of government measures.
Chapter 2. The Ethics of Emergency
If laws can be abridged and liberties suspended during an ’emergency’, what remains of their legitimacy in times of peace? If laws are rules, and emergencies make exceptions to theses rules, how can their authority survive once exceptions are made? (p.25)
Chapter 2 examines the impact the emergency suspensions of civil liberties has on the rule of law and civil rights. Does the emergency derogation of normal rights strengthen or weaken the rule of law which we pride ourselves on in the Western democracies?
Ignatieff takes the middle ground that suspension of rights does not destroy them or undermine the normal practice of them, indeed helps to preserve them – provided they are ‘temporary, publicly justified, and deployed only as a last resort.’
Chapter 3. The Weakness of the Strong
Why do liberal democracies to habitually over-react to terrorist threats? Why do we seem so quick to barter away our liberties? One way to explain it is that majorities (i.e. most of us) are happy to deprive small and relatively powerless minorities (in the War against Terror, Muslims and immigrants) of their rights in order to achieve ‘security’.
But our opponents have rights, too. Just as in the debate over freedom of speech, any fool can approve free speech which they agree with, it’s harder to fight for the right of people to say things you dislike or actively think are wrong. But that is the essence of free speech, that is its crucial test – allowing the expression of opinions and views you violently disagree with, believe are wrong and immoral. It is precisely these kinds of views we should make every effort to allow free expression. ‘I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ as Voltaire famously put it.
It’s easy and uncontroversial to defend the human rights of poets and activists who protested against apartheid or communist oppression. Much harder to insist that detainees being grabbed in Iraq or Syria or anywhere else in the Arab world and flown half way round the world and who might well be members of al Qaeda or ISIL, are provided just the same level of legal representation and rights as you and me. But that is exactly the test of our commitment to human rights: whether we extend them to our bitterest enemies.
Same goes for the other elements in the system of checks and balances, namely the other wings of government, the courts and the media. The temptation and the tendency is for everybody to ‘rally round the flag’ but this is exactly the opposite of what ought to happen. The American constitution vests power in the Presidency to take extraordinary steps in times of crisis or war but that is precisely the moment when the other elements in the division of power should increase their oversight of executive actions.
In his searing indictment of America’s mismanagement of the war in Iraq, Thomas E Ricks makes just this point. The build-up to the war involved questionable evidence (about weapons of mass destruction), wrong assumptions (about the response of the Iraqi population to foreign invasion), criminal mismanagement and the complete absence of a plan for the aftermath. While describing all this in forensic detail, Ricks points out that this is precisely the point when the administration’s plans should have been subjected to intense and critical scrutiny, something which might have saved tens of thousands of lives, billions of money, untold materiel. Instead, in the atmosphere of hysterical patriotism which gripped America, Congress rolled over and approved the plans with little serious examination and the press turned into bombastic cheerleaders. Both miserably failed to live up to the roles assigned to them in a free democratic society.
In fact most of this chapter is taken up with a useful and informative history of terrorism as a political tactic, starting with the Nihilists in nineteenth century Russia, then onto the two great loci of political violence, in revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany, before turning to post-war terrorism in Latin America (Chile, Colombia, Peru), in Sri Lanka, in Israel, before cycling back to Europe and the 1970s terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades, before a brief consideration of the separatist/nationalist terrorism faced by Britain in Northern Ireland and Spain in the Basque Country.
Ignatieff’s summary from this brief conspectus is that terrorism never works, it never achieves its political aims. The Russian and Weimar regimes weren’t undone by political violence but by the cataclysm of World War One and the Great Depression, respectively. Marxist terrorism in 1970s Germany and Italy aimed to create media spectaculars and psychological tipping points whereby the population would be woken from their slumber, rise up and overthrow the repressive bourgeois state etc. Complete failure with the terrorists either committing suicide or publicly recanting.
In Latin America political terrorism either produced the exact opposite of what was intended, for example in Argentina, where it helped a repressive military junta into power. Or, as in Sri Lanka and some extent Israel, it became a stalemate that extended over such a long period of time that it became the social reality of the country, giving rise to a society characterised by random atrocities, intimidation of local populations by the terrorists, and repressive state apparatuses. The host society wasn’t liberated and transformed but permanently degraded.
Ignatieff then considers how the British, on the whole, managed the Northern Ireland situation successfully by abrogating various civil rights but under the aegis of government and judicial review.
But part of the reason his review of traditional terrorism is so enjoyable is because it’s so familiar from decades of print and TV journalism – but this itself highlights, I think, a weakness of the whole book: which is that the campaign of al Qaeda and related groups was not to achieve political change (like the Marxist terrorist groups of the 1970s) or to achieve constitutional change / nationalist independence (as with the Basques or, at the other end of the Europe, the Kurdish terrorist groups in Turkey). Those aims could both be handled in Ignatieff’s model i.e. carefully incorporated into the existing political structures.
By contrast Al Qaeda wanted to destroy the West not only as a goal in itself but as part of an even grander aim which was to undermine the contemporary world order of nation-states and re-create the historical umma, the worldwide community of Muslims that was once held together under the caliphate of the prophet Mohammed. Osama bin Laden identified America as the chief bulwark of the existing world order, especially in the Arab world, where it subsidised and underpinned repressive states. So as a first step to remodelling the world, bin Laden ordered his followers to attack Western targets anywhere, at any time.
Ignatieff was writing in 2003. We had yet to have the 2004 Madrid train bombings (193 dead), the 7/7 2005 attacks in London (56 dead), the Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April 2013 (3 dead), the 18 March 2015 attack on a beach in Tunisia (21 dead), the 13 November 2015 attack at the Bataclan theatre in Paris (90 dead), the Manchester Arena bombing on 22 May 2017 (23 dead), plus numerous other Islamist atrocities in countries further afield.
If the central aim of al Qaeda and its affiliates is to kill and maim as many Westerners as possible, it’s difficult to see how this can be incorporated into any kind of political process. And in the next chapter Ignatieff indeed concludes that the organisation itself can only be defeated militarily.
Chapter 4. The Strength of the Weak
An examination of terrorism itself.
In this chapter I want to distinguish among forms of terrorism, identify the political claims terrorists use to justify violence against civilians, and propose political strategies to defeat them (p.82)
Ignatieff considers terrorism the resort of groups who are suppressed and oppressed, who have no voice and no say in the power structures which rule over them. He gives a handy categorisation of six types of terrorism:
- insurrectionary terrorism aimed at the revolutionary overthrow of a state
- loner or issue terrorism, aimed at promoting a single cause
- liberation terrorism, aimed at the overthrow of a colonial regime
- separatist terrorism, aiming at independence for a subordinate ethnic or religious group within a state
- occupation terrorism, aimed at driving an occupying force from territory acquired through war or conquest
- global terrorism, aimed not at the liberation of a particular group, but at inflicting damage and humiliation on a global power
With the last one sounding like it’s been made up to describe al Qaeda-style hatred of America.
Terrorism presents a classic challenge for liberals, who have traditionally been on the side of the underdog and oppressed minorities, from the early trade unions to blacks under apartheid, and so often have an instinctive sympathy for the social or political or economic causes of terrorism but who, obviously, want to stop short of supporting actual acts of violence. Where do you draw the line?
Ignatieff says the only practical solution is to ensure that the oppressed always have peaceful political means to address their grievances. Purely military means cannot solve terrorism. It requires political solutions, above all bringing the voiceless into peaceful political processes. He doesn’t mention it but I think of how the warring factions in Northern Ireland were cajoled into joining a political ‘peace process’ which promised to take seriously the concerns of all sides and parties, to listen to all grievances and try to resolve them in a peaceful, political way.
Mrs Thatcher said ‘we do not talk to terrorists’ but, rather as with free speech, it is precisely the terrorists that you should be talking to, to figure out how their grievances can be addressed and the violence be brought to an end.
Thus even if al Qaeda’s values come from completely outside the modern framework of human rights, even if they base themselves on Islamic traditions of jihad and unrelenting war against the infidel, even if they cannot be reasoned with but only crushed militarily, this doesn’t prevent Ignatieff making the obvious point that we in the West can still bring pressure to bear on many authoritarian Arab regimes to try and remove the causes of grievance which drive young men into these causes. These would include overt American imperialism; repressive police policies which enact brutal violence and deny human rights; lack of pluralistic political systems i.e. which allow subaltern voices a say and some influence. And so on (pages 99 to 101).
The weak and oppressed must be given a peaceful political alternative that enables them to rise up against the violence exercised in their name. (p.106)
The Arab future
Trouble is, a lot of this kind of hopeful rhetoric was claimed for the movements of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, when authoritarian regimes were overthrown in Libya, Egypt and nearly in Syria. Just a few years later it was clear that the ‘spring’ comprehensively failed: an even more authoritarian regime was in place in Egypt, Libya had split into warlord-run areas and a ruinous civil war had bedded down in Syria which would pave the way for the rise of ISIS.
