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

by Anthony Everitt

Known for his personal vanity, he kept his thinning hair neatly trimmed and his face shaved. (According to gossip, he was also in the habit of depilating his pubic hair.)

Given no forewarning of what was to happen, Cicero saw to his astonishment that one of his closest friends, Marcus Brutus, was leading the bloodstained throng as it hacked and thrust at its victim. Cassius, who gave Caesar a glancing blow across the face, was in the melee too. Clearly, there had been a conspiracy and, equally clearly and hurtfully, Cicero had not been invited to join it.

Then Brutus wounded Caesar in the groin. The dying man gasped: “You too, my son?”

The number of Senators varied; at one point, in Cicero’s youth, there were only 300, but half a century later Julius Caesar packed the Senate with his supporters, and the membership reached 900.

The only political job open to them was the Censorship: every five years two former Consuls were appointed Censors, whose main task was to review the membership of the Senate and remove any thought to be unworthy.

Another remarkable device inhibited overmighty citizens. This was the widespread use of the veto. One Consul could veto any of his colleagues’ proposals and those of junior officeholders. Praetors and the other officeholders could veto their colleagues’ proposals.

“We consider both the place where we were born and the city that has adopted us as our fatherland.” His dual nationality is central to an understanding of Cicero’s personality. He had that passionate affection for Rome and its traditions which many newcomers feel when they join an exclusive club and was deeply hurt when the feeling was not invariably reciprocated. But he could always recharge his self-confidence with a trip to the place of his birth.

Finally, the cognomen, a personal surname, was particular to its holder or his branch of the family. It often had a jokey or down-to-earth ring: so, for example, “Cicero” is Latin for “chickpea” and it was supposed that some ancestor had had a wart of that shape on the end of his nose. When Marcus was about to launch his career as an advocate and politician, friends advised him to change his name to something less ridiculous. “No,” he replied firmly, “I am going to make my cognomen more famous than those of men like Scaurus and Catulus.” These were two leading Romans of the day, and the point of the remark was that “Catulus” was the Latin for “whelp” or “puppy,” and “Scaurus” meant “with large or projecting ankles.”

In the city of Rome it is estimated that slaves amounted to about a quarter of the population in Cicero’s day.

Romantic attachment was felt to be beside the point. If a wife was seen in public with her husband, any display of affection was universally felt to be indecent. Less than a century before Cicero’s birth, Cato the Censor, self-appointed guardian of traditional Roman values, expelled a candidate for the Consulship from the Senate on the grounds that he had kissed his wife in broad daylight and in front of their daughter. Unsurprisingly, Helvia is a shadowy figure, although she seems to have been a sharp-eyed housewife. Quintus recalled “how our mother in the old days used to seal up the empty bottles, so that bottles drained on the sly could not be included in the empties.” It is curious that throughout his copious writings Cicero himself never once mentions her: this may simply be a consequence of the low status of women, but perhaps his silence reflects some unhappiness in his childhood, which may in turn have helped to create the adult man with all his multiple insecurities.

Cato, who was as blunt as he was censorious, reportedly remarked, “We rule the world and our wives rule us.”

The good public speaker recognized that he had to be a performer, like an actor. Later in his life Cicero wrote books on oratory and in them he underscored the point: A leading speaker will vary and modulate his voice, raising and lowering it and deploying the full scale of tones. He will avoid extravagant gestures and stand impressively erect. He will not pace about and when he does so not for any distance. He should not dart forward except in moderation with strict control. There should be no effeminate bending of the neck or twiddling of his fingers or beating out the rhythm of his cadences on his knuckles. He should control himself by the way he holds and moves his entire body. He should extend his arm at moments of high dispute and lower it during calmer passages.… Once he has made sure he does not have a stupid expression on his face and or a grimace, he should control his eyes with great care, for as the face is the image of the soul the eyes are its translators. Depending on the subject at hand they can express grief or hilarity.

