I grew up in a free country which was decolonised seven years before my birth. The reflexes of colonialism linger on for a time after the rulers have departed.
(page 14)
‘I defy anyone to study Irish history without getting a dislike and distrust of England.’
(Lady Gregory)
This is, in the old and best sense of the word, an amateur book. It is a highly personal perspective on the series of very famous events in Irish history. Ulick O’Connor had a long and successful life as a sportsman, lawyer, writer, poet, playwright, historian and biographer, summarised in his obituary:
As a sportsman he certainly excelled. As a lawyer I’ve no idea of his status. As a writer, apparently his biographies of Oliver St John Gogarty and Brendan Behan are still important. But he was definitely not a professional historian and it shows. This slim 180-page account of the leadup to and aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin is anecdotal and empassioned rather than detached and scholarly. It’s a handy enough introduction to the events, although there must be many far more rigorous and scholarly accounts.
And it seems to skip or gloss over complex details. Every time I looked up an aspect of the leadup to the rising on Wikipedia, I found it to be more complex and byzantine than O’Connor’s account. This appears to be a simplified and romanticised account.
What makes it stand out is O’Connor’s flashes of real anger against British imperial rule in Ireland and, in the later stages, the number of participants and eye-witnesses who O’Connor seems to have met and interviewed for this book and so quotes verbatim.
Introduction
Setting the personal tone of the book, it opens with O’Connor visiting the Public Records Office at Dublin Castle to see the file on his great-grandfather. This was Matthew Harris who fought in the Irish risings of 1848 and 1867 and became one of three members of the Supreme Council of the Fenians, who, even though he went on to be elected as an MP to Westminster, was in later life followed everywhere by detectives. O’Connor discovers his file is huge and could be compared to the Czarist authorities’ files on Lenin. So O’Connor is using his great-grandfather as an example of the huge amount of time and energy the British colonial system spent keeping tabs on anyone who spoke against it.
But the anecdote is also typical of O’Connor’s romanticising tendency: he is quick to say of his forebears, or of any notable Irishman he’s writing about, that tales were told of him round fireplaces and ballads sung in pubs. The heroes of his story are constantly being turned into tales and ballads sung wherever patriots assemble.
His name had passed into tradition so that as I grew up I heard him talked about with reverence. (p.8)
And it’s typical of O’Connor’s approach in a third way, in that he underpins it, not with scholarly documentary information or research, but with an anecdote told him by an eminent person. In this case it’s the novelist Liam O’Flaherty, who tells O’Connor that he remembered his father recalling Harris’s fiery speeches. And in another anecdote, a visitor to the West of Ireland tells O’Connor that the peasants still remembered his great-grandfather. This is how the book proceeds: by anecdotes about heroes.
And a fourth way in which the introduction sets the tone and approach is when O’Connor broadens out his theme to explain how the Irish patriots’ struggle for independence went on to inspire like-minded revolutionaries in Egypt, India and many other colonies of the British Empire, a point he repeats a number of times in the rest of the book.
Back to great-grandfather Harris: O’Connor tells us that in 1880 he was persuaded to moderate his beliefs enough to stand for Parliament. He was persuaded to do this by Charles Stewart Parnell whose strategy was to unite the three elements in Irish political life: the physical forcers, the Land league and the Parliamentary Party. It was Parnell’s great achievement to do this and make his parliamentary party into the deciding force in British politics.
1. Rise and fall of Charles Stewart Parnell
O’Connor steps back to give us the deep background: he says it was the Flight of the Earls in 1607 after defeat in battle which handed Ireland over to British control. His great-great-grandfather was alive at the time of the 1798 rebellion. His great-grandfather lived through the potato famine when up to a million died of starvation due to the incompetence of the British administration, and some 2 million emigrated, mostly to America.
In the four years after the famine, 58,000 families amounting to 316,000 people were evicted from their homes for non-payment of rent, saw their houses destroyed and were left destitute, living in caves or wooden huts or dying by the roadside.
In 1886, leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone introduced the first Home Rule Bill with a horrified description of the abject poverty found throughout rural Ireland.
At the turn of the century the British Empire was at its height. O’Connor quotes Louis Fischer, the biographer of Gandhi, as saying that imperialism is a sort of perpetual insult to the colonised and governed.
Charles Stewart Parnell was a Protestant, a member of the ‘Protestant ascendency’ born into a wealthy Anglo-Irish Protestant landowning family in County Wicklow in 1846. He was leader of the Home Rule League from 1880 to 1882, and then of the Irish Parliamentary Party from 1882 to 1891, by which time his party held the balance of power in the House of Commons.
In a typically family anecdote, O’Connor remembers his grandmother telling him how, as a small girl, she used to greet Parnell when he came to stay with her father in the west of Ireland. ‘She treasured the table on which he wrote his speeches as if it were the relic of one of her favourite saints’ (p.16).
She also taught O’Connor that it was incorrect to refer to the married woman Parnell had a ten-year affair with as ‘Kitty’ O’Shea, it should always be Mrs O’Shea. It is typical of the book that we see the whole Parnell tragedy through the eyes of an O’Connor family member.
What happened was when it looked likely the Liberals under Gladstone were going to win the 1892 general election and pass his Home Rule bill, some Tory leaders persuaded Captain O’Shea (who knew about his wife’s long-standing affair with Parnell) to divorce her, citing Parnell as the third party. As soon as this happened Gladstone, leading a party whose core was nonconformist, was forced to repudiate Parnell and withdraw his support for the Irish Party till it replaced its leader. Parnell refused to stand down and the furore split his party with the majority of its MPs, and all his senior colleagues, abandoning him to form a new party.
The following, much more recent, account suggests the train of events had more to do with Captain O’Shea’s greed than with scheming Tories. In this as everywhere else you can feel O’Connor’s 1) tendency to simplify the story and 2) burning animus against English rule.
The party split and Parnell went into exile in… England, dying the next year, 1891, of pneumonia, aged just 45. His body was brought back to Dublin. A crowd of some 200,000 watched the procession to Glasnevin Cemetery. Many people say a meteor (or shooting star as O’Connor puts it with characteristic romance) fall from the sky.
O’Connor quotes James Joyce’s famous quip about the Parnell ‘betrayal’ although, characteristically, he slightly misquotes him. Here’s the Joyce quote from his 1912 essay ‘The Shade of Parnell’:
In his final desperate appeal to his countrymen, he begged them not to throw him as a sop to the English wolves howling around them. It redounds to their honour that they did not fail this appeal. They did not throw him to the English wolves; they tore him to pieces themselves.
Joyce’s essay was written 21 years after Parnell’s fall and indicates how long-lasting the sense of failure and loss was, as described in vivid fictional form in 1) his short story ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ and 2) the famous Christmas dinner argument scene in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’.
Rather than attempt a full historical perspective, O’Connor characteristically quotes the opinions of famous writers: Joyce, Dennis Ireland, W.B. Yeats, Sean O’Faolain, P.S. O’Hegarty, an old Sinn Fein writer who spoke to him. All the way through it’s these personal perspectives which O’Connor likes to give. And seeing as these writers or old-timers tend to romanticise and glamorise events, this contributes to the romanticising tendency of the whole book.
2. Celtic Revival
1884: foundation of the Gaelic Athletic Association: hurling, Gaelic football.
1893: Douglas Hyde, another son of the Protestant Ascendency, decided to set up the Gaelic League, an organisation to promote the Gaelic language, fast dying out in the cities but preserved among the peasantry. By 1906, over 3,000 branches.
An early convert was Lady Augusta Gregory, Anglo-Irish daughter of landed gentry (1852 to 1932). She was home schooled then married off to Sir William Henry Gregory, a widower with an estate at Coole Park, near Gort, in 1880. Sir William was 36 years older than her and had just retired from his position as Governor of Ceylon. He had a large house and estate at Coole Park which she, in the coming decades, turned into a major venue for nationalist writers. He also had a town house in London where she held literary soirées for leading figures of the time.
Throughout, O’Connor refers to the military element of the occupying power by the general term ‘the Garrison’.
Novelists George Moore and Edward Martyn were attracted to the Celtic Revival but it was the conversion of young William Butler Yeats which transformed things. Up till then he’d been writing fey pre-Raphaelite poetry under the influence of William Morris.
O’Connor fast forwards to the founding of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 and the renaissance of literary talent which constellated round it including J.M. Synge, James Stephens, George Russell A.E., Padraig Column, Katherine Tynan and more. O’Connor was to deal with the Celtic Revival separately in his 1984 group biography Celtic Dawn.
This all allows him to proceed by his favourite method which isn’t via documents or data, but by cherry-picking quotes from Famous Authors. On the upside, these are always chatty and anecdotal; on the downside, it’s the absence of any real historical context which gives the book its thin texture.
3. Portrait of turn-of-the-century Dublin
Parks, grand squares, the Season at the Castle, debutante balls. Population 400,000 with a small centre where it was easy to bump into people you knew (compare with London’s monstrous 6.5 million).
This leads him to Maud Gonne (1866 to 1953) ‘the most beautiful woman in Europe’ according to Wickham Stead, editor of the Times. Despite her claims she was of English descent on both sides but became a firebrand Irish revolutionary. Willie Yeats fell madly in love with her but she refused to become his lover.
In 1900, Gonne helped found Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland). Twenty-nine women attended the first meeting. They decided to ‘combat in every way English influence doing so much injury to the artistic taste and refinement of the Irish people’.
Lady Constance Gore-Booth (1868 to 1927) was an Irish revolutionary, nationalist, suffragist, and socialist, famous as the first woman elected to the UK Parliament (1918), though she did not take her seat. Born into Anglo-Irish aristocracy at Lissadell, she rejected her privileged background to fight for Irish independence, becoming a key figure in the 1916 Easter Rising. In 1900 she married Polish artist and playwright Casimir Dunin-Markievicz, and they styled themselves the Count and Countess = Constance Markievicz.
4. Arthur Griffith and Sinn Fein
Ireland was ruled by England from 1170. There was a short period of home rule from 1782 to 1800 which was put to an end by the 1800 Act of Union. Since 1800 nationalists had wanted to replace this foreign rule with home rule, some by constitutional means, some by violent uprising, as in 1848 and 1867.
In the early 1900s a journalist called Arthur Griffith came to prominence with a new strategy, passive resistance. In 1900 he founded the United Irishman which attracted top writers and became very influential.
Characteristically, O’Connor paints Griffith’s portrait by quoting other writers (Oliver St John Gogarty, James Joyce). Just as characteristically, he dwells on the way the short unprepossessing Griffith was madly in love with Gonne.
1903: Griffith starts publishing articles about how Hungary secured home rule within the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the Hungarian People’s Party led by Francis Deak. The next year he launched a political party to copy Deak’s strategy (the historical figure’s proper name appears to have been Ferenc Deák) – Sinn Fein, ‘Ourselves alone’.
Clause 14 of the Sinn Fein constitution: Non-recognition of the British Parliament. The plan was not just to abstain, but to set up a parallel Irish administration at all levels. However (in the book’s first mention of the Ulster problem) Griffith allowed for there to be a King of Ireland and a King of Britain.
Constance Markievicz joined Sinn Fein as did Maud Gonne.
Chapter 5. Roger Casement
Sir Roger Casement (1864 to 1916) worked for the British Foreign Office as a diplomat. He was honoured in 1905 for the Casement Report on the Congo Free State and knighted in 1911 for his investigations of human rights abuses in the rubber industry in Peru, sometimes credited as the ‘father of twentieth-century human rights investigations’.
Typically O’Connor conveys his importance by quoting writers – Joseph Conrad, who knew him in the Congo, and E.D. Morel who campaigned with Casement to end Belgium’s disgusting slave regime in the Belgian Congo (characteristically, the book incorrectly gives his initials as A.D.). See:
- King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild (1998)
- Congo: the epic history of a people by David Van Reybrouck (2010)
Resting in his native County Antrim, Casement heard about Griffith’s party and joined. He set out to learn Gaelic. He had seen imperialism at its most disgusting and had a shrewd feeling that Griffith’s strategy for freeing Ireland could work. He donated money to a school being run by a young Gaelic Leaguer called Eamon de Valera.