Personally, I think the countries in that part of the world which aren’t lucky enough to be sitting on vast reserves of oil will be condemned to perpetual poverty and conflict, because of:
- the lack of traditions of individual civic responsibility and the complex matrix of civil society organisations which make the Western countries stable as politically stable as they are;
- as the main offshoot of the above – universal corruption
- the entrenched political tradition of strong rulers invoking ethnic nationalism or Islamic models of rule or both (Nasser, Gaddafi, Saddam)
- what Ignatieff calls ‘the corruption and decay of the Arab and Islamic political order’ (p.152)
- the economic backwardness of most Arab countries i.e. preponderance of subsistence agriculture
- widespread lack of education
- marginalisation / lack of education or political rights for women
- the extraordinary population explosion (when I first visited Egypt in 1981 it had a population of 45 million; now it’s 110 million) which ensures widespread poverty
- and now, the speedy degradation of the environment by climate change (loss of water and agricultural land)
One or two of these would be tricky challenges enough. All of them together will ensure that most countries in the Arab world will remain breeding grounds for angry, aggrieved and unemployed young men who can be persuaded to carry out atrocities and terrorist acts against domestic or Western targets, for the foreseeable future.
Chapter 5. The Temptations of Nihilism
This chapter addresses the way that, in the absence of peaceful talks, terrorist campaigns tend to degenerate into destruction and killing for their own sake, as does the behaviour of the authorities and security services set to combat them. Tit-for-tat killing becomes an end in itself. Violence begets violence in a downward spiral.
This is the most serious ethical trap lying in wait in the long war on terror that stretches before us. (p.115)
Ignatieff realises that this well-observed tendency can be used by opponents of his notion of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. the moderate and constantly scrutinised, temporary abrogation of human rights. Their argument goes that what begins as a high-minded, carefully defined and temporary ‘abrogation’ of human rights law has so often in the past degenerated into abuse, which then becomes standard practice, becomes institutionalised, and then causes permanent damage to the democracies which implemented it.
As you’d expect, Ignatieff meets this claim by breaking the threat down into categories, and then analysing them and the moral problems and issues they throw up.
First, though, he starts the chapter with some low-pressure, enjoyably colourful discussion of Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Possessed – which describes a terrorist group which takes over a remote Russian town – and then of Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent, which features a nihilistic character named the Professor, who walks round London with an early version of a suicide vest.
Part of the chapter addresses the practical, administrative problem of preventing anti-terrorist campaigns from descending into violence. But, as mention of the novels suggest, he also explores (as far as anyone can) the psychology of the nihilistic terrorist i.e. people who just want to destroy, for no purpose, with no political aim, for destruction’s sake.
It can be an individual who wants to make a name for themselves through a spectacular, for example Timothy McVeigh who carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured 680. Lone actors like this are always going to be very difficult to detect or deter.
Then he discusses the Japanese doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo which carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, killing 13 commuters, seriously injuring 54 and affecting 980 more. Terrorists who (claim to) represent an ethnic or nationalist cause can, in principle, be negotiated with for at least two reasons: one is that negotiations may hold out the hope that some at least of their goals may be achieved; the other, is that, insofar as they represent an ethnic group, a population, this population can be worked on to reject the group or moderate its behaviour.
With single actors or death cults, levers of negotiation and bargaining are obviously absent. Having established the key characteristics of these kinds of actors, Ignatieff moves on to a detailed consideration of al Qaeda. In his view it has twisted Islamic teachings so completely as to become a death cult. The 9/11 bombers didn’t leave demands or any way to negotiate – they just wanted to strike a blow at the West, specifically America, and that meant killing as many Americans as possible.
His analysis is on the brief side (there are, obviously, hundreds of books about bin Laden and al Qaeda) but, as usual, throws up fascinating insights and ideas. a) It is impossible to negotiate with a suicide bomber because being negotiated out of detonating is, by definition, a failure of the mission they’ve taken on.
b) More subtly, an organisation that sets out to use suicide bombing as a strategy cannot fail because it has no defined, workable political goals or aims. Bin Laden’s aim of clearing Westerners out of Arab lands, overthrowing the existing Arab states, recreating the 7th century caliphate and implementing Sharia law in full, is not a practical programme, it is a utopian millennarian vision. It is so impractical, it is such a long-term and enormous goal, that true believers can’t, in a sense, be demoralised.
c) And this is where the promise of immortality comes in. Once true believers are promised direct entry into heaven, they have ceased to be political actors and, in this narrow sense, Ignatieff defines them as fanatics.
He adds a distinct and fascinating idea which is that all death cults, and most terrorist groups, have to have a theory which discredits the idea of civilian innocence. Obviously blowing up a load of people going to work in their offices is murder. So, just as obviously, terrorists who do it have been re-educated or indoctrinated not to see it that way. The most basic route is for their ideological leaders to persuade them that nobody is innocent; that so-called ‘civilians’ are as guilty as the acts of repression or infidelity or murder as the armies or forces of their countries.
The Algerian National Liberation Front used this defence to justify blowing up cafes full of civilians as part of their ‘war’. Scores of other terrorist groups use the same justification, erasing the difference between the soldier (a figure defined and attributed specific rights and responsibilities under international convention going back at least as far as the Geneva Conventions) and the civilian (who, under human rights law, is not responsible in warfare and should not be a target).
But this works both ways. For when terrorists are embedded in local populations, emerging to ambush soldiers then disappearing back into the crowd, a tendency develops for those soldiers to come to hate the civilian population and take out their anger and frustration on them. Happened in Vietnam (My Lai etc), happened in Iraq (Haditha etc). And of course all such breakdowns of military discipline it play into the terrorists’ hands by getting the population to move over to support them. That’s why terrorists work hard to trigger them.
So, blurring the difference between soldier and civilian can be practiced by both terrorist and security forces and always heads in the same direction, towards ever-growing atrocity and massacre. Eventually both sides are murdering unarmed civilians, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Something which distinguishes us from the terrorists is that liberal democracies put huge value on human life, and this particularly applies to civilian human life. Therefore the kinds of massacres which US troops carried out in Vietnam and Iraq sully the reputation and undermine the meaning of liberal democracy itself. I.e. they drag us closer to the indiscriminate violence of our enemies.
These pictures of fanatical death cults are by way of preparing the way for the second half of the chapter which moves on to try and define precisely when two anti-human rights tactics may be used, namely selective assassination and torture. Ignatieff is not an absolutist or civil libertarian i.e. he reluctantly admits that, in addressing the kind of nihilistic fanatics he has described, assassination may be the only way to eliminate people you can’t bargain with, and that extremely ‘coercive’ interrogation may be necessary to extract information from fanatics which may save lives.
This is a detailed discussion of contentious issues, but the bottom line is Ignatieff things they may be permitted, but so long as his basic criteria are fulfilled, namely that they are a) approaches of last resort, after all else has been tried b) and that some kind of independent judicial review or oversight is in place. It is when these kind of policies turn into secret death squads that a rules-based liberal democracy starts to be in trouble.
Ignatieff repeats some familiar objections to torture, namely that it simply doesn’t work, that it produces intense hatred which can motivate those who survive and are released into going on to carry out atrocities, and it degrades those tasked with carrying it out. There’s evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by American operatives tasked with torturing during the War on Terror.
Typically, Ignatieff adds another point I’d never considered which is that there is a slippery slope from torture to plain murder. This may be for two reasons: the tortured may be converted by the process into such inveterate enemies of the state that their interrogators realise they will never be rehabilitated; and, more sinisterly, the torturers realise they can never release their victims because they themselves, will eventually be implicated i.e. the truth will out. Therefore it’s easier all round just to bump them off. Hence the ‘disappeared’ in South American dictatorships, all those detainees who, after extensive torture, were taken out in helicopters and thrown into the sea. Torture doesn’t just not work, create new enemies and degrade the torturers – it creates a problem of what to do with the tortured? A downward spiral all the way.
Chapter 6. Liberty and Armageddon
The book ends with a bleak discussion of what may happen as and when terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction i.e. terror attacks on a devastating scale. Are our democracies strong enough to withstand such attacks? How can we strengthen our institutions to ensure that they are?
Ignatieff has a number of suggestions about how to prevent the proliferation of terrifying WMDs. But he comes back to his fundamental position which is that the way to defend and strengthen liberal democracies in the face of increased terrorist threats is to make them more liberal and democratic, not less.
Other thoughts
1. Internecine killing
The text is continually spinning off insights and ideas which I found distracted me from the main flow. For example, the notion that every terror campaign, sooner or later, with complete inevitability, ends up terrorising and killing people on their own side – moderates and ‘sell-outs’ and anybody in their ethnic group or repressed minority who threatens to engage in political discussion with the oppressors. In a sense, moderates are more threatening to a terrorist group than their overt enemy, the repressive state, which is why so many terrorist groups end up killing so many people on their own side (p.104).
2. The threshold of repugnance
The savagery of the Algerian fighters for independence in the 1950s left a permanent scar on the national psyche of all concerned so that when, 30 years after independence (1962) in 1992, the ruling elite disallowed an election which would have given power to the new radical Islamist party, the country very quickly descended into a savage civil war, with Islamic terrorists and government security forces both murdering unarmed civilians they considered guilty of aiding their opponents.
Both sides, with generational memories of the super-violence of the struggle for independence, invoked it and copied it in the new struggle. There was little or no threshold of repugnance to deter them (p.105). Violent civil wars set new lows of behaviour with after-comers can then invoke. The whole process ratchets ever downwards.
3. The world is watching
There’s plenty of evidence that if a movement judges that it needs the help of the outside world (of the ‘international community’ which Ignatieff is so sceptical about in his previous books) then it will tailor its behaviour accordingly. It will, in other words, try to restrain violence.
The African National Congress knew it had strong support across the Western world and put its faith in international pressure eventually bringing a settlement, so that its political leaders (and its defenders in the West) chose to play down the violence of the movement’s activist wings (which, as per rule 1, above, were mostly directed against their own i.e. the black community, witness the invention and widespread use of ‘necklacing).
