Cicero The Life And Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician by Anthony Everitt Random House, 368 pp., $25.95 FOR CENTURIES the works of Cicero were models of Latin style, and even after Latin no longer served as Europe’s literary language, Cicero’s rotund and balanced phrases shaped the speeches and prose of England and America–of Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill, to name only a few. Indeed, the recognition of Cicero’s style began earlier. Within a few generations of his death he had already become the standard by which Latin prose was measured. Quintilian, the great Roman teacher of rhetoric, wrote: “For posterity the name of Cicero has come to be regarded not as the name of a man, but as the name of eloquence itself.” (Not all have agreed. Montaigne quipped that with his speeches one could nod off for a quarter of an hour and still pick up the thread.) But Cicero was more than an orator and exemplary stylist. When he found himself shut out of political affairs, he retired to one of his several villas to write books on political philosophy, ethics, law, theology, and the theory and teaching of rhetoric. No Latin author before Augustine offered so many writings on so many different subjects in so many genres. It was a singular achievement that set his oeuvre apart from that of such poets as Catullus, Horace, and Virgil, or such historians as Livy and Tacitus, or such dramatists as Plautus and Terence. Though not an original thinker, Cicero had mastered Greek, and with his knowledge of the philosophers and his talent as a writer, he transmitted and interpreted the wisdom of ancient Greece to the Romans, creating a philosophical vocabulary in Latin that endures to this day in words such as “quality” and “essence.” In the Middle Ages, when knowledge of Greek was lost, Western thinkers knew the Greeks primarily through Cicero. In the early years of America, his writings were invoked to support the idea of three branches of government. John Adams read and reread his essay “On Old Age” throughout his life. Today Cicero is read by few even in translation, and for many, students and faculty alike, he is only a dim memory. In a new biography, “Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician,” Anthony Everitt hopes to restore him “to his proper place in the pantheon of our common past.” There are many books on Cicero, though no recent biography in English, and Everitt has chosen to highlight the personal and the political, with Cicero’s intellectual accomplishments and influence on later generations treated only perfunctorily. Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in 106 B.C., and his life parallels the gradual disintegration of the Roman Republic in the middle of the first century. He lived during a time of continuous disorder and recurrent warfare (political leaders could not go about the city without an armed guard), and he fought to prevent the republican constitution from being paralyzed and dismantled. He moved swiftly up the political ladder and was made consul in his early forties, but his political good fortune was short lived. Driven into exile after his success in securing a conviction in the Catiline conspiracy, he languished for a year and a half in Macedonia. On return he was welcomed warmly, but events had passed him by. The world he had tried to preserve was collapsing, and more and more of his time was spent at one of his villas writing philosophical essays, among which are his treatises “On the Orator,” really an essay on political education, and “On the State.” When Caesar began to seize power, Cicero vacillated, but as Caesar’s intentions became evident, Cicero resisted his entreaties to join him and retreated again to his books. He could not abide Caesar’s imperiousness. Though not invited to join in the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar, he hailed his death. In the months that followed, he made one last desperate attempt to save the republic. Week after week he appeared in the Forum to deliver a series of speeches, called the “Philippics” (after the famous speeches of Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon). Without public office or soldiers under his command, armed only with his voice and reputation, he stood against the foes of the republic, notably Antony. This was the time of his greatest triumph, but he was blind to what lay ahead. It proved to be Octavian, not Antony, who was the greatest danger to the future of the republic. When Octavian (the future Caesar Augustus) joined forces with Antony and marched on Rome, the abolition of the republic was no less complete than if Caesar had lived. “I am a spent force,” Cicero wrote. “The Senate was my weapon and it has fallen to pieces.” His struggle to preserve the constitution was dead, and his own execution would follow shortly. Cicero’s life was full, and he did live in historic times, but Everitt’s narrative lacks an authoritative interpretive voice. Though one learns a great deal about Cicero and life in ancient Rome, “Cicero” trudges along too close to the ground. By relegating Cicero’s intellectual contributions to a few obligatory and superficial pages Everitt makes it hard to discern the links between his philosophical views and his actions. In part this may be because Everitt has a jejune view of human greatness. Cicero was a man of firm convictions, moral self-assurance, and courage, who struggled his entire life to preserve the republic from the rule of one man, who believed there was no form of government that could compare with the Roman constitution, who labored to hand on the traditions of the past–yet, according to Everitt, his “greatest gift to European civilization” was that he was “rational, undogmatic, tolerant, law-abiding, urbane.” If latitudinarianism is the measure of virtue, the stature of a man like Cicero will remain elusive. CICERO WAS MANY THINGS, orator, advocate, essayist, sage, statesman, patriot, but “Rome’s greatest politician,” as Everitt’s subtitle has it, is a stretch. He was often out of power, and his impact on events was slight. He misjudged the intentions of others, he was unrealistic, he was outmaneuvered and outwitted by his adversaries, and he was susceptible to flattery. In truth, his immortality rests more on his words than on his deeds. Petrarch may have had it right in his famous letter to the “shade” of Cicero in which he reproached him for returning to politics after the death of Caesar: “Why did you involve yourself in so many contentions and useless quarrels, and forsake the calm so becoming to your age, your position and the vicissitudes of your life? What vain splendor of fame drove you . . . into a death unworthy of a sage?” Cicero was a tireless letter writer (most were written to an intimate friend, Atticus, over many years), and the preservation of his letters means that we know him far better than we know most figures from the ancient world. Once the reader gets past his vanity and immoderate boasting (some Renaissance figures argued that it was his enemies who first had his letters published to embarrass him), his words speak to us with the voice of a living man. He opened his heart to his friends: “My brilliant worldly friendships may make a fine show in public, but in the home they are barren things. My house is crammed of a morning, I go down to the Forum surrounded by droves of friends, but in all the crowds I cannot find one person with whom I can exchange an unguarded joke or let out a private sigh.” After the death of his daughter he wrote Atticus from his house in Astura, south of Rome: “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 can. But so far it is an unequal fight.” And he had a quick and mordant wit. On meeting a man with three unattractive daughters he quoted the verse, “Apollo never meant him to beget.” When death came, Cicero fa
ced it bravely and with serenity. One of the first acts of the new triumvirate of Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus was to place his name, and those of his family, on the “proscription,” a list for a political massacre that made one’s enemies fair game for bounty hunters. Cicero fled Rome, and headed to the sea where he found a ship. Setting sail, his pilots found favorable winds, but after a few hours he ordered them to return to shore. AT FIRST he began walking towards Rome, but soon changed his mind and retired to his villa on the sea at Caeta, sixty miles south of Rome. There he was hunted down and brutally murdered with a copy of Euripides’ “Medea” in his hand. When his assassin approached his litter, he pulled aside the curtain and said, “Come here, soldier. There is nothing proper about what you are doing, but at least make sure you cut off my head properly.” His killers obliged by cutting off not only his head but also his right hand (the instrument of his speeches), both to be displayed in the Forum. Cicero was a man of words, and even in his death he had the right words for the occasion. Yet this greatest of Latin orators, the exemplar of literary grace and sophistication, is also the man who wrote that it is the person of the speaker, not the speech itself, that gives power to words. In the end, only the constancy of character persuades. Robert Louis Wilken is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia.