Chapter 6. The 1912 home rule bill
In 1910, though, the lead party was not Sinn Fein but the Irish Party led by Parnellite John Redmond. The Liberal Party returned to power in 1906 and, in order to pass its social legislation, needed the support of the Irish Party to pass its legislation neutering the House of Lords. In exchange its leader, Herbert Asquith, promised to sponsor another Irish Home Rule bill.
In March 1912, at a mass meeting in Dublin, Irish nationalists greeted the launch of an Irish Home Rule bill in Parliament but warned that if their hopes were dashed, Ireland would take arms.
Chapter 7. Ulster
A quarter of the population of Ireland was Protestant, over a million living in the counties of Ulster. Two weeks after the Dublin nationalist meeting, a mass meeting was held in Ulster, with 100,000 men marching past Sir Edward Carson.
O’Connor analyses the Ulster Protestant as a typical colon in that his link to the imperial power gave him superiority. Even the poorest Protestant was, in a sense, superior to the richest Catholic. He compares them to the poor whites in the American South, persuaded of their racial superiority by their exploiters who thus kept the working class divided.
Carson had been Solicitor General in the Conservative government which fell in 1906 election. Next to him on the stand was Andrew Bonar Law, the Canadian-born new leader of the Conservative Party. In subsequent speeches Carson made it quite clear he was prepared to break the law and disobey officers of the Crown if home rule were passed.
In 1912 he and others set up the Solemn League and Covenant which was signed by hundreds of thousands (echoing the Covenants signed in Scotland during the civil wars).
Echoing Griffith, the Ulstermen set up their own provisional government. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was set up under a British Army general. F.E. Smith was a leading figure, who later became Attorney General of Britain.
In Britain, a British League for Ulster was set up and 120 MPs and 100 Lords joined it.
It became obvious that these Ulster refuseniks were the key issue in the Irish Question. Carson and the rest were openly declaring treason. Warrants were made out for their arrest, in Dublin but not issued. Prime Minister Asquith hoped Ulster resistance would die down.
Chapter 8. The Irish Volunteers
Mirroring the foundation of the Ulster Volunteers, in the south the Irish Volunteers were founded. It was founded by professor of Irish history Eoin MacNeill. Characteristically, O’Connor’s grandfather knew him. His mother told stories of going with her parents and MacNeill to the Aran Isles for the summer to learn Gaelic and come back with Gaelic-speaking nannies.
It was following an article about the Ulster volunteers, that MacNeill was approached to spearhead its southern equivalent. A committee of 30 was set up, including men from Redmond’s party. Roger Casement (returned from Peru) was made secretary.
By January 1914 there were 10,000 volunteers, by September 180,000.
Chapter 9. The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB)
Clann na Gael based in New York, run by old Feinian John Devoy. In 1907 he sent Thomas Clarke to Dublin to recruit for the IRB. Willie Yeats joined. And working class Catholic Sean O’Casey. They looked up to intellect and culture.
The (underground) IRB carefully infiltrated its members into the (aboveground) Irish Volunteers.
Chapter 10. The Citizen Army
In chapter 3 O’Connor gave us a very brief sense of upper class life in Dublin. This chapter emphasises the poverty. Dublin had the highest death rate of any city in Europe. The Irish Times compared living conditions of the poor to Dante’s Inferno.
August to Christmas 1913 Dublin saw a massive general strike, led by Jim Larkin (orator and journalist) and James Connolly (brilliant analyst who applied Marxist theory to Ireland, founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party). He left for the States, then returned to become General Secretary of Larkin’s Transport Union.
The outcome of the long bitter violent general strike wasn’t concessions from the employers, but the creation of a Citizen Army which proceeded to arm itself. It came into being in November 1913 with a constitution drawn up by Sean O’Casey, who became its secretary and later wrote its history.
The Army Commander was Captain Jack White who had distinguished himself in the Boer War. He received a telegram of praise from Roger Casement.
Chapter 11. Guns for the Ulster Volunteers
In March 1914 a huge consignment of arms and ammunition arrived at Ulster to be distributed to the Ulster Volunteers. O’Connor describes how hundreds of cars owned by the landed gentry were parked along the route at night to light the lorries away from the port. Reading this, I was impressed by the commitment and organisation of these people, always painted as the baddies. I went looking for books about the Ulster Volunteers and only found two. History is written by the winners.
Its arrival triggered similar thoughts in the Irish Volunteers who arranged for Roger Casement. In July a yacht left Hamburg carrying 10,000 rifles. They docked at Howth, were met by Irish Volunteers, who marched with them back into Dublin.
Chapter 12. The Curragh Mutiny, then war
In March 1914 General Sir Arthur Paget, commander of British forces in Ireland, ordering to send detachments to protect depots in the north from raids by the Ulster Volunteers, firing on them if necessary. 60 officers and the leader of the 3rd cavalry brigade refused. This was regarded as a mutiny and rocked the British Army.
What it seemed to show everyone was that the British government would back down when faced with the threat of force. This triggers amusingly emotional rhetoric in O’Connor: ‘sordid intrigue… devious charade… ‘
O’Connor is quick to say in this rebellion of part of the Establishment against another, this splinter was the crack that foreshadowed the end of empire in violent independence movements around the world.
The Home Rule bill passed through the Commons in May 1914 and was scheduled to become law in September 1914. But in August the Great War broke out and all domestic legislation was suspended.
When war broke out, John Redmond, leader of the Irish Party which held the balance of power in the Commons, and with a force of some 180,000 trained men at his disposal, could have bargained with the Liberal government and witheld his support until the government absolutely promised to enact the bill. If an Irish government had been set up in Dublin, albeit with limited powers and still under ultimate British control, it is unlikely there would have been any Easter Rising.
But he didn’t. Without consulting his party he stood in the House of Commons and pledged the support of the entire nation of Ireland to the British in their time of need. This made the Irish immensely popular, even with the Conservative right, but at a stroke he handed over his trump card and had nothing left to bargain with.
The bill was placed on the statute book but only to come into force after the war. That was the rub. That was the cause.
Recruits flocked to volunteer. Some 300,000 Irish fought for the Empire, 40,000 of them were killed. But after the first flush of enthusiasm, many Irish found it difficult to win commissions in Irish regiments. The British Army establishment preferred Irish regiments to be officered by loyal British Protestant officers.
Chapter 13. Padraig Pearse and the military council
September 1914 the leadership of the Irish Republican Brotherhood decided that a nationalist uprising would take place before the war ended and began making plans.
James Connolly opposed the war from a Marxist point of view, as empires fighting over resources and markets.
Snapshots of: Padraig Pearse, at this point teaching at St Enda’s school; Thomas MacDonagh, English lecturer at the National University; Joseph Plunkett, poet and editor of the Irish Review. All three are members of the military council of the IRB. They didn’t expect a rising to defeat the British. They expected it to create an independent republic long enough for its case to be made at the conferences which would end the war. More poetically, the felt that they would revive the soul of their nation.
In March 1916 Clann na Gael contacted him to say they would be sending 20,000 rifles and 10 million rounds.
Meanwhile James Connolly, the socialist trade unionist, independent of the IRB, had concluded that an armed uprising was necessary, using his citizen army. Fearful lest the plans clash, the military council invited Connolly to a meeting in January 1916. He was delighted to hear the news from Joseph Plunkett and both sides agreed the uprising would happen at Easter 1916.
Chapter 14. The Easter Rising
Eoin MacNeill interferes MacNeill was the commander-in-chief of the Irish Volunteers but he was deliberately kept out of the loop by the IRB military council. Only on Good Friday did he learn about plans for an uprising on Monday. He strongly disapproved and went to St Enda’s to see Pearse. Pearse persuaded him plans were too far advanced and also a shipment of arms was arriving from Germany so MacNeill acquiesced.
But late on Saturday morning, he learned the arms shipment had been intercepted. Feeling he’d been fooled, MacNeill took out an advert in the Sunday papers telling his volunteers their traditional Easter weekend training manoeuvres were cancelled. Many read this and stayed at home. When the news of the uprising spread on Monday they weren’t ready. Pearse’s response was to send out envoys to Volunteer groups around the country and tell them to carry on, but the damage was done. On the Monday, most Volunteer groups did not rise along with Dublin. If they had the British Army would have been spread very thin. Instead they were able to concentrate their firepower in Dublin and end the uprising after a week (p.84).
O’Connor tells us that his grandfather knew MacNeill and once told him he wasn’t a bad man. Hard to see how he doesn’t come out of this as the fall guy.
The uprising began at 12 noon on Monday 24 April 1916 and continued for 6 days. At 11 Pearse and Connolly marched their men from Liberty Hall over to the poorly defended Post Office and seized it. Pearse stood between the huge Greek columns and read out a declaration of independence. O’Connor gives a good enough account but I’m not sure it’s worth my summarising his summary. Instead here’s the Wikipedia article:
Chapter 15. The uprising continues
The British put Brigadier Lowe in charge of suppressing the uprising. He brought a gunboat up the river which bombarded Liberty Hall then the GPO. Houses on both sides were set on fire. Eight or so other buildings had been seized so sporadic sniping and shelling took place round those, too.
The weirdest thing about it was the way most Dubliners strolled around watching it take place. O’Connor quotes the usual suspects, Gogarty, James Stephens, George Moore, Sean O’Casey, strolling round the city, listening to the shellfire, observing other citizens going about their business.
Chapter 16. The uprising ends; the executions
On Friday 28 April 1916 General Maxwell arrived and began investing the key sites in a rigorous way. At 2.30pm the next day, Saturday 29 April, Pearse surrendered to General Lowe.
Four days later the executions began. Sixteen rebel leaders were shot:
Signatories of the Proclamation of Independence: Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett, Sean Mac Diarmada, Éamonn Ceannt, and James Connolly.
Other leaders: Willie Pearse (brother of Patrick), Edward Daly, Michael O’Hanrahan, John MacBride, Seán Heuston, Con Colbert, and Michael Mallin.
MacBride was husband to Maud Gonne, the dazzling beauty who bewitched Willie Yeats.
Remember dashing Lady Constance Markievicz? She had been deputy of the troop which held Stephen’s Green then pulled back to the College of Surgeons. She was sentenced to death, too, which was commuted to life imprisonment as she was a woman. In fact she was released after less than a year when the British government offered a general amnesty.
About 1,350 people were killed or wounded, mostly civilians. The centre of Dublin had been gutted. The general population was furious with the rebels. Elsewhere life went on as normal with business carried out while the middle classes played golf and tennis.
Chapter 17. Poetic reactions
Characteristically, O’Connor summarises the aftermath by quoting the usual suspects: W.B. Yeats, George Russell, James Stephens, Lady Gregory, Tom Kettle.
He has a romantic notion of poets, that they are the first to notice the changes in a nation’s soul, that these poets grasped the rising’s significance way before the silly politicians.
Chapter 18. Roger Casement
In the last few years before the war Casement developed a pathological hatred of Britain’s rule in Ireland. Just before the Great War broke out he went to New York to work with Clann na Gael. In December 1914 he persuaded its leader, John Devoy, to Germany, as an envoy from independent Ireland and to secure arms. In fact Casement spent two weary years getting nowhere, and eventually asked to be returned to Ireland (with no guns). The Germans laid on a submarine which took him to the south coast but due to a SNAFU in the arrangements he was put into a canvas boat with two others, while the U-boat departed. The canvas boat overturned in high seas and Casement barely made it ashore. he staggered to the nearest house where he was resting when he was arrested by the local bobby, sent to Dublin and then to the Tower of London.
Chapter 19. The trial of Roger Casement
O’Connor was a practicing lawyer and so gives a brief but vivid account of Casement’s trial. As usual, a trial had nothing to do with ‘justice’ but entirely practical wrangles and politicking. Casement’s defence lawyer, Serjeant Sullivan, had himself recruited in Ireland for the British Army i.e was on the opposite side of the political cause. (O’Connor remembers seeing the 90-something old lawyer still beetling around the Dublin Inns of Court when your man was just a young barrister.)
