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

by Anthony Everitt

In December one of the Dictator’s staff published a collection of these assiduously collected witticisms.

NEED

Cicero tirelessly exploited his Caesarian connections on behalf of defeated optimates.

Working closely with the Dictator on reconciliation was an essential precondition if the new political order was to be truly inclusive.

He was so upset that he asked Hirtius to write a refutation. (It was a flop, which Cicero delightedly asked Atticus to distribute as widely as possible, on the grounds that it could only further enhance Cato’s reputation.)

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.

Marcus was good-natured, lazy and fond of a good time. He was too much in awe of his father to stand up to him directly and had the diffidence of the child who knows he is not a favorite.

Accounts of the political support she gave him during his Consulship suggest a businesslike relationship and strong mutual loyalty. What remains of their correspondence was written when they were both middle-aged and conveys little more than routine affection.

The only woman with whom Cicero’s emotions seem to have been powerfully engaged was Tullia. This was noticed by his contemporaries.

Tullia is a shadowy figure, who never speaks for herself and is glimpsed only through her father’s loving comments. We can guess that she was intelligent and amusing (as well as being self-willed and with a pronounced tendency to fall for unsuitable men).

“The things you like in me are gone for good.”

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 ca...

This was a true breakdown and he recognized it. He withdrew from the world like a sick animal and fought as hard as he could for recovery, for the regaining of his life.

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...

“Brutus reports that Caesar has joined the honest men,” he wrote sardonically to Atticus. “Good news! But where is he going to find them—unless he hangs himself? AS for Brutus, he knows which side his bread is buttered.”

In 46, at the age of sixty, he started work on a succession of books which, taken together, represent one of Rome’s most valuable legacies to posterity. At their core is a summary of the philosophical issues that had concerned thinkers and moralists from Plato to Cicero’s own day.

Cicero responded with a powerful apologia for philosophy. The seeker after truth traveled hopefully, he said, but would never arrive.

Cicero tends to a Stoic pantheism (which gives him the opportunity to celebrate the physical universe in passages of great poetic grandeur).

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.

Composed at a time when Cicero was returning to public life, it condemns citizens who abstain from political activity.

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.

Cicero’s central concern is the contradiction between virtue and the inevitable expediencies that divert human agents fro...

The primary duty, transcending all others, is loyalty to the state and Cicero takes the opportunity to review the record of his contemporaries.

the avaricious Crassus and Caesar, who has gone to the lengths of destroying the state—is compared with this principle and found wanting. This body of work kept Cicero’s name in the public eye for the brief remainder of his lifetime as a man of principle and thoughtful reflection.

“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. Sometime towards the end of his life, Caesar remarked that Cicero had won greater laurels than those worn by a general in his Triumph, for it meant more to have extended the frontiers of Roman genius than of its empire.

Tears

should be an idiot to suppose that even so easygoing an individual as Cicero is my friend when he has to sit waiting for my convenience all this time.”

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.)

Caesar’s reluctance to show any signs of compromise and his refusal to share power with others explain the remarkable fact that so many leading members of the government joined the conspiracy to put an end to their leader.

The two years that followed Caesar’s assassination are the best documented in Roman history.

Their assumption was that the constitution would simply and automatically resume its functions. The Senate would have little difficulty in taking over the reins of power. This was not an unreasonable analysis and was confirmed in the event—for

ConspirAtors idea

Although he did not say so at once, Cicero took the view in April that “the Ides of March was a fine deed, but half done.” That is, Antony should have been killed along with his master.

Later he remarked to Cassius: “A pity you didn’t invite me to dinner on the Ides of March! Let me tell you, there would have been no leftovers.”

“Nothing in my visit gave me any satisfaction except the consciousness of having made it,” Cicero concluded. “I found the ship going to pieces, or rather its scattered fragments. No plan, no thought, no method. AS a result, though I had doubts before, I am now all the more determined to escape from here, and as soon as I possibly can.”

In Duties, which he was writing at the time, he made no concession to the genius of his great contemporary; he condemned the

the conflict between loyalty to one’s friend and loyalty to the state. There was no easy answer, he decided, except that one should make sure that a friend deserved one’s trust before giving it to him.

The future for Republicans lay in splitting the partisans of Caesar.

One certainly senses a coarsening of his personality, the obverse perhaps of his new decisiveness. This was the price Cicero was to pay for his return to power. Although he held no public office, the next six months saw him become the first man in Rome, with as great a dominance over the political scene as during his Consulship. The disappointments and humiliations of the intervening twenty years were behind him.

“If I may, I will remain in the city. Here is my place. Here I keep watch. Here I stand sentinel. Here is my guardhouse.”

I reaped the richest of rewards for my many days of labor and sleepless nights—if there is any reward in true, genuine glory. The whole population of Rome thronged to my house and escorted me up to the Capitol, then set me on the Speakers’ Platform amid tumultuous applause. I am not a vain man, I do not need to be; but the unison of all classes in thanks and congratulations does move me, for to be popular in serving the People’s welfare is a fine thing.

Cicero saw the dangers in this attitude and tried to have both generals appointed as commissioners, but the Senate, complacent now that the crisis was over, was less willing to do his bidding than it had used to be. He praised Octavian as highly as the other generals, despite the fact that he had played a subordinate role in the fighting. He proposed an Ovation for him, but it is not certain that the motion was passed.

He was prone to seesaws of emotion and longed for compliments, of which he felt he did not receive nearly enough.

Me

But although his connection with Octavian fed his self-esteem, it was also based on a sound analysis of the political situation.

he failed to understand that the only card Cicero had left in his hand was his relationship with Octavian, who might otherwise join forces with Antony so that he could be strong enough to deal with ...

“What is the use? Believe me, Brutus, as one not given to self-deprecation, I am a spent force. The Senate was my weapon and it has fallen to pieces.”

Verres, Cicero’s old adversary, whom he had prosecuted for corruption in Sicily a quarter of a century before, was still alive and a collector of valuable Corinthian bronze artifacts; it was said that Antony had him proscribed when he refused to part with any of them.

In a thoroughly un-Roman betrayal of family loyalties and the ties of amicitia, each Commissioner agreed to abandon friends and relatives.

with Octavian personal ties took second place to public expediency.

Quintus suddenly realized that he had brought no cash with him and Cicero too had insufficient funds for the journey. So Quintus volunteered to go back home, get what was needed and catch up with Cicero later. The brothers hugged each other and parted in tears.