“It sounds to me as though you should not be here, Cicero,” sneered Gabinius. He was something of a dandy, with thick and wavy hair slicked back in a quiff, in imitation of his chief. “To achieve our objective will require bold hearts, and possibly stout fists, not the quibbles of clever lawyers.”

“You will need hearts and fists and lawyers before you are done, Gabinius, believe me,” responded Cicero. “The moment you lose the legal immunity conferred by your tribuneship, the aristocrats will have you in court and fighting for your life. You will need a clever lawyer, well enough, and so will you, Cornelius.”

“Let us move on,” said Pompey. “Those are the problems. Do you have any solutions to offer?”

“Well,” replied Cicero, “for a start, I strongly urge that your name should not appear anywhere in the bill setting up the supreme command.”

“But it was my idea!” protested Pompey, sounding exactly like a child whose game was being taken over by his playmates.

“True, but I still say it would be prudent not to specify the actual name of the commander at the very outset. You will be the focus of the most terrible envy and rage in the Senate. Even the sensible men, whose support we can normally rely on, will balk at this. You must make the central issue the defeat of the pirates, not the future of Pompey the Great. Everyone will know the post is designed for you; there is no need to spell it out.”

“But what am I to say when I lay the bill before the people?” asked Gabinius. “That any fool off the street can hold the office?”

“Obviously not,” said Cicero, with a great effort at patience. “I would strike out the name ‘Pompey’ and insert the phrase ‘senator of consular rank.’ That limits it to the fifteen or twenty living ex-consuls.”

“So who might be the rival candidates?” asked Afranius.

“Crassus,” said Pompey at once; his old enemy was never far from his thoughts. “Perhaps Catulus. Then there is Metellus Pius-doddery, but still a force. Hortensius has a following. Isauricus. Gellius. Cotta. Curio. Even the Lucullus brothers.”

“Well, I suppose if you are really worried,” said Cicero, “we could always specify that the supreme commander should be any ex-consul whose name begins with a P .” For a moment no one reacted, and I was certain he had gone too far. But then Caesar threw back his head and laughed, and the rest-seeing that Pompey was smiling weakly-joined in. “Believe me, Pompey,” continued Cicero in a reassuring tone, “most of these are far too old and idle to be a threat. Crassus will be your most dangerous rival, simply because he is so rich and jealous of you. But if it comes to a vote you will defeat him overwhelmingly, I promise you.”

“I agree with Cicero,” said Caesar. “Let us clear our hurdles one at a time. First, the principle of the supreme command; then, the name of the commander.” I was struck by the authority with which he spoke, despite being the most junior man present.

“Very well,” said Pompey, nodding judiciously. “It is settled. The central issue must be the defeat of the pirates, not the future of Pompey the Great.” And on that note, the conference adjourned for lunch.

THERE NOW FOLLOWED a squalid incident which it embarrasses me to recall, but which I feel I must, in the interest of history, set down. For several hours, while the senators lunched, and afterwards strolled in the garden, I worked as rapidly as I could to translate my shorthand notes into a fair manuscript record of proceedings, which I could then present to Pompey. When I had finished, it occurred to me that perhaps I should check what I had written with Cicero, in case there might be something in it to which he objected. The chamber where the conference had been held was empty, and so was the atrium, but I could hear the senator’s distinctive voice and set off, clutching my roll of paper, in the direction from which I judged it was coming. I crossed a colonnaded courtyard, where a fountain played, then followed the portico around to another, inner garden. But now his voice had faded altogether. I stopped to listen. There was only birdsong, and the trickling of water. Then, suddenly, from somewhere very close, and loud enough to make me jump, I heard a woman groan, as if in agony. Like a fool, I turned and took a few more steps, and through an open door I was confronted by the sight of Caesar with Pompey’s wife. The Lady Mucia did not see me. She had her head down between her forearms, her dress was bunched up around her waist, and she was bent over a table, gripping the edge so tightly her knuckles were white. But Caesar saw me well enough, for he was facing the door, thrusting into her from behind, his right hand cupped around her swollen belly, his left resting casually on his hip, like a dandy standing on a street corner. For exactly how long our eyes met I cannot say, but he stares back at me even now-those fathomless dark eyes of his gazing through the smoke and chaos of all the years that were to follow-amused, unabashed, challenging. I fled.

By this time, most of the senators had wandered back into the conference chamber. Cicero was discussing philosophy with Varro, the most distinguished scholar in Rome, of whose works on philology and antiquities I was deeply in awe. On any other occasion I would have been honored to be introduced, but my head was still reeling from the scene I had just witnessed and I cannot remember a thing of what he said. I handed the minutes to Cicero, who skimmed them quickly, took my pen from me, and made a small amendment, all the while still talking to Varro. Pompey must have noticed what he was doing, for he came across with a big smile on his wide face and pretended to be angry, taking the minutes away from Cicero and accusing him of inserting promises he had never made-“though I think you can count on my vote for the praetorship,” he said, and slapped him on the back. Until a short while earlier, I had considered Pompey a kind of god among men-a booming, confident war hero-but now, knowing what I did, I thought him also sad. “This is quite remarkable,” he said to me, as he ran his huge thumb down the columns of words. “You have captured my voice exactly. How much do you want for him, Cicero?”

