Lustrum
By Robert Harris
Hutchinson £18.99, 464 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.19

The annals of ancient Rome offer famously rich pickings for writers. So one could easily undervalue the distinctive excellence of Robert Harris’s Lustrum, his second novel after Imperium to centre on the rhetorician politician Marcus Tullius Cicero in the dwindling years of the Roman republic.

In one sense, though, Harris has made much of unpromising material, for many a student of antiquity has tried and failed to like Cicero. On paper the celebrated orator can seem merely orotund, much less intriguing than those disreputable men of action Pompey and Julius Caesar, whose martial prowess converted Rome into an empire.

Harris, though, performs an endearing trick: Lustrum, like Imperium, is cast as a memoir by Cicero’s loyal retainer Tiro, who offers a well-turned assessment of his master’s strengths and failings. Cicero emerges as a principled and self-made man, operating between the factions of patrician and plebeian, trying to shield the virtues of the republic from the rapacity of aspirant dictators such as Caesar.

The novel opens with an eviscerated corpse fished from the Tiber on the eve of Cicero’s ­consulship of 63BC – a grim portent of the “Catiline Conspiracy”, which Cicero thwarts and so seals his reputation. Yet though he is hailed for his wits, Cicero finds he must live by them, for in Rome he is a wordsmith among wolves. Harris certainly makes us feel the lethally high stakes of an age when politicians could be quite unabashed about stabbing their rivals in the front.

But Harris also has something to say of our own age, in a novel that is dedicated to Peter Mandelson. He understands politics and how to dramatise them: their necessary imperfection, their dependence on the embrace of lesser evils and shabby means that serve higher ends. If he has made little effort to inhabit the minds of his chief villains, Caesar and Pompey, Harris still makes Cicero a worthy hero: a Roman who might even strike the reader as somewhat British in “his reluctant, nervous resolution in the end to do the right thing”.

Richard T Kelly is author of ‘Crusaders’ (Faber)