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

by Anthony Everitt

nor were there public libraries, until Caesar founded the first one in the 40s.

Books were written out by hand on papyrus rolls (sometimes as long as thirty feet), which were then passed around to friends and acquaintances and stored on shelves. The task of copying was usually given to highly trained slaves. Atticus employed a large number and seems to have acted as a prototypical publisher, probably selling books for a profit. He had many of Cicero’s speeches and books copied and distributed.

Although copying runs must have been small, books appear to have been in plentiful supply. (According to Catullus, they could end up wrapping mackerel in fish shops.)

Cicero’s literary career was checkered. The precocious teenage poet had grown into an overprolific windbag with his endless autobiographical epic.

Cicero argued for a broadly based and well-integrated liberal education in which the discidium linguae atque cordis, the split between word and heart, would be healed.

“When we inherited the Republic from our forebears,” he wrote, “it was like a beautiful painting whose colors were fading with age. We have failed to restore its original colors and have not taken the

trouble to preserve its overall composition or even its general features.”

Cicero probably started On the State in May 54 and it was ...

The scene is Scipio’s country estate, where the old man is found in his bedroom receiving callers. The conversation touches on the reported sighting of two suns in the sky. More visitors arrive, including his lifelong friend Laelius, whose cognomen, Sapiens,

Scipio’s thesis, which can be supposed to be Cicero’s, is that there are three basic systems of government: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. Each has its strengths and weaknesses and it is the unique distinction of Rome to have devised a constitution which combines elements of all three.

This theory of the mixed constitution had a great influence on the development of European political thought during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It retained its appeal until the eighteenth century and the emergence of modern democracy.

Cicero was an acute observer of his times and it seems strange that the book does not reflect a more accurate perception of what was really happening. His analysis was cultural rather than political. Like most of his contemporaries, he saw politics fundamentally in personal rather than ideological or structural terms.

All would be well if only there were a return to traditional values, a rediscovery of the “ideal” statesman and citizen.

On the State seems to have been an immediate success with the reading public. It contains some of Cicero’s most majestic prose.

AS a literary call to order, the appearance of On the State was timely. But it made little or no impact on the political situation.

Human law is merely a version, and an imperfect one at that, of the wisdom of the natural order. “Law is the highest reason,” he says, “implanted in nature, which commands what ought to be done and forbids the opposite. This reason, when firmly fixed and fully developed in the human mind, is Law. And so … Law is intelligence whose natural function it is to command right conduct and forbid wrongdoing.” Later he summarizes: “Virtue is reason completely developed.”

An important means of fostering virtue is through the art of explanation and persuasion—the “science of distinguishing the true from the false [and] the art of understanding the consequences and opposites of every statement.”

But Cato shouted that he was making a fool of himself again and letting himself be taken in.

Stupid stupid stupid

Cicero was shocked as much by the incompetence and rashness of the optimates as by the catastrophe itself.

What he found deepened his pessimism. The recruiting officers were afraid to do their work; the Consuls were hopeless and, as for Pompey, “How utterly down he is! No courage, no plan, no forces, no energy.” Cicero resigned his Campanian commission, saying he could do nothing without troops and money. Letters came from Caesar full of kind words and peace proposals and so did curt missives from Pompey asking Cicero to join him.

This act of clemency had a huge impact on public opinion, which began to swing in his direction, and a number of optimates returned to Rome. Caesar maintained this policy of leniency for the rest of his life. He intended it as vivid proof that he was no Sulla, set on the armed overthrow of the state.

The truth was, as Cicero admitted to Atticus, he had not yet made up his mind what to do. He was coming to believe that there was less to choose between the opposing sides than he had originally thought. The constitution would probably be destroyed whoever won the impending struggle.

“Nothing in [Pompey’s] conduct seemed to deserve that I should join him as his companion in flight. But now my affection comes to the surface, the sense of loss is unbearable, books, writing, philosophy are all to no purpose.”

The presence of his brother doubled his anxiety: Quintus, having spent some years fighting under Caesar in Gaul, owed much more to his old commander than Cicero did and could expect to suffer the severest consequences if he defected. Nevertheless, he told Cicero that he would follow his lead.