“I have already turned down an enormous sum from Crassus,” replied Cicero.

“Well, if ever there is a bidding war, be sure that I am included,” said Caesar in his rasping voice, coming up behind us. “I would dearly love to get my hands on Tiro.” But he said it in such a friendly way, accompanying it with a wink, that none of the others heard the menace in his words, while I felt almost faint with terror.

“The day that I am parted from Tiro,” said Cicero, prophetically as it turned out, “is the day that I quit public life.”

“Now I am doubly determined to buy him,” said Caesar, and Cicero joined in the general laughter.

After agreeing to keep secret everything that had been discussed, and to meet in Rome in a few days’ time, the group broke up. The moment we turned out of the gates and onto the road to Tusculum, Cicero let out a long, pent-up cry of frustration and struck the side of the carriage with the palm of his hand. “A criminal conspiracy!” he said, shaking his head in despair. “Worse-a stupid criminal conspiracy. This is the trouble, Tiro, when soldiers decide to play at politics. They imagine that all they need to do is issue an order, and everyone will obey. They never see that the very thing which makes them attractive in the first place-that they are supposedly these great patriots, above the squalor of politics-must ultimately defeat them, because either they do stay above politics, in which case they go nowhere, or they get down in the muck along with the rest of us and show themselves to be just as venal as everyone else.” He stared out at the lake, darkening now in the winter light. “What do you make of Caesar?” he said suddenly, to which I returned a noncommittal answer about his seeming very ambitious. “He certainly is that. So much so, there were times today when it occurred to me that this whole fantastic scheme is actually not Pompey’s at all, but Caesar’s. That, at least, would explain his presence.”

I pointed out that Pompey had described it as his own idea.

“And no doubt Pompey thinks it is. But that is the nature of the man. You make a remark to him, and then you find it being repeated back to you as if it were his own. ‘The central issue must be the defeat of the pirates, not the future of Pompey the Great.’ That is a typical example. Sometimes, just to amuse myself, I have argued against my own original assertion, and waited to see how long it was before I heard my rebuttal coming back at me, too.” He frowned and nodded. “I am sure I am right. Caesar is quite clever enough to have planted the seed and left it to flower on its own. I wonder how much time he has spent with Pompey. He seems very well bedded-in.”

It was on the tip of my tongue then to tell him what I had witnessed, but a combination of fear of Caesar, my own shyness, and a feeling that Cicero would not think the better of me for spying-that I would in some sense be contaminated myself by describing the whole sordid business-caused me to swallow my words. It was not until many years later-after Caesar’s death, in fact, when he could no longer harm me and I was altogether more confident-that I revealed my story. Cicero, then an old man, was silent for a long time. “I understand your discretion,” he said at last, “and in many ways I applaud it. But I have to say, my dear friend, that I wish you had informed me. Perhaps then things might have turned out differently. At least I would have realized earlier the kind of breathtakingly reckless man we were dealing with. But by the time I did understand, it was too late.”

THE ROME TO WHICH WE RETURNED a few days later was jittery and full of rumors. The burning of Ostia had been clearly visible to the whole city as a red glow in the western night sky. Such an attack on the capital was unprecedented, and when Gabinius and Cornelius took office as tribunes on the tenth day of December, they moved quickly to fan the sparks of public anxiety into the flames of panic. They caused extra sentries to be posted at the city’s gates. Wagons and pedestrians entering Rome were stopped and searched at random for weapons. The wharves and warehouses along the river were patrolled both day and night, and severe penalties were promulgated for citizens convicted of hoarding grain, with the inevitable result that the three great food markets of Rome in those days-the Emporium, the Macellum, and the Forum Boarium-immediately ran out of supplies. The vigorous new tribunes also dragged the outgoing consul, the hapless Marcius Rex, before a meeting of the people, and subjected him to a merciless cross-examination about the security lapses which had led to the fiasco at Ostia. Other witnesses were found to testify about the menace of the pirates, and that menace grew with every retelling. They had a thousand ships! They were not lone raiders at all, but an organized conspiracy! They had squadrons and admirals and fearsome weapons of poison-tipped arrows and Greek fire! Nobody in the Senate dared object to any of this, for fear of seeming complacent-not even when a chain of beacons was built all along the road to the sea, to be lit if pirate vessels were seen heading for the mouth of the Tiber. “This is absurd,” Cicero said to me on the morning we went out to inspect these most visible symbols of the national peril. “As if any sane pirate would dream of sailing twenty miles up an open river to attack a defended city!” He shook his head in dismay at the ease with which a timorous population can be molded by unscrupulous politicians. But what could he do? His closeness to Pompey had trapped him into silence.