Not just that, but the prosecuting counsel was F.E. Smith who had been active in the setting up of the Ulster Volunteers back in 1912 i.e. was extremely anti-Casement’s independence position and also, as O’Connor emphasises, arguably more guilty of treason than Casement.
The case revolved round the accusation that casement tried to recruit Irish prisoners of war held in Germany to join the German Army and fight against Britain. The defence argued that the treason act only applied to activities here in England, and Casement’s activities had taken place abroad.
Throughout the trial the authorities made available to the police, lawyers and senior figures in the Establishment the so-called black diaries in which Casement appeared to describe his personal homosexual activities in great detail. For a long time these were thought to be fakes but in the 1990s were apparently confirmed as true.
Poor Casement, a hero of international human rights, a principled nationalist and patriot, he was found guilty and hanged on 3 August 1916. He made a condemned man’s speech from the dock. O’Connor points out that so many Irish patriots did this that it is virtually a literary genre in itself. He made the point that the creation of the Ulster Volunteers created the atmosphere of violence, and the Curragh Mutiny in effect condoned disobedience to the Crown (although all that was fine if you were on the Protestant side).
(True to his recurring attempts to portray the rising as the having international impacts on other freedom struggles of other imperial colonies, O’Connor claims that Casement’s speech had a profound impact on the young Pandit Nehru.)
The Trial of Sir Roger Casement by Sir John Lavery (1916)
With the end of the Casement trial we reach the en of the build-up to and events of, the Easter Rising, on page 114 of this 180-page book. The rest of O’Connor’s book describes events over the next 4 years, the rise of Sinn Fein, the success of Arthur Griffith’s abstentionist policy, the granting of home rule and then the bitter civil war of 1921 to ’22.
Chapter 20. Sinn Fein
Some 3,000 people were interned after the rising. Over the next 12 months they were released in batches. By June 1917 the public mood had changed to become more sympathetic to the rising leaders who were coming to be seen as martyrs. In by-elections that year, Sinn Fein candidates won but refused to take their seats in the London Parliament, a tradition which continues to this day.
Eamon de Valera was the only commander who wasn’t executed. Upon release he contested a by-election and defeated the Irish Party candidate. Sinn Fein was replacing Redmond’s party.
Thomas Ashe, president of the IRB, went on hunger strike in prison. When he died, Michael Collins, who’d been released from internment at Christmas 1916, decided to organise a vast funeral for him. Characteristically, O’Connor tells us Sean O’Casey wrote a ballad requiem for Ashe, and quotes a hymn by Ashe himself.
Chapter 21. Conscription and the Dail
Most Irish still favoured the constitutional party of John Redmond and expected the home rule bill, which was on the statute books, to be implemented as soon as the war ended.
Then in spring 1918 the British made the latest in a long line of blunders when the Army Chiefs of Staff prevailed on Lloyd George to pass an act compelling the conscription of all able-bodied men in Ireland into the British Army. Not only Sinn Fein and the Irish Party but the Catholic party opposed it, though O’Connor skips completely over its implementation. He quotes A.J.P. Taylor as saying it was the decisive moment in Ireland’s seceding from the Union.
In the December 1918 general election the Irish Party was obliterated by Sinn Fein, winning just 6 seats to the nationalists’ 73. John Redmond had died in March.
The Sinn Fein MPs promptly set up their own government in the Mansion House in Dublin and called it the Dail. No fewer than 36 of the 73 MPs were in British prisons. A Declaration of Independence was read out.
Three delegates were chosen to attend the Peace Conference in Versailles. In April 1919 a President was elected and a Cabinet chosen. Griffith stood down in favour of de Valera who was beginning to acquire charisma and status, although the latter was in prison in England. Republican courts of justice were set up in the counties of Ireland and slowly these began to replace the British institutions.
When physical force was used later, it was important that the Volunteers and others derived genuine legitimacy by acting as the Army of an elected government rather than a paramilitary force.
Michael Collins, who was becoming chief fixer, organised the escape of de Valera from Lincoln prison.
Chapter 22.
The British banned the Dail and set about arresting nationalists. The cabinet ministers went into hiding. Collins had been made Director of Intelligence. Now he turned out to be a spymaster and guerrilla organiser of genius. O’Connor makes his recurring point that the strategy Collins developed went on to be copied by independence movements around the globe.
Collins knew they couldn’t fight the British soldier for soldier. But imperial rule rested on a network of spies and he could kill these spies. He got his own men on the inside of Dublin Castle and access to government files. He drew up lists of informers, and then he created a cadre of cold-hearted killers who began a campaign of targets assassinations starting in July 1919.
I noted that O’Connor mentioned when he had personal connections with various figures in the story. Now these become more frequent. He appears to have interviewed quite a few of these informers and assassins (Bill Stapleton, Joe Dolan) who give him vivid descriptions of actual assassinations they took part in.
The squad operated out of a decorators’ shop in Abbey Street. It’s difficult to credit, hard to believe, that this gang of assassins operated just a few minutes’ walk from Dublin Castle, the centre of the British police effort. How?
Chapter 23. The IRA in the countryside
At some point the Irish Volunteers morphed into the Irish Republican Army although, apparently, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when. O’Connor describes the spread of volunteers through towns around Ireland. Often these were dominated by Big Houses and/or British Army barracks, along with schools, Protestant churches and so on.
As so often, the authorities found it difficult to deal with an enemy which was part of the local population, appeared suddenly to assassinate someone or blow something up, then melted back into the general population. Also they knew the country better than the occupier, and where to hide out.
The strategy of ambushing British Army troops, convoys and so on, sometimes throwing grenades, sometimes mining roads, followed by rifle fusillades. The Brits called it ‘ditch murder’, but in his internationalist mode. O’ Connor points out how it went on to be copied by Mao Tse Tung, Tito, General Guap, Che Guevara and many others (p.140).
These attacks continued through 1920, with sometimes large-scaled engagements leaving 10 to 20 British soldiers dead. It was a real guerrilla war On Easter Sunday 1920 these flying squads set fire to 100 Inland Revenue buildings and 350 empty police stations.
Inevitably the British retaliated with a heavy hand. If a police station was attacked, neighbouring houses were to be burned down. Hunger strikers were to be helped to die. This not only embittered local populations but led to widespread resignations by Irishmen from the Royal Irish Constabulary.
Chapter 24. The Black and Tans
Many servicemen demobilised after the Great War were still unemployed. The British government launched a recruitment drive and many signed up to go and serve in Ireland. There was a shortage of uniforms so they were given dark green tunics and khaki trousers. So the locals nicknamed the Black and Tans. The first arrived in Ireland in March 1920. A few months later they were joined by Auxiliaries, ex-Army officers paid £7 a week. They were given licence to embark on savage, undisciplined reprisals .
Every media outlet was soon condemning their activities which came to be described as a terror campaign. They arrived in force in a town, made all the inhabitants assemble in the street, humiliated and beat them, set some houses on fire, occasionally bayoneted or shot anyone who resisted, then drove off leaving generations of bitterness behind them. Stupid stupid stupid.
The worst burning was in Cork where the Black and Tans went berserk, burning down key buildings including the City Hall. For weeks after they suspended burned corks from their hats. Who authorised this? Whose bright idea was this?
O’Connor gives a particular anecdote. On 15 December 1920 Canon Magnar of Dunmanway County Cork was in the street talking to a man. A lorryload of Auxies drew up, some jumped out, and shot the man dead. When the Canon protested, he was shot dead too.
O’Connor notes how they often destroyed local dairies and creameries in an effort to destroy local economies, prompting a letter of protest from AE who had spent many years setting up dairy co-operatives precisely to support locals. O’Connor quotes Yeats’ poem Nineteen nineteen:
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
Chapter 25. de Valera
Back in June 1919 de Valera was smuggled onto a ship to New York. Here he held press conferences as the spokesman of the new (not yet existent) republic. New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, he spread the word in a calm and dignified manner, boosting his own profile in the process. He took a financier with him and together they raised over a million dollars by the time he returned in January 1921.
Meanwhile the Dail continued to set up an alternative governance infrastructure with land courts, district courts etc, complete with lawyers and judges. People stopped using the British courts and used the nationalist ones. O’Connor quotes landowners and senior figures praising the new regime for its fairness and efficiency.
As usual, O’Connor internationalises it to say that just these tactics would be used in other colonies under the phrase ‘civil disobedience’ (p.152).
Chapter 26. Michael Collins
By the autumn of 1920 Dublin was under curfew. Lorries of soldiers patrolled the streets, with wire netting so grenades thrown at them bounced off. Houses were subject to random searches and maybe burning by the Black and Tans and citizens hauled off to prison. A police state. Officials and Auxies were assassinated in the streets. The press had uniformly turned against the government.
Meanwhile Michael Collins held four portfolios within the unofficial government and maintained an intricate network of spies, informers and assassination squads. He kept scrupulous records and accounts which O’Connor has perused.
The government put a bounty of £10,000 on his head but, incredibly, he remained not only at liberty but calmly cycled around central Dublin between his various offices. One of Collins’s key spies in Dublin Castle, Eamonn Broy, personally told O’Connor of some of his escapades with Collins.
O’Connor gives a brief impressionistic pen portrait, admiring Collins’s meticulous way with figures and accounting, his head rammed with facts and details which helped him make intelligence connections, his absolute cold-bloodedness when it came to assassinations, his courage in facing out numerous dicey situations and, alongside, what O’Connor sees as a typically Irish strain of romantic patriotism (he spends a page attributing the same thing to Casement, earlier).
Chapter 27. Martyrs
25 October 1920 Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, died after a prolonged hunger strike in Brixton Prison. His lingering death was given international coverage, along with his claims for Irish freedom. He had actually written a play about a nationalist hunger striker but here, as elsewhere, O’Connor says the British authorities didn’t pay enough attention to Irish poetry, plays and literature. Here’s just one example of O’Connor’s personal and ripe prose style.
As with the death of Thomas Ashe, a shudder ran through the Nation’s being. (p.160)
If you wanted objective history, O’Connor is not your man. Facts yes, but also plenty of melodrama, passion, bitterness and romanticisation, along with quite a few personal confidences from eye witnesses, that’s what this brief book provides.
MacSweeney was afforded a magnificent funeral at Southwark cathedral in London. Sir John Lavery made this preparatory sketch for a large-scale painting.
Sketch for the Funeral of Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, at Southwark cathedral by Sir John Lavery (1920)
On 1 November good looking, 18-year-old medical student Keven Barry was hanged for his involvement in an ambush in which a British soldier was killed. According to O’Connor his name became a symbol around the world, and:
There are few places in the English-speaking world where ‘Keven Barry’ is not sung. (p.162)
I’d never heard of it till I read this book. 1) Times change 2) it’s a typical example of O’Connor’s chauvinism, which I use to mean ‘excessive or prejudiced support for one’s own cause or group’, which crops up throughout the book. I don’t really mean that in a bad sense – just to mean that he is very strongly biased indeed.
Yeats had been booked to debate at the Oxford Union and apparently walked up and down the central aisle railing against the British government’s stupidity and mismanagement. A.E. lobbied Lord Northcliffe to get his American newspapers to print opinion pieces decrying British atrocities in Ireland. What with this and de Valera and their own anti-British history, American opinion swung behind the nationalists. It played an important part in negotiations between Britain and Ireland as it was to do for the rest of the century.
O’Connor quotes a very effective letter from Yeats to the Times saying the British spent the entire Great War railing against Germany’s atrocities against civilians in Belgium and philistine burning of cultural centres and now they were doing exactly the same in Ireland.
Chapter 28. The Cairo gang
Set up by Sir Henry Wilson in autumn 1920 to identify and assassinate all key Sinn Fein and IRA personnel. In one night one of these death squads murdered the current and former Lord Mayor of Limerick. The latter was Alderman George Clancy who had been a close friend of James Joyce and appears in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ as Davin, the peasant nationalist.
Collins used his intelligence network to identify members of the Cairo gang. O’Connor spoke with General Richard Mulcahy, Chief of Staff of the IRA, who is forthright about the need to destroy the death squads. So after much planning, Collins launched Black Sunday, when his death squads assassinated their death squads. 9am on the morning of 21 November 1920. A total of 14 British spies were executed.
