He always belonged to the best party [i.e., the optimates] … only he made it a rule not to serve his party; he was contented with giving it his good wishes. But these good wishes were the warmest imaginable.… His reserve only began when it was necessary to act.… The more we think about it, the less we can imagine the reasons he could give [his friends] to justify his conduct.
Cicero agreed neither with Caesar nor with Atticus about the conclusions to be drawn from the years of bloodshed and confusion. In his eyes, the breakdown of civilized values was inexcusable. Physical timidity may have had something to do with it, but his deepest instincts were for the rule of law. What was needed, in his view, was a recall to order.
AS a fellow Arpinate, he had mixed feelings about Marius, whom he saw during his last agonized years. He wrote a poetic eulogy of Marius in epic hexameters and admired the superhuman achievements of the general who had destroyed the Cimbri and the Teutones and the tenacity that had raised him to the head of affairs, but he was not at all tempted by his popularis politics. He despised Cinna, whose reign he regarded as a black interlude of criminality. The time spent in the company of senior statesmen and jurists, two of whom, Antonius and Scaevola, had perished in the chaos, gave him a love of tradition he never lost. If only the good old ways could be restored, he thought, all would again be well.
At the same time, although he was on Sulla’s side ideologically, the memory of the Dictator’s vengefulness never left him. In a book published in the 40s he referred, one senses almost with a physical shudder, to “the proscriptions of the rich, the destruction of the townships of Italy, the well-known ‘harvest’ of Sulla’s time.” Cicero detested Roman militarism and came to the view that his old civilian patron, Scaurus, the Leader of the Senate and a forceful defender of the Senate’s authority, was in no way inferior to a general like Marius. “Victories in the field,” he commented, “count for little if the right decisions are not taken at home.”
While in the last resort he could be brave and decisive, Cicero did not have Caesar’s flamboyant coolness under fire. His brief military experience during the War of the Allies had not recommended a soldier’s life to him. So, not for the last time in his career, when confronted by brute force, he retreated from the bloodshed into his books. He feared that he would never realize his ambition to become a lawyer, for, as he recalled, “it appeared that the whole institution of the courts had vanished forever.” AS Plutarch, his biographer, who wrote around the turn of the first century AD, put it: “Seeing that the whole state was splitting up into factions and that the result of this would be the unlimited power of one man, he retired into the life of a scholar and philosopher, going on with his studies and associating with Greek scholars.”
An uncovenanted benefit of the war with Mithridates was that many intellectuals and thinkers fled to Rome. One of these was Philo of Larisa, head of the Academy in Athens, founded by Plato three hundred years before. He inspired Cicero with a passion for philosophy, and in particