In the meantime, Verres finds Sthenius guilty of spying in his absence and sentences him to death. Cicero decides to defend him and raises the matter in the Roman senate but his motion is talked out by Catulus and finally Hortensius, an aristocrat, Cicero's arch rival and the leading lawyer in Rome.Ĭicero dispatches Tiro to the National Archive, Catulus's domain, to check Verres's quaestorian records as governor and finds no accounts submitted. The plot develops when the senator and lawyer is visited some months later by Sthenius of Thermae, who has fled from Sicily after being threatened by the governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres.

Returning to Rome and becoming a senator, Cicero participates in a year of obligatory government service in Sicily and makes his way back to Rome to seek his fame and fortune. It is here that Cicero develops the physical physique and voice that will make him such a popular and effective orator. After trying the so-called Asiatic method, Cicero decides to enroll in the school of Apollonius Molon, a lawyer from Alabanda, who had retired to Rhodes to open his rhetorical school. Cicero decided to consult the leading teachers of rhetoric, most of whom lived in Greece and Asia Minor, and borrows Tiro, never to return him. They met when he was twenty-four years old and Cicero twenty-seven on the family estate in the hills of Arpinum. The book opens with Tiro, the secretary of Marcus Tullius Cicero and the book's narrator, looking back in time over the thirty-six years he was with his master. The two plays were directed by RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran, with Richard McCabe as Cicero.

Unabridged audiobooks on compact disc are also available, read by Simon Jones and Bill Wallis.Ī theatrical adaptation of the trilogy by Mike Poulton was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon in 2017, and transferred to the Gielgud Theatre in London in 2018. An abridged audiobook on compact disc is available, read by British actor Oliver Ford Davies. The book was serialised as the Book at Bedtime on BBC Radio 4 from 4 to 15 September 2006, read by Douglas Hodge. Publication of the sequels was delayed whilst Harris worked on other books, including his contemporary political novel, The Ghost, inspired by the resignation of Tony Blair. The third volume, Dictator, was published in 2015. audiences), was published in October 2009.

The second volume, Lustrum ( Conspirata for U.S. It is a fictional biography of Cicero, told through the first-person narrator of his secretary Tiro, beginning with the prosecution of Verres. Imperium is a 2006 novel by English author Robert Harris.

The empirium trilogy book 3