O’Connor gives several pages detailed descriptions of men kicking in doors, shooting unarmed men in the back, as they nipped out of windows, taking them to a cellar and shooting them in the side of the head, the British torturing captives.
Lieutenant Aimes and Bennet were pulled out of bed by a group of armed men, placed standing together, both were then shot.
Some of the men refused to come out and were shot in bed. Others came to the door and were shot as they opened it. Two agents were shot on the landing, the stairs were covered in blood.
Flanagan took four Englishmen down to the cellar and after asking their names, shot them in the side of the head.
[Ordered to track down an Irishman identified as a snitch, Bill Stapleton tells O’Connor] We found him in a pub, a big burly man. He blustered at first: then we took him out and shot him.
O’Connor and other nationalists see this as the price of freedom. I see it as the inevitable outcome of the ethnic nationalist way of thinking. Compare the similar accounts I’ve summarised of the civil wars in Yugoslavia or the chaos in Iraq: perfectly decent educated men convinced that in order to make a better world they have to torture and execute other unarmed men, sometimes women, and burn their houses down.
In retaliation for the Bloody Sunday assassinations, later the same day a detachment of Black and Tans drove to Croke Park Sports ground where a Gaelic football match was in progress. They set up a machine gun and started firing into the panic-stricken crowd. A drunk Black and Tan lined up both teams and was going to execute them all until a sober regular British Army officer intervened.
And there are people who still insist that humanity is a rational creature.
O’Connor suggests Bloody Sunday was the day British rule broke in Ireland, although I thought he said the same about the introduction of conscription in 1917. Maybe it broke repeatedly. As I’ve said, O’Connor links Ireland to the independence struggles of other British colonies.
Not only was Bloody Sunday to mark the end of Britain’s rule in the greater part of Ireland, it was to be the beginning of the break-up of British rule throughout the Empire.
In Kenya, in Cyprus, in Egypt, Palestine and Burma, for the next forty years, guerrilla leaders were to claim Collins as their prototype and adapt the strategy he had designed for evacuating the colonial power. (p.175)
What beggars belief is that Collins organised the funeral of his friend Dick McKee who the British had tortured to death to get information about Collins’s operation, and attended the funeral in person, even though the entire British operation in Ireland was obsessed with finding and arresting him. How was that possible?
Epilogue
The last four pages of O’Connor’s book give a very brisk account of the peace talks which led to the Treaty and then the intense civil war between pro and anti-treaty Irish forces which followed, in which Collins himself (pro-treaty) was killed by anti-treaty forces.
He jumps to January 1922 when the British flag was taken down over Dublin Castle and the last troops marched down to the quay to take ship back to England. Negotiations had taken place from September to December 1921 and a treaty signed with the Dail in January 1922. The 6 northern counties were excluded although everyone expected them to join the Irish Free State within a few years. Civil war broke out between pro and anti treaty nationalists and lasted till May 1922. Griffith died of a stroke. W.T. Cosgrave became the independent nation’s first president.
A Senate was formed which at Griffith’s suggestion reached out to specifically invite the Protestant landed gentry. The new nation had to include everyone. W.B. Yeats was nominated and given the job of designing the states new coinage.
1927: De Valera had been anti the treaty but in 1927 was persuaded to attend the Dail.
1932: Five years later the party he created, known as Fianna Fail, won the 1932 general election.
1937: De Valera set about removing the last vestiges of British rule, in 1937 passing a new constitution.
1938: De Valera persuaded the British government to evacuate its three treaty ports.
1939-45: Thus cleansed of British presence it was easy for the Irish Free State to maintain independence in the war against Nazi Germany. So many Irishmen had died defending the Empire which treated them so poorly in 1914-18.
1948: Fianna Fail lost the general election but the new coalition government promptly removed Ireland from the Commonwealth. Non serviam.
In a throwaway last page, he says the tragic legacy of Northern Ireland was a result of Carson and his ilk refusing to accept the home rule movement and being prepared to go to war to preserve their economic and social status. If only they had thrown in their lot with the nationalists, together they could have forced the British government to give independence 1) much earlier and 2) on more inclusive terms to include the Ulster Protestants. Instead they insisted on holing up in their ghetto which, at the time of O’Connor’s writing (1975) was in chaos.
Thoughts
England’s crimes
It goes without saying that it makes me ashamed to be English to read (yet again) the litany of exploitation, repression, spying, corruption and naked violence with which the English mismanaged Ireland for centuries. But a few other thoughts as well:
History is written by the winners
They say history is written by the victors. The irony here is that the victors were the Irish nationalists who won their free state, with the result that thousands of books, papers, presentations, school syllabuses, TV series and movies have been made about Ireland’s heroic struggle for independence, and not least the dramatic events surrounding the Easter Rising. Supported by latterday English progressives, in the same way that we English now retrospectively (and safely) root for the independence movements in India, Kenya and scores of other places, taking a masochistic pleasure in seeing our own men shot and blown up and our own government covered in ignominy.
What about the losers? With no motive except idle curiosity I went looking to see if there are any books about the Ulster Volunteers and discovered there appear to be just three in print: Carson’s Army, a boringly specialised one about the precise configuration, training etc of the UVF; Friends in High Places; and Ulster will Fight, a series of three books which are prohibitively expensive and aren’t stocked by my London library. Of accounts of the Easter Rising and the long centuries of struggle behind it, there will be no end, as a proud nation promotes itself and mythologisers line up to retell the romantic story. Of the much less glamorous but in its way just as important obstinacy of the Ulster Protestants, very little. They’ll always be the ugly sisters in the fairy tale.
(An impression confirmed by contemporary historian Charles Townshend in his recent book ‘The Partition’ (2021) where he mentions ‘the dearth of significant historical studies of Ulster, certainly in comparison with the plethora of nationalist histories of Ireland (p.265).)
Nationalism
As I’ve read my way across the history of the nineteenth century I’ve come to think of nationalism as a mental virus, like something out of a zombie movie. It spreads across entire nations converting everyone to the belief that they must be ‘free’, no matter how much pain is caused and blood is shed in the process. The problem is that forging a nationalist identity almost instantly requires identifying the enemies within, the protestants or Jews or Roma or Muslims who are tainting ‘the purity of the Nation’.
Nationalism gave birth to the utter catastrophes of the 20th century, to the Great War and the collapse of empires which followed it, and led to the rise of fascism and its turbo-charged mission to liquidate the enemies of the People, all of which led up to the catastrophic Second World War.
The fever of nationalism spread far and wide as scores of imperial colonies fought for their freedom and independence: Israel, the partition of India, the long struggles in Algeria or Malaya or Kenya or Vietnam to name obvious ones.
In the 1970s the struggle of self-defined communities to be free led to ruinous civil wars in Cyprus and Lebanon and countless African nations.
And then after the long freeze of the Cold War, ethnic nationalism led to disasters in Rwanda and the Yugoslav civil wars. Then in this century the rise of ISIS in post-war Iraq, the Arab Spring which led to the ruinous Syrian civil war, and now here we are in 2026 with bloody rebellion in Iran, Israel’s brutal suppression of Palestine, the triumph of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the resurgence of ISIS in Syria. My barbers in south London are all Iraqi Kurds. For as long as I’ve been getting my hair cut there I’ve listened to them giving me the latest on their small nation’s struggle to be free.
Everywhere peoples conceiving of themselves as a nation which needs to be free, or needs to expel the enemy within (as in contemporary Myanmar needs to eliminate its Muslim Rohynga minority). There has been no end of young nationalist zealots who are prepared to die for the Fatherland and take quite a few people along with them.
Irish independence was no doubt a righteous cause, the repressive and incompetent rule of the pompous British needed to be overthrown, and the Irish patriots’ struggle for freedom is no doubt inspiring when viewed from the patriotic angle.
But read now, in 2026, after a century of any-level-of-violence-is-justified-to-free-my-people nationalism, and the hecatombs of atrocities it has inspired, a big part of my response to all of these stories is a shiver of horror at humanity’s utter inability to manage itself.
Now more than ever, Stephen Dedalus’s cry, ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’, rings true.
Credit
‘A Terrible Beauty is Born’ by Ulick O’Connor was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1975.
Books & Boots 
Dictator by Robert Harris (2015)
‘My skill is statecraft and that requires me to be alive and in Rome.’
(Cicero talking to Tiro, Dictator, page 36)
This is the third and concluding novel in the Robert Harris’s epic ‘Cicero trilogy’. Harris is a highly successful writer of intelligent thrillers and in the Cicero trilogy he has applied the style and mentality of a modern thriller to the life of the Roman lawyer and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC) with great success.
Book one, Imperium, covered Cicero’s life and career over the years 79 to 64 BC, the second novel, Lustrum, covered the five years from 63 to 58, and this concluding volume covers the last 15 years of his life, from 58 to his murder at the hands of agents of Mark Antony in 44 BC.
I’ve covered the outline of Cicero’s life in my reviews of his letters and Plutarch’s Life:
Tiro’s memoirs
As with its two predecessors, Dictator (a weighty 504 pages long) purports to be part of the multi-volume first-person memoir of Cicero written by his loyal slave and personal secretary Tiro almost 40 years after Cicero’s death:
I still possess my shorthand notes…it is from these that I have been able to reconstruct the many conversations, speeches and letters that make up this memoir of Cicero (p.37)
A summary cannot convey the skill with which Harris plunges you right into the heart of the toxic politics of republican Rome, or into the mind of Tiro, the shrewd, literate observer of the dilemmas and experiences of Cicero, a figure who combined wit and dazzling oratory with a profound interest in contemporary philosophy and, above all, deep embroilment in the complex power politics of his day. It is an utterly absorbing and thrilling read.
Tiro is aged 46 when the narrative opens (p.40).
Sources
Because there is so much information flying in from different places about so many events, Harris relies much more than in both the previous books combined on actual historical documents, on Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars in the early part (for example, pages 147 to 148), then on the letters to and from Cicero, for example to and from his lifelong friend Atticus.
Like the preceding two novels Dictator is divided into two substantial parts:
Part one: Exile (58 to 47 BC)
‘Exile’ is a slightly misleading title as Cicero was only in exile from Rome for 18 months, returning in late 57 BC. And it doesn’t really refer to a spiritual or political exile either since, once he returned to Rome, he was right back in the thick of political intrigue and returned to his position as Rome’s leading barrister.
The narrative begins exactly where Lustrum broke off, with Cicero, Tiro and a few slaves secretly leaving Rome at night due to the threat against his life issued by the populist politician Publius Clodius Pulcher. Clodius issues a law saying anyone who gives Cicero help, food or fire within 500 km of Rome is liable to execution.
They clandestinely travel south but their attempt to sail to Sicily is blocked by the governor (p.7). Travel back across Italy to Brundisium (11). Nightmare sea crossing to Dyrrachium (13 to 15). Governor of Macedonia, old friend Apuleius Saturninus, sends a message saying Cicero can’t stay with him (16). But one of Saturninus’s junior magistrates, the quaestor Gnaeus Plancius, offers to put him up in his town house in Thessalonika. News of Cicero’s wife and family’s mistreatment back in Rome (21). His luxury house has been burned down, the land confiscated and a shrine to ‘Liberty’ erected.
Clodius and his gangs have complete control of Rome. His sort-of ally Cato the Younger has been packed off to serve as governor of Cyprus (22). Atticus tells him about a fight between Gnaeus Pompey’s men and Clodius’s men for possession of the son of the King of Armenia, a hostage held by Rome, in which one of Pompey’s friends is killed. This decisively turns Pompey against Clodius and he now regrets having supported Cicero’s exile (24).
Unexpected arrival of the fierce ex-gladiator Titus Annius Milo, who has just managed to be elected tribune and offers his services to Cicero, accompanied by a really hard-looking gladiator named Birria (30). He explains he offered Pompey the services of 100 hardened gladiators to confront Clodius’s gangs in exchange for Pompey helping him (Milo) get elected tribune. Pompey himself has been attacked and forced back to his house by Clodius’s gangs so now he whole-heartedly wants Cicero back.
