'Conspirata' by Robert Harris

by Nicholas A. Basbanes

As the second installment in British novelist Robert Harris' trilogy of cutthroat politics and intrigue during the late Roman Republic opens, Marcus Tullius Cicero is about to assume the consulship of Rome, the position of supreme authority he had secured against all odds in Imperium, the first volume in the series. What should be, in Conspirata, a time of great joy and satisfaction for the legendary politician of antiquity is jolted by the shocking discovery in the Tiber River of a young slave who appears to have been killed and mutilated as part of an ominous ritual.

Called immediately to the scene, Cicero does his level best to prevent details of the outrage from circulating, but of far deeper concern to him is who among his enemies could have sanctioned such a despicable act, and to what end.

Rome being Rome, there is no shortage of possibilities, but since this is not a conventional whodunit – Harris, whose books include the 1992 bestseller Fatherland, is far too clever a writer of speculative thrillers for that sort of treatment – we learn in fairly short order that Catilina, one of Cicero's defeated rivals for the consulship, had sacrificed the boy as part of a high-level plot to murder Cicero and take control.

There is little doubt as to the fate that awaits the five aristocrats unmasked in the conspiracy; what does become problematic in the months that follow Cicero's consulship, however, are the expedient measures he took to execute the traitors, complications that threaten him with an untimely demise of his own. Of even greater moment – indeed, it is the ever-present back story in Conspirata – is the palpable erosion of the Roman Republic, and the inexorable march toward authoritarian rule. To this end – and about to take center stage in his own right – is Julius Caesar, rumored but never proved to have been a part of the plot.

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February 9, 2010

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