Imperium (play cycle)

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Imperium: The Cicero Plays is a stage adaptation by Mike Poulton of Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy (Imperium, Lustrum, Dictator). The drama centers on the life of the Roman orator Cicero, with Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great among the key figures.

Premiere and production
- Premiered: 16 November 2017
- Place: Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
- Original language: English
- Setting: Rome, 70 BC to 43 BC
- Produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by Gregory Doran, with Richard McCabe as Cicero
- Also staged at the Gielgud Theatre in London from 14 June to 8 September 2018

Format and structure
- The cycle consists of six plays, each about an hour long, shown in two groups of three. The narrator is Cicero’s slave, later freedman, Tiro.

First group: Cicero, Catiline, Clodius
- Includes a brief flashback to Cicero’s prosecution of Verres in 70 BC
- Covers Cicero’s election as consul in 64 BC and his exile in 58 BC
- Draws from the end of Imperium, all of Lustrum, and the start of Dictator

Second group: Caesar, Mark Antony, Octavian
- Adapts the remainder of Dictator into three plays
- Opens with Cicero returning to Italy after Caesar’s victory at Pharsalus (48 BC) and a summary of the Civil War and Caesar’s dictatorship
- Follows Cicero’s failed efforts to save the Republic by pitting Mark Antony against Octavian
- Concludes with Cicero’s execution in 43 BC

Epilogue
- Tiro delivers a closing epilogue, reflecting on the later fates of Brutus, Cassius, Octavian, and Mark Antony, and imagines Cicero’s afterlife with ideas from his Dream of Scipio