“My dear,” said Cicero beseechingly, pressing his hand to his forehead, “if you will tell me how I am supposed to defeat time itself, then I will fight it bravely. But what am I to do if I have only ten days to set out my prosecution before the court goes into recess for weeks on end?”

Terentia leaned in so that her face was only inches from his and hissed, “Make your speech shorter!”

AFTER HIS WIFE HAD RETIRED to her corner of the house, Cicero, still not fully recovered from his fit of nerves, retreated to his study and sat there for a long time, staring at the wall. We left him alone. Sthenius came by just before sunset to report that Quintus Metellus had summoned all the Sicilian witnesses to his house, and that a few of the more timid souls had foolishly obeyed. From one of these, Sthenius had obtained a full report of how Metellus had tried to intimidate them into retracting their evidence. “I am consul-elect,” he had thundered at them. “One of my brothers is governing Sicily, the other is going to preside over the extortion court. Many steps have been taken to ensure that no harm can befall Verres. We shall not forget those who go against us.” I took down the exact quotation and tentatively went in to see Cicero. He had not moved in several hours. I read out Metellus’s words, but he gave no sign of having heard.

By this stage I was becoming seriously concerned, and would have fetched his brother or his wife again, if his mind had not suddenly reemerged from wherever it had been wandering. Staring straight ahead, he said in a grim tone: “Go and make an appointment for me to see Pompey this evening.” When I hesitated, wondering if this was another symptom of his malady, he glared at me. “Go!”

It was only a short distance to Pompey’s house, which was in the same district of the Esquiline Hill as Cicero’s. The sun had just gone down but it was still light, and swelteringly hot, with a torpid breeze wafting gently from the east-the worst possible combination at the height of summer, because it carried into the neighborhood the stench of the putrefying corpses in the great common graves beyond the city wall. I believe the problem is not so acute these days, but sixty years ago the Esquiline Gate was the place where everything dead and not worth a proper funeral was taken to be dumped-the bodies of dogs and cats, horses, donkeys, slaves, paupers, and stillborn babies, all mixed up and rotting together, along with the household refuse. The stink always drew great flocks of crying gulls, and I remember that on this particular evening it was especially acute, a rancid and pervasive smell, which one tasted on the tongue as much as one absorbed it through the nostrils.

Pompey’s house was much grander than Cicero’s, with a couple of lictors posted outside and a crowd of sightseers gathered opposite. There were also half a dozen canopied litters set down in the lee of the wall, their bearers squatting nearby playing bones-evidence that a big dinner party was in progress. I gave my message to the gatekeeper, who vanished inside and returned a little later with the praetor-elect, Palicanus, who was dabbing at his greasy chin with a napkin. He recognized me, asked what it was all about, and I repeated my message. “Right you are,” said Palicanus, in his blunt way. “You can tell him from me that the consul will see him immediately.”

Cicero must have known Pompey would agree to meet, for when I returned he had already changed into a fresh set of clothes and was ready to go out. He was still very pale. He exchanged a last look with Quintus, and then we set out. There was no conversation between us as we walked, because Cicero, who hated any reminder of death, kept his sleeve pressed to his mouth and nose to ward off the smell from the Esquiline field. “Wait here,” he said, when we reached Pompey’s house, and that was the last I saw of him for several hours. The daylight faded, the massy purple twilight ripened into darkness, and the stars began to appear in clusters. Occasionally, when the door was opened, the muffled sounds of voices and laughter reached the street, and I could smell meat and fish cooking, although on that foul night they all reeked of death to me, and I wondered how Cicero could possibly find the stomach for it, for by now it was clear that Pompey had asked him to join his dinner party.

I paced up and down, leaned against the wall, attempted to think up some new symbols for my great shorthand system, and generally tried to occupy myself as the night went on. Eventually Pompey’s guests started reeling out, half of them too drunk to stand properly, and it was the usual crew of Piceneans-Afranius, the former praetor and lover of the dance; Palicanus, of course; and Gabinius, Palicanus’s son in law, who also had a reputation for loving women and song-a real old soldiers’ reunion, it must have been, and I found it hard to imagine that Cicero could have enjoyed himself much. Only the austere and scholarly Varro-“the man who showed Pompey where the Senate House was,” in Cicero’s cutting phrase-would have been remotely congenial company, especially as he at least emerged sober. Cicero was the last to leave. He set off up the street and I hurried after him. There was a good yellow moon and I had no difficulty in making out his figure. He still kept his hand up to his nose, for neither the heat nor the smell had much diminished, and when he was a decent distance from Pompey’s house, he leaned against the corner of an alley and was violently sick.

I came up behind him and asked him if he needed assistance, at which he shook his head and responded, “It is done.” That was all he said to me, and all he said to Quintus, too, who was waiting up anxiously for him at the house when he got in: “It is done.”

AT DAWN THE FOLLOWING DAY we made the two-mile walk back to the Field of Mars for the second round of elections. Although these did not carry the same prestige as those for the consulship and the praetorship, they always had the advantage of being much more exciting. Thirty-four men had to be elected (twenty senators, ten tribunes, and four aediles), which meant there were simply too many candidates for the poll to be easily controlled: when an aristocrat’s vote carried no more weight than a pauper’s, anything could happen. Crassus, as junior consul, was the presiding officer at this supplementary election-“but presumably even he,” said Cicero darkly as he pulled on his red leather shoes, “cannot rig this ballot.”