But there’s a catch: Cicero must ‘reassure’ Caesar i.e. promise not to oppose him. So Cicero’s exile will be ended if he agrees to truckle to the Triumvirate. Milo says he must send a letter and emissary to Caesar in person, so Tiro sets off on the long journey across the Adriatic, up Italy and finds Caesar doing his assizes at a town called Mutina in Cisalpine Gaul (41).
Publius Crassus, son of Marcus, spots Tiro in the queue of supplicants and takes him to see the great man in person. Tiro finds Caesar naked on a table being given a massage by a big black man (46). He scans Cicero’s letter in which he promises to meekly support Caesar’s legislation and keep out of politics and simply signs it ‘Approved’ (48). (While waiting, Publius shows Tiro copies of the Commentaries Caesar is writing, the annual account of his campaigns which he is having published back in Rome to win support – see my reviews of Caesar’s Gallic Wars for a summary. Harris also uses it to meditate on the appalling atrocities Caesar carried out against the Gauls, see below.)
Atticus is sending him letters from Rome keeping him informed and tells him that although Clodius’s gangs are still beating up their opponents (including Cicero’s brother, Quintus) the tide is turning against him. Friendly senators arrange a vote of the entire citizenry which is unanimous to have Cicero’s exile ended (52) and then restore full rights of citizenship (57).
Cicero’s triumphant march from Brundisium to Rome, feted and welcomed at every village and town. Reunion with brother Quintus who he hasn’t seen for 2 years (while he’s been off serving with Caesar in Gaul) (61). A vivid description of his triumphal entry into Rome and the ceremonies around his restoration as a citizen (63).
Because his house was demolished, Cicero’s household move in with brother Quintus. The two wives do not get on, but Cicero’s marriage to Terentia is under strain. She gave him her full support on the understanding he would be a success. Exile was the extreme opposite of success and exposed her, back in Rome, to any number of threats and humiliations (65).
Straight back into toxic politics. In return for his support in having his exile rescinded, Pompey wants Cicero to propose a bill giving Pompey executive control over Rome’s food supply for the next five years (68). This will redirect the people’s loyalty from Clodius’s crowd-pleasing back to Pompey, an establishment figure.
Clodius still has control of street gangs and sets a crowd to besiege Cicero and his family in Quintus’s house (73 to 78) until they smuggle a slave out to fetch Milo and his gladiators who see off Clodius’s thugs.
Next day Cicero presents Pompey’s grain powers bill in the senate and wins a huge ovation, supporters carry him to the rostra where he addresses a cheering crowd and then introduces the man of the hour, Pompey (81-81). Pompey accompanies Cicero home and tries to strong arm him into becoming one of the 15 food commissioners; is disgruntled when Cicero refuses (he’s only just got back to Rome and his family), so Pompey bullies Quintus into reluctantly taking up a post in Sicily (82).
Vivid description of Cicero presenting his case to the College of Pontiffs to have ownership of his (ruined) house returned to him, claiming it was never properly sanctified, helped by the discovery that the so-called Statue of Liberty Clodius set up in the ruins is actually a half-naked statue stolen from Greece where it adorned the tomb of a famous courtesan. Clodius’s case is laughed out of court and the land restored to Cicero to rebuild his mansion (85-89).
But workmen starting to rebuild it are attacked and Clodius’s gangs throw firebrands onto Quintus’s house nearly burning it down (93), forcing the family to go and stay at Atticus’s empty house. Eight days later they are walking along the Via Sacra when they are attacked by Clodius and a dozen of his hoods carrying cudgels and swords and only escape by dodging into a nearby house (94).
Terentia shows Cicero the weals on her back where she was savagely whipped on the orders of Clodia, Clodius’s fearsome sister, while Cicero was in exile (96)
The affair of Dio of Alexander, philosopher from Alexandria who had come to Rome to petition against the return of the pharaoh Ptolemy and is one day found murdered. Ptolemy is staying with Pompey and so suspicion falls on him, specifically on one of his managers, Asicius. Pompey strong-arms Cicero into defending him (100). Asicius chooses as alibi the young protege of Cicero’s, Calius Rufus. Now this smooth young man had defected from Cicero to Clodius in the previous novel. Now Cicero meets him and realises he has fallen out with Clodius. Cicero discovers his affair with Clodia ended badly with her accusing him of trying to poison her.
Pompey lobbies for a bill giving him sole command of a commission to restore Auletes to power in Egypt. Crassus is so jealous he pays Clodius to launch a campaign to stop him. Meetings and speeches to the people are broken up in violence. Cicero is delighted because it heralds the end of the Triumvirate (105).
The Rufus strategem (pages 105 to 122)
Cicero learns Rufus is scheduled to prosecute Lucius Calpurnius Bestia for corruption. Bestia was a creature of Cataline’s and so a sworn enemy of Cicero’s but Cicero conceives a Machiavellian plan. First Cicero amazes everyone by volunteering to defend Bestia, does a great job and gets him off. Irritated, Rufus issues another write against Bestia. Bestia comes to Cicero for advice. Cicero advises the best form of defence is attack; he should issue a counter-writ. More than that, he should meet with Clodius and Clodia and get them to join his case. They loathe Rufus. With them on his side Bestia can’t lose. Delighted, Bestia goes away, meets with Clodius, and issues a writ against Rufus accusing him of a) murdering the Egyptian envoys b) poisoning Clodia (110).
Cicero chuckles. His plan is working. He takes a puzzled Tiro on a visit to Rufus and finds him disconsolate: just the accusation means his budding career as a lawyer is in tatters. To Rufus’s amazement Cicero offers to be his defence counsel. Neither Rufus nor Tiro understand what is going on.
First day of the trial passes without Cicero’s intervention. Clodius is one of the three prosecutors. He depicts his sister (Clodia) as the innocent victim of a cruel libertine (Rufus). On the second day Cicero takes to the stage (trials were held on raised platforms in the Forum) and proceeds to lay into Clodia with unparalleled fury and accuracy, describing her as a whore, a courtesan, Medea, hinting at her incest with her brother, depicting her as having countless lovers, depicting him as the sensual immoral seducer of a boy half her age (Rufus) and she the daughter of an infamous, merciless, crime-stained, lust-stained house. Clodius is infuriated, Clodia sits motionless. Cicero eviscerates her in front of a cheering Roman audience who end up pointing their fingers at her and chanting ‘Whore, whore, whore.’ It is said she never went out in public again (122).
And this entire elaborate scam? Revenge for Clodia having his wife, Terentia, whipped. Cicero presents the result to his wife as a gift and atonement for her sufferings during his exile.
Cicero makes one more intervention in politics. Next day he speaks in the Senate to the bill to assign 20 million sestercii to Pompey for his grain commission but he uses the opportunity to ask whether they should reconsider the land reform legislation Caesar passed before he left for Gaul. This pleases the anti-Caesarians but infuriates his supporters, not least Crassus (125).
He makes an evening visit to Pompey’s villa outside Rome, politely greeting the great generals’ beautiful young wife. Pompey tut tuts over Cicero’s speech against the land reform but Cicero goes on the offensive saying Crassus’s insensate jealousy of Pompey is far more dangerous than anything he, Cicero, can say. Pompey agrees. Cicero comes away well pleased at his work undermining the unity of the anti-republican triumvirate (130).
Tired, Cicero takes a holiday at Cumae, in a villa left to him by a rich tax collector he did some legal work for (126). They notice it’s surprisingly empty for the time of year (132). Then dusty soldiers approach. Scared, they receive them and they turn out to be envoys from Luca.
After Cicero’s disruptive speech, Crassus went to see Caesar and they then summoned Pompey to what turned into the Conference of Luca, designed to shore up the Triumvirate. Now this soldier has brought an ultimatum to Cicero. He must shut up. He must stop criticising the triumvirs. He must reverse his position and support the land reform.
And astonishes him by telling him Pompey and Clodius have been publicly reconciled. Crassus and Pompey are going to stand for election as consuls. If they stood in the summer they would fail. But the elections will be delayed because of the escalating violence Clodius will provide. By the time it’s safe enough to hold election in the winter, campaigning season in Gaul will be over and Caesar will send thousands of his soldiers to vote for Pompey and Crassus. When they have finished their year as consuls they will be awarded provinces, Pompey to Spain, Crassus Syria. These commands will be for five years, and Caesar’s command in Gaul will also be extended.
Altogether these plans are known as the Luca Accords (136). If Cicero doesn’t support them, bad things will happen to him. After the soldiers leave Cicero is shaken but furious with Pompey. Can’t he see he is being turned into Caesar’s dupe? He is securing Caesar the few more years he needs to thoroughly subjugate and pillage Gaul and then, when he’s done, Caesar will return to Rome and dispense with Pompey.
But Terentia intervenes. She is fed up with Cicero thinking he and he alone must save the Republic. There are hundreds of other senators and ex-consuls. Let them do something about it for a change. Cicero knows he is right. After this ultimatum from the three most powerful men in Rome he realises his time is up. He should back away from active politics (139).
Vivid description of Cato the Younger returning from two years as governor of Cyprus with vast wealth (140). He is shocked at the Senate’s obeisance before the Triumvirate and at Cicero’s pessimism. From now on Cato becomes the leader of the opposition to Caesar (143). Cicero kowtows. In the Senate he humiliatingly withdraws his suggestion that Caesar’s land reform be reviewed – and receives a letter of thanks from Caesar (146).
(150-154) Portrait of Crassus as he prepares to set off on his military campaign against the Parthian Empire. He is only interested in looting everywhere and amassing as much money as possible. It is unpopular with the people. Cato makes speeches against it, declaring it immoral to commence a war against a nation Rome has treaties with. But when Crassus asks for Cicero’s support the latter is happy to invite him and his wife round for supper and pledge his heartfelt support. Anything to appease the Triumvirate and get them off his back. Tiro notes the slack, dilettantish behaviour of the officers who accompany Crassus, a sharp contrast with the whip-smart and efficient officers who surround Caesar. (This is all by way of being anticipation of Crassus’s disastrous defeats and miserable death in Syria the following year).
Over the next 3 years Cicero writes and rewrites the first of his works, On the Republic. Harris has Tiro give a useful summary (p.156):
Tiro has a severe fever during which Cicero promises to finally make him free – description of Tiro’s manumission
Crassus is killed at Carrhae – Harris chooses to quote Cassius’s long message as read out by Pompey to the assembled senators
detailed description of the affray which leads to the murder of Clodius – Cicero defends Milo at his trial but can’t be heard above the barracking (p.194)
Cicero is forced to go serve as governor of Cilicia as the political situation in Rome intensifies. Tiro doesn’t want to go but Cicero persuades him with the offer of buying him the farm he’s always wanted (p.198). Terentia wants him to play the traditional Roman governor and fleece the province for everything he can but Cicero knows this will play into the hands of his enemies as well as being against his temperament (202).
En route to take ship at Brundisium, the party is invited to go stay with Pompey at his nearby villa. They discuss the political situation. With Crassus dead the triumvirate is now an unstable duumvirate. Because Caesar has now successfully conquered and pacified all of Gaul, the question becomes what to do about him. Caesar wants to stand for the consulship in absentia to ensure that he gets it and secures immunity from prosecution which the office provides (204).
In Athens discussion with Aristatus, leading exponent of Epicureanism (206). He argues that physical wellbeing, the avoidance of pain and stress, is all. But Cicero argues that physical illness and pain are unavoidable and so the Epicurean notion of ‘good’ is weak and vulnerable. A more robust notion of the Good is needed, namely the moral goodness of the Stoics which endures no matter what state our body is in. Which inspires Cicero to write a guide to the Good Life.
Harris skimps on Cicero’s governorship, giving a very brief account of the one military campaign he led, to besiege the capital of a rebellious tribe. He omits two aspects described in Cicero’s own letters, namely a) his difficult relationship with his predecessor who just happened to be a brother of his bitter (and dead) enemy, Clodius and b) his very real achievement of setting a ruined province back on its feet, reducing taxes, reviving trade and administering justice fairly. You can see that these nuts and bolts aspects of actual administrative work don’t fit the thriller template.
