Imperium Read Online Free PDF Page B

he would seem to have all the hours of the day to listen to his dreary story, but then you would see his hand flicker out and catch some passerby, and he would spin as gracefully as a dancer, with the tenderest backward glance of apology and regret, to work on someone else. Occasionally he would gesture in our direction, and a senator would stare at us, and perhaps shake his head in disbelief, or nod slowly to promise his support.
    “What is he saying about me?” asked Sthenius. “What is he going to do?”
    I made no answer, for I did not know myself.
    By now, it was clear that Hortensius had realized something was going on but was unsure exactly what. The order of business had been posted in its usual place beside the door of the Senate House. I saw Hortensius stop to read it— the prosecution of persons in their absence on capital charges should be prohibited in the provinces —and turn away, mystified. Gellius Publicola was sitting in the doorway on his carved ivory chair, surrounded by his attendants, waiting until the entrails had been inspected and the auguries declared favorable before summoning the senators inside. Hortensius approached him, palms spread wide in inquiry. Gellius shrugged and pointed irritably at Cicero. Hortensius swung around to discover his ambitious rival surrounded by a conspiratorial circle of senators. He frowned and went over to join his own aristocratic friends: the three Metellus brothers—Quintus, Lucius, and Marcus—and the two elderly ex-consuls who really ran the empire, Quintus Catulus (whose sister was married to Hortensius) and the double triumphator, Publius Servilius Vatia Isauricus. Merely writing their names after all these years raises the hairs on my neck, for these were such men, stern and unyielding and steeped in the old republican values, as no longer exist. Hortensius must have told them about the motion, because slowly all five turned to look at Cicero. Immediately thereafter a trumpet sounded to signal the start of the session, and the senators began to file in.
    The old Senate House was a cool, gloomy, cavernous temple of government, split by a wide central aisle of black and white tile. Facing across it on either side were long rows of wooden benches, six deep, on which the senators sat, with a dais at the far end for the chairs of the consuls. The light on that November afternoon was pale and bluish, dropping in shafts from the unglazed windows just beneath the raftered roof. Pigeons cooed on the sills and flapped across the chamber, sending small feathers and even occasionally hot squirts of excrement down onto the senators below. Some held that it was lucky to be shat on while speaking, others that it was an ill omen, a few that it depended on the color of the deposit. The superstitions were as numerous as their interpretations. Cicero took no notice of them, just as he took no notice of the arrangement of sheep’s guts, or whether a peal of thunder was on the left or the right, or the particular flight path of a flock of birds—idiocy all of it, as far as he was concerned, even though he later campaigned enthusiastically for election to the College of Augurs.
    By ancient tradition, then still observed, the doors of the Senate House remained open so that the people could hear the debates. The crowd, Sthenius and I among them, surged across the Forum to the threshold of the chamber, where we were held back by a simple rope. Gellius was already speaking, relating the dispatches of the army commanders in the field. On all three fronts, the news was good. In southern Italy, the vastly rich Marcus Crassus—he who once boasted that no man could call himself wealthy unless he could keep a legion of five thousand solely out of his income—was putting down Spartacus’s slave revolt with great severity. In Spain, Pompey the Great, after six years’ fighting, was mopping up the last of the rebel armies. In Asia Minor, Lucius Lucullus was enjoying a glorious run of