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

by Anthony Everitt

If Epicureans say “it is good because it is pleasant,” Stoics answer that “it is pleasant because it is good.” Cato is now given the task of representing the Stoic view that virtue is what we naturally desire, which Cicero rebuts as not taking into sufficient account humanity’s lower faculties.

The Conversations at Tusculum (Tusculanae disputationes) were written in the summer of 45 when Cicero had begun to recover somewhat from Tullia’s death.

Having examined the nature of the good life in the previous books of the cycle, Cicero now turns to practicalities. How is the good life to be lived? He answers the question by citing many instances of human behavior both from the past and from his own time.

right attitudes and a philosophical cast of mind can alleviate misfortune and suffering. Death, he argues, is not an evil, being either a change of place for the soul or annihilation.

Mental suffering and distress, whether caused by mourning, envy, compassion, vexation or despondency, are acts of the will and can be eliminated by thoughtfulness, courage and self-control.

For what else do we do when we remove the soul from pleasure—that is to say, from the body, from private property (the body’s agent and servant), from public affairs and from every kind of private business: what, I repeat, do we do except call the soul into its own presence and cancel its allegiance to the body? And is separating the soul from the body anything else than learning how to die?

While we are still alive, this will be an imitation of heavenly life: once we are free from our chains here, our souls will run their race less slowly.

The discipline of the gladiator and the self-sacrifice of the Indian widow who commits suttee and joins her husband on the funeral pyre demonstrate that virtue can transcend pain.

The Nature of the Gods (De deorum natura), Foretelling the Future (De divinatione) and Destiny (De fato) address religious and theological themes.

He criticizes superstition—dreams, portents, astrology and the like—and is particularly incensed by the Stoics’ commitment to the art, or pseudoscience, of divination, by which investigation into the future can make it possible to avoid unpleasant events.

Cicero’s last major work is Duties (De officiis); written in autumn 44, it takes the form of a letter to Marcus, who was making heavy weather of his philosophical studies in Athens at this time.

The work opens with a discussion of the cardinal virtues—wisdom, justice, fortitude and temperance—and goes on to set out the specific duties that follow from adherence to them.

The primary duty, transcending all others, is loyalty to the state and Cicero takes the opportunity to review the record of his contemporaries. The behavior of various politicians of his day—the avaricious Crassus and Caesar, who has gone to the lengths of destroying the state—is compared with this principle and found wanting.

Caesar may well have laughed with everyone else when all those years ago the boastful ex-Consul had written the much-ridiculed sentence “Cedant arma togae,” “Let the soldier yield precedence to the civilian.” But now, with his customary clarity and generosity of mind, he well understood the nature of the “glory” Cicero had won for himself.

From the moment the civil war finally ended in 45, respectable opinion agreed that Caesar’s duty was to restore the constitution.

He probably did. But he was also convinced that a strong executive authority should replace the incompetent competitive cockpit of Senatorial government.

He had the means with which to impose his will. However, minimum cooperation from the political class was necessary if any solution he devised was to last. To begin with, he thought that he had gained it. But former enemies—such as Marcus Junius Brutus, the dead Cato’s son-in-law and half-nephew, and Caius Cassius Longinus, Praetor for 44 and hungry for a senior military command that Caesar never gave him—were willing to work with him only as long as they believed that he would bring back the Republic.

The first signs of the conspiracy against Caesar can be detected almost exactly one year before the Ides of March 44—after the last battle of the civil war at Munda. AS soon as news reached Rome of the outcome of the battle, all kinds of people—entrepreneurs, politicians and young men on the make—left Rome to meet the returning army en route and catch the eye of the Republic’s undisputed master.

Trebonius had a very curious deal to propose. He wanted to know if Antony would join a plot to kill Caesar. Antony did not respond to the tentative sounding.

Nothing came of this démarche, but at some point in the months that followed individuals began meeting in small groups in one another’s houses and discussed various ideas of how and where the murder should be committed.

One of the leading conspirators was Caius Cassius Longinus. AS Quaestor he had taken charge of Syria after Crassus met his end at Carrhae and had scored a military success against the Parthians in 51, when Cicero had been governor of the neighboring province of Cilicia.

Yet there is also evidence that Cassius had a long-standing deeply felt aversion to arbitrary government: as a boy he had gone to the same school as Sulla’s son, Faustus.

Gradually more and more people were drawn into the plot against Caesar and by the end at least sixty were involved.

Meanwhile, the regime continued to entrench itself. Honors were poured on Caesar and statues of him began appearing all over the city.

AS an expression of the new spirit of harmony that he wished to project, Caesar re-erected statues of Pompey and other onetime political opponents in their old places.

Plans for the huge expeditionary force of sixteen legions that Caesar had decided to lead against the Parthian Empire to avenge the defeat and death of Crassus in 53 were approaching completion.

