Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician

by Anthony Everitt

Cicero wrote about how a state should best be organized and decision-makers of the eighteenth century read and digested what he had to say. His big idea, which he tirelessly publicized, was that of a mixed or balanced constitution. He favored not monarchy nor oligarchy nor democracy, but a combination of all three. His model was Rome itself, but improved. Its executive had quasi-royal powers. It was restrained partly by the widespread use of vetoes and partly by a Senate, dominated by great political families. Politicians were elected to office by the People. This model is not so very distant from the original constitution of the United States with the careful balance it set between the executive and the legislature, and the constraints, now largely vanished, which it placed on pure, untrammeled democracy. When George Washington, meditating on the difficulty of ensuring stable government, said, “What a triumph for the advocates of despotism, to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious,” he could have been quoting Cicero.

St. Jerome,

Petrarch’s

Dr. Johnson

Edward Gibbon.

Thomas Je...

Willia...

Abraham L...

Winston Chur...

Cicero merits our attention not just for his influence, but because he was a fascinating man who lived through extraordinary times. One reason why he still speaks to us across a vast interval of time is that we know so much about him. Uniquely in the classical world, hundreds of his letters survive, many written to his dear friend Atticus. I challenge anyone who reads them not to warm to his nervous, self-regarding, generous personality. He was an introvert who led the most public of lives, a thinker and intellectual who committed himself to a life of action. We see him live his life from day to day and sometimes from hour to hour. We follow the spectacular narrative of the fall of the Roman Republic through the excited, anxious eyes of a participant who twice held the reins of power and who did not know how the story would end. Here is someone who dined wit...

bête noire Publius Clodius Pulcher

The letters to Atticus are a unique repository of firsthand information, but when Atticus is with Cicero in Rome the picture breaks up. Posterity should be grateful that he spent as much time as he did in Athens or on his estates in Epirus. It has often been possible to smooth the lumpiness in the historical record, but where the detail is missing there is no point in trying to conceal the fact.

Pompey,

Mark Antony

Octa...

L...

Ho...

Plu...

Sall...

imperium,

equites,

amicitia,

clientela,

optimates,

sestertius or sesterce.

Four sesterces

A b...

A tal...

Sadly, what cannot be conveyed is the quality and contemporary impact of his Latin; not only do his melodious periods, which have the grandeur of classical architecture, fail to translate well, but his style of oratory is a vanished art. When quoting from Cicero’s letters or other ancient texts I have been guided by published translations and am grateful for permission to quote them. They are listed at the end of this book under Sources. However, I have translated a few texts myself. Cicero peppered his correspondence with Greek phrases; these are usually rendered in French.

Plutarch

Much indebted to my predecessors, I enter the lists only because I believe that each generation should have a chance to see a giant figure of the past from the perspective of its own time and circumstances.

This book is an exercise in rehabilitation. Many writers from ancient times to the present day have seriously undervalued Cicero’s consistency and effectiveness as a politician. Too often tactical suppleness has been judged to be indecisiveness. His perspective was narrower and less imaginative than that of Julius Caesar, but Cicero had clear aims and very nearly realized them. He was unlucky, a defect for which history has no mercy but for which historians are entitled to offer a discount.

Good Description of difference between Caesar and Cicero

More generally, I shall be happy if I have succeeded in showing, first, how unrecognizably different a world the Roman Republic was from ours and, second, that the motives of human behavior do not change. Concepts such as honor and dignitas, the dependence on slavery, the fact that the Romans ran a sophisticated and complex state with practically none of the public institutions we take for granted (a civil service, a police force and so forth) and the impact of religious ritual on the conduct of public affairs make ancient Rome a very strange place to modern eyes. But, as we feel the texture of their daily lives, we can see that its inhabitants are not alien beings but our neighbors.

“Motives of Human Behaviour do not change” - Exactly the reason for me reading more of the old texts

Titus Pomponius Atticus

Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Quintus Tullius Cicero

Caius Julius Caesar

Sulla’s

Sextus Roscius Amerinus

Terentia

Tullia

Quaestor

Pompey

Marcus Licinius Crassus.

V...

Pom...

Caius Calpurnius Piso Frugi

Praetor

Consul.

Caius Octavius,