Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome

Robert Harris

Sep 2006 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

From the bestselling author of Fatherland and Pompeii, comes the first novel of a trilogy about the struggle for power in ancient Rome.

In his “most accomplished work to date” (Los Angeles Times), master of historical fiction Robert Harris lures readers back in time to the compelling life of Roman Senator Marcus Cicero. The re-creation of a vanished biography written by his household slave and righthand man, Tiro, Imperium follows Cicero’s extraordinary struggle to attain supreme power in Rome.

On a cold November morning, Tiro opens the door to find a terrified, bedraggled stranger begging for help. Once a Sicilian aristocrat, the man was robbed by the corrupt Roman governor, Verres, who is now trying to convict him under false pretenses and sentence him to a violent death. The man claims that only the great senator Marcus Cicero, one of Rome’s most ambitious lawyers and spellbinding orators, can bring him justice in a crooked society manipulated by the villainous governor. But for Cicero, it is a chance to prove himself worthy of absolute power. What follows is one of the most gripping courtroom dramas in history, and the beginning of a quest for political glory by a man who fought his way to the top using only his voice—defeating the most daunting figures in Roman history.

Ratings and reviews

I liked these bits: "In other words, the tribuneship was designed to be a political dead end - a place to confine the ranting and the rancorous, the incompetent and the unpromotable: the effluent of the body politic" About Lictors, "These people are a warning of what happens to any state which has a permanent staff of officials. They begin as our servants and end up imagining themselves our masters!" Old dictum "sometimes you have to start a fight to discover how to win it" To Pompeus, "Rather than using your patronage to reward your friends, you should use it to divide your ennemies" About generals, "This is the trouble when soldiers decide to play at politics. They imagine that all they need to do is to issue an order, and everyone will obey. They never see that the very thing which makes them attrative in the first place - that they are supposdly these great patriots, above the squalor of politics - must ultimately defeat them, because either they do stay above politics, in which case they go nowherem or they get down in the muck along with the rest of us, and show themselves to be just as venal as everyone else.

This is a very interesting book and is extremely well written, even if it is more or less the short hand notes of Tiro, who, i regard as, an extremely important person in retracing the life of the great Marcus Tullius Cicero. What i find truly gripping is the extraordinary way in which Tiro accurately retells the story with an accurate translation from Robert Harris. I drop only 1 star due to the hard going nature of this book due to the volume of characters with new characters appearing throughout. This pushes a person to further their knowledge of this great man, Cicero, but what I find most upsetting is that Tiro's other books are lost and this books drives me to try and find them to distinguish yet more of his own literary genious and Cicero's amazing life. Anonymous.

This is one of my favourite ways to learn history - through a fictional narrative. I have also read "Pompeii" by Harris, which was similar in that it got right into the plumbing, literally. In both books I found the characters and storyline just enough to keep me reading but what genuinely intrigued me was the (to me) minute details of Roman life, and in this case the political system especially. The conversations, strategies and plots as they unfold have a very modern ring to them. I know this is artistic license at work, but you can't help but think. Are we really so different? Have we changed at all? I still find it hard to warm up to politicians though. I'll stick to the plumbers! +

About the author

Robert Harris is the author of Pompeii, Enigma, and Fatherland. He has been a television correspondent with the BBC and a newspaper columnist for the London Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. His novels have sold more than ten million copies and been translated into thirty languages. He lives in Berkshire, England, with his wife and four children.