Before his governorship is quite over, Cicero packs and sets off back to Rome, accompanied by Tiro and his entourage. He detours via Rhodes to visit the tomb of his tutor in oratory, Apollonius Molo. However, the winds change and block them there. Finally they sail on to Corinth but Tiro is taken very ill and eventually cannot be moved. He is left in the care of a banker friend of Cicero’s who he was not to see again for 8 months.
So he is forced to watch from a distance as the Roman Republic collapses for it was in January of that year, 49 BC, that Caesar crossed the River Rubicon and sparked civil war against Pompey, the defender of the constitution and senate.
Harris uses a series of Cicero’s actual letters to describe events. Pompey panics, thinking Caesar has his entire army with him (whereas he only had one legion) and orders the authorities to evacuate Rome and head east, ultimately holing up in Brundisium before sailing for Greece.
Caesar just fails to stop him then, without ships of his own, is forced to march back to Rome. En route he stops off at Cicero’s house in Formiae and has a brief meeting. He asks him to come back to Rome, to address the senate supporting him. Cicero refuses. Caesar is angered but leaves.
Cicero realises he must throw in his lot with Pompey and heads back to Greece. Tiro travels from his sickhouse to rendezvous back in Thessalonika, the same house where he spent his exile. Everyone is miserable (226). Cicero talks to Pompey, attends meetings. 200 senators are there with their families and staffs, bickering and politicking.
Caesar finally secures a fleet and sends half his army to Dyrrachium. Pompey marches there and surrounds his camp. It settles down into trench warfare, with the soldiers yelling abuse at each other and the occasional outbreak of fraternisation. Defectors tell Pompey about a weak place in Caesar’s defences so he attacks there. In a confused fight it is generally thought Caesar lost. Next morning his fortifications are abandoned. He is marching east into Greece. Pompey resolves to chase him and also strikes camp. Cicero’s son, brother and nephew all march off, but he doesn’t like war and elects to stay in a villa near the now liberated town of Dyrrachium (249). Cato is put in charge of forces there.
It is here that, weeks later, rumours reach them of disaster. Then Labienus arrives in a terrible state having ridden for days from the disaster that was the Battle of Pharsalus, 9 August 48 BC (252).
The senators and leaders who stayed behind at Dyrrachium hold a meeting and resolve to fight on and rally the Pompeian forces at Corfu, an island and so defensible.
And so amid scenes of chaos and panic the Pompeian forces pack up and sail for Corfu. Here another summit meeting is held in the Temple of Jupiter. Cato proposes Cicero be their leader, but Cicero laughs out loud and says he is fit for nothing. In his opinion they should immediately sue for peace in order to end the bloodshed. Pompey’s son Gnaeus is incensed by Cicero’s defeatism and goes to stab him with a sword, only Cato’s restraining words prevent him and save Cicero’s life (259). Cato lets anyone who wants to, leave, so Cicero slowly rises and walks out:
out of the temple, out of the senatorial cause, out of the war and out of public life. (p.260)
In Patrae they are delighted to come across Cicero’s son, Marcus, his brother Quintus and young nephew, who all fought in the battle but survived (260). Cicero speaks tactlessly of the meeting of leaders he attended, ridiculing them and their cause, not realising how deeply it was offending these three men who put their lives at risk for the cause. This prompts a furious tirade from Quintus in which he expresses a lifetime of resentment at being forced to play second fiddle to his oh-so-clever brother and he and his son walk out (264).
Heart-broken at this family rupture, Cicero returns to Italy accompanied by Tiro who has been away three full years. They find the region round Brundisium controlled by a legate of Caesar’s, Publius Vatinius, who, however, Cicero defended in a trial and so is helpful (267). Cicero is given a villa under guard for his protection and only slowly realises that he is in fact under house arrest while Vatinius finds out what Caesar wants done with him.
Cicero and Tiro realise this is life under a dictatorship: no freedoms, no magistrates, no courts, no elections. One lives at the whim of the dictator.
Cicero’s heart sinks further when Vatinius tells him that while Caesar is absent on campaign, Italy is ruled by his Master of Horse (traditional post for second in command) Marcus Antonius. Cicero and Antonius have always had a distant relationship but there is an underlying animosity because Antonius’s stepfather, Publius Lentulus Sura, was one of the five Catiline conspirators Cicero had put to death in 63 BC (as described in detail in the previous novel in the series, Lustrum).
Depressing months of house arrest follow. Cicero is deeply upset by the rift with his beloved brother. All the news is of death, including that of Milo the gladiator and Cicero’s promising pupil, Marcus Caelius Rufus (269). Then they all hear news of the the miserable end of Pompey, treacherously stabbed as he went ashore in Egypt (270).
In the spring of 47 the news is that Caesar is still in Egypt with his alleged paramour, Cleopatra. Cicero is still stuck in Brundisium. His beloved daughter Tullia makes the dangerous journey to visit him. Her husband, Dolabella, now ignores her completely and has affairs. Worse, Tullia brings news that his wife, Terentia, has been conspiring with her steward Philotimus, to plunder his estate and belongings for years. Cicero’s private life is in ruins.
Then a letter comes from Caesar, no less, announcing he is returning to Italy and will come to visit Cicero. Soon afterwards Cicero is summoned to meet the dictator at Tarentum. Cicero is rising there with an entourage of cavalry and lictors when they encounter the huge column of Caesar’s army. The dictator dismounts from his horse, greets Cicero and walks with him.
It is a perfectly genial conversation. Cicero asks to be relieved of the damned lictors who still accompany him everywhere because he still, legally, is governor of Cilicia, but are a damned inconvenience. Caesar agrees on the spot. But shouldn’t that take a vote in the senate? Caesar replies: ‘I am the senate’. Caesar politely says he isn’t sure he wants Cicero back in Rome making speeches against him. Cicero assures him that he has utterly retired from politics. He intends to devote his life to studying and writing philosophy. Caesar is pleased. Then Harris has Cicero ask one of the Great Questions of History: Did Caesar always aim at this outcome, a dictatorship? No, is Caesar’s swift reply.
‘Never! I sought only the respect due my rank and my achievements. For the rest, one merely adapts to the circumstances as they arise.’ (p.281)
The thoughtful reader reels at the impact of these words, on the light they shed on the real processes of history, and this encounter makes you review everything, the long complex violent sequence of events which has led to the collapse of the Roman Republic and Cicero’s hectic chequered career which has brought the two men to this encounter on a dusty road amid a huge entourage of battle hardened soldiers. Then Caesar mounts his horse and gallops off (282).
Part two: Redux (47 to 43 BC)
They head back to Rome but Cicero decides to stop and live outside the city, at his country house at Tusculum (287). Description of the house. Here he settles down to translate the best of Greek philosophy into Latin (289). He starts with a history of oratory he called the Brutus and dedicated to him, though the dedicatee didn’t like it (290).
He divorces Terentia (286). They still have much in common but she’s been robbing him blind, stripping his properties of their furnishings and selling them off.
Cicero gives oratory lessons to Caesar’s exquisite lieutenant Aulus Hirtius (who is rumoured to have written many of the commentaries on the Gallic War) (291). He is soon joined by Gaius Vibius Pansa and Cassius Longinus as pupils of Cicero (292). Cassius admits that he regrets allowing himself to be pardoned by Caesar and confides in Cicero that he has already planned to assassinate Caesar (292).
Tullia’s errant husband Dolabella is back from fighting in Africa. He asks to come visit Cicero and Tullia. He tells them about the war in Africa, about Caesar’s great victory at Thrapsus, and about the hideous suicide of Cato (297). The deep impact on Cassius and Brutus, both of whom were related to Cato i.e. shame for having accepted Caesar’s pardon and living on under his dictatorship. Cicero writes a short eulogy to Cato (299).
Caesar holds four triumphs in a row and absurdly lavish games (300) but during one of them his chariot’s axle snaps and he’s thrown to the ground. Caesar’s clemency, forgiving errant senators (302). He pardons many of his enemies, notably Brutus, some said because Brutus was his son by his long-term mistress Servilia, herself half sister of Cato.
Cicero is forced to marry the totally unsuitable Publilia for money (Tiro reviews the three eligible i.e. rich candidates) (306). Description of the wedding including the disarmingly simple Roman marriage vow (‘Where you are Gaia, I am Gaius’) (308). After only a few weeks the marriage isn’t working (309).
His daughter Tullia comes to stay to bear the child she was impregnated with when Dolabella visited (she had been staying with her mother since the divorce). But she is ill with tuberculosis. She gives birth to a healthy boy (named Lentulus) but never recovers. Death bed scene, Cicero holds her hand, she dies peacefully in her sleep (312).
Stricken with grief, Cicero flees his young wife and hides himself away in a succession of friends’ houses and remote villas, writing a handbook of Greek philosophy about consolation (314). Eventually he divorces Publilia (315), and invites Tiro to join him in Tusculum where he sets about dictating the Tusculan Disputations (317). There are to be five books cast in the form of a dialogue between a philosopher and his student:
One must train for death by leading a life that is morally good:
‘Such were the lessons that Cicero had learned and wished to impart to the world’ (319).
Dolabella comes to visit. He is back from the war in Spain. He was badly injured. He asks to take possession of his son by Tullia, and Cicero agrees. Dolabella tells Cicero the fight in Spain was different from the other campaigns, more hard fought, more bitter. When Pompey’s son Gnaeus was killed in battle, Caesar had his head stuck on a lance (321). They took no prisoners. They killed 30,000 enemy i.e. Roman troops. Many of the enemies he pardoned after the earlier wars had fought against him. Caesar has returned a different man, angry and embittered.
Cicero continues turning out books at speed. Burying himself in Greek philosophy , reading, studying, dictating to Tiro, all help him manage his grief over Tullia’s death. He writes On the nature of the gods and On divination.
Caesar is a changed man, angrier, more controlling. His grasp on reality seems to have slipped. He writes a petty-minded riposte to Cicero’s eulogy of Cato. His infatuation with Cleopatra leads him to set up statues of her in Rome, including in temples. He has himself declared a god with his own priesthood (323). He announces a grandiose plan to take 36 legions (!) to the east to smash the Parthian Empire, march back round the Black Sea conquering all the territory, approach Germany from the East to conquer and pacify it. Basically, to conquer the whole world (323). Alexander the Great.
Cicero goes to stay on the Bay of Naples. On the Feast of Saturnalia he gives all his staff presents and finally, after years of prevaricating, gives Tiro the farm he’s always yearned for. It is described in idyllic terms but the thing that struck me was that is staffed by six slaves and an overseer. This doesn’t cause a bump or hesitation in the description by Tiro, the ex-slave (330).
Caesar sends a letter announcing he will drop by. Cicero is thrown into a panic and makes massive preparations. Caesar arrives with his entourage and cohorts of soldiers. Dinner conversation. Caesar flatters him by saying he enjoyed reading the Tusculan Disputations. This leads Cicero to ask Caesar whether he thinks his soul will survive his death. Caesar replies he doesn’t know about anyone else, but he knows that his soul will survive his death – because he is a god! Simples. Cicero concludes the intensity of his isolation, achievements and responsibility have driven him mad (328).
Caesar is made dictator for life. He has the seventh month of the year renamed July. He is given the title Emperor and Father of the Nation. He presides over the Senate from a golden throne. He has a statue of himself added to the seven statues of the ancient kings of Rome. Harris repeats the famous story that at the Lupercal festival Mark Antony repeatedly tries to crown Caesar with a laurel wreath, though the crowd boos (331).
Caesar plans to leave Rome on 18 March 44 BC to commence his huge campaign in the East. A meeting of the Senate is arranged for the 15th or Ides of March, to confirm the list of appointments to all the magistracies which Caesar has drawn up for the three years he intends to be away.
On the morning of the fifteenth Cicero and Tiro get up early and arrive at the Senate ahead of time. The meeting is being held in the theatre built by Pompey because the old Senate house still hasn’t been rebuilt after Clodius’s mob burned the old one down on the day of his funeral in 52.
Harris manages the tense build-up to one of the most famous events in Western history, the assassination of Julius Caesar very well. Tiro gives an eye witness account the main point of which is confusion and delay. Caesar was warned by a soothsayer and his wife’s bad dreams not to attend the session and so the assembled senators mill around increasingly impatient for hours. Eventually Caesar arrives having been cajoled into coming by Decimus Brutus, one of the conspirators.
