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

by Anthony Everitt

Caesar enacted at great speed a number of important and well-judged reforms. To many people’s surprise he acted evenhandedly and favored neither radical nor conservative causes, making decisions on the merits of a case.

From January 1, 45, the calendar was sensibly extended to 365 days. Previously the year had had ten fewer days, necessitating occasional intercalary months and every other year the College of Pontiffs had usually inserted an additional month to keep the calendar in time with the sun.

Apart from such sour wisecracks, Cicero had little to say about all this legislation, at least in the extant correspondence. (There are no long runs of letters from this period.) He was silent in the Senate and his attendance record does not survive.

In order to be able to govern effectively, Caesar assembled a personal cabinet drawn from trusted lieutenants of his in Gaul, who worked alongside the official magistrates.

He also seems to have laid the foundations of what eventually became the imperial civil service. Balbus was one of its key members and spent much of his time drafting decrees. Every now and then Cicero’s name was borrowed without prior consultation as having proposed an edict.

For anyone with eyes to see, the old, level arena where equal competitors could contend had disappeared.

Members of the ruling class who had survived the civil war were no longer genuinely elected to office but became functionaries whose imperium was not theirs but was on loan from the Dictator.

For all his active social life, it would be wrong to regard the Cicero of these years as merely a dilettante and socialite. The creative and organizational energies he had once devoted to politics and th...

The busy head of state enjoyed Cicero’s sense of humor and received daily reports of his latest sallies, even if some of them were at his expense.

Different cultures have different senses of humor. Cicero specialized in the brutal put-down, as when he met a man with three ugly daughters and quoted the verse “Apollo never meant him to beget.”

At one trial a young man accused of having given his father a poisoned cake said he wanted to give Cicero a piece of his mind. Cicero replied: “I would prefer that to a piece of your cake.” Only a few of Cicero’s jokes st...

Cicero tirelessly exploited his Caesarian connections on behalf of defeated optimates. His motives for using his good offices in this way were predictably mixed.

By far the most important factor driving Cicero, though, was the hope that after all, at the eleventh hour and defying all probability, the “mixed constitution” for which he had argued in On the State and which had been Rome’s glory might be reinstated.

For Quintus Ligarius, a former opponent of whom the Dictator had a poor opinion, Cicero offered a personal plea, as he described in a letter to him:

The most distinguished surviving Republican for whom Cicero spoke was Marcus Claudius Marcellus, the Consul for 51, a steady but not diehard opponent of Caesar who had retired to the island of Lesbos after Pharsalus.

The decision to pardon Marcellus persuaded the orator to break his long silence in the Senate. He delivered a brilliant speech of thanks, which reached the boundary of flattery but did not quite cross it.

It is interesting to observe from the tone of Cicero’s correspondence at this time that he did not suffer the agonizing doubts of the early months of the civil war.

Cicero’s book on Cato was published towards the end of the year and attracted much attention. Although it argued that Cato had been an exemplar of all that was best in Roman culture, this was apparently not good enough for its dedicatee, Brutus, who went on to produce his own eulogy.

More seriously, it was a reminder that, to Cicero and the political class for which he stood, reform and renewal meant returning to a failed model of governance rather than inventing a new one.

In due course, the Dictator regained his equanimity. The following summer he praised Cicero’s writing style and commented wryly that reading and rereading his Cato improved his powers of expression, whereas after reading Brutus’s account he began to fancy himself as a writer.

The Anti-Cato was written while Caesar was on the march again, for it turned out that despite his African victory the civil war was not quite over after all.

Having escaped from Thapsus, Pompey’s two sons, Cnaeus and Sextus, went to Spain, where they raised the standard of rebellion again.

Young Quintus joined Caesar’s army and Marcus, nervous of approaching his father directly and working through Atticus, sought permission to go too.

The exchange was a reminder that some thought needed to be given to the twenty-year-old’s future.

Cicero now made a disastrous move in his personal life. In 46 he at last found the wife he had been looking for, but his selection, a wealthy teenage ward of his, Publilia, was unfortunate.

Little is known about Cicero’s relations with the opposite sex. He claims that he made a point of not being promiscuous in his youth and seems to have endured separations from Terentia even early on in their marriage with equanimity.

The only woman with whom Cicero’s emotions seem to have been powerfully engaged was Tullia.

Although Roman upper-class women had considerable social freedom and could sometimes exert political influence behind the scenes, it was a male world and the socially conservative Cicero mainly enjoyed the company of men.

Tiro disagreed with Terentia about Cicero’s motives for marrying Publilia. Many years later he claimed that friends and relatives pressed Cicero to make the match in order to settle his large debts.

A month or two after the marriage Cicero was struck by the most terrible blow he had ever experienced in his life. For the first time since his exile his mental equilibrium was threatened. Tullia died.

Cicero was devastated. Tusculum and his house on the Palatine were too full of memories and for a time he stayed with Atticus, reading everything he could find in his library that the Greek philosophers had to say about grief.

Then, having gained leave of absence from his public duties, he fled the city. He went to Astura, a property he had recently bought on the coast south of Antium, a wooded and remote spot where he could hide away and grieve.

The Romans disapproved of extravagant mourning, especially over a woman, and Cicero did his best to control or at least to conceal his emotions. He asked Atticus to ...

Reading did not help, so he picked up his pen and wrote a Self-Consolation, one of the most celebrated works ...

Consolatory texts were a recognized genre, but he was, he thought, the first man to write one for himself. He assembled every relevant text he could find and “threw them all into one attempt at consolation,” he wrote to Atticus, “for my soul was in a f...

He found that he could not stop crying and spent most of his time on his own out-of-doors. “In this lonely place I don’t talk to a soul. Early in the day I hide myself in a thick, thorny wood, and don’t emerge till evening. When I am alone all my conversation is with books; it is interrupted by fits of weeping, against which I struggle as best I can.

When contrasted with the self-indulgent and sometimes slightly formulaic expressions of grief of his letters from exile, Cicero’s state of mind during this crisis reveals a new intensity of feeling, too raw and too astonishing to be publicized.

Tullia’s death spelled the end of Cicero’s brief marriage to Publilia. She was said to be pleased that someone she had seen as a rival had been removed from the scene, and Cicero could not forgive this.

Letters of condolence for Tullia’s death poured in, among them from Brutus and from Caesar in Spain, who knew well the agony of grief for a dead daughter.

Aegina

Megara,

Piraeus,

Corinth;

Slowly Cicero began to get better. With an effort of will he returned to Tusculum towards the end of May.

One good sign was that he transposed his emotions onto an external project. He conceived the idea of erecting a shrine to Tullia’s memory. This would give her immortality of a sort, for it would celebrate her “glory.” The Greeks and Romans believed that in exceptional cases a bridge could be built between the human and the divine.

Atticus thought the scheme eccentric, but he went patiently along with his friend and for some months they discussed various possible sites Cicero might purchase.

By the summer the project was abandoned. Cicero’s engagement with and curiosity about the world around him were returning.

On March 17, 45, Caesar won the battle of Munda against an army led by Pompey’s son Cnaeus. His victory, although total, was narrowly achieved. Afterwards he admitted: “Today, for the first time, I fought for my life.”

Caesar remained for a few months in Spain reorganizing the provincial administration before setting out for home.

Exhausted and unwell, he did not go to the capital immediately but spent some time on one of his country estates. There he wrote his will, which he deposited in September with the Vestal Virgins, as custom dictated.