All hail 'Dictator,' last in Cicero trilogy

As Cicero might warn many a modern politician, your friends can be far more dangerous than your enemies.

Not that Cicero has many friends left by time we meet him in Dictator (Knopf, 416 pp., *** ½ out of four stars), the last of three strong novels from Robert Harris about the last of the great Roman Republicans. He is in exile, forced out of Rome by a triumphant Julius Caesar and turned away from homes where he was once welcomed. But Rome’s most famous senator, litigator and orator does have one steady ally left: Tiro, his slave and stenographer, and, once again, our narrator.

And so begins the last 15 years of Cicero’s life, a decade and a half that will see his fortune’s rise and fall as his beloved Republic is consumed by civil war. Many of the figures who march through these pages have anchored multiple books and plays of their own: Caesar, Pompey, Brutus, Mark Antony, Octavian — the boy who will become Augustus and found the Empire. But Harris’s focus remains on Cicero, pulling him out of the classical studies courses where he and his voluminous writings have long resided and letting him hold his dramatic ground with his now more famous contemporaries.

And what a character Cicero is — or at least he is in Harris's skillful hands. Vain, self-centered, egotistical and astute, he's also capable of great kindness, and of recognizing his own contradictions. He was, as Harris reminds us, an infamous wit.  (“When (Caesar) changed the calendar and someone enquired whether the Dog Star would still rise on the same date, Cicero replied, ‘It will do as it is told.’”) But as Harris also makes clear, he had a bad habit of letting his wit run away with him, and most opponents were not amused.

With Tiro and Cicero, we plow through times and problems that may remind us of our own, but Harris doesn’t over-stress the comparisons. The fall of the Republic was rooted in its own peculiar structure, as a government designed to limit power found itself unable to manage an empire or control the ambitions of men grown rich and powerful through conquest. But there’s also a universal message here about the inability of any elected government to function when the democratic process is overrun by violence and lawlessness.

These were exciting times, for Rome and Cicero, with armies clashing and alliances constantly shifting. The rush of events can be thrilling — but in that rush, we sometimes lose track of the characters, Cicero included. Even so, the rush always subsides and Cicero always reemerges to remind us that these events were not just happening in a vacuum. Lives and a way of life were being destroyed, and Dictator makes you feel the pain of that loss.

And when it ends, taking Cicero with it, you just may feel like you’ve lost a friend.