In other words, the international community counts. It can exert pressure. It can use its leverage to turn liberation movements away from terrorist methods. Up to a point. As long as the movement is well organised, as the ANC was and is. At the other extreme is the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), little more than a rag-tag band of psychopaths, who led an 11-year ‘civil war’, little more than a campaign of terror against their own populations (as described in stomach-churning detail in Anthony Loyd’s book, ‘Another Bloody Love Letter’). They had nothing whatsoever to gain from outside influence except being shut down. So with nothing to lose, they continued their killing sprees for 11 long years (1991 to 2002).
At the other end of the organisational scale, Russia was able to carry out atrocities and conduct a war of total destruction in Chechnya because they know no-one was looking (it was almost impossible for foreign journalists to get in) and nobody cared (it wasn’t a location of strategic significance, no oil, none of the racial discrimination the West gets so worked up about) so mass murder proceeded with barely a ripple in the Western press.
These examples prove a general rule which is that the ‘international community’ can have some moderating influence on some insurgences, terrorist campaigns and wars (p.98).
Notes and thoughts
This is a complex and sophisticated book. The language of human rights often segues into discussion of particular conventions and international declarations in such a way that to really follow the discussion you have to be pretty familiar with these documents and laws and rules.
I also found some of the political concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around quite obscure and unfamiliar – communitarianism, the conservative principle, adversarial justification, the decision cycle and so on.
I got along with his first political book, ‘Blood and Belonging’, very well. Ignatieff began his discussions with detailed descriptions of the political situations in half a dozen countries, giving plenty of colour and a good feel for the place, its history and issues and people, before getting on to the philosophical discussion, and only applied a handful of relatively simple ideas in order to shed light on the nationalist conflict he was covering.
This book is the opposite. It is sustained at a high academic level, continually introducing new concepts and making fine distinctions and drawing subtle conclusions, with only passing reference to real world examples. It sustains a level of abstraction which I eventually found exhausting. I wasn’t clever enough, or educated enough in the concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around, to really make the most of it. Probably the best way to read it is one chapter at a time, going back and working through the logic of his argument, chewing over the tumble of clever conclusions. It’s certainly the most demanding of Ignatieff’s half dozen politics books.
Seven days later
Having pondered and revisited the book for a week, maybe I can offer a better description of how the text works. The best bits of ‘Blood and Belonging’ were where Ignatieff shed light on the psychology of different types of nationalism (especially the crude sort of ethnic nationalism which so quickly degenerates into violence).
The same is true here, as well. The best bit about, say, the chapter on nihilism, is Ignatieff’s categorisation of different types of terrorist psychology, and then his exploration of what each psychology is, how it comes about and works in practice. This is fascinating and hugely increases the reader’s understanding, especially when he applies the categories to real historical examples.
What I found harder going, where I think the book comes adrift, is when he moves on to discuss how ‘we’ in liberal democracies ought to deal with the new post-9/11 terrorism threat. It’s at this point, throughout the book, that he keeps using his concept of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. we should, temporarily, and with supervision by some kind of objective person like a judge, abrogate some of our treasured human rights in some circumstances, where it’s absolutely necessary – it’s these passages, and the entire concept of ‘the lesser evil’, which I sometimes struggled to understand and never found completely clear or convincing.
Ignatieff’s categorisations and definitions of types of society or politics or terrorism, and his descriptions of the psychologies behind them, I found thrilling because they’re so incisive and instantly clarified my own thinking; whereas his discussions of the ‘morality’ of the political response to terrorism, I found confusing and unsatisfactory.
Credit
The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff was published by Vintage in 2004. All references are to the 2005 Edinburgh University Press paperback edition.
Books & Boots 
Dictator by Robert Harris (2015)
‘My skill is statecraft and that requires me to be alive and in Rome.’
(Cicero talking to Tiro, Dictator, page 36)
This is the third and concluding novel in the Robert Harris’s epic ‘Cicero trilogy’. Harris is a highly successful writer of intelligent thrillers and in the Cicero trilogy he has applied the style and mentality of a modern thriller to the life of the Roman lawyer and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC) with great success.
Book one, Imperium, covered Cicero’s life and career over the years 79 to 64 BC, the second novel, Lustrum, covered the five years from 63 to 58, and this concluding volume covers the last 15 years of his life, from 58 to his murder at the hands of agents of Mark Antony in 44 BC.
I’ve covered the outline of Cicero’s life in my reviews of his letters and Plutarch’s Life:
Tiro’s memoirs
As with its two predecessors, Dictator (a weighty 504 pages long) purports to be part of the multi-volume first-person memoir of Cicero written by his loyal slave and personal secretary Tiro almost 40 years after Cicero’s death:
I still possess my shorthand notes…it is from these that I have been able to reconstruct the many conversations, speeches and letters that make up this memoir of Cicero (p.37)
A summary cannot convey the skill with which Harris plunges you right into the heart of the toxic politics of republican Rome, or into the mind of Tiro, the shrewd, literate observer of the dilemmas and experiences of Cicero, a figure who combined wit and dazzling oratory with a profound interest in contemporary philosophy and, above all, deep embroilment in the complex power politics of his day. It is an utterly absorbing and thrilling read.
Tiro is aged 46 when the narrative opens (p.40).
Sources
Because there is so much information flying in from different places about so many events, Harris relies much more than in both the previous books combined on actual historical documents, on Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars in the early part (for example, pages 147 to 148), then on the letters to and from Cicero, for example to and from his lifelong friend Atticus.
Like the preceding two novels Dictator is divided into two substantial parts:
Part one – Exile (58 to 47 BC)
‘Exile’ is a slightly misleading title as Cicero was only in exile from Rome for 18 months, returning in late 57 BC. And it doesn’t really refer to a spiritual or political exile either since, once he returned to Rome, he was right back in the thick of political intrigue and returned to his position as Rome’s leading barrister.
The narrative begins exactly where Lustrum broke off, with Cicero, Tiro and a few slaves secretly leaving Rome at night due to the threat against his life issued by the populist politician Publius Clodius Pulcher. Clodius issues a law saying anyone who gives Cicero help, food or fire within 500 km of Rome is liable to execution.
They clandestinely travel south but their attempt to sail to Sicily is blocked by the governor (p.7). Travel back across Italy to Brundisium (11). Nightmare sea crossing to Dyrrachium (13 to 15). Governor of Macedonia, old friend Apuleius Saturninus, sends a message saying Cicero can’t stay with him (16). But one of Saturninus’s junior magistrates, the quaestor Gnaeus Plancius, offers to put him up in his town house in Thessalonika. News of Cicero’s wife and family’s mistreatment back in Rome (21). His luxury house has been burned down, the land confiscated and a shrine to ‘Liberty’ erected.
Clodius and his gangs have complete control of Rome. His sort-of ally Cato the Younger has been packed off to serve as governor of Cyprus (22). Atticus tells him about a fight between Gnaeus Pompey’s men and Clodius’s men for possession of the son of the King of Armenia, a hostage held by Rome, in which one of Pompey’s friends is killed. This decisively turns Pompey against Clodius and he now regrets having supported Cicero’s exile (24).
Unexpected arrival of the fierce ex-gladiator Titus Annius Milo, who has just managed to be elected tribune and offers his services to Cicero, accompanied by a really hard-looking gladiator named Birria (30). He explains he offered Pompey the services of 100 hardened gladiators to confront Clodius’s gangs in exchange for Pompey helping him (Milo) get elected tribune. Pompey himself has been attacked and forced back to his house by Clodius’s gangs so now he whole-heartedly wants Cicero back.
But there’s a catch: Cicero must ‘reassure’ Caesar i.e. promise not to oppose him. So Cicero’s exile will be ended if he agrees to truckle to the Triumvirate. Milo says he must send a letter and emissary to Caesar in person, so Tiro sets off on the long journey across the Adriatic, up Italy and finds Caesar doing his assizes at a town called Mutina in Cisalpine Gaul (41).
Publius Crassus, son of Marcus, spots Tiro in the queue of supplicants and takes him to see the great man in person. Tiro finds Caesar naked on a table being given a massage by a big black man (46). He scans Cicero’s letter in which he promises to meekly support Caesar’s legislation and keep out of politics and simply signs it ‘Approved’ (48). (While waiting, Publius shows Tiro copies of the Commentaries Caesar is writing, the annual account of his campaigns which he is having published back in Rome to win support – see my reviews of Caesar’s Gallic Wars for a summary. Harris also uses it to meditate on the appalling atrocities Caesar carried out against the Gauls, see below.)
Atticus is sending him letters from Rome keeping him informed and tells him that although Clodius’s gangs are still beating up their opponents (including Cicero’s brother, Quintus) the tide is turning against him. Friendly senators arrange a vote of the entire citizenry which is unanimous to have Cicero’s exile ended (52) and then restore full rights of citizenship (57).
Cicero’s triumphant march from Brundisium to Rome, feted and welcomed at every village and town. Reunion with brother Quintus who he hasn’t seen for 2 years (while he’s been off serving with Caesar in Gaul) (61). A vivid description of his triumphal entry into Rome and the ceremonies around his restoration as a citizen (63).
Because his house was demolished, Cicero’s household move in with brother Quintus. The two wives do not get on, but Cicero’s marriage to Terentia is under strain. She gave him her full support on the understanding he would be a success. Exile was the extreme opposite of success and exposed her, back in Rome, to any number of threats and humiliations (65).