Assassination of Caesar (338). Conspirators retreat to the Capitol Hill. Cicero meets them and is staggered that they have no plan (347). Instead of seizing power they expect the republic to magically reconstitute itself. Leaving this vacuum is their tragic mistake (353 and 368). Lepidus moves troops into Rome and takes control. The assassins address the crowd but don’t win them over:
A speech is a performance not a philosophical discourse: it must appeal to the emotions more than to the intellect. (p.349)
Meeting of the Senate at which Antony makes a commanding speech calling for compromise and amnesty for the assassins (358). Several sessions of the Senate trying to reconcile the parties. Nervously the assassins agree to come off the hill and negotiate with Antony, the serving consul after both sides have given hostages (as in The Gallic Wars, the only mechanism for gaining trust between chronically suspicious partners.)
So Caesar’s assassins and supporters sit in a further session of the Senate, which agrees to keep magistrates in place, Caesar’s laws unaltered, then agrees with Antony’s suggestion that Caesar’s will is opened and read publicly (364).
The big surprise of Caesar’s will, that he leaves three-quarters of his estate to his nephew Octavianus, who he legally adopts and is to be named Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (367).
Five days after the assassination there is a grand funeral for Caesar, complete with elaborate cortege. Tiro thinks it was stage managed by Fulvia, Antony’s venomous wife. It climaxes with Antony’s speech to the crowd in which he drops all pretence at reconciliation and says Caesar was cruelly murdered by cowards (370). Antony displays Caesar’s corpse and then says he left the people 300 sestercii each in his will to inflames the crowd. When the pyre is lit the crowd go mad, tear off their clothes and throw them in, loot nearby shops and chuck furniture on. Then go rampaging through the streets attacking the houses of the assassins. They tear Helvius Cinna the poet to pieces under the misapprehension he is Cinna the conspirator (372). The assassins leave Rome.
Cicero flees Rome and devotes himself to writing, producing in feverish outburst the books On auguries, On fate, On glory, and begun sketching On Friendship (375). Visitors from Rome bring stories of Antony’s high handed behaviour.
One day Cornelius turns up with a short skinny kid with pimples. This is the famous Octavian who is staying with neighbours (there is ambiguity about his name so Harris gets the boy himself to tell everyone he wants to be referred to as Octavian, p.377). Octavian butters Cicero up and seeks his advice. He has no small talk. He is a logical machine.
An extended dinner party at which Octavian’s father, advisors, some of Caesar’s senior officers and Cicero discuss what he should do. Cicero is blunt. Go to Rome, claim your inheritance and stand for office. He tells Tiro he doesn’t think the boy stands a chance but his presence will undermine Antony.
Cicero sends Tiro to attend the next meeting of the Senate (he is too concerned for his own safety to go). Tiro witnesses Antony award himself the command of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul for five years and arrange other allies in positions of power. Octavian is nowhere to be seen. He visits Cicero’s son-in-law Dolabella. Cicero wants the dowry which accompanied Tullia back. Instead Dolabella gives him a document which assigns Cicero as Dolabella’s legate in Syria. He doesn’t have to do anything but it gives him the legal right to travel and Greece and immunity for 5 years (385).
Cicero and Tiro travel to Brutus’s family home at Antium to discuss what the leading assassins should do. Brutus’s mother Servilia is disgusted at the thought her son will be merely handed on of Pompey’s grain commissioners, but Cicero advises Brutus and Cassius to take these posts and wait on events (388). But the real point is the assassins are falling out among themselves and have no plan.
Cicero moves on to another of his properties. He is working simultaneously on three books, On friendship, On duties and On virtues (391). Reluctantly Tiro decides it is time to quit Cicero and go live on that farm. He is 60. Cicero accepts it calmly and returns to his work. Tiro’s farm (393). Nonetheless, he still frequents spas and there overhears gossip about Rome, opposition to Antony.
He meets again Agathe, the slave girl he paid to have liberated but never to to see again. With her freedom she worked, saved money and bought the spa where Tiro has bumped into her (398). [Right at the end of the narrative we are told her full name is Agathe Licinia and she owns the baths of Venus Libertina at Baiae, p.488).
Cicero comes to visit him on the farm. Antony is failing, and Brutus and Cassius have determined to revive the opposition. He is energised and going back to Rome to throw himself back into the fray. His daughter’s dead, he’s divorced from his wife, he has nothing to lose. He doesn’t mean to but Cicero is so charismatic that…he lures Tiro back into his service (402).
It takes them 8 days to travel to Rome. The roads are dangerous. Gangs of Caesar’s demobbed soldiers roam the countryside, stealing, killing, burning. People are terrified. Once in Rome Cicero attends the next sitting of the Senate and makes a speech against the corruption and distortion of the law by Antony. This becomes known as the First Phillippic, in a jokey reference to the speeches Demosthenes delivered against the Macedonian tyrant, Philip II (411).
Antony replies with an excoriating speech to the Senate dragging up every disreputable scrap he can about Cicero, and highlighting his flip-flopping support for great men as signs of a self-seeking sycophant (412).
It is December 44 BC. The military situation is chaotic. There are no fewer than seven armies with different leaders (413). Octavian’s army occupies Rome. Antony is in Brundisium trying to bribe legions returned from Macedonia into supporting him. Octavian makes a speech about calling his adoptive father the greatest Roman, to applause from the crowd. He leaves Rome, Antony exits it but then has to speed to one of his legions which Octavian has bribed away. Chaos.
Cicero’s second Philippic against Antony, packed with scurrilous gossip and accusations of corruption (418). Cicero explains his position to Tiro and Atticus: Antony is the enemy, ‘a monstrous and savage animal’ (432), often drunk dictator in the making. Octavian, with the name of Caesar and many of his legions, is the only force which can stop Antony. Atticus wisely asks whether Octavian will not himself then become dictator. But Cicero naively thinks that he can control and steer the young man, in order to restore the Republic (421).
Cicero meets Octavian at one of Atticus’s houses by Lake Volsinii. Harris is in his element. He imagines the power plays and negotiations. Octavian agrees to be guided by the Senate if Cicero persuades the Senate to give him imperium and legal authority to fight Antony (426).
Antony has marched with his legions to besiege Decimus Brutus, governor of Cisapline Gaul, in the town of Mutena. Brutus remains loyal to the state and Senate, so Antony is clearly everyone’s enemy. Cicero makes a big speech in the Senate claiming the state is being rescued by the boy Octavian. This speech became known as the Third Philippic (430). When he goes out to repeat it to the people in the Forum he is drowned by cheers.
BUT when the Senate meets early in January 43 Cicero is shocked when both new consuls (Hirtius and Pansa) and other senators reject his criticism of Antony and hope peace can still be negotiated. Next day Cicero makes the speech of his life, the Fifth Philippic in which he scorns any peace overtures to Antony, proposes he be declared an enemy of the state, and that Octavian be given full official backing (438).
But the next day Antony’s wife and mother are presented in the Senate. If Antony is declared an enemy of the state, his property will be confiscated and they will be thrown out on the streets. To Cicero’s disgust this moderates the Senate’s decision from open war down to sending peace envoys.
A month later the peace envoys return from Mutena, where Antony is besieging Decimus. Antony refused all their proposals and made his own counter-proposals including 5 years command of Further Gaul. Once again a debate in the Senate where Antony’s friends and relations sway things. Once again Cicero rises the following day to utterly condemn Antony as the instigator of war. As Cato was Caesar’s inveterate enemy, so Cicero has made himself Antony’s.
The two consuls lead a conscript army off to face Antony in the north. The leading magistrate left in Rome, the urban praetor Marcus Cornutus, is inexperienced and turns to Cicero for advice. Thus at the age of 63 he becomes the most powerful man in the city, dictator in all but name.
It takes a while for despatches to return from the north and when they do they initially tell of a great defeat of Antony. Cicero is triumphant. It is the most successful day of his life. But then further despatches reveal that not one but both consuls were killed in the Battle of Mutena. Then Decomus Brutus reveals that his weakened army allowed Antony to flee with his over the Alps.
Worst of all, word has got to Octavian of some casual slighting remarks of Cicero’s. Octavian warns he is not prepared to be subordinate to Decimus, as the Senate ordered. Since there are 2 vacancies for consul, why can he not be made one? (He is only 19; the lower age limit for the consulship is meant to be 43.)
In May 43 Antony and his army arrived at the base of Lepidus, who was meant to be holding Gaul for the Senate. Instead he goes over to Antony. He claims his troops mutinied and wanted to join Antony’s.
When official news reaches the Senate Cicero is called on to make a speech summarising the situation. This is that Antony, far from being extinguished, is more powerful than ever. Deep groans from the senators. To Cicero’s horror the traditionalist Isauricus announces that he has swung his power and influence behind Octavian, and offered him his daughter’s hand in marriage, and proposes that Octavian be allowed to stand as consul in absentia. In other words, Octavian has dropped Cicero. In his shock, Cicero gives a speech crystallising his political beliefs in a nutshell:
That the Roman Republic, with its division of powers, its annual free elections for every magistracy, its law courts and its juries, its balance between Senate and people, its liberty of speech and thought, is mankind’s noblest creation (p.475)
And goes on to say that, for this reason, he thinks Octavian should not be awarded the consulship. It’s precisely this kind of bending of the rules which brought them the rule of Pompey, then Caesar. This speech places Cicero, for the first time, directly against Octavian’s wishes.
Crucially, he points out to the Senate that even if Lepidus goes over to Antony and Octavian is of increasingly uncertain loyalty, they can call on the legions commanded by Brutus in Syria and Cassius in Macedon. The point is that, without realising it, Cicero is creating the conditions under which Octavian and Antony will unite as the Caesarian party and declare war on the army of the assassins.
At the end of the new month of ‘July’ they learn that Octavian has struck camp, crossed the Rubicon with his army and is marching on Rome. Cicero had repeatedly assured the Senate of Octavian’s good intentions. Now he looks naive at best, Octavian’s tool at worst (476).
Legions arrive from Africa and Cornutus assures they will be loyal. But when Cicero goes to address them they remain resolutely silent. What do his fancy words about ‘liberty’ mean to them? They want money (480).
Next day the African legions mutiny and join Octavian’s. Cornutus kills himself in shame. Octavian’s troops now occupy Rome. Cicero contemplates suicide, but goes to see him. Their relationship has completely changed. Octavian tells Cicero he has organised to have the consulship, and who his fellow consul will be, an obscure relative who will be a puppet. Soon he will go to meet Antony and Lepidus. He recommends Cicero leaves Rome. Go to Greece and write philosophy. He won’t be allowed to return without permission. Don’t write anything against Octavian. Octavian is the new dictator (483).
Broken in spirit, all his hopes crushed, Cicero retreats to his country villa at Tusculum (485). They hear Octavian has set up a special court to try Caesar’s assassins. Then that he has left Rome with 11 legions, marching to confront Antony.
A month goes by and he conceives the idea of collecting all his letters. Tiro has kept all of them. He unpacks them. Cicero has them read out in chronological order. His whole hectic public and private life. He is fully aware that they amount to:
the most complete record of an historical era ever assembled by a leading statesman. (p.487)
So he instructs Tiro to assemble his letters in the right order, then make several complete copies to be hidden and preserved. Atticus, always keen to ingratiate himself with everyone, averse to all risk, insists that all his letters to Cicero are burned, burns them with his own hands. But copies of the rest are made and Tiro sends his copies down to his farm to be hidden for posterity.
At the end of November 43 Cicero sends Tiro into Rome to recover the last of his papers from his properties. That night there is screaming in the streets. Tiro learns the devastating news that Antony, Octavian and Lepidus have joined forces to create a Second Triumvirate. They have published a list of hundreds of senators and knights who have been proscribed: their properties are to be confiscated and a bounty of 100,000 sesterces on their heads. Both Marcus and Quintus Cicero are on the list (490).
Panic, pandemonium, the city at night is full of death gangs seeking out the proscribed men in order to kill them, cut off their heads, and present them to the auditors. In mad haste, Tiro tells the remaining slaves in Cicero’s houses to flee, scribbles a message to be taken by courier to Cicero at Tusculum telling him to flee to his villa on the small island of Astura, then follows in a carriage.
