The image of the avenue of crosses on the Appian Way sets the tone for Cicero’s meeting with Crassus. Crassus has summoned Cicero to the 18th milestone, and the road there is lined with 6,000 crucified rebels at 117-pace intervals, a figure Crassus delivers with pride: “I doubt whether many slaves, once they hear of this, will rise against Rome in the future” (52). Tiro registers the scene as “a long avenue of crosses running straight ahead for mile after mile, shimmering in the mid-morning heat” (51), and Cicero understands immediately that the spectacle is meant to cow him into supporting Crassus. The scene thus develops the theme of The Republic’s Slow Surrender to Strongmen: Crassus, a military leader but not an elected one, has staged a public execution on Italy’s busiest road as a personal advertisement, and the Senate’s role is reduced to legitimating this show of power by granting or withholding a triumph. Cicero says as much when he points at the crosses and names them the real triumph. The circumstances of his remark are equally telling: Unwilling to voice opposition to a triumph when Crassus has tacitly promised advancement for any who support him, Cicero can only flatter the violence he has been brought there to witness. The vote against the triumph follows in chamber, but the Appian Way has already shown where power actually sits.

The Villa Publica scene affirms this. Cicero waits outside while Pompey, Crassus, Hortensius, the Metelli, and Catulus carve up the next several years inside, prompting Tiro to reflect on the way power operates in practice: “I have frequently observed this curious aspect of power, that it is often when one is physically closest to its source that one is least well-informed as to what is actually going on” (57). The deal that emerges reveals a republic running on private treaty, which explains why apparent proximity to power counts for so little. Pompey’s dismissal of Cicero’s hoped-for aedileship further emphasizes the extent to which the wishes of a few powerful men dictate the republic’s course; his use of the first person—“I do not think aedile. I have other plans in that direction” (60)—is conspicuous in a discussion of an ostensibly democratic process.

The public announcement of Pompey and Crassus’s bargain complicates the novel’s depiction of Eloquence as Political Weapon. Pompey speaks too quickly for the crowd to relay his words, Crassus upstages him with a cash bribe announced in trained orator’s cadences, and Cicero, watching 20,000 voters cheer a deal struck without them, mutters that he would have given them a show. On the one hand, the scene shows the limits of Cicero’s power; his voice is worth little in a room where military and economic power prevail. At the same time, that Pompey and Crassus are able to achieve so much without rhetoric and spectacle on their side hints at what a trained orator might do with similar resources, foreshadowing the rise of demagogues like Julius Caesar.

Pompey’s snub ultimately precipitates the decision to prosecute Verres, which marks a turning point in Cicero’s career and character arc. Cicero names the consulship aloud for the first time, and Tiro marks the moment with a military simile: “When Cicero pronounced the word consul, he planted it in the ground like a standard for us all to admire” (67). The prosecution is the instrument by which an outsider with no army and no fortune intends to vault past the men who excluded him at the Villa Publica: By defeating Hortensius in open court, Cicero will assume Verres’s praetorian rank, shore up his bid for the aedileship, and secure a network of clients in Sicily and Rome, all “without owing favors to anyone, least of all Pompey the Great” (66). His voice is his only resource, and he is wagering it against the combined weight of aristocratic pedigree, immense fortune, and outright corruption. Quintus’s warning that defenders make friends and prosecutors make enemies references this older politics, in which relationships are everything; Cicero’s answer, that a “dangerous animal” must be killed “with the first thrust” (66-67), heralds a more openly cutthroat kind of power play.

The prosecution of the Verres case thus ironically becomes a statement on The Corrupting Price of Ambition. Prior to Pompey and Crassus’ deal and Sthenius’s return with additional evidence, Cicero had declined to represent him; though he did advocate for him in general terms in the Senate, he viewed the case itself as beneath him. Indeed, Tiro notes that Sthenius had been reduced to “yesterday’s topic” once Pompey’s return crowded him out. Now, however, Cicero sees an opportunity to use the case to advance his own career, and it is, more than any commitment to principle, that motivates him. The discussion of the case’s costs underscores this. Cicero must beg his wife for funds, and Terentia, after making her husband rehearse the case in his own study, advances exactly half what he asked. Cicero’s gloss is unsparing: “That is a shrewd businesswoman’s assessment of my chances, Tiro, and who is to say she is wrong?” (91). For Terentia, justice is beside the point, and Cicero tacitly accepts her logic.