Straight back into toxic politics. In return for his support in having his exile rescinded, Pompey wants Cicero to propose a bill giving Pompey executive control over Rome’s food supply for the next five years (68). This will redirect the people’s loyalty from Clodius’s crowd-pleasing back to Pompey, an establishment figure.
Clodius still has control of street gangs and sets a crowd to besiege Cicero and his family in Quintus’s house (73 to 78) until they smuggle a slave out to fetch Milo and his gladiators who see off Clodius’s thugs.
Next day Cicero presents Pompey’s grain powers bill in the senate and wins a huge ovation, supporters carry him to the rostra where he addresses a cheering crowd and then introduces the man of the hour, Pompey (81-81). Pompey accompanies Cicero home and tries to strong arm him into becoming one of the 15 food commissioners; is disgruntled when Cicero refuses (he’s only just got back to Rome and his family), so Pompey bullies Quintus into reluctantly taking up a post in Sicily (82).
Vivid description of Cicero presenting his case to the College of Pontiffs to have ownership of his (ruined) house returned to him, claiming it was never properly sanctified, helped by the discovery that the so-called Statue of Liberty Clodius set up in the ruins is actually a half-naked statue stolen from Greece where it adorned the tomb of a famous courtesan. Clodius’s case is laughed out of court and the land restored to Cicero to rebuild his mansion (85-89).
But workmen starting to rebuild it are attacked and Clodius’s gangs throw firebrands onto Quintus’s house nearly burning it down (93), forcing the family to go and stay at Atticus’s empty house. Eight days later they are walking along the Via Sacra when they are attacked by Clodius and a dozen of his hoods carrying cudgels and swords and only escape by dodging into a nearby house (94).
Terentia shows Cicero the weals on her back where she was savagely whipped on the orders of Clodia, Clodius’s fearsome sister, while Cicero was in exile (96)
The affair of Dio of Alexander, philosopher from Alexandria who had come to Rome to petition against the return of the pharaoh Ptolemy and is one day found murdered. Ptolemy is staying with Pompey and so suspicion falls on him, specifically on one of his managers, Asicius. Pompey strong-arms Cicero into defending him (100). Asicius chooses as alibi the young protege of Cicero’s, Calius Rufus. Now this smooth young man had defected from Cicero to Clodius in the previous novel. Now Cicero meets him and realises he has fallen out with Clodius. Cicero discovers his affair with Clodia ended badly with her accusing him of trying to poison her.
Pompey lobbies for a bill giving him sole command of a commission to restore Auletes to power in Egypt. Crassus is so jealous he pays Clodius to launch a campaign to stop him. Meetings and speeches to the people are broken up in violence. Cicero is delighted because it heralds the end of the Triumvirate (105).
The Rufus strategem (pages 105 to 122)
Cicero learns Rufus is scheduled to prosecute Lucius Calpurnius Bestia for corruption. Bestia was a creature of Cataline’s and so a sworn enemy of Cicero’s but Cicero conceives a Machiavellian plan. First Cicero amazes everyone by volunteering to defend Bestia, does a great job and gets him off. Irritated, Rufus issues another write against Bestia. Bestia comes to Cicero for advice. Cicero advises the best form of defence is attack; he should issue a counter-writ. More than that, he should meet with Clodius and Clodia and get them to join his case. They loathe Rufus. With them on his side Bestia can’t lose. Delighted, Bestia goes away, meets with Clodius, and issues a writ against Rufus accusing him of a) murdering the Egyptian envoys b) poisoning Clodia (110).
Cicero chuckles. His plan is working. He takes a puzzled Tiro on a visit to Rufus and finds him disconsolate: just the accusation means his budding career as a lawyer is in tatters. To Rufus’s amazement Cicero offers to be his defence counsel. Neither Rufus nor Tiro understand what is going on.
First day of the trial passes without Cicero’s intervention. Clodius is one of the three prosecutors. He depicts his sister (Clodia) as the innocent victim of a cruel libertine (Rufus). On the second day Cicero takes to the stage (trials were held on raised platforms in the Forum) and proceeds to lay into Clodia with unparalleled fury and accuracy, describing her as a whore, a courtesan, Medea, hinting at her incest with her brother, depicting her as having countless lovers, depicting him as the sensual immoral seducer of a boy half her age (Rufus) and she the daughter of an infamous, merciless, crime-stained, lust-stained house. Clodius is infuriated, Clodia sits motionless. Cicero eviscerates her in front of a cheering Roman audience who end up pointing their fingers at her and chanting ‘Whore, whore, whore.’ It is said she never went out in public again (122).
And this entire elaborate scam? Revenge for Clodia having his wife, Terentia, whipped. Cicero presents the result to his wife as a gift and atonement for her sufferings during his exile.
Cicero makes one more intervention in politics. Next day he speaks in the Senate to the bill to assign 20 million sestercii to Pompey for his grain commission but he uses the opportunity to ask whether they should reconsider the land reform legislation Caesar passed before he left for Gaul. This pleases the anti-Caesarians but infuriates his supporters, not least Crassus (125).
He makes an evening visit to Pompey’s villa outside Rome, politely greeting the great generals’ beautiful young wife. Pompey tut tuts over Cicero’s speech against the land reform but Cicero goes on the offensive saying Crassus’s insensate jealousy of Pompey is far more dangerous than anything he, Cicero, can say. Pompey agrees. Cicero comes away well pleased at his work undermining the unity of the anti-republican triumvirate (130).
Tired, Cicero takes a holiday at Cumae, in a villa left to him by a rich tax collector he did some legal work for (126). They notice it’s surprisingly empty for the time of year (132). Then dusty soldiers approach. Scared, they receive them and they turn out to be envoys from Luca.
After Cicero’s disruptive speech, Crassus went to see Caesar and they then summoned Pompey to what turned into the Conference of Luca, designed to shore up the Triumvirate. Now this soldier has brought an ultimatum to Cicero. He must shut up. He must stop criticising the triumvirs. He must reverse his position and support the land reform.
And astonishes him by telling him Pompey and Clodius have been publicly reconciled. Crassus and Pompey are going to stand for election as consuls. If they stood in the summer they would fail. But the elections will be delayed because of the escalating violence Clodius will provide. By the time it’s safe enough to hold election in the winter, campaigning season in Gaul will be over and Caesar will send thousands of his soldiers to vote for Pompey and Crassus. When they have finished their year as consuls they will be awarded provinces, Pompey to Spain, Crassus Syria. These commands will be for five years, and Caesar’s command in Gaul will also be extended.
Altogether these plans are known as the Luca Accords (136). If Cicero doesn’t support them, bad things will happen to him. After the soldiers leave Cicero is shaken but furious with Pompey. Can’t he see he is being turned into Caesar’s dupe? He is securing Caesar the few more years he needs to thoroughly subjugate and pillage Gaul and then, when he’s done, Caesar will return to Rome and dispense with Pompey.
But Terentia intervenes. She is fed up with Cicero thinking he and he alone must save the Republic. There are hundreds of other senators and ex-consuls. Let them do something about it for a change. Cicero knows he is right. After this ultimatum from the three most powerful men in Rome he realises his time is up. He should back away from active politics (139).
Vivid description of Cato the Younger returning from two years as governor of Cyprus with vast wealth (140). He is shocked at the Senate’s obeisance before the Triumvirate and at Cicero’s pessimism. From now on Cato becomes the leader of the opposition to Caesar (143). Cicero kowtows. In the Senate he humiliatingly withdraws his suggestion that Caesar’s land reform be reviewed – and receives a letter of thanks from Caesar (146).
(150-154) Portrait of Crassus as he prepares to set off on his military campaign against the Parthian Empire. He is only interested in looting everywhere and amassing as much money as possible. It is unpopular with the people. Cato makes speeches against it, declaring it immoral to commence a war against a nation Rome has treaties with. But when Crassus asks for Cicero’s support the latter is happy to invite him and his wife round for supper and pledge his heartfelt support. Anything to appease the Triumvirate and get them off his back. Tiro notes the slack, dilettantish behaviour of the officers who accompany Crassus, a sharp contrast with the whip-smart and efficient officers who surround Caesar. (This is all by way of being anticipation of Crassus’s disastrous defeats and miserable death in Syria the following year).
Over the next 3 years Cicero writes and rewrites the first of his works, On the Republic. Harris has Tiro give a useful summary (p.156):
Tiro has a severe fever during which Cicero promises to finally make him free – description of Tiro’s manumission
Crassus is killed at Carrhae – Harris chooses to quote Cassius’s long message as read out by Pompey to the assembled senators
detailed description of the affray which leads to the murder of Clodius – Cicero defends Milo at his trial but can’t be heard above the barracking (p.194)
Cicero is forced to go serve as governor of Cilicia as the political situation in Rome intensifies. Tiro doesn’t want to go but Cicero persuades him with the offer of buying him the farm he’s always wanted (p.198). Terentia wants him to play the traditional Roman governor and fleece the province for everything he can but Cicero knows this will play into the hands of his enemies as well as being against his temperament (202).
En route to take ship at Brundisium, the party is invited to go stay with Pompey at his nearby villa. They discuss the political situation. With Crassus dead the triumvirate is now an unstable duumvirate. Because Caesar has now successfully conquered and pacified all of Gaul, the question becomes what to do about him. Caesar wants to stand for the consulship in absentia to ensure that he gets it and secures immunity from prosecution which the office provides (204).
