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

    I got a pretty random urge to read something about Cicero's life, and I'd had this on my shelf for a while waiting for the right time. I would say that Everitt's book is a good resource on Cicero's life, and does a good job as a biography, but it falls short. On one hand, there are a lot of materials surviving about Cicero's life, but they must not be enough to give a really good analysis of his personality. Everitt doesn't get deep into his mind, and really only hypothesizes briefly about Cicero's inner life. And then, Cicero's biography isn't enough to learn about the fall of the Roman Republic. Sure enough, Cicero's son-in-law is Dolabella and briefly a tutor to Octavian, but his interactions with some of the big players aren't enough to tell the story of the fall of the Republic, so Everitt has to sideline Cicero several times to get that story in a way that a biography of Julius Caesar doesn't have to do. Now maybe that's not the purpose of a biography of Cicero, but because the inner life wasn't coming through, it left me with a feeling of something missing.

    That said, Everitt does really interesting discussions of why the Republic fell. Above all, attributes to the Republic the property of being "a state without most of the institutions needed to run a state." There was no civil service, so governors needed to have their own people on payroll, necessitating corruption to pay for them. Without a police force, mobs could take over the capital. There was no public prosecution service, and private individuals had to being lawsuits. Without prisons, penalties had to be execution, exile, or a fine. There was no banking system, and the government had no bureaucracy to collect taxes, selling the right to collect taxes to the highest bidder. Over the centuries, Rome's "constitution" accreted new layers, much like the British constitution did approximately two millennia later. This created institutions a mile wide and an inch deep, capable of conquering the lands around the Mediterranean, but also fragile enough to be overthrown by its own armies, or mobs in the capital.

    Rome was also a victim of its own success. Sooner or later, everyone has to do land reform. Either the country isn't expanding and everything is gobbled up by large landowners, or the country is expanding, and needs to decide how to parcel out newly acquired land. Rome faced both issues in the second century BC, with Italian lands turning into large ranches, forcing peasants into Rome, and new lands being acquired on the borders. That distribution of lands created the major political issues of the fall of the Republic, for about a century from 146 BC, when Rome finally conquered Carthage as well as Corinth, until 31 BC, when Octavian defeated Marc Antony and became the emperor.

    Sulla's Civil War, fought in 83 and 82 BC, dominated the young lives to Cicero (20 years old) and Caesar (18 years old). The war culminated in Sulla's victory, reforms to strengthen the Senate, and proscriptions that went way over the top and led to killings not due to any criminality, but just to seize the property of the proscribed. Sulla became dictator, and set a new precedent for the use of force in public life against Romans (although he hadn't been the first or last). While Cicero took away the idea that Republican traditions must be jealously guarded, Caesar felt that radical reforms were needed. Maybe this was because Caesar had been proscribed.

    Cicero rose to become a Consul as a conservative, more on the side of the optimates than the populares as Rome became increasingly polarized. Catilina, who tried to stage a coup, was on the side of the populares, and championed land reform. I hadn't realized that Cicero was a conservative. But he was not strictly ideological. He was mainly in favor of preservation of the Republic, and as long as that was in reach, he would play all sides. He regularly corresponded with Caesar, and later Octavian, even though the assassins of Caesar championed Cicero as a hero of the Republic. So he was very confusing to read about since everyone had this simultaneous respect for him but also disdain for the fact that he didn't come from an old family and was always bragging about himself.

    Cicero had two periods of great power: the first, when he defeated Catiline as Consul, and the second, when he held no office, but led the Senate for about six months after the assassination of Caesar. In that time, he attempted to divide Octavian from Marc Antony, keeping them apart so that Brutus and Cassius Longinus could defeat Antony and save the Republic. But it was not to be. Octavian and Marc Antony formed the Second Triumvirate with Lepidus and overthrew the Republic before casting Lepidus aside. The critical problem is that both sitting Consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, were each killed in the First and Second Battles of Mutina against Marc Antony, and left the Senate without leadership. The Senate was divided on naming the 19-year-old Octavian as a Consul, and when they did not do so, Octavian turned against them. While Cicero had a chance to join Octavian has consul, he didn't, and Octavian allowed Marc Antony to proscribe Cicero, and he was hunted down on the Southern Italian coast. He told his assassin, "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."

    The final chapter, "Postmortems," contains the best analysis of the book. In it, Everitt identifies that the turning point in Cicero's career was his decision not to join Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus in their political alliance in the 50s. Cicero never sold out his values/ideals, but he rightly acquired a reputation for vacillation, always sitting on the fence. He knew that was a powerful place to be, since everyone had to win him over. Ultimately, he fell off the fence. He didn't understand what was necessary to save the Roman Republic, only that he wanted to save it. But maybe there was not way of saving it--after all, no one did. Cicero thought that everything needed to be put back the way it is, but Caesar understood that, to borrow a line from another Italian, "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." Caesar understood the necessity of a completely new means of government, but didn't live to implement it, so we will never know what he would have created. Instead, his grandnephew Octavian turned Rome from a city of bricks into a city of marble, and the rest is history. Everitt ends the book very appropriately, quoting Octavian, who had been tutored by Cicero, and who had also signed Cicero's death warrant. After seeing his grandson reading from a book of Cicero's, decades after Cicero's assassination, the now-Augustus said of Cicero, "an eloquent man, my child, an eloquent man, and a patriot."

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Roman life was "lived in daylight hours," because there were no public streetlights. People needed to carry torches to get around the city. This can't be unique at all, but is a fact about premodern life that really colors my entire perspective.
• Cicero had a career as a very successful "advocate" (read: lawyer), who would have been crushed by any judge following the Federal Rules of Evidence in 2026. The stuff he was saying in court was waaaaayyyy out of order by modern standards. But it was a different time, and so he could tell the jurors that if they voted to convict, then everyone would know that they must have been bribed.
  
• The Senate would sit to hear trials in Republican Rome, which was actually still going on in the American colonies in the 1700s, when the legislatures of the colonies would handle judicial business like King Henry VII in the Star Chamber centuries before.
• Ancient Roman texts are written without differentiation into capital and lowercase letters, without spaces between words, without paragraphs, and without punctuation. Absolute madness. 
• Cicero's first wife, Terentia, lived to be 103 years old.