Book review: Dictator by Robert Harris

The forty-ninth book I read in 2017 was the final volume of Robert Harris's Cicero trilogy, Dictator.  The book begins where Conspirata left off, with Cicero fleeing into exile after Clodius's rise to tribune.  The politics of the Republic during this time, however, were in very rapid flux, and after only a year, Cicero is welcomed back to Rome -- and sucked back into the political jockeying that would eventually lead not only to his own death but to the end of the Republic and rise of the Empire.

This book covers the last fifteen years of Cicero's life, and decline is never as fun to read as rise.  The shifting allegiances which Cicero rode to power in Imperium, like Mario jumping from platform to platform in a video game, this time around lead to Cicero's ultimate downfall, and yet it is hard to see what he might have done differently to ensure a different outcome.