In Athens discussion with Aristatus, leading exponent of Epicureanism (206). He argues that physical wellbeing, the avoidance of pain and stress, is all. But Cicero argues that physical illness and pain are unavoidable and so the Epicurean notion of ‘good’ is weak and vulnerable. A more robust notion of the Good is needed, namely the moral goodness of the Stoics which endures no matter what state our body is in. Which inspires Cicero to write a guide to the Good Life.
Harris skimps on Cicero’s governorship, giving a very brief account of the one military campaign he led, to besiege the capital of a rebellious tribe. He omits two aspects described in Cicero’s own letters, namely a) his difficult relationship with his predecessor who just happened to be a brother of his bitter (and dead) enemy, Clodius and b) his very real achievement of setting a ruined province back on its feet, reducing taxes, reviving trade and administering justice fairly. You can see that these nuts and bolts aspects of actual administrative work don’t fit the thriller template.
Before his governorship is quite over, Cicero packs and sets off back to Rome, accompanied by Tiro and his entourage. He detours via Rhodes to visit the tomb of his tutor in oratory, Apollonius Molo. However, the winds change and block them there. Finally they sail on to Corinth but Tiro is taken very ill and eventually cannot be moved. He is left in the care of a banker friend of Cicero’s who he was not to see again for 8 months.
So he is forced to watch from a distance as the Roman Republic collapses for it was in January of that year, 49 BC, that Caesar crossed the River Rubicon and sparked civil war against Pompey, the defender of the constitution and senate.
Harris uses a series of Cicero’s actual letters to describe events. Pompey panics, thinking Caesar has his entire army with him (whereas he only had one legion) and orders the authorities to evacuate Rome and head east, ultimately holing up in Brundisium before sailing for Greece.
Caesar just fails to stop him then, without ships of his own, is forced to march back to Rome. En route he stops off at Cicero’s house in Formiae and has a brief meeting. He asks him to come back to Rome, to address the senate supporting him. Cicero refuses. Caesar is angered but leaves.
Cicero realises he must throw in his lot with Pompey and heads back to Greece. Tiro travels from his sickhouse to rendezvous back in Thessalonika, the same house where he spent his exile. Everyone is miserable (226). Cicero talks to Pompey, attends meetings. 200 senators are there with their families and staffs, bickering and politicking.
Caesar finally secures a fleet and sends half his army to Dyrrachium. Pompey marches there and surrounds his camp. It settles down into trench warfare, with the soldiers yelling abuse at each other and the occasional outbreak of fraternisation. Defectors tell Pompey about a weak place in Caesar’s defences so he attacks there. In a confused fight it is generally thought Caesar lost. Next morning his fortifications are abandoned. He is marching east into Greece. Pompey resolves to chase him and also strikes camp. Cicero’s son, brother and nephew all march off, but he doesn’t like war and elects to stay in a villa near the now liberated town of Dyrrachium (249). Cato is put in charge of forces there.
It is here that, weeks later, rumours reach them of disaster. Then Labienus arrives in a terrible state having ridden for days from the disaster that was the Battle of Pharsalus, 9 August 48 BC (252).
The senators and leaders who stayed behind at Dyrrachium hold a meeting and resolve to fight on and rally the Pompeian forces at Corfu, an island and so defensible.
And so amid scenes of chaos and panic the Pompeian forces pack up and sail for Corfu. Here another summit meeting is held in the Temple of Jupiter. Cato proposes Cicero be their leader, but Cicero laughs out loud and says he is fit for nothing. In his opinion they should immediately sue for peace in order to end the bloodshed. Pompey’s son Gnaeus is incensed by Cicero’s defeatism and goes to stab him with a sword, only Cato’s restraining words prevent him and save Cicero’s life (259). Cato lets anyone who wants to, leave, so Cicero slowly rises and walks out:
out of the temple, out of the senatorial cause, out of the war and out of public life. (p.260)
In Patrae they are delighted to come across Cicero’s son, Marcus, his brother Quintus and young nephew, who all fought in the battle but survived (260). Cicero speaks tactlessly of the meeting of leaders he attended, ridiculing them and their cause, not realising how deeply it was offending these three men who put their lives at risk for the cause. This prompts a furious tirade from Quintus in which he expresses a lifetime of resentment at being forced to play second fiddle to his oh-so-clever brother and he and his son walk out (264).
Heart-broken at this family rupture, Cicero returns to Italy accompanied by Tiro who has been away three full years. They find the region round Brundisium controlled by a legate of Caesar’s, Publius Vatinius, who, however, Cicero defended in a trial and so is helpful (267). Cicero is given a villa under guard for his protection and only slowly realises that he is in fact under house arrest while Vatinius finds out what Caesar wants done with him.
Cicero and Tiro realise this is life under a dictatorship: no freedoms, no magistrates, no courts, no elections. One lives at the whim of the dictator.
Cicero’s heart sinks further when Vatinius tells him that while Caesar is absent on campaign, Italy is ruled by his Master of Horse (traditional post for second in command) Marcus Antonius. Cicero and Antonius have always had a distant relationship but there is an underlying animosity because Antonius’s stepfather, Publius Lentulus Sura, was one of the five Catiline conspirators Cicero had put to death in 63 BC (as described in detail in the previous novel in the series, Lustrum).
Depressing months of house arrest follow. Cicero is deeply upset by the rift with his beloved brother. All the news is of death, including that of Milo the gladiator and Cicero’s promising pupil, Marcus Caelius Rufus (269). Then they all hear news of the the miserable end of Pompey, treacherously stabbed as he went ashore in Egypt (270).
In the spring of 47 the news is that Caesar is still in Egypt with his alleged paramour, Cleopatra. Cicero is still stuck in Brundisium. His beloved daughter Tullia makes the dangerous journey to visit him. Her husband, Dolabella, now ignores her completely and has affairs. Worse, Tullia brings news that his wife, Terentia, has been conspiring with her steward Philotimus, to plunder his estate and belongings for years. Cicero’s private life is in ruins.
Then a letter comes from Caesar, no less, announcing he is returning to Italy and will come to visit Cicero. Soon afterwards Cicero is summoned to meet the dictator at Tarentum. Cicero is rising there with an entourage of cavalry and lictors when they encounter the huge column of Caesar’s army. The dictator dismounts from his horse, greets Cicero and walks with him.
It is a perfectly genial conversation. Cicero asks to be relieved of the damned lictors who still accompany him everywhere because he still, legally, is governor of Cilicia, but are a damned inconvenience. Caesar agrees on the spot. But shouldn’t that take a vote in the senate? Caesar replies: ‘I am the senate’. Caesar politely says he isn’t sure he wants Cicero back in Rome making speeches against him. Cicero assures him that he has utterly retired from politics. He intends to devote his life to studying and writing philosophy. Caesar is pleased. Then Harris has Cicero ask one of the Great Questions of History: Did Caesar always aim at this outcome, a dictatorship? No, is Caesar’s swift reply.
‘Never! I sought only the respect due my rank and my achievements. For the rest, one merely adapts to the circumstances as they arise.’ (p.281)
The thoughtful reader reels at the impact of these words, on the light they shed on the real processes of history, and this encounter makes you review everything, the long complex violent sequence of events which has led to the collapse of the Roman Republic and Cicero’s hectic chequered career which has brought the two men to this encounter on a dusty road amid a huge entourage of battle hardened soldiers. Then Caesar mounts his horse and gallops off (282).
Part two – Redux (47 to 43 BC)
They head back to Rome but Cicero decides to stop and live outside the city, at his country house at Tusculum (287). Description of the house. Here he settles down to translate the best of Greek philosophy into Latin (289). He starts with a history of oratory he called the Brutus and dedicated to him, though the dedicatee didn’t like it (290).
He divorces Terentia (286). They still have much in common but she’s been robbing him blind, stripping his properties of their furnishings and selling them off.
Cicero gives oratory lessons to Caesar’s exquisite lieutenant Aulus Hirtius (who is rumoured to have written many of the commentaries on the Gallic War) (291). He is soon joined by Gaius Vibius Pansa and Cassius Longinus as pupils of Cicero (292). Cassius admits that he regrets allowing himself to be pardoned by Caesar and confides in Cicero that he has already planned to assassinate Caesar (292).
Tullia’s errant husband Dolabella is back from fighting in Africa. He asks to come visit Cicero and Tullia. He tells them about the war in Africa, about Caesar’s great victory at Thrapsus, and about the hideous suicide of Cato (297). The deep impact on Cassius and Brutus, both of whom were related to Cato i.e. shame for having accepted Caesar’s pardon and living on under his dictatorship. Cicero writes a short eulogy to Cato (299).
Caesar holds four triumphs in a row and absurdly lavish games (300) but during one of them his chariot’s axle snaps and he’s thrown to the ground. Caesar’s clemency, forgiving errant senators (302). He pardons many of his enemies, notably Brutus, some said because Brutus was his son by his long-term mistress Servilia, herself half sister of Cato.
Cicero is forced to marry the totally unsuitable Publilia for money (Tiro reviews the three eligible i.e. rich candidates) (306). Description of the wedding including the disarmingly simple Roman marriage vow (‘Where you are Gaia, I am Gaius’) (308). After only a few weeks the marriage isn’t working (309).
