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

by Anthony Everitt

I am well aware of the criticisms which people have leveled at me since Caesar’s death.

The letter is testimony to the magnetism of Caesar’s personality.

The entente between Antony and Octavian was short-lived, and the scene of action soon shifted from the Forum to the legionary camps.

The Consul’s rage at Cicero’s first Philippic reflected a tacit acknowledgment that he could no longer depend on support from the Senate. His year of office was drawing to a close and his priority now was to establish himself in his province with a strong army. Otherwise, he would be politically marginalized.

He decided to move at once to Italian Gaul, before his Consulship was over, and to seize it from Decimus Brutus, who was enlisting legions to...

At this point his plans faltered. While his back was turned, Octavian went to Campania and started recruiting veterans. It was completely illegal for someone who held no public office to raise a private army, although forty years previously Pompey had launched his career by doing so.

Today’s young adventurer, only nineteen years old, knew that unless he had troops behind him he would make no political headway. The appeal of his name and the added inducement of a hefty bribe of 2,000 sesterces per soldier was persuasive, and Octavian soon had a force of 3,000 experienced men at his disposal.

Meanwhile, at Brundisium the Consul found his legions in truculent mood. He promised them only 400 sesterces for their loyalty. Aware of Octavian’s much more generous offer, they booed him, left h...

What had been a political crisis was transforming itself into a phony war. The civilian leaders in Rome had no direct access to an army and were on the sidelines.

Between Antony and Octavian there was a standoff. The former was an experienced general and commanded a substantial force, but his soldiers would not follow him against Octavian.

Faced with this impasse, Octavian had to regularize his position somehow or he risked being marginalized by both Antony and the Senate.

the young man and his advisers took what must have been an agonizing step, going against their deepest instincts. This was to ally themselves with the despised Republican leadership, which was only too happy to forget all about Octavian’s adoptive father and had not the slightest intention of making the conspirators pay for his death.

was at this moment that Octavian decided to approach Cicero: if he could only win over the leading personality in the Senate to his scheme, the other Republicans would follow.

At a safe distance from these alarms and excursions, Cicero continued to devote much of his time to literary pursuits. Besides Duties, he was working on a short dialogue, Friendship, dedicated to Atticus, as a complement to Growing Old, which he probably completed towards the end of November.

This principle was soon put to the test, for a proposal of friendship arrived from a startling source. On October 31 Cicero, who was staying in his villa at the seaside resort of Puteoli on the Bay of Naples, received a letter from Octavian in which he offered to lead the Republican cause in a war against Antony.

Octavian proposed a secret meeting and asked for Cicero’s advice: should he anticipate the Consul, who would soon be returning from Brundisium with his troops, and march on Rome himself? In Cicero’s opinion, a secret meeting was a childish idea because news of it would inevitably be leaked.

The future for Republicans lay in splitting the partisans of Caesar. Moderates grouped around Hirtius and Pansa, the following year’s Consuls, were likely to align themselves with Cicero and the constitutionalist majority in the Senate.

Cooperation with Octavian would raise two difficult issues. If Cicero wanted to play this dangerous and delicate game, he would have to work with people who operated outside the constitution; he might even have to act unconstitutionally himself.

It seemed that the people around him, like Balbus and Oppius, shared the dead Dictator’s belief that the Republican oligarchy was incompetent to run an empire and would have to give way to some kind of autocracy.

For the time being Cicero kept his distance. For some days he wondered nervously whether or not to join Octavian in Rome. He did not want to miss some great event; but then it might not be safe to leave the coast: Antony was approaching and Cicero could be cut off and at the Consul’s mercy.

The march on Rome turned out to be the fiasco Cicero had feared. Undeterred by the absence of Senators, Octavian met the General Assembly and delivered an uncompromisingly anti-Republican speech.

He gestured towards a statue of Caesar and swore under oath his determination to win his father’s honors and status. But Antony was fast approaching and Octavian’s troops made it clear they would not fight against him. Many deserted. His hopes dashed, he withdrew north to Arretium.

He called a Senate meeting for November 24, with the intention of charging Octavian with treason. However, for some reason the session was postponed. According to Cicero, Antony was drunk: “He was detained by a drinking bout and a feast—if you can call a blowout in a public house a feast.”

A former Consul had been primed with a motion declaring Octavian a public enemy, but now Antony faced another disaster. The Fourth Legion also changed sides. The balance of power was shifting and Antony could no longer depend on a favorable vote in the Senate; even if he could win a majority, a Tribune would probably veto the bill.