Cicero describes them as going later to the Senate House to look at the spot where that last “swan song” (a phrase he popularized) had been heard.

pursuits was temporary; he had every intention of entering the law and politics once circumstances permitted. If he was out of sympathy with the more aggressive, military aspirations of his peers, he did share with them an unquenchable thirst for personal fame. This found its classic expression in Homer’s Iliad, in which Glaucus says to Diomedes that he still hears his father’s urgings ringing in his ears: Always be the best, my boy, the bravest, and hold your head high above the others. It was a text that had inspired Alexander the Great and, once Homer appeared on their curriculum, many Roman boys were equally impressed, among them Marcus Tullius Cicero. Years later he told his brother that the lines had expressed his “childhood dream.” He was determined to be the best and the bravest, to join the ranks of the Republic’s greatest heroes. He planned to excel, however, not on the battlefield, but in Rome’s sacred center, the Forum.

A Speakers’ Platform stood on the outer edge of the Comitium. It was decorated with ships’ prows captured in a sea battle in 338 and their name in Latin, Rostra, was applied to the platform as a whole. The long sides of the square were bordered by two colonnaded halls, the Basilica Fulvia Aemilia and the Basilica Sempronia.

At the center of the Forum a low wall surrounded a water hole near a cluster of three plants: a vine, a fig tree and an olive bush. This was the Pool of Curtius, where in Rome’s early years a chasm had suddenly appeared. The prophetic Sibylline Books, an antique collection of oracular utterances in Greek hexameters which the Romans consulted in times of national crisis, advised that the gap in the ground would close only when it received what the Roman people valued most highly. From that day forward the earth would produce an abundance of what it had taken in. People threw cakes and silver into the hole, but it stayed open. Then a young cavalryman, one Marcus Curtius, told the Senate that he had worked out the answer to the riddle: it was its soldiers’ courage that Rome held most dear. Fully armed astride his warhorse, he galloped down into the chasm and the crowd hurled animals, precious fabrics and other valuables after him. Finally, the earth closed. According to another version, Curtius was an enemy Sabine whose horse drowned in what was then a swamp. The most plausible (and least exotic) account claimed that a Consul named Curtius fenced the Pool off and consecrated it after the area had been struck by lightning. But for the average Roman, the historical truth was neither here nor there. What mattered was that the Pool was a holy emblem of the city’s past.

Religion was not so much a set of personal beliefs as precisely laid-down ways of living in harmony with the expectations of the gods. In fact, by the end of the Republic educated men believed less in the literal truth of the apparatus of religious doctrine than in a vaguer notion of the validity of tradition.

Public and religious ceremonies were conducted according to precise forms of words and any mistake by the officiant was held to be so unlucky that the entire ritual had to be repeated. Men in public life did their best to avoid accidental events or actions from being seen as unlucky. On a famous occasion during the civil war, Caesar tripped when disembarking from a ship on the shores of Africa and fell flat on his face. With his talent for improvisation, he spread out his arms and embraced the earth as a symbol of conquest. By quick thinking he turned a terrible omen of failure into one of victory.

Cicero was noticed as a promising newcomer; but while his voice was powerful, it was harsh and untrained and he strained it from overuse. All his life he suffered from first-night nerves. He acknowledged: Personally, I am always very nervous when I begin to speak. Every time I make a speech I feel I am submitting to judgment, not only about my ability but my character and honor. I am afraid of seeming either to promise more than I can perform, which suggests complete irresponsibility, or to perform less than I can, which suggests bad faith and indifference.

Success had come at a high price and he needed time to recoup his forces. Such in any case was his own explanation and there is little reason to doubt it. He recalled: I was at that time very slender and not strong in body, with a long, thin neck; and such a constitution and appearance, if combined with hard work and strain on the lungs, were thought to be almost life-threatening. Those who loved me were all the more alarmed, in that I always spoke without pause or variation, using all the strength of my voice and the effort of my whole body. When friends and doctors begged me to give up speaking in the courts, I felt I would run any risk rather than abandon my hope of fame as a speaker. I thought that by a more restrained and moderate use of the voice and a different way of speaking I could both avoid the danger and acquire more variety in my style; and the reason for my going to Asia was to change my method of speaking. And so, when I had two years’ experience of taking cases and my name was already well-known in the Forum, I left Rome.

