Imperium - Харрис Роберт - Страница 76
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I no longer possess those wax tablets, but Cicero kept my subsequent transcription among his most secret papers, and looking at it now, I am not surprised that I could not follow the original discussion. The conspirators had obviously met many times before, and their deliberations that night presupposed a good deal of knowledge. There was much talk of legislative timetables, and amendments to drafts of bills, and divisions of responsibilities. So you must not imagine that I simply read out what I had written and all was clear. It took the two of us many hours of puzzling over various cryptic remarks, and fitting this to that, until at last we had the whole thing plainly in sight. Every so often, Cicero would exclaim something like, “Clever devils! They are such clever devils!” and get up and prowl around, then return to work some more. And to cut it short, and give you the gist, it turned out that the plot which Caesar and Crassus must have been hatching over many months fell into four parts. First, they aimed to seize control of the state by sweeping the board in the general elections, securing not only both consulships but also all ten tribunates, and a couple of praetorships besides; the bribery agents reported that the thing was more or less a fait accompli, with Cicero’s support slipping daily. The second stage called for the introduction by the tribunes of a great land reform bill in December, which would demand the breaking up of the big publicly owned estates, in particular the fertile plains of Campania, and their immediate redistribution as farms to five thousand of the urban plebs. The third step involved the election in March of ten commissioners, headed by Crassus and Caesar, who would be given immense powers to sell off conquered land abroad, and to use the funds thereby released to compulsorily purchase further vast estates in Italy, for an even greater program of resettlement. The final stage demanded nothing less than the annexation of Egypt the following summer, using as a pretext the disputed will of one of its dead rulers, King Ptolemy the something-or-other, drawn up some seventeen years earlier, by which he had supposedly bequeathed his entire country to the Roman people; again, the revenue from this was to be given to the commissioners, for further acquisition of land in Italy.
“Dear gods: it is a coup d’etat disguised as an agrarian reform bill!” cried Cicero when we finally reached the end of my record. “This commission of ten, led by Crassus and Caesar, will be the real masters of the country; the consuls and the other magistrates will be mere ciphers. And their domination at home will be maintained in perpetuity by the proceeds of extortion abroad.” He sat back and was silent for a long while, his arms folded, his chin on his chest.
I was drained by what I had endured and longed only for sleep. Yet the early summer light now beginning to seep into the room showed we had worked right through the night and it was already election eve. I was aware of the dawn chorus starting up outside, and soon after that heard the tread of someone coming down the stairs. It was Terentia in her nightdress, her hair awry, her un-made-up face soft with sleep, a shawl drawn around her narrow shoulders. I stood respectfully and looked away in embarrassment. “Cicero!” she exclaimed, taking no notice of me. “What on earth are you doing down here at this hour?”
He looked up at her and wearily explained what had happened. She had a very quick mind for anything political or financial-had she not been born a woman, and given her spirit, there is no telling what she might have done-and the moment she grasped it she was horrified, for Terentia was an aristocrat to her core, and to her the notion of privatizing state land and giving it to the plebs was a step on the road to the destruction of Rome.
“You must lead the fight against it,” she urged Cicero. “This could win you the election. All the decent men will rally to you.”
“Ah, but will they?” Cicero picked up one of my notebooks. “Outright opposition to this could rebound on me badly. A large faction in the Senate, half of them patriotic and the other half just plain greedy, has always favored seizing Egypt. And out on the streets, the cry of “Free farms for all!” is far more likely to gain Catilina and Hybrida votes than cost them. No, I am trapped.” He stared at the transcript of the conference and shook his head slowly, like an artist ruefully contemplating the work of some talented rival. “It really is an extraordinary scheme-a stroke of true political genius. Only Caesar could have dreamed it up. And as for Crassus-for a down payment of just twenty million, he can expect to gain control of most of Italy and the whole of Egypt. Even you would concede that that is a good return on your investment.”
“But you have to do something,” persisted Terentia. “You cannot simply allow it to happen.”
“And what exactly would you have me do?”
“And you are supposed to be the cleverest man in Rome?” she asked in exasperation. “Is it not obvious? Go to the Senate this morning and expose what they are plotting. Denounce them!”
“A brilliant tactic, Terentia,” responded Cicero sarcastically. (I was beginning to find my position between them increasingly uncomfortable.) “I both reveal the existence of a popular measure and I denounce it at the same time. You are not listening to me: the people who stand to benefit the most from this are my supporters.”
“Well, then, you have only yourself to blame for depending on such a rabble in the first place! This is the problem with your demagoguery, Cicero-you may think you can control the mob, but the mob will always end up devouring you. Did you seriously believe you could beat men like Crassus and Catilina when it came to a public auction of principles?” Cicero grunted irritably; however I noticed he did not argue with her. “But tell me,” she continued, needling away at him, “if this ‘extraordinary scheme,’ as you call it-or ‘criminal enterprise,’ as I should prefer it-really is as popular as you say, why all this skulking around at night? Why do they not come out with it openly?”
“Because, my dear Terentia, the aristocrats think like you. They would never stand for it. First it will be the great public estates that are broken up and redistributed, next it will be their private domains. Every time Caesar and Crassus give a man a farm, they will create another client for themselves. And once the patricians start to lose control of the land, they are finished. Besides, how do you think Catulus or Hortensius would react to being ordered around by a ten-man commission elected by the people? The people! To them it would seem like a revolution-Tiberius Gracchus all over again.” Cicero threw the notebook back onto the dining table. “No, they would scheme and bribe and kill to preserve the status quo, just as they always have done.”
“And they would be right!” Terentia glowered down at him. Her fists were clenched; I almost expected her to hit him. “They were right to take away the powers of the tribunes, just as they were right to try to stop that provincial parvenu, Pompey. And if you had any sense, you would go to them now with this, and you would say to them, ‘Gentlemen, this is what Crassus and Caesar are proposing to do-support me and I shall try to put a stop to it!’”
Cicero sighed in exasperation and slumped back onto the couch. For a while he was silent. But then he suddenly glanced up at her. “By heavens, Terentia,” he said quietly, “what a clever shrew you are.” He jumped up and kissed her on the cheek. “My brilliant, clever shrew-you are quite correct. Or rather, half correct, for there is actually no need for me to do anything with it at all. I should simply pass it to Hortensius. Tiro, how long would it take you to make a fair copy of this transcript-not of all of it necessarily, just enough to whet Hortensius’s appetite?”
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