Antony’s ally Lepidus

Sextus Pompey,

After a military review the following day the Consul, who had been given a bad fright, left Rome and marched north. He still had four legions at his disposal. If he could have had his way, he would doubtless have preferred to finish off Octavian and encamped at Arretium, but he knew that his men would not have followed him.

On December 9 Cicero at last made his way back to Rome from the country. Before setting off, he gave Atticus a summary of the political situation as he saw it. He was still cautious about Octavian, especially

The boy is taking the steam out of Antony neatly enough for the moment, but we had best wait and see the issue. But what a speech—a copy was sent to me. Swears “by his hopes of rising to his father’s honors,” stretching his hand out towards the statue! Sooner destruction than this kind of a rescuer! But, as you say, the clearest test will be our friend Casca’s Tribuneship.

At this point the correspondence with Atticus closes. We do not know why. Atticus may have been in Rome for the rest or most of the rest of Cicero’s life and so there would have been no need to write; alternatively the correspondence may in fact have continued but have been judged to be too controversial for publication and thus suppressed.

In the absence of both Consuls (Dolabella had already left Rome for Asia, his province) a Tribune called a meeting of the Senate for December 20 to approve the appointment of an armed guard for the new Consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, when they took up office on January 1.

There was no time to be lost. The Consul was moving as fast as he could to take over Italian Gaul before his successors could repudiate the legality of the law that had given him the province.

Cicero opened the debate at an unusually well-attended meeting with a powerful address, his third Philippic. He sought to demonstrate that Antony was an enemy of the state (arguably a treasonable assertion, bearing in mind that he was still Consul, if only for a few more days).

The Senate accepted most of Cicero’s advice but not all. It agreed that Antony was engaging in civil war but refused to outlaw him. It recognized Caesar and his army and confirmed all provincial governors in their posts until further notice, thereby overriding the following year’s appointments.

In his speech Cicero made a passing reference to young Quintus. He had definitively broken with Antony, who accused him of plotting his father’s and uncle’s deaths.

Aware of the need to secure public opinion for the Republican side, Cicero made a point throughout this period of guiding the People through complex and confusing developments.

AS Consul in 63, Cicero had had Catilina condemned for raising a private army, but now he was using all his powers of persuasion to have a legally appointed Consul declared a public enemy and a freebooting young privateer its savior. The lifelong conservative was standing his convictions on their head.

Without the letters to Atticus we no longer have a window into Cicero’s mind, his private moods and doubts; but, so far as we can tell, the process of transformation that had begun with Cato’s death was now reaching completion.

January 43 opened with gales. Some tablets around the Temple of Saturn in the Forum were snapped off and scattered on the ground.

The Senate met starting on January 1 for three days to discuss the political situation.

Aulus Hirtius

Caius Vibiu...

Somewhat to Cicero’s annoyance, Pansa, in the chair, called on his father-in-law, Quintus Fufius Calenus, to speak first. A supporter of Antony, Calenus argued for negotiation and proposed that a delegation be sent to meet the former Consul, who was now besieging Decimus Brutus at the town of Mutina in Italian Gaul.

In his fifth Philippic, Cicero argued that this motion was pernicious and absurd. Antony’s intentions were the reverse of peaceful and negotiations would be pointless. He went through the familiar catalog of sins. The blockade of Mutina was an act of war and he proposed that the Senate declare a state of military emergency.

Finally, Cicero came to Octavian, whom he called “this heaven-sent boy.” Throwing constitutional proprieties to the winds, he proposed that he be coopted to the Senate and given Propraetor status (that is, as if he had served as Praetor and so was eligible for military command).

This was a bold statement. If Cicero were not entirely convinced of Octavian’s settled intentions, he would know it to be a dangerous hostage to fortune.

Cicero had not lost his fondness for teaching and guiding young men. He had even offered his services earlier in the year as mentor to his disreputable former son-in-law, Dolabella, before his defection to Antony.

Although he was popular with the legions, Octavian was in a weak position. The Caesarian faction, as we have seen, was split into three parts—the young man’s own followers, moderates who fell into place behind the Consuls Hirtius and Pansa, and supporters of Antony—and there was little he could do to bring them back together for the moment.

Cicero’s speech was well received and he got much of what he asked for. The Senate had no difficulty in agreeing to the honors. Octavian was given Propraetorian rank and Antony’s Land Reform Act was declared invalid.

Piso,