He sought out and rediscovered the lost grave of Archimedes, the great scientist and geometer, a citizen of Syracuse who had been killed during the Roman siege more than one hundred years before. The exploit demonstrated detective skills and inquisitiveness which he put to good use in his legal career, and he recalled it with pride: When I was Quaestor, I tracked down his grave; the Syracusans not only had no idea where it was, they denied it even existed. I found it surrounded and covered by brambles and thickets. I remembered that some lines of doggerel I had heard were inscribed on his tomb to the effect that a sphere and a cylinder had been placed on its top. So I took a good look around (for there are a lot of graves at the Agrigentine Gate cemetery) and noticed a small column rising a little way above some bushes, on which stood a sphere and a cylinder. I immediately told the Syracusans (some of their leading men were with me) that I thought I had found what I was looking for. Slaves were sent in with scythes to clear the ground and once a path had been opened up we approached the pedestal. About half the lines of the epigram were still legible although the rest had worn away. So, you see, one of the most celebrated cities of Greece, once upon a time a great seat of learning too, would have been ignorant of the grave of one of its most intellectually gifted citizens—had it not been for a man from Arpinum who pointed it out to them.

AS he observed towards the end of his life: “It is the judge’s responsibility always to seek the truth in trials; while it is the advocate’s to make out a case for what is probable, even if it doesn’t precisely correspond to the truth.”

Caesar was captured by pirates, who were endemic in the Mediterranean; while waiting for his ransom to arrive he got onto friendly terms with his captors, but warned them that he would return and have them crucified. They thought he was joking. They were not the last to underestimate Caesar’s determination and regret it. AS soon as he was free, he raised a squadron on his own initiative, tracked down the pirates and executed them, just as he had promised.

In 63 Caesar stood for the senior religious post of Chief Pontiff, chairman of the college of pontifices, the most important political function of which was to decide the annual calendar of lucky and unlucky days for the conduct of public business. It was usually the preserve of ex-Consuls and elder statesmen and Caesar contracted enormous debts to bribe the necessary voters. Success brought him little power but great prestige and an official residence in the Forum. If Caesar had lost, his credit would have collapsed and he would have been bankrupt. He told his mother, as she kissed him good-bye on the morning of the poll, that if he did not return as Chief Pontiff, he would not return at all.

An incident occurred while Cato was speaking which caused much amusement at his expense. A letter was brought in for Caesar, and Cato immediately accused him of being in touch with the conspirators. He challenged him to read the note out loud. Caesar simply passed it across: it was a love letter from Servilia, Caesar’s mistress at the time and Cato’s half-sister. Cato threw it back angrily with the words: “Take it, you drunken idiot.”

Cicero told Atticus that “Sampsiceramus,” his nickname for Pompey (after an oriental potentate), “is out for trouble. We can expect anything. He is confessedly working for absolute power.… They would never have come so far if they were not paving their way to other and disastrous objectives.” He noticed that the uninhibited freedom of speech which marked political life in the Republic was giving way to caution at social gatherings and across dinner tables. Despite the fact that there was no official censorship, he agreed on a simple code with Atticus for sensitive parts of their correspondence.

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 still raise a smile, but his contemporaries delighted in them.

He found it shocking that Brutus’s Games were advertised for “July,” the new name in honor of Julius Caesar that had replaced the month of Quintilis.

He was reclining in a characteristic posture, with his chin resting on his left hand. He had a copy of Euripides’ Medea with him, which he had been reading. He would have been familiar with this drama of bitter revenge, in which a woman kills her children to spite her faithless husband. His eyes may have fallen on lines near the beginning of the play: “But now everything has turned to hatred and where love was once deepest a cancer spreads.” He looked terrible: he was covered in dust, his hair was long and unkempt, his face pinched and worn with anxiety. He drew aside the curtain of his litter a little and said: “I am stopping here. Come here, soldier. There is nothing proper about what you are doing, but at least make sure you cut off my head properly.” Herennius trembled and hesitated. Cicero added, supposing that the man had already killed other victims and should by now have perfected his technique: “What if you’d come to me first?” He stretched his neck as far as he could out of the litter and Herennius slit his throat. While this was being done, most of those who were standing around covered their faces. It took three sword strokes and some sawing to detach the head and then the hands were cut off.