Set in the final days of the Roman Republic, Imperium traces the gradual concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands. Cicero registers this process and its likely endpoint. At the Villa Publica in Roll IV, watching Pompey and Crassus extort the joint consulship, he turns to Tiro and says: “We are witnessing the beginning of the end of the republic, Tiro, remember my words!” (58). The narrative vindicates Cicero’s claim, even as it shows him participating in the Republic’s unraveling. More specifically, the novel points to longstanding tensions between the aristocracy and common people, or plebeians, as a reason for the decline. Paradoxically, the Roman aristocracy is far more invested in democracy than the population at large; Rome’s constitutional norms work to their advantage. By contrast, those who have the vote but little money or power are easy marks for cynical politicians who highlight the system’s injustice for their own ends.

The lex Gabinia sequence in Roll XI is a case study. Cicero sees the danger immediately, telling Pompey at the Alban Hills conference that the proposal is unprecedented in the history of the republic. He then drafts the strategy that gets it passed, including Pompey’s feigned retirement and the threat to depose the obstructing tribune Trebellius. Tellingly, the latter relies on a precedent set by the populist politician Gracchus, which Tiro digs out of the National Archive. However, where Gracchus sought a tribune’s removal to pass land reform that would benefit ordinary citizens, the novel is clear that the lex Gabinia serves little but Pompey’s career. Rather, Pompey and his allies have stoked fears about the pirate threat to justify their power grab, as Cicero himself recognizes: “He shook his head in dismay at the ease with which a timorous population can be molded by unscrupulous politicians” (178). Meanwhile, the largely aristocratic Senate recognizes that the danger is overblown but cannot say as much without seeming “complacent”—that is, without ignoring the common good and popular will as it has repeatedly in the past.

Crassus’s scheme in Roll XVI further exposes the Republic’s underlying tensions and the role those tensions play in its collapse. Quintus’s gasp in the Subura tavern in Roll XVI, “Crassus is trying to buy the entire government!” (263), already marks a significant escalation of the bribery that has long plagued the system. As more details emerge, however, it becomes clear to Cicero that Crassus’s actions are an attempt to yoke the interests of a few elite individuals to those of the population at large, consolidating their own power via the mechanism of land reform: “[I]t is a coup d’état disguised as an agrarian reform bill! […] This commission of ten, led by Crassus and Caesar, will be the real masters of the country; […] And their domination at home will be maintained in perpetuity by the proceeds of extortion abroad” (277).

Cicero’s response is to expose the conspiracy in the In toga candida speech. The exposure is itself a transaction; Cicero buys the aristocrats’ support for his consular campaign in revealing the scheme. While the novel does not excuse this, it suggests that the contradictions underpinning Roman democracy have placed Cicero, and the Republic itself, in an impossible position. With popular sentiment increasingly harnessed by demagogues, those seeking to preserve Rome’s republican traditions must ally themselves with a corrupt aristocracy, which in and of itself hastens the Republic’s demise.