His daughter Tullia comes to stay to bear the child she was impregnated with when Dolabella visited (she had been staying with her mother since the divorce). But she is ill with tuberculosis. She gives birth to a healthy boy (named Lentulus) but never recovers. Death bed scene, Cicero holds her hand, she dies peacefully in her sleep (312).
Stricken with grief, Cicero flees his young wife and hides himself away in a succession of friends’ houses and remote villas, writing a handbook of Greek philosophy about consolation (314). Eventually he divorces Publilia (315), and invites Tiro to join him in Tusculum where he sets about dictating the Tusculan Disputations (317). There are to be five books cast in the form of a dialogue between a philosopher and his student:
One must train for death by leading a life that is morally good:
‘Such were the lessons that Cicero had learned and wished to impart to the world’ (319).
Dolabella comes to visit. He is back from the war in Spain. He was badly injured. He asks to take possession of his son by Tullia, and Cicero agrees. Dolabella tells Cicero the fight in Spain was different from the other campaigns, more hard fought, more bitter. When Pompey’s son Gnaeus was killed in battle, Caesar had his head stuck on a lance (321). They took no prisoners. They killed 30,000 enemy i.e. Roman troops. Many of the enemies he pardoned after the earlier wars had fought against him. Caesar has returned a different man, angry and embittered.
Cicero continues turning out books at speed. Burying himself in Greek philosophy , reading, studying, dictating to Tiro, all help him manage his grief over Tullia’s death. He writes On the nature of the gods and On divination.
Caesar is a changed man, angrier, more controlling. His grasp on reality seems to have slipped. He writes a petty-minded riposte to Cicero’s eulogy of Cato. His infatuation with Cleopatra leads him to set up statues of her in Rome, including in temples. He has himself declared a god with his own priesthood (323). He announces a grandiose plan to take 36 legions (!) to the east to smash the Parthian Empire, march back round the Black Sea conquering all the territory, approach Germany from the East to conquer and pacify it. Basically, to conquer the whole world (323). Alexander the Great.
Cicero goes to stay on the Bay of Naples. On the Feast of Saturnalia he gives all his staff presents and finally, after years of prevaricating, gives Tiro the farm he’s always yearned for. It is described in idyllic terms but the thing that struck me was that is staffed by six slaves and an overseer. This doesn’t cause a bump or hesitation in the description by Tiro, the ex-slave (330).
Caesar sends a letter announcing he will drop by. Cicero is thrown into a panic and makes massive preparations. Caesar arrives with his entourage and cohorts of soldiers. Dinner conversation. Caesar flatters him by saying he enjoyed reading the Tusculan Disputations. This leads Cicero to ask Caesar whether he thinks his soul will survive his death. Caesar replies he doesn’t know about anyone else, but he knows that his soul will survive his death – because he is a god! Simples. Cicero concludes the intensity of his isolation, achievements and responsibility have driven him mad (328).
Caesar is made dictator for life. He has the seventh month of the year renamed July. He is given the title Emperor and Father of the Nation. He presides over the Senate from a golden throne. He has a statue of himself added to the seven statues of the ancient kings of Rome. Harris repeats the famous story that at the Lupercal festival Mark Antony repeatedly tries to crown Caesar with a laurel wreath, though the crowd boos (331).
Caesar plans to leave Rome on 18 March 44 BC to commence his huge campaign in the East. A meeting of the Senate is arranged for the 15th or Ides of March, to confirm the list of appointments to all the magistracies which Caesar has drawn up for the three years he intends to be away.
On the morning of the fifteenth Cicero and Tiro get up early and arrive at the Senate ahead of time. The meeting is being held in the theatre built by Pompey because the old Senate house still hasn’t been rebuilt after Clodius’s mob burned the old one down on the day of his funeral in 52.
Harris manages the tense build-up to one of the most famous events in Western history, the assassination of Julius Caesar very well. Tiro gives an eye witness account the main point of which is confusion and delay. Caesar was warned by a soothsayer and his wife’s bad dreams not to attend the session and so the assembled senators mill around increasingly impatient for hours. Eventually Caesar arrives having been cajoled into coming by Decimus Brutus, one of the conspirators.
Assassination of Caesar (338). Conspirators retreat to the Capitol Hill. Cicero meets them and is staggered that they have no plan (347). Instead of seizing power they expect the republic to magically reconstitute itself. Leaving this vacuum is their tragic mistake (353 and 368). Lepidus moves troops into Rome and takes control. The assassins address the crowd but don’t win them over:
A speech is a performance not a philosophical discourse: it must appeal to the emotions more than to the intellect. (p.349)
Meeting of the Senate at which Antony makes a commanding speech calling for compromise and amnesty for the assassins (358). Several sessions of the Senate trying to reconcile the parties. Nervously the assassins agree to come off the hill and negotiate with Antony, the serving consul after both sides have given hostages (as in The Gallic Wars, the only mechanism for gaining trust between chronically suspicious partners.)
So Caesar’s assassins and supporters sit in a further session of the Senate, which agrees to keep magistrates in place, Caesar’s laws unaltered, then agrees with Antony’s suggestion that Caesar’s will is opened and read publicly (364).
The big surprise of Caesar’s will, that he leaves three-quarters of his estate to his nephew Octavianus, who he legally adopts and is to be named Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (367).
Five days after the assassination there is a grand funeral for Caesar, complete with elaborate cortege. Tiro thinks it was stage managed by Fulvia, Antony’s venomous wife. It climaxes with Antony’s speech to the crowd in which he drops all pretence at reconciliation and says Caesar was cruelly murdered by cowards (370). Antony displays Caesar’s corpse and then says he left the people 300 sestercii each in his will to inflames the crowd. When the pyre is lit the crowd go mad, tear off their clothes and throw them in, loot nearby shops and chuck furniture on. Then go rampaging through the streets attacking the houses of the assassins. They tear Helvius Cinna the poet to pieces under the misapprehension he is Cinna the conspirator (372). The assassins leave Rome.
Cicero flees Rome and devotes himself to writing, producing in feverish outburst the books On auguries, On fate, On glory, and begun sketching On Friendship (375). Visitors from Rome bring stories of Antony’s high handed behaviour.
One day Cornelius turns up with a short skinny kid with pimples. This is the famous Octavian who is staying with neighbours (there is ambiguity about his name so Harris gets the boy himself to tell everyone he wants to be referred to as Octavian, p.377). Octavian butters Cicero up and seeks his advice. He has no small talk. He is a logical machine.
An extended dinner party at which Octavian’s father, advisors, some of Caesar’s senior officers and Cicero discuss what he should do. Cicero is blunt. Go to Rome, claim your inheritance and stand for office. He tells Tiro he doesn’t think the boy stands a chance but his presence will undermine Antony.
Cicero sends Tiro to attend the next meeting of the Senate (he is too concerned for his own safety to go). Tiro witnesses Antony award himself the command of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul for five years and arrange other allies in positions of power. Octavian is nowhere to be seen. He visits Cicero’s son-in-law Dolabella. Cicero wants the dowry which accompanied Tullia back. Instead Dolabella gives him a document which assigns Cicero as Dolabella’s legate in Syria. He doesn’t have to do anything but it gives him the legal right to travel and Greece and immunity for 5 years (385).
Cicero and Tiro travel to Brutus’s family home at Antium to discuss what the leading assassins should do. Brutus’s mother Servilia is disgusted at the thought her son will be merely handed on of Pompey’s grain commissioners, but Cicero advises Brutus and Cassius to take these posts and wait on events (388). But the real point is the assassins are falling out among themselves and have no plan.
Cicero moves on to another of his properties. He is working simultaneously on three books, On friendship, On duties and On virtues (391). Reluctantly Tiro decides it is time to quit Cicero and go live on that farm. He is 60. Cicero accepts it calmly and returns to his work. Tiro’s farm (393). Nonetheless, he still frequents spas and there overhears gossip about Rome, opposition to Antony.
He meets again Agathe, the slave girl he paid to have liberated but never to to see again. With her freedom she worked, saved money and bought the spa where Tiro has bumped into her (398). [Right at the end of the narrative we are told her full name is Agathe Licinia and she owns the baths of Venus Libertina at Baiae, p.488).
Cicero comes to visit him on the farm. Antony is failing, and Brutus and Cassius have determined to revive the opposition. He is energised and going back to Rome to throw himself back into the fray. His daughter’s dead, he’s divorced from his wife, he has nothing to lose. He doesn’t mean to but Cicero is so charismatic that…he lures Tiro back into his service (402).
It takes them 8 days to travel to Rome. The roads are dangerous. Gangs of Caesar’s demobbed soldiers roam the countryside, stealing, killing, burning. People are terrified. Once in Rome Cicero attends the next sitting of the Senate and makes a speech against the corruption and distortion of the law by Antony. This becomes known as the First Phillippic, in a jokey reference to the speeches Demosthenes delivered against the Macedonian tyrant, Philip II (411).
Antony replies with an excoriating speech to the Senate dragging up every disreputable scrap he can about Cicero, and highlighting his flip-flopping support for great men as signs of a self-seeking sycophant (412).
It is December 44 BC. The military situation is chaotic. There are no fewer than seven armies with different leaders (413). Octavian’s army occupies Rome. Antony is in Brundisium trying to bribe legions returned from Macedonia into supporting him. Octavian makes a speech about calling his adoptive father the greatest Roman, to applause from the crowd. He leaves Rome, Antony exits it but then has to speed to one of his legions which Octavian has bribed away. Chaos.
