Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome

"I think this is my favourite of his books. He’s written many excellent novels, but this is a career high to me. The whole trilogy is excellent, but obviously the place to start is Imperium . It’s the story of Cicero, but it’s narrated by his slave and secretary Tiro. You have this interesting tension, wherein we have a story of all-consuming ambition, narrated by someone whose own ambitions and prospects are completely limited by their enslavement—and yet he does love and is devoted to Cicero. Beyond all of this, it’s just a very fun, propulsive narrative and brilliantly-done courtroom drama—or sequence of courtroom drama set pieces—taking place within this vividly conjured, well-researched late Republic Rome. It’s an excellent character study and a fun, fantastic read. Barry Unsworth, the great historical novelist, spoke about historical fiction as a “distant mirror”—it’s taken from Barbara Tuchman’s classic work of non fiction about 14th century France, A Distant Mirror —the idea being that with historical fiction, you can remove the distracting need to be topical, strip the narrative down to the underlying human drama and convey something about the contemporary moment by seeming to look backwards. Obviously, a good historical fiction writer should engage with the culture and specificities of their chosen time period, but I do think that there can be a more essential quality. Also, there’s an interesting juxtaposition of the recognisable and the alien, and the to and fro of these qualities, I believe, makes for a special kind of narrative. Like with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall . There are moments that will feel very familiar and understandable. Then, there will be something that happens and you realise you are in a completely different time period with vastly different belief systems."

"Anyone who has read my previous novel, Istria Gold , will be aware of my passion for the classical and devotion to the depiction of the Roman Empire in all its sophistication and gory brutality. Harris is a great historical thriller writer. He has a deftness of touch and way of writing that depicts the classical period as being very vivid and very modern – and most importantly, not without humour and the ability to subvert himself from time to time. Imperium is not just about Cicero and his servant Tiro, but it’s a profound comment on the last days of the Roman Republic. Oddly enough it has much in common with Robert Graves seminal I, Claudius . Like I, Claudius , Imperium takes the form of a memoir and synthesizes the past and the present, classical and modern, in an extraordinarily entertaining manner. Utterly masterful."

"This is one of my favourite books, even if it weren’t classical. I read this book for the first time when I was up for interview at Oxford and it was quite fun because it allowed me to switch off at the end of the day at the same time as reading something useful. A lot of Robert Harris’s books are quite similar: they have a protagonist and you see the story—all the machinations—through his eyes. In Imperium we see the life of Cicero through the eyes of his slave, Tiro. We know Tiro was a real person, who recorded everything Cicero wrote. The late Republic is my favourite period of any period of history ever. You get all the figures: Cicero, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Octavian, Antony and Cato. Robert Harris paints portraits of these people so nicely that even with Crassus, say, who comes up every so often, you get a sense of who he is. There are actually two more books in the trilogy: Lustrum and Dictator . Once you get to Dictator , you know who Caesar is, you know why he’s doing it. I’m a bit of a fan of Caesar’s and I don’t always agree with how he’s represented by Robert Harris, but it’s a consistent, wonderfully-done portrayal. “The late Republic is my favourite period of any period of history ever. You get Cicero, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Octavian, Antony and Cato.” I’ve never been a huge fan of Cicero—I have my issues with him—but you feel so sorry for him by the end, when you realise he’s got nothing left. He’s going to be killed by the Triumvirate, you know it’s going to happen, but you want it to stop because you’ve invested so much in him. The Royal Shakespeare Company did a version of Imperium in London last year, two three-hour plays which we went to go and see, which was great. You can see the seams, so you can see where he’s trading off Cicero’s own writing or Sallust. You can see where a bit of Suetonius or Plutarch comes in. Everything is included, but it’s made to seem coherent, which is very difficult to do. Ancient historians are often contradicting each other, but he’s very good at making it fit into a single narrative. It is pretty historically accurate. He does put in things which now we might say are controversial or we’re not sure about but, for the most part, his portrayal of what it would have been like for a senator going about his daily business is absolutely spot on. The way I think about Cicero is as the Latin Shakespeare. The plays he wrote were dreadful, he thought himself better at writing tragedies than he was, but if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have a job. If you look at a Latin dictionary, pretty much every word in it was used by Cicero at some point. He wrote thousands and thousands of lines of text and his writings are just everywhere. We owe so much of the language and the study of the language to him, and to the fact that he realised the importance of writing things down and passing them on to the next generations. “The way I think about Cicero is as the Latin Shakespeare” There’s also a lot to identify with Cicero, as a man who always wanted to avoid bloodshed. This morning in class we were talking about Cicero in 49 BC, when Caesar is on one side and Pompey on the other. He writes a letter saying, ‘What am I supposed to do? What is a man who wants to stop war supposed to do?’ It’s not pacifism but a wish to mediate and to find common ground. That’s what Cicero does. He’s never doctrinaire about anything. He could be on one person’s side for one thing and another person’s side for another thing. Then you’ve got Cato on one side attacking Caesar and saying no surrender. On the other side you’ve got Caesar wanting to tear the Republican system down. Cicero says, ‘I want to keep the Republic, can’t we all just get along?’ And you feel sorry for him. Imperium is great at portraying a man doing everything he can to keep things afloat. It’s ultimately unsuccessful, but he keeps things going for 20 years or so. My mum is a classics teacher and from an early age I always wanted to talk to her about it. I think I was just amazed by the stories. There are really a couple of hundred thousand people in Rome at this time and only a small percentage of those are literate. And yet you have all these amazing people that we all know about. They all left their mark in some way. The other period I compare it with is that of the Founding Fathers in America. There are all these famous figures in the same place at one time. But rather than working together, they all worked against each other. If you ever want to understand how politics works and things get done, just study the late Republic. It shows you how things don’t get done. It shows you how to postpone things, how to stop things, how to deter things. I love the bloodshed. When we introduce the topic, I have a PowerPoint that I do for the girls. They have to match up Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Octavian, Antony and Cato with how they died, because all except one died in horrible ways. The only one to survive is Octavian who becomes Augustus. So, the late Republic is basically this free-for-all, this battle royale where everyone knows we’re heading towards an Empire with one person ruling it, but we just don’t know who it’s going to be. And it ends up being this rather sickly, skinny guy. Octavian was only 19 years old when Caesar died and out of all those men, it’s him. I just find it fascinating."