Imperium

Of all the great figures of the Roman era, none was more fascinating or attractive than Marcus Cicero. A brilliant lawyer and orator, a famous wit and philosopher, he launched himself at the age of twenty-seven into the violent, treacherous world of Roman politics, determined to attain imperium, the supreme power in the state. Beside him at all times in his struggle to reach the top – the office of Consul – was his confidential secretary, Tiro: the inventor of shorthand, and author of numerous books, including a famous life of Cicero, which was lost in the Dark Ages.
Now, Robert Harris – author of the number one bestseller POMPEII – has recreated Tiro’s vanished masterpiece, to tell in vivid detail the story of Cicero’s rise to power, from radical young lawyer to first citizen of Rome, competing with men such as Pompey, Caesar, Crassus and Cato. This is a world at once exotically different, and yet startlingly similar to our own – a world of Senate intrigue and electoral corruption, special prosecutors and political hostesses – in which the ancient rights of free speech and liberty are being threatened as a result of military adventures abroad.
Harris’s Cicero is an immensely sympathetic figure – an outsider, ambitious, vulnerable, highly intelligent, compassionate, frequently devious but always human: the world’s first professional politician. As his secretary writes on the opening page of this imaginary memoir: 'Cicero was unique in the history of the Roman republic in that he pursued supreme power with no resources to help him apart from his own talent… All he had was his voice – and by sheer effort of will he turned it into the most famous voice in the world'.