Ask the Author: Robert Harris
Answered Questions (16)
Robert Harris
There is no doubt that Cicero loved Tiro � we have letters in which he tells him so � and that Tiro was an essential support in all areas of his life, as a friend, secretary, advisor and literary collaborator. It is a mistake to think of all slaves in the Roman era as labourers in shackles, driven by the whip: that was true of most, no doubt, but some such as Tiro were valued members of the family. The complex, loving, and sometimes tense relationship between master and slave is at the heart of this trilogy.
Robert Harris
A strange choice, I know, but I would have loved to have been at the final dinner that Cicero gave for Julius Caesar in December 45 BC, three months before Caesar’s assassination. It is described in Dictator. Caesar turned up with a bodyguard of 1,000 men, and afterwards Cicero wrote to Atticus that although it had been an enjoyable occasion “he is not the kind of man to whom one says, ‘do drop by the next time you are in the neighbourhood.’�
Robert Harris
I greatly admire the Irish writer Brian Moore, who wrote several brilliant historical novels. The best novels about ancient Rome are by Robert Graves, Marguerite Yourcenar and the Scottish novelist Allan Massie.
Robert Harris
I think he genuinely believed in the Republic, with the true blind love of an outsider. I think it made his career possible. I also think he genuinely believed in liberty. He had many faults � he was vain, snobbish, deluded, bitchy, greedy, two-faced and sometimes cowardly � but these were outweighed by his virtues: compassion, wit, cleverness, love of friendship, charm, and (when the chips were down) bravery.
Robert Harris
I would ask him whether he did a deal with Octavian (later the Emperor Augustus), and who ratted on who.
Robert Harris
The pleasure of the writing life is you never know what might turn up next. I started in 1999-2000 wanting to write a novel about America, and decided to make it an allegory and set it in Pompeii. I enjoyed Pompeii so much that I decided to write a big piece of historical fiction set in the Roman republic � a kind of ‘West Wing on the Tiber�. Roman Polanski wanted to make a film about the Dreyfus affair and asked me to write a screenplay, and I discovered the story of Colonel Picquart and persuaded him to let me write a novel first (hopefully one day he’ll make the movie). It’s purely a matter of serendipity.
Robert Harris
When the characters start to stand on their own. When the world has become as familiar as my modern environment. When I am confident enough to let go of the research and let the story take shape naturally.
Robert Harris
Beyond a doubt, the letters, and in particular the letters to Atticus. They show us an astonishingly modern man. Of the speeches, I like his defence of Murena. Of the philosophy, I like both the Tusculum Disputations and On the Republic.
Robert Harris
I am keeping that to myself for the moment, but I hope to have a new novel out before the end of this year.
Robert Harris
Part of the pleasure of these novels for me is trying to figure out what it must have been like at the time. It’s like uncovering some ancient mosaic floor, and having to fill in the places where the tiles are missing. The sense of reality therefore is inseparable from the success of the novel. But of course it is a novel, I am inventing, and what I seek to do � to be pretentious about it -- is to transform facts via the imagination into art.
Robert Harris
My two favourite periods are 1933-45, and the final years of the Roman republic, 70 BC � 43 BC: I suppose because I am interested in power and ideology and those are the two eras when these forces are seen in their rawest forms. But really what inspires me is a story. I hugely enjoyed writing about late 19th century France in ‘An Officer and a Spy�.
Robert Harris
I started with the original sources � first and foremost Cicero’s own writings, of which we have an enormous amount, in particular his letters: nearly 1,000 survive. Arguably not until Pepys in the 17th century do we have a more complete contemporaneous record of what a man was doing and thinking at any one time. Then I read the ancient historians, Plutarch in particular. Finally, I moved on to modern scholars. By the time I had finished I had more than half a million words of notes for the Cicero books.
Robert Harris
I grew to like him more as he got older. To start with he was a young man on the make, and then a fairly unscrupulous politician, but by the time we get to the final volume, Dictator, he has suffered a lot. He comes to know himself, and in the end is brave. He has the best kind of courage: he flinches, and then goes on.
Robert Harris
Thank you for reading the books. I chose Cicero because of all the ancient Romans we know the most about him from day to day; because I find him intensely sympathetic, for all his faults and foibles; and because he was as influential, in his way, as Caesar, in the development of the modern world, and yet he has either been ignored in popular fiction, or treated with contempt.
Robert Harris
I have made it a rule in all my books never directly to contradict the historical record. For example, I would never put historical events in a different sequence, or turn a victory into a defeat. What I do feel is legitimate is to condense and simplify: to dig out the bones of a narrative. And of course I invent scenes to fit in and around the known facts.
Robert Harris
Aristotle said that the truest guide to a man’s character is his actions, and I suppose that is the basis for my characterization. I look at what these men did, and then try to work backwards, imagining what it was in their personalities that led them to behave as they did. I also work on the basis that 2,000 years is the blink of an eye in terms of the scale of evolution, and they weren’t that dissimilar to us.
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