Cicero’s second Philippic against Antony, packed with scurrilous gossip and accusations of corruption (418). Cicero explains his position to Tiro and Atticus: Antony is the enemy, ‘a monstrous and savage animal’ (432), often drunk dictator in the making. Octavian, with the name of Caesar and many of his legions, is the only force which can stop Antony. Atticus wisely asks whether Octavian will not himself then become dictator. But Cicero naively thinks that he can control and steer the young man, in order to restore the Republic (421).
Cicero meets Octavian at one of Atticus’s houses by Lake Volsinii. Harris is in his element. He imagines the power plays and negotiations. Octavian agrees to be guided by the Senate if Cicero persuades the Senate to give him imperium and legal authority to fight Antony (426).
Antony has marched with his legions to besiege Decimus Brutus, governor of Cisapline Gaul, in the town of Mutena. Brutus remains loyal to the state and Senate, so Antony is clearly everyone’s enemy. Cicero makes a big speech in the Senate claiming the state is being rescued by the boy Octavian. This speech became known as the Third Philippic (430). When he goes out to repeat it to the people in the Forum he is drowned by cheers.
BUT when the Senate meets early in January 43 Cicero is shocked when both new consuls (Hirtius and Pansa) and other senators reject his criticism of Antony and hope peace can still be negotiated. Next day Cicero makes the speech of his life, the Fifth Philippic in which he scorns any peace overtures to Antony, proposes he be declared an enemy of the state, and that Octavian be given full official backing (438).
But the next day Antony’s wife and mother are presented in the Senate. If Antony is declared an enemy of the state, his property will be confiscated and they will be thrown out on the streets. To Cicero’s disgust this moderates the Senate’s decision from open war down to sending peace envoys.
A month later the peace envoys return from Mutena, where Antony is besieging Decimus. Antony refused all their proposals and made his own counter-proposals including 5 years command of Further Gaul. Once again a debate in the Senate where Antony’s friends and relations sway things. Once again Cicero rises the following day to utterly condemn Antony as the instigator of war. As Cato was Caesar’s inveterate enemy, so Cicero has made himself Antony’s.
The two consuls lead a conscript army off to face Antony in the north. The leading magistrate left in Rome, the urban praetor Marcus Cornutus, is inexperienced and turns to Cicero for advice. Thus at the age of 63 he becomes the most powerful man in the city, dictator in all but name.
It takes a while for despatches to return from the north and when they do they initially tell of a great defeat of Antony. Cicero is triumphant. It is the most successful day of his life. But then further despatches reveal that not one but both consuls were killed in the Battle of Mutena. Then Decomus Brutus reveals that his weakened army allowed Antony to flee with his over the Alps.
Worst of all, word has got to Octavian of some casual slighting remarks of Cicero’s. Octavian warns he is not prepared to be subordinate to Decimus, as the Senate ordered. Since there are 2 vacancies for consul, why can he not be made one? (He is only 19; the lower age limit for the consulship is meant to be 43.)
In May 43 Antony and his army arrived at the base of Lepidus, who was meant to be holding Gaul for the Senate. Instead he goes over to Antony. He claims his troops mutinied and wanted to join Antony’s.
When official news reaches the Senate Cicero is called on to make a speech summarising the situation. This is that Antony, far from being extinguished, is more powerful than ever. Deep groans from the senators. To Cicero’s horror the traditionalist Isauricus announces that he has swung his power and influence behind Octavian, and offered him his daughter’s hand in marriage, and proposes that Octavian be allowed to stand as consul in absentia. In other words, Octavian has dropped Cicero. In his shock, Cicero gives a speech crystallising his political beliefs in a nutshell:
That the Roman Republic, with its division of powers, its annual free elections for every magistracy, its law courts and its juries, its balance between Senate and people, its liberty of speech and thought, is mankind’s noblest creation (p.475)
And goes on to say that, for this reason, he thinks Octavian should not be awarded the consulship. It’s precisely this kind of bending of the rules which brought them the rule of Pompey, then Caesar. This speech places Cicero, for the first time, directly against Octavian’s wishes.
Crucially, he points out to the Senate that even if Lepidus goes over to Antony and Octavian is of increasingly uncertain loyalty, they can call on the legions commanded by Brutus in Syria and Cassius in Macedon. The point is that, without realising it, Cicero is creating the conditions under which Octavian and Antony will unite as the Caesarian party and declare war on the army of the assassins.
At the end of the new month of ‘July’ they learn that Octavian has struck camp, crossed the Rubicon with his army and is marching on Rome. Cicero had repeatedly assured the Senate of Octavian’s good intentions. Now he looks naive at best, Octavian’s tool at worst (476).
Legions arrive from Africa and Cornutus assures they will be loyal. But when Cicero goes to address them they remain resolutely silent. What do his fancy words about ‘liberty’ mean to them? They want money (480).
Next day the African legions mutiny and join Octavian’s. Cornutus kills himself in shame. Octavian’s troops now occupy Rome. Cicero contemplates suicide, but goes to see him. Their relationship has completely changed. Octavian tells Cicero he has organised to have the consulship, and who his fellow consul will be, an obscure relative who will be a puppet. Soon he will go to meet Antony and Lepidus. He recommends Cicero leaves Rome. Go to Greece and write philosophy. He won’t be allowed to return without permission. Don’t write anything against Octavian. Octavian is the new dictator (483).
Broken in spirit, all his hopes crushed, Cicero retreats to his country villa at Tusculum (485). They hear Octavian has set up a special court to try Caesar’s assassins. Then that he has left Rome with 11 legions, marching to confront Antony.
A month goes by and he conceives the idea of collecting all his letters. Tiro has kept all of them. He unpacks them. Cicero has them read out in chronological order. His whole hectic public and private life. He is fully aware that they amount to:
the most complete record of an historical era ever assembled by a leading statesman. (p.487)
So he instructs Tiro to assemble his letters in the right order, then make several complete copies to be hidden and preserved. Atticus, always keen to ingratiate himself with everyone, averse to all risk, insists that all his letters to Cicero are burned, burns them with his own hands. But copies of the rest are made and Tiro sends his copies down to his farm to be hidden for posterity.
At the end of November 43 Cicero sends Tiro into Rome to recover the last of his papers from his properties. That night there is screaming in the streets. Tiro learns the devastating news that Antony, Octavian and Lepidus have joined forces to create a Second Triumvirate. They have published a list of hundreds of senators and knights who have been proscribed: their properties are to be confiscated and a bounty of 100,000 sesterces on their heads. Both Marcus and Quintus Cicero are on the list (490).
Panic, pandemonium, the city at night is full of death gangs seeking out the proscribed men in order to kill them, cut off their heads, and present them to the auditors. In mad haste, Tiro tells the remaining slaves in Cicero’s houses to flee, scribbles a message to be taken by courier to Cicero at Tusculum telling him to flee to his villa on the small island of Astura, then follows in a carriage.
It’s several days before Marcus and Quintus arrive on the shore. It’s the depths of winter, it’s raining, they look bedraggled. Tiro had a slave go and hire a boat in nearby Antium to carry them down the coast and abroad, but Quintus refuses to get in it.
They spend a miserable night in the little house on the island. Cicero elaborates on what happened: Octavian, Antony and Lepidus have met in Bononia and struck a deal to divide the empire between them. They’ve agreed to fund their armies by the simple expedient of killing the richest 2,000 men in the republic and seizing their property. To vouch for their good intentions they each agreed to include in the list someone dear to them: Antony his uncle, Lucius Caesar; Lepidus his own brother; and Octavian, after several days of holding out, Cicero, his former mentor and adviser (494).
They set off by ship but the seas and the winds are against them. Ten men are rowing the ship but it makes almost no headway. They put into a cove, beach the ship and try to shelter from the elements under the sails. Misery.
Next morning Tiro wakes to find Cicero gone. There is a path up from the beach. Tiro finds Cicero wandering along it, distracted. He tells Tiro he plans to head back to Rome to kill himself on Octavian’s doorstep. He’ll die of the shame. No he won’t, says Tiro. Cicero will just be captured and tortured to death, then decapitated. Reluctantly Cicero turns and returns with him to the beach.
They all embark back in the ship and set off rowing again. But it is hard going, the wind against them, the seas heavy. Cicero recognises the headland of Caieta and knows he has a house nearby. He insists they dock at a small jetty. Tiro checks the villa hasn’t been occupied by soldiers or death squads but it appears untouched so he sends slaves to fetch Cicero from the beach and tells the housekeeper to light fires and prepare a bath.
They sleep deeply but are wakened next morning by a slave saying soldiers are coming. Cicero insists on having a bath and dressing formally. Only then will he enter the litter Tiro has arranged and is being carried down to the sea to board the ship when they are cut off by a dozen legionaries. The slaves turn about face and carry the litter hastily back up the path but are met by more legionaries.
The tribune leading the soldiers turns out to be one Caius Popillius Laenas. By a supreme irony he was one of Cicero’s first clients in law. He defended him against a charge of parricide when he was a measly 15 year old and got him acquitted on condition he join the army. Oh the irony (which Harris appears to havey confected; none of this is in the historical accounts I’ve read).
Popollius orders the centurion under him to execute Cicero. Cicero is utterly resigned and insists they do it while he lies back on the litter, assuming the position of a defeated gladiator. And so with one stroke of his sword the centurion cuts off the head which composed some of the greatest speeches and works of literature in the Latin language. Little good they all did him in the end.
