The opening roll is framed as a deathbed deposition, setting up Tiro’s promise to honor Cicero’s last request to tell the truth: “If [Cicero] does not always emerge as a paragon of virtue, well, so be it. Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them. And it is of power and the man that I shall sing” (3). The pre-emptive apology for dirty hands sets the terms of The Corrupting Price of Ambition: Tiro is telling readers, before any compromise has been depicted, that compromises are coming and that even Cicero’s loyal secretary cannot pretend otherwise. The echo of epic poetry broadly and of Virgil in particular reinforces the point. The phrase “of power and the man” alludes to Virgil’s “of arms and the man” (3), but where the Aeneid follows its hero, the Trojan prince Aeneas, from the sack of Troy to the founding of Rome, Tiro announces an epic in which the hero does battle with words for imperium, the legal authority of life and death Tiro has just defined a paragraph earlier (Virgil. Aeneid. Translated by H. R. Fairclough, revised by G. P. Goold, Harvard UP, 1999. Loeb Classical Library 63). Given Aeneas’s involvement in Rome’s inception and Imperium’s setting in the waning days of the Roman Republic, the allusion also frames the novel as a bookend finishing what the Aeneid started, with ambition playing a role in the Republic’s unraveling. In a similar vein, the frame tacitly links Cicero’s rise and fall to the Republic’s. When the young Cicero is sketched as sickly, stuttering, and broke, Tiro has already foretold what ambition will cost him; the sickly body and the stained hands are the same story at different ends.

Apollonius Molon’s regimen on Rhodes makes the novel’s case that voice is the one form of capital a “new man”—that is, someone not from Rome’s aristocratic class—can manufacture, and Harris dwells on the technical training to show what that manufacture looks like. Molon feeds Cicero red meat, makes him bend and run uphill while reciting Menander, paces him 80 yards down the shingle to declaim against the surf, and lectures him on hand gestures. This is Eloquence as Political Weapon in its most literal staging: Tiro inventories the body’s training (lungs, stomach, fingers, knees) as though Cicero were preparing for physical battle. The valedictory line, “go back, my boy, and conquer Rome” (9), uses a verb of military conquest for a man with no soldiers, further reinforcing the point. At the same time, Harris plants the warning that Tiro will return to: A republic that decides by speeches can be steered by whoever speaks best, and the lessons Cicero is acquiring are morally indifferent tools. Indeed, when Cicero asks whether arguments will not carry the day, Molon shrugs: “Content does not concern me. Remember Demosthenes: ‘Only three things count in oratory. Delivery, delivery, and again: delivery’” (7). This establishes that polish is more important than the merits of an argument or the character of the speaker.

The marriage to Terentia, dispatched in a single sentence (“he married it [property]” [9]), is the first major compromise Cicero makes to achieve success. The property qualification turns a wife into a senatorial entry fee, and Tiro’s parenthetical aside on Terentia (“plain, grand, and rich, what a piece of work you were!” [9]) underscores the terms of the transaction. However, Tiro traces the true hardening of Cicero’s ambition to a small social wound in Puteoli. Cicero hires a 12-oared boat, dons the purple-edged toga worn by senators, and expects a laurel wreath to honor his success; what he gets is a drunk red-haired reveler (Verres, though Tiro withholds the name here) confusing Sicily with Africa, and Hortensius failing to invite him to the party. Tiro reports the change in plain words: “He had been humiliated, humiliated by his own vanity, and given brutal evidence of his smallness in the world […] when he turned away, he had changed. I do not exaggerate. I saw it in his eyes” (11). Cicero’s own preserved sentence follows: “[F]rom that day I took care that I should be seen personally every day. I lived in the public eye” (12). The vow is not yet corruption, but its single-mindedness foreshadows events to come.

The case of Sthenius reveals where ambition can lead by exposing the systemic corruption protecting Governor Verres. To safeguard Sthenius, Cicero is forced into his first major political bargain, aligning himself with forces that operate outside the constitutional norms he seeks to master: He makes a pact with the tribune Palicanus to support Pompey the Great’s illegal bid for the consulship. This is a defining moment of compromise that moves him from working within traditional political avenues toward leveraging the populist power of men like Pompey, whose irregular careers were actively destabilizing the Republic. At the same time, it is a move Cicero undertakes because those traditional political avenues are themselves steeped in corruption. The novel thus contextualizes The Republic’s Slow Surrender to Strongmen within a critique of its already shaky democratic norms.