It’s several days before Marcus and Quintus arrive on the shore. It’s the depths of winter, it’s raining, they look bedraggled. Tiro had a slave go and hire a boat in nearby Antium to carry them down the coast and abroad, but Quintus refuses to get in it.
They spend a miserable night in the little house on the island. Cicero elaborates on what happened: Octavian, Antony and Lepidus have met in Bononia and struck a deal to divide the empire between them. They’ve agreed to fund their armies by the simple expedient of killing the richest 2,000 men in the republic and seizing their property. To vouch for their good intentions they each agreed to include in the list someone dear to them: Antony his uncle, Lucius Caesar; Lepidus his own brother; and Octavian, after several days of holding out, Cicero, his former mentor and adviser (494).
They set off by ship but the seas and the winds are against them. Ten men are rowing the ship but it makes almost no headway. They put into a cove, beach the ship and try to shelter from the elements under the sails. Misery.
Next morning Tiro wakes to find Cicero gone. There is a path up from the beach. Tiro finds Cicero wandering along it, distracted. He tells Tiro he plans to head back to Rome to kill himself on Octavian’s doorstep. He’ll die of the shame. No he won’t, says Tiro. Cicero will just be captured and tortured to death, then decapitated. Reluctantly Cicero turns and returns with him to the beach.
They all embark back in the ship and set off rowing again. But it is hard going, the wind against them, the seas heavy. Cicero recognises the headland of Caieta and knows he has a house nearby. He insists they dock at a small jetty. Tiro checks the villa hasn’t been occupied by soldiers or death squads but it appears untouched so he sends slaves to fetch Cicero from the beach and tells the housekeeper to light fires and prepare a bath.
They sleep deeply but are wakened next morning by a slave saying soldiers are coming. Cicero insists on having a bath and dressing formally. Only then will he enter the litter Tiro has arranged and is being carried down to the sea to board the ship when they are cut off by a dozen legionaries. The slaves turn about face and carry the litter hastily back up the path but are met by more legionaries.
The tribune leading the soldiers turns out to be one Caius Popillius Laenas. By a supreme irony he was one of Cicero’s first clients in law. He defended him against a charge of parricide when he was a measly 15 year old and got him acquitted on condition he join the army. Oh the irony (which Harris appears to havey confected; none of this is in the historical accounts I’ve read).
Popollius orders the centurion under him to execute Cicero. Cicero is utterly resigned and insists they do it while he lies back on the litter, assuming the position of a defeated gladiator. And so with one stroke of his sword the centurion cuts off the head which composed some of the greatest speeches and works of literature in the Latin language. Little good they all did him in the end.
They then chop off his hands and put them all in a basket and depart. Tiro hears Antony was so delighted by the hands he gave Popillius a bonus of a million sestercii. Antony had Cicero’s head and hands nailed to the public rostra as a warning to anyone else who opposed the triumvirate. It is said that Antony’s wife, Flavia, who hated Cicero, stuck needles through his witty tongue (502).
Tiro and the slaves carry Cicero’s body down to the beach and burn it on a pyre. Then he headed south to his farm. Quintus and his son were caught and executed. Atticus was spared because he had helped Fulvia when anti-Antony feeling was at its height.
All the loose ends are neatly tied up and Harris gives Tiro the briefest of spaces, just one page, to reflect on the extraordinary life he has described and the epic times it sheds light on.
My work is done. My book is finished. Soon I will die too. (p.503)
The Victorians achieved moving literary effects by writing too much. Modern writers strive for the same emotional impact by writing too little.
It is a moving and emotional end because Cicero’s life itself was so awesome and his end so wretched. The facts themselves are very moving for the reader who has accompanied Cicero this far, however. Harris’s treatment is a little disappointing. He winds up the narrative by telling us that Tiro marries that slave girl he freed all those years ago, Agath,e and they often spend the evenings together reminiscing. Sounds like a Disney movie or the Waltons.
And he quotes the passage from Cicero’s work, The Dream of Scipio, where Cicero tells the statesman to look down from the vast heavens on the insignificant earth and dismiss the petty activities of humans.
Ah, but that’s what politicians all say when their careers are over. Contrary to all Cicero’s preaching in his literary works, the consolations of philosophy are feeble compared with the full-blooded excitement of action.
Key themes
Politics
As I made abundantly clear in my reviews of the first two books, these are novels about politics, not in the broad theoretical sense, but in the narrow sense of the day to day scrabble to win and then maintain positions of power in the state. One of the many pleasures of the previous books is the way Harris has characters state sententiae – maxims or sayings about politics – which are perfectly meaningful in their context but framed in such a way as to be widely applicable to any time and place, including our own.
But having got into the habit of writing out all the apothegms in all three books made me realise there are far, far fewer uses of the word, and hardly any zingy apothegms about it in this one.
Power
I think the word ‘politics’, central to the previous two novels, is superseded in this one by use of the word ‘power’, signifying a shift in subject and in historical events. With the advent of the Triumvirate the time for petty politics passes and is replaced by the more naked manipulation of power.
And then, possibly, the word ‘power’ is itself superseded half-way through the book by ‘war’. And neither Cicero nor Tiro can make casual, knowing generalisations about war since neither of them are soldiers.
It’s a subtle, lexical indication of the way the focus of a novel supposedly about Cicero shifts its emphasis, spreads it more widely, in this novel. Well before the end of part one the energy centre of the narrative, as of Cicero’s world, has shifted to Caesar. Caesar is the true protagonist and Cicero an increasingly passive cork floating on the huge ocean of disruption and war he causes.
With the outbreak of civil war Cicero – and the text – become increasingly reliant on letters and third person accounts of events scattered all round the known world (Greece, Egypt, Spain).
And then, after the assassination of Caesar, not only all the characters but the narrative itself feels adrift. Retreating to the country, Cicero tries to make sense of the fast-moving series of events where no-one is in control, certainly not the assassins, but not Mark Antony either.
It’s in this chaos that slowly emerges from the confusions of the narrative the cold-eyed, steely determination of young Octavian who is to astonish the world by mastering the chaos created by his elders. Initially Octavian is keen to meet Cicero, ask his advice, when he departs with his army keeps in touch by letter. But when he hears about Cicero’s fateful slighting remark, he goes ominously silent. No letters, no replies, no despatches.
Octavian’s silences signal the text’s final abandonment of Cicero. Tiro’s narrative continues to focus on Cicero’s activities and attitudes but the narrative has moved through three key words – politics, power, war – and the final buzzword is nothing, nothingness.
The authorities in Rome hear nothing about Antony for months, Cicero hears nothing from Octavian for months. But in this ominous silence they are cooking up the Second Triumvirate, which will seize power and unleash an army of assassins whose aim is the end of all words. The end of Cicero. The end of the text.
The law
A little into this one I realised I’d been missing the importance of an obvious subject, the law. Cicero was first and foremost a lawyer. He made his name with the Verres case (described in great detail in part one of Imperium). Even when he ducked out of politics he continued to advocate cases in the courts. And what comes over very loudly is that in ancient Rome the law had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with fancy notions of ‘Justice’ but was entirely a tool of political manipulation, attack and revenge.
Trials in ancient Rome were wildly different from modern trials. They involved a jury of scores, sometimes hundreds (75 jurors were sworn in for the trial of Rufus, p.116), were conducted in the open air with the Roman crowd watching, sometimes in their thousands. Speeches were astonishingly ad hominem, not only dishing up all kinds of dirt on the accused and witnesses but also on the opposing advocates, who were often accused of the most grotesque crimes themselves.
Above all, cases could descend into violence as the onlookers behaved more like a football crowd than the limited number of public allowed into a modern court, and started yelling or applauding or booing, or sometimes throwing things, and sometimes invading the platform where the trial was being conducted.
So much highfalutin’, self-serving rhetoric surrounds the practice of the law but the Roman reality was obvious a shambles. Harris has Cicero tell Rufus:
‘My dear Rufus, have you learned nothing? There is no more honour in a legal dispute than there is in a wrestling match.’ (p.108)
War atrocities
As always, I am appalled at the gross violence, war crimes and atrocities carried out by the Roman army:
It is notable that the only member of the entire ruling class who protests against this behaviour is Cato, who makes a speech in the senate saying Caesar should be declared a war criminal, removed from his command and prosecuted. His suggestion is shouted down.
Even Cicero does’t care that much about these atrocities. But Tiro does. Harris has Tiro dwell on them with horror and this confirms for me, not that Tiro is a sensitive soul, but that he is the representative of the modern liberal consciousness in the novel. Tiro would be a more interesting character if he were either malicious or unreliable. Instead he is the simplest kind of narrator possible, the loyal friend of the protagonist who reports everything he sees with utter honesty. And is as appalled as a Guardian editorial by violence and war.
Family ties
Dated diction
In my review of Lustrum I mentioned the way the thriller, as a genre, uses stereotypical characters, situations and language to guarantee an enjoyable read. The characters and events may be unpleasant (betrayal, murder etc) but the shape and feel of the incidents is almost always super-familiar and, in a paradoxical way, despite being superficially unpleasant, at a deeper level, cognitively reassuring.
I meant to mention something else I noticed, which is that Harris’s characters often speak like characters from a 1950s British movie. I mean they use a reassuringly old fashioned and very pukka diction.
Some of the reviewers suggest Harris has rewritten Roman history for our times, and insofar as his narrative focuses on cynical abuses of political power that may be true. But I was struck by how very 1950s the language of a lot of the characters is. They often reminded me of characters from Ealing Comedies or the St Trinian’s movies.
It first struck me when Cicero talks about one of the other characters as ‘not being such a bad fellow’. From then on I noticed this 1950s upper-middle class professional register.
‘Very well, young man, that’s enough’ (p.29).
On page 107 Tiro refers to Bestia as ‘the old rogue’. Who uses the word ‘rogue’ any more unless they’re talking about the Star Wars movie Rogue One or a ‘rogue state’ or maybe describing a ‘loveable rogue’ in a review of a movie?
Bestia had with him ‘his son Atratinus, a clever lad’.
When characters address each other they’re likely to say things like, ‘My dear Rufus…’ or ‘My dear, poor boy…’ Atticus speaks with the overemphasis typical of the English upper-middle classes: ‘Tiro, my dear fellow, thank you so much for taking care of my old friend so devotedly‘ (p.113). And:
Now you could argue that the dialogue is a bit old fogeyish as part of a broader authorial strategy by which Tiro’s language as a whole has a definite oldster tinge, like the pages of an old paperback which have yellowed with age.
I slept, and very deeply despite my anxieties, for such was my exhaustion… (p.499)
Not ‘because I was so exhausted’ but ‘such was my exhaustion’. It’s not exactly Victorian or really old diction and it’s not dominant in every sentence; but at moments when he has a choice, Harris always chooses the more old-fashioned, stiffer phrase.
Presumably this dated tinge is a conscious effort. I can see it has two intentions: one is to subtly convey that this is a 2,000 year old document describing a lost world. It is meant to feel, not archaic exactly, but slightly dated, in order to convey its pastness.
The other, more obvious motivation, is that the narrator is 100 years old. Tiro is an oldster. So of course his turn of phrase would be dated, even in his own time. When you ponder that fact, you could argue that the phrasing throughout the book is not dated enough.
But at the end of the day this is not a literary work, but a popular novel, a historical thriller and its default prose style is the crisp, factual manner of the thriller and most literary effects are clinically dispensed with in order to achieve its strong, direct, intelligent but simple impact.
Scraps
Cicero tells Tiro that Cato is the only one of them who clearly sees they they’re on the road to ruin (p.149).
Tiro the slave (p.20). His (sketchy) thoughts about slavery (p.226).
Caesar is like a whirlpool (p.147).
Credit
Dictator by Robert Harris was published by Hutchinson books in 2015. Page references are to the 2016 Arrow paperback edition.
The Cicero trilogy
My Cicero reviews
Roman reviews
Robert Harris reviews
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Posted by Simon on July 29, 2022
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/07/29/dictator-robert-harris/