They then chop off his hands and put them all in a basket and depart. Tiro hears Antony was so delighted by the hands he gave Popillius a bonus of a million sestercii. Antony had Cicero’s head and hands nailed to the public rostra as a warning to anyone else who opposed the triumvirate. It is said that Antony’s wife, Flavia, who hated Cicero, stuck needles through his witty tongue (502).
Tiro and the slaves carry Cicero’s body down to the beach and burn it on a pyre. Then he headed south to his farm. Quintus and his son were caught and executed. Atticus was spared because he had helped Fulvia when anti-Antony feeling was at its height.
All the loose ends are neatly tied up and Harris gives Tiro the briefest of spaces, just one page, to reflect on the extraordinary life he has described and the epic times it sheds light on.
My work is done. My book is finished. Soon I will die too. (p.503)
The Victorians achieved moving literary effects by writing too much. Modern writers strive for the same emotional impact by writing too little.
It is a moving and emotional end because Cicero’s life itself was so awesome and his end so wretched. The facts themselves are very moving for the reader who has accompanied Cicero this far, however. Harris’s treatment is a little disappointing. He winds up the narrative by telling us that Tiro marries that slave girl he freed all those years ago, Agath,e and they often spend the evenings together reminiscing. Sounds like a Disney movie or the Waltons.
And he quotes the passage from Cicero’s work, The Dream of Scipio, where Cicero tells the statesman to look down from the vast heavens on the insignificant earth and dismiss the petty activities of humans.
Ah, but that’s what politicians all say when their careers are over. Contrary to all Cicero’s preaching in his literary works, the consolations of philosophy are feeble compared with the full-blooded excitement of action.
Key words
Politics
As I made abundantly clear in my reviews of the first two books, these are novels about politics, not in the broad theoretical sense, but in the narrow sense of the day to day scrabble to win and then maintain positions of power in the state. One of the many pleasures of the previous books is the way Harris has characters state sententiae – maxims or sayings about politics – which are perfectly meaningful in their context but framed in such a way as to be widely applicable to any time and place, including our own.
But having got into the habit of writing out all the apothegms in all three books made me realise there are far, far fewer uses of the word, and hardly any zingy apothegms about it in this one.
Power
I think the word ‘politics’, central to the previous two novels, is superseded in this one by use of the word ‘power’, signifying a shift in subject and in historical events. With the advent of the Triumvirate the time for petty politics passes and is replaced by the more naked manipulation of power.
And then, possibly, the word ‘power’ is itself superseded half-way through the book by ‘war’. And neither Cicero nor Tiro can make casual, knowing generalisations about war since neither of them are soldiers.
It’s a subtle, lexical indication of the way the focus of a novel supposedly about Cicero shifts its emphasis, spreads it more widely, in this novel. Well before the end of part one the energy centre of the narrative, as of Cicero’s world, has shifted to Caesar. Caesar is the true protagonist and Cicero an increasingly passive cork floating on the huge ocean of disruption and war he causes.
With the outbreak of civil war Cicero – and the text – become increasingly reliant on letters and third person accounts of events scattered all round the known world (Greece, Egypt, Spain).
And then, after the assassination of Caesar, not only all the characters but the narrative itself feels adrift. Retreating to the country, Cicero tries to make sense of the fast-moving series of events where no-one is in control, certainly not the assassins, but not Mark Antony either.
It’s in this chaos that slowly emerges from the confusions of the narrative the cold-eyed, steely determination of young Octavian who is to astonish the world by mastering the chaos created by his elders. Initially Octavian is keen to meet Cicero, ask his advice, when he departs with his army keeps in touch by letter. But when he hears about Cicero’s fateful slighting remark, he goes ominously silent. No letters, no replies, no despatches.
Octavian’s silences signal the text’s final abandonment of Cicero. Tiro’s narrative continues to focus on Cicero’s activities and attitudes but the narrative has moved through three key words – politics, power, war – and the final buzzword is nothing, nothingness.
The authorities in Rome hear nothing about Antony for months, Cicero hears nothing from Octavian for months. But in this ominous silence they are cooking up the Second Triumvirate, which will seize power and unleash an army of assassins whose aim is the end of all words. The end of Cicero. The end of the text.
The law
A little into this one I realised I’d been missing the importance of an obvious subject, the law. Cicero was first and foremost a lawyer. He made his name with the Verres case (described in great detail in part one of Imperium). Even when he ducked out of politics he continued to advocate cases in the courts. And what comes over very loudly is that in ancient Rome the law had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with fancy notions of ‘Justice’ but was entirely a tool of political manipulation, attack and revenge.
Trials in ancient Rome were wildly different from modern trials. They involved a jury of scores, sometimes hundreds (75 jurors were sworn in for the trial of Rufus, p.116), were conducted in the open air with the Roman crowd watching, sometimes in their thousands. Speeches were astonishingly ad hominem, not only dishing up all kinds of dirt on the accused and witnesses but also on the opposing advocates, who were often accused of the most grotesque crimes themselves.
Above all, cases could descend into violence as the onlookers behaved more like a football crowd than the limited number of public allowed into a modern court, and started yelling or applauding or booing, or sometimes throwing things, and sometimes invading the platform where the trial was being conducted.
So much highfalutin’, self-serving rhetoric surrounds the practice of the law but the Roman reality was obvious a shambles. Harris has Cicero tell Rufus:
‘My dear Rufus, have you learned nothing? There is no more honour in a legal dispute than there is in a wrestling match.’ (p.108)
War atrocities
As always, I am appalled at the gross violence, war crimes and atrocities carried out by the Roman army:
It is notable that the only member of the entire ruling class who protests against this behaviour is Cato, who makes a speech in the senate saying Caesar should be declared a war criminal, removed from his command and prosecuted. His suggestion is shouted down.
Even Cicero does’t care that much about these atrocities. But Tiro does. Harris has Tiro dwell on them with horror and this confirms for me, not that Tiro is a sensitive soul, but that he is the representative of the modern liberal consciousness in the novel. Tiro would be a more interesting character if he were either malicious or unreliable. Instead he is the simplest kind of narrator possible, the loyal friend of the protagonist who reports everything he sees with utter honesty. And is as appalled as a Guardian editorial by violence and war.
Family ties
Dated diction
In my review of Lustrum I mentioned the way the thriller, as a genre, uses stereotypical characters, situations and language to guarantee an enjoyable read. The characters and events may be unpleasant (betrayal, murder etc) but the shape and feel of the incidents is almost always super-familiar and, in a paradoxical way, despite being superficially unpleasant, at a deeper level, cognitively reassuring.
I meant to mention something else I noticed, which is that Harris’s characters often speak like characters from a 1950s British movie. I mean they use a reassuringly old fashioned and very pukka diction.
Some of the reviewers suggest Harris has rewritten Roman history for our times, and insofar as his narrative focuses on cynical abuses of political power that may be true. But I was struck by how very 1950s the language of a lot of the characters is. They often reminded me of characters from Ealing Comedies or the St Trinian’s movies.
It first struck me when Cicero talks about one of the other characters as ‘not being such a bad fellow’. From then on I noticed this 1950s upper-middle class professional register.
‘Very well, young man, that’s enough’ (p.29).
On page 107 Tiro refers to Bestia as ‘the old rogue’. Who uses the word ‘rogue’ any more unless they’re talking about the Star Wars movie Rogue One or a ‘rogue state’ or maybe describing a ‘loveable rogue’ in a review of a movie?
Bestia had with him ‘his son Atratinus, a clever lad’.
When characters address each other they’re likely to say things like, ‘My dear Rufus…’ or ‘My dear, poor boy…’ Atticus speaks with the overemphasis typical of the English upper-middle classes: ‘Tiro, my dear fellow, thank you so much for taking care of my old friend so devotedly‘ (p.113). And:
Now you could argue that the dialogue is a bit old fogeyish as part of a broader authorial strategy by which Tiro’s language as a whole has a definite oldster tinge, like the pages of an old paperback which have yellowed with age.
I slept, and very deeply despite my anxieties, for such was my exhaustion… (p.499)
Not ‘because I was so exhausted’ but ‘such was my exhaustion’. It’s not exactly Victorian or really old diction and it’s not dominant in every sentence; but at moments when he has a choice, Harris always chooses the more old-fashioned, stiffer phrase.
Presumably this dated tinge is a conscious effort. I can see it has two intentions: one is to subtly convey that this is a 2,000 year old document describing a lost world. It is meant to feel, not archaic exactly, but slightly dated, in order to convey its pastness.
The other, more obvious motivation, is that the narrator is 100 years old. Tiro is an oldster. So of course his turn of phrase would be dated, even in his own time. When you ponder that fact, you could argue that the phrasing throughout the book is not dated enough.
But at the end of the day this is not a literary work, but a popular novel, a historical thriller and its default prose style is the crisp, factual manner of the thriller and most literary effects are clinically dispensed with in order to achieve its strong, direct, intelligent but simple impact.
Scraps
Cicero tells Tiro that Cato is the only one of them who clearly sees they they’re on the road to ruin (p.149).
Tiro the slave (p.20). His (sketchy) thoughts about slavery (p.226).
Caesar is like a whirlpool (p.147).
Credit
Dictator by Robert Harris was published by Hutchinson books in 2015. All references are to the 2016 Arrow paperback edition.
The Cicero trilogy
Robert Harris reviews
Roman reviews
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Posted by Simon on July 29, 2022
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/07/29/dictator-robert-harris/