From The Times, April 12 2008

The author explains how he catapulted the Roman statesman Cicero into the bestselling stratosphere

ROBERT HARRIS IS, by anyone's standards, a curious literary phenomenon. A betting man would be unlikely to stake his shirt on the runaway success of a three-volume fictionalisation of the life of Cicero. It is hard, as any Latin teacher will tell you, to get people excited about Cicero. So how to explain the almost spooky omnipresence of Harris's novel Imperium on bestseller lists and, wrapped and labelled “Dad”, under Christmas trees?

The next volume is eagerly awaited and the film rights have been sold. Today, when a film about the ancients has to feature Brad Pitt in the nude and blood-spattered battle scenes to be successful, Harris has made an intellectual and somewhat disagreeable lawyer of drab republican Rome a hero. This is quite an achievement for Harris. whose accomplishments include making ancient concrete interesting (the structure of aqueducts plays a big part in his terrific yarn Pompeii). Classicists, as a consequence, love him more than they love Corinthian columns and stuffed dormice combined, and have appointed him this year's President of the Classical Association.

And so, last month, Harris came to be in Liverpool's Anglican cathedral, standing next to a reconstruction of the Golden Lyre of Ur (of which more later), hobnobbing with the great and good of the classical world before his speech. It is curious to watch him, looking deeply dapper and talking about an imminent holiday in Barbados. Certainly, he enjoys chatting to the learned and passionate scholars, certainly they have much to talk about. But Harris freely admits that he read nothing of the Latin authors until his early forties, has never learnt Latin, and is no scholar. The crowd he is addressing is trying to keep a faltering field of study alive - but while its delegates are all clever and interesting, they are not exactly busting into the mainstream. The question that hangs in the air is: how did a non-specialist, ex-hack such as Harris succeed in what so many clever people have failed to do, making Ancient Rome gripping?

Meeting him beforehand, I ask how he came to choose Cicero as the subject of a novel. “Well,” he says, “no one had written a novel or a play or a film about Cicero.” Of course they hadn't, I want to interrupt. He wrote the longest sentences known to man, usually on the subject of obscure Roman laws. Reading Cicero is insanely boring. I did a classics degree, I know. But it is Harris who has made millions of pounds by thinking that Cicero is interesting, so I keep quiet.

“No one has really written about him,” continues Harris, “but he is maybe the most modern and intriguing of all the Romans, and he is a fantastic figure in history. I was pretty ignorant about him, but he is the perfect way into the whole world of Republican Rome and the politics, which makes great fiction.”

Although Harris may not be steeped in Roman history, as a former political editor and author of the political thriller The Ghost (now out in paperback), his love of the cut and thrust of politics runs deep. And there was plenty of cutting and thrusting in Roman politics. “I wanted to write a political novel,” he says, “and it was exciting that in the senate at that time was Cicero and Crassus and Caesar. They all knew each other, were all rivals for power - and all died violently.”

Cicero is also, he says, definitely the Roman with whom he would most like to have dinner: “Julius Caesar has had a spectacularly good press, but strikes me as rather a chilling character. I think Cicero would be the funniest and the cattiest and the cleverest, and probably the most indiscreet of them all.”

Harris's motivation may stem from a love of politics rather than a love of Latin, but reading the novel, it's clear that he is too much of a class act to skimp on research. Cicero was the master of the rhetorical flourish, and Harris has done a beautiful job of imagining how he might have sounded in everyday speech. Cicero's letters and orations run to several volumes; was the work involved daunting? “This was a huge undertaking,” Harris says. “I read all the Cicero that was available, then all the Plutarch and secondary sources and scholarship. I spent two years doing research and wrote 400,000 words of notes.”

The genesis of his earlier novel Pompeii came, he says, when he was in the city: “in the heat of August, and I could smell water drying on stone, and the idea of the aqueduct came to me - a sort of allegory.” But when studying the politics of the republic, the excitement all had to come from the texts. There was, he says: “not much to see of republican Rome, it was all built over by Augustus, so it was just a matter of understanding all the sources.”

Does he ever wish he read Latin? “I do,” he says cautiously, “but I don't think it's vital. I think reading in English has made me a lot freer.” Do academics write to him, fussing about columns being in the wrong place or the wrong sort of sundial? Not so much, it would seem. “I have to say, the academic community have by and large been very kind to me. I feel like I have been a footsoldier in the great struggle of keeping this study alive.”

Ah, yes, the crumbling of classics. With fewer and fewer schoolchildren studying Latin and Greek, the study of the ancient world finds itself on the defensive against accusations of irrelevance. Harris, in Liverpool, endorsed the Classics 08 programme, a series of extra classes and summer schools run by saintly teachers striving to encourage children. Does Harris think classics is worth saving? “Yes. I think people get a lot out of it, and the feel of the subject has changed since I was at school. It's more engaging, and has benefited from an explosion of media and the internet.” He does, however, attribute a recent rise in university applications not to any outreach scheme but to the film Gladiator. The logical next step, then, for him to make classics popular again is to create commercially successful versions of the classical world. This strategy, of course, has the advantageous side-effect of keeping him in Aston Martins.

During his speech, Harris wows the collected Latin lovers. He pretends to be terrified of their steely intellects and vast knowledge, begging them to be gentle with him. But in reality, he knows his stuff. The delegates, of course, see no reason why a novel about Cicero wouldn't be successful, and are savvy enough to realise that having this smart, high-profile author on their side will do as much for their subject as their teaching and evangelism. They are too keen on the subject to be snobby about populism.

However, they cannot help but indulge - this is their party after all - in a little esoterica. Back to the Golden Lyre of Ur. During the gala dinner in the cathedral, diners are treated to a recitation of Sumerian proverbs by costumed actors stalking up and down between the tables. The proverbs contain dire warnings about kissing with the tongue in the noontime, and a performance and monologues accompanied by a reconstruction of a lyre originally played nearly 5,000 years ago in Ur, now Iraq. The whole experience is deliciously eccentric. I corner Harris after the speeches to ask what he thinks: “That was,” he says, “quite something, wasn't it?”

I cannot imagine that any publishers are chasing a blockbusting novel about the Golden Lyre of Ur. But if they were, I know just the man for the job.