Caesar was not in an accommodating mood. He complained that Cicero was passing judgment against him and that “the others would be slower to come over”

Caesar must have realized that he could not push an obviously unhappy man any further. He

broke into the Treasury at the Temple of Saturn and removed its contents: 15,000 bars of gold, 30,000 of silver and 30 million sesterces—a move for which he paid with the total collapse of his popularity.

He could not resist making sarcastic comments and jokes about his colleagues and companions in arms and wandered about the camp looking so glum that he became something of a figure of fun.

Caesar recorded 200 fatalities while some 15,000 of Pompey’s men were killed and 23,000 captured.

Pharsalus

Cicero was as annoyingly sarcastic as ever. When someone said optimistically that there was hope yet, for they had seven Eagles left (the legionary standards), he joked bitterly: “Excellent, if we were fighting jackdaws.”

Yo

Cato made the invitation other than for form’s sake; even he would have seen something absurd in the distinctly unmilitary orator challenging the greatest general of his day.

By following Cicero’s star, Quintus had lost everything. He had sacrificed his excellent relationship with Caesar, under whose command in Gaul he had for once been his own man.

For all their lives Quintus had willingly played second fiddle to his older and more famous brother. Perhaps resentment had so long been growing below the surface—all

The upshot was that Quintus and his son followed after Caesar, with whom they intended to make their peace. Meanwhile, Cicero had nowhere to go but back to Italy. Worn down by his adventures and broken by the collapse of both his public and domestic worlds, he set off once again, without pause for second thoughts, to Brundisium and home.

Cicero always found it hard to keep a feud going and was prone to be fond of anyone who showed him affection, whatever he really thought of them and their politics.

Cicero knew Caesar well and might have guessed that treachery of this kind would not endear Quintus to a man who valued personal loyalty above almost all things. AS part of his reconciliation policy, Caesar had had all of Pompey’s correspondence burned unread after Pharsalus.

All in all, the behavior of his relatives added private misery to Cicero’s public misfortune.

“Her own beauty, so we are told, was not of that incomparable kind which instantly captivates the beholder,” Plutarch avers. “But the charm of her presence was irresistible: and there was an attractiveness in her person and talk, together with a peculiar force of character which pervaded her every word and action, and laid all who associated with her under its spell. It was delight merely to hear the sound of her voice.”

Quintus, badgered by Atticus, sent his brother a grudging letter of apology, which as far as Cicero was concerned only made matters worse. Young Quintus also wrote to him “most offensively.” In the summer Cicero learned that his nephew had been given an interview with Caesar and that he and his father had been forgiven.

Cato’s suicide was extremely damaging to Caesar’s reputation. At the beginning of the civil war, many educated Romans saw the struggle between Pompey and Caesar as no more than a competition between two overmighty generals and chose sides according to their personal and political loyalties. Inevitably, one or other of them would win.

Although it began to look over time as if this might not, after all, be the final outcome, it was still possible at this stage to give Caesar the benefit of the doubt. So all-embracing and deeply rooted was the idea of the constitution’s permanence that it took a year or two before suspicions of his revolutionary intentions hardened into certainty that the days of the Republic were over for good. In the meantime Cato’s final act of defiance, his deliberate rejection of Caesar’s tyranny and by extension of all political servitude, harshly dramatized half-spoken

Catos suicide consequences

But his suicide burned away the inessentials of his character, leaving him as the symbol of pure principles and of a lost time for which he mourned.

have set up as schoolmaster, as it were, now that the courts are abolished and my forensic kingdom lost.”

The all-conquering war leader had not yet registered how long a shadow Cato was to cast.

To many people’s surprise he acted evenhandedly and favored neither radical nor conservative causes, making decisions on the merits of a case.

When someone remarked that the constellation Lyra was due to rise on the following night, he replied: “Of course. It will be following orders.”

Paradoxically, although he was profoundly out of sympathy with the new regime, his personal relations with Caesar had never been warmer. After the Dictator’s death, he admitted that “for some reason he was extraordinarily patient where I was concerned.”

Different cultures have different senses of humor. Cicero specialized in the brutal put-down, as

Is this my cture?

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.”

Talk of this and that produces many casual remarks which perhaps strike these people when I say them as not deficient in polish and point. They are conveyed to him with the rest of the day’s news, according to his express instructions.

Caesar collected ciceros jokes