Annus Periculosus

Barack Obama’s worst day is a sugary cakewalk compared with what the Roman consul Marcus Tullius Cicero endures in “Conspirata,” a portrait of ancient politics as a treasonous blood sport in which more — much more — than health care reform is on the line.

Cicero must regularly foil death threats, his vestibule patrolled by a fearsome guard dog; his front door barricaded against invaders; and his wife, Terentia, alternately moping about the danger and questioning his response to it. Many of his supposed allies are really wolves in sheep’s togas, and the spies Cicero plants in enemy camps sometimes prove cowardly or inconven­iently mortal. One, a woman, winds up gutted like a fish. While they were sharp with words around the Roman Senate, they were even sharper with daggers.

Will Cicero survive, entrails intact? What of the Republic he governs? History buffs can already answer those questions, so it’s to Robert Harris’s considerable credit that he wrings some suspense from them, producing a fact-based novel that’s deliciously juicy and fleetly paced — maybe too fleetly, all told: the comically foreboding title foreshadows Harris’s principal intentions, which are to make you gasp, titter and turn the pages. This you will surely do, but with an engagement limited by an occasional sense of silly overkill.

“Conspirata” is a sequel to the best-­selling novel “Imperium” and part of what is intended to be a trilogy devoted to the power games played by Cicero and a few contemporaries whose names just might strike a bell: Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Pompey, Marcus Antonius. “Imperium” traced the rise of Cicero from cunning lawyer to crafty consul, or senior magistrate, of Rome. Reviewing the book in these pages in 2006, Marcel Theroux noted that the portrait of its protagonist variously brought to mind Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and that Harris seemed to be holding up “a distant mirror of the politics of our own age.”

“Conspirata” is less pointed than that, the political stratagems it recounts so rococo and dastardly they would make Karl Rove quiver and James Carville blush. It’s precisely that outlandishness that makes ancient Rome so attractive to Harris and legions of others, who keep traveling back to the gilt and the gladiators, to Spartacus and Claudius and Maximus, courtesy of too many books, movies and cable television shows to count. Rome’s unruliness and ostentation provide a flattering, reassuring point of reference, and there’s nary a handsome actor who doesn’t look even better in sandals and a vintage tunic.

Harris, whose previous novels include “Pompeii” and the World War II thriller “Enigma,” doesn’t take the path of many other writers of historical fiction and provide copious, painstaking descriptions of meals, wardrobes, palaces and the like to summon a long-ago, far-away past. He’s from the slam-bang school, quickly ticking off a few geographical signposts — there’s the Esquiline Hill, and over there the Palatine — as he lets the characters’ names, a great many of which end in the same two letters, bear the brunt of establishing a bygone era.