TRILOGY FINALE’S A SLAVE TO DETAIL
DICTATOR by Robert Harris Hutchinson, £ 20
ROBERT Harris is an incomparable storyteller. Whether he is writing about Bletchley Park, Soviet Russia, the Dreyfus Affair or contemporary hedge- fund management he builds up a convincing picture of the society he is describing.
That is certainly true of his four novels about the Ancient World. He dipped his toe into the distant past with Pompeii before embarking 12 years ago on a trilogy of novels about Cicero, the great Roman lawyer, statesman and political philosopher.
Harris has already produced Imperium and Lustrum, describing Cicero’s rise to power in republican Rome from a background of relative obscurity. Dictator, the final novel in the trilogy, recounts the last years of his life when his beloved republic is under threat.
All three novels are narrated by Cicero’s devoted political secretary and former slave Tiro and are a fictionalised version of his biography of his master.
This third volume is set in what Harris suggests was the “most tumultuous era in human history” ( at least until the events of 1933- 45).
It opens with Cicero on his way into exile, believing himself unfairly pursued for sticking to his principles. His execution of five prominent members of the Cataline conspiracy to overthrow the republic has incurred the wrath of his enemies, among them the dangerous and bloodthirsty Clodius who is determined to hunt down Cicero.
Caesar is cutting a swathe through Gaul and Rome is now led by the increasingly tyrannical Pompey, Crassus and Clodius.
Cicero spends long months with Tiro under virtual house arrest in Thessalonica but as Cicero himself says politics is never static and in the course of the novel he is alternately revered and reviled.
In the wake of the murders of Pompey, Crassus and Clodius, Cicero regains his status and reputation as he speaks out in favour of the republic. He witnesses the assassination of Julius Caesar, which he applauds, but bemoans the fact that the conspirators gave no thought to what would happen afterwards.
Designed to free the republic from a dictator, the murder plays into the hands of Octavian, Julius Caesar’s great- nephew, adopted son, and the future Emperor Augustus.
Harris paints Rome racked by civil war and already sowing the seeds of its own destruction 400 years before it was sacked by Germanic invaders.
It’s a brutal tale of murder and mayhem and a tour de force of research and imagination which once again underlines Harris’ position as one of the UK’s leading writers of popular fiction.