On December 31 one of the Consuls died and, as elections for some other officeholders were being held at the time, Caesar forced the immediate election of a certain Caius Caninius Rebilus, a New Man who had served under him in Gaul, to be his successor for a few hours.

AS the new year dawned the mood in the city was darkening. Many damaging rumors were being assiduously spread—that Caesar was going to establish Egypt as the seat of his Empire where he would rule with his mistress, Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, now living just outside the capital in opulent, un-Roman style; or, even more implausibly, that Troy was to be the new capital of the Empire.

Caesar may have begun to suspect that among the fawning Senators there were those who recommended more and more fantastic honors with the conscious aim of setting opinion against him.

Caesar’s decision was seen as a very bad sign by Republicans, an obvious first step to a formal monarchy. Some of the conspirators, wanting to stir up bad feeling, began saluting him as king in public.

On February 15, 44, the festival of the Lupercalia was held—a strange ritual which symbolized the renewal of civil order near the year’s beginning. The Luperci were a college of priests, young men of good family who every year on this day ran through the city naked except for goatskin loincloths.

Antony, now in his late thirties and a little old for the part, was among the runners, but instead of carrying a thong he held a diadem in his hand, twined around a laurel wreath. Some of his fellow runners lifted him up so that he could place it at Caesar’s feet.

Eventually Antony retrieved the diadem and had it sent to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol.

The episode betrays every sign of having been premeditated. AS Cicero pointed out later to Antony: “Where did the diadem come from? It is not the sort of thing you pick up in the street. You had brought it from home.”

In all probability Caesar decided that the growing rush of rumors needed to be stemmed. Perhaps he had become wise to the unwisdom of accepting so many honors.

The maneuver failed. What if the crowd’s applause had supported rather than refused the “crowning”? skeptics wondered. Could suspicious and cynical constitutionalists be sure what would have happened then?

About this time, an apparently unimportant misunderstanding also left a bad impression. Caesar was sitting in the vestibule of the Temple of Venus in his newly opened Julian Forum deciding various construction contracts.

What were Caesar’s real political intentions for the future? It is hard to be certain today, and even contemporaries struggled to find an answer to the question.

This may well be because Caesar himself was unsure of the way forward. In all probability he recognized that the formal assertion of monarchy was out of the question. The Dictatorship for Life gave him what he wanted while staying, more or less, inside constitutional norms.

Caesar’s personal mood was depressed. His health was deteriorating. (As he got older, it is reported, his epileptic fits became more frequent and he suffered from headaches and nightmares.) He became aware of plots against him and secret nocturnal meetings but took no action except to announce that he knew of them.

The Dictator dispensed with a troop of armed Spaniards that was his permanent escort, as well as a bodyguard of Senators that had been voted to him. He mingled publicly and unprotected among all comers. When advised to rehire the Spaniards, he said: “There is no fate worse than being continuously under guard, for it means you are always afraid.”

His decision was probably as much motivated by scorn for the opposition as by a desire to bid for popularity. “It is more important for Rome than for me that I should survive,” he said on more than one occasion. “If anything happens to me, Rome will enjoy no peace. A new civil war will break out under far worse conditions than the last one.” Those close to him felt he had lost the desire to live much longer.

During the first three months of 44 a great simplification of Roman politics took place. On the one hand, Caesar finally came to see that he had failed to reconcile the optimates to his dominance and further consolidated his authority. On the other, the optimates finally came to despair of a restoration of the Republic. Neither side could see a way out of the impasse except by Caesar’s removal from the scene—permanent, so far as Brutus and Cassius were concerned, and temporary from Caesar’s perspective.

AS the chosen date was a holiday, a gladiatorial display was due to take place later in the day in the theater. Brutus, as Praetor, was in charge of the gladiators, who could be useful in the aftermath of the assassination if anything went wrong.

command of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, who as Master of the Horse was the Dictator’s official deputy,

By March 15 information about the conspiracy was leaking out. Almost as soon as Caesar left the State House in the morning a member of his household who had heard something of what was going on came running into the building to report what he had gleaned.

While Brutus and Cassius were standing around with the other Senators waiting for Caesar’s arrival, a certain Popillius Laenas came up to them. “I join you in praying for the accomplishment of what you have in mind,” he said. “I urge you not to delay, for people are talking about it.”

Caesar took the document and several times appeared to be on the point of looking through it, but was prevented from doing so by all the people who came up to talk with him. It was the only paper he was holding when he finally walked through the doorway to join the Senate.

There was an understanding that, as a sign of their commitment and solidarity, all the conspirators should try to stab their victim. AS a result, many wounded each other accidentally in the scrum and few had a good chance to strike home. An autopsy later showed that only one wound had been fatal—the second, which Publius Servilius Casca’s brother had delivered to the flank.

The assassins wound their togas around their arms to serve as shields and, with bloodstained swords in their hands, ran out into the open, shouting that they had destroyed a tyrant and a king.