He had woken in an edgy, preoccupied mood. Whatever he and Pompey had agreed to the previous night had obviously disturbed his rest and he snapped irritably at his valet that his shoes were not clean. He donned the same brilliant white toga he had worn on this day six years earlier, when he had first been elected to the Senate, and braced himself before the front door was opened, as if he were about to shoulder a great weight. Once again, Quintus had done a fine job, and a marvelous crowd was waiting to escort him out to the voting pens. When we reached the Field of Mars we found it was packed right down to the river’s edge, for there was a census in progress, and tens of thousands had come to the city to register. You can imagine the noisy roar of it. There must have been a hundred candidates for those thirty-four offices, and all across the vast open field one could see these gleaming figures passing to and fro, accompanied by their friends and supporters, trying to gather every last vote before polling opened. Verres’s red head was also conspicuous, darting all over the place, with his father, his son, and his freedman Timarchides-the man who had invaded our house-making extravagant promises to any who would vote against Cicero. The sight seemed to banish Cicero’s ill humor instantly, and he plunged into the canvass. I thought on several occasions that our groups might collide, but the crowd was so huge it never happened.

When the augur pronounced himself satisfied, Crassus came out of the sacred tent and the candidates gathered at the base of his tribunal. Among them, I should record, making his first attempt to enter the Senate, was Julius Caesar, who stood beside Cicero and engaged him in friendly conversation. They had known each other a long time, and indeed it was on Cicero’s recommendation that the younger man had gone to Rhodes to study rhetoric under Apollonius Molon. Much hagiography now clusters around Caesar’s early years, to the extent that you would think he had been marked out by his contemporaries as a genius ever since the cradle. Not so, and anyone who saw him in his whitened toga that morning, nervously fiddling with his thinning hair, would have been hard put to distinguish him from any of the other well-bred young candidates. There was one great difference, though: few can have been as poor. To stand for election, he must have borrowed heavily, for he lived in very modest accommodation in the Subura, in a house full of women-his mother, his wife, and his little daughter-and I picture him at this stage not as the gleaming hero waiting to conquer Rome, but as a thirty-year-old man lying sleepless at night, kept awake by the racket of his impoverished neighborhood, brooding bitterly on the fact that he, a scion of the oldest family in Rome, had been reduced to such circumstances. His antipathy toward the aristocrats was consequently far more dangerous to them than Cicero’s ever was. As a self-made man, Cicero merely resented and envied them. But Caesar, who believed he was a direct descendant of Venus, viewed them with contempt, as interlopers.

But now I am running ahead of myself, and committing the same sin as the hagiographers, by shining the distorting light of the future onto the shadows of the past. Let me simply record that these two outstanding men, with six years difference in their ages but much in common in terms of brains and outlook, stood chatting amiably in the sun, as Crassus mounted the platform and read out the familiar prayer: “May this matter end well and happily for me, for my best endeavors, for my office, and for the People of Rome!” And with that the voting started.

The first tribe into the pens, in accordance with tradition, were the Suburana. But despite all Cicero’s efforts over the years, they did not vote for him. This must have been a blow, and certainly suggested Verres’s bribery agents had earned their cash. But Cicero merely shrugged: he knew that many influential men who had yet to vote would be watching for his reaction, and it was important to wear a mask of confidence. Then, one after another, came the three other tribes of the city: the Esquilina, the Collina, and the Palatina. Cicero won the support of the first two, but not the third, which was scarcely surprising, as it was easily the most aristocratically inclined of Rome’s neighborhoods. So the score was two-two: a tenser start than he would have liked. And now the thirty-one rustic tribes started lining up: the Aemilia, Camilia, Fabia, Galeria…I knew all their names from our office files, could tell you who were the key men in each, who needed a favor and who owed one. Three of these four went for Cicero. Quintus came up and whispered in his ear, and for the first time he could perhaps afford to relax, as Verres’s money had obviously proved most tempting to those tribes composed of a majority of city dwellers. The Horatia, Lemonia, Papiria, Menenia…On and on, through the heat and the dust, Cicero sitting on a stool between counts but always rising whenever the voters passed in front of him after casting their ballots, his memory working to retrieve their names, thanking them, and passing on his respects to their families. The Sergia, Voltina, Pupinia, Romilia…Cicero failed in the last tribe, not surprisingly, as it was Verres’s own, but by the middle of the afternoon he had won the support of sixteen tribes and needed only two more for victory. Yet still Verres had not given up, and could be seen in huddled groups with his son and Timarchides. For a terrible hour, the balance seemed to tilt his way. The Sabatini did not go for Cicero, and nor did the Publilia. But then he just scraped in with the Scaptia, and finally it was the Falerna from northern Campania who put him over the top: eighteen tribes out of the thirty which had so far voted, with five left to come-but what did they matter? He was safely home, and at some point when I was not looking Verres quietly removed himself from the election field to calculate his losses. Caesar, whose own elevation to the Senate had just been confirmed, was the first to turn and shake Cicero’s hand. I could see Quintus triumphantly brandishing his fists in the air, Crassus staring angrily into the distance. There were cheers from the spectators who had been keeping their own tallies-those curious zealots who follow elections as fervently as other men do chariot racing-and who appreciated what had just happened. The victor himself looked stunned by his achievement, but no one could deny it, not even Crassus, who would shortly have to read it out, even though the words must have choked him. Against all odds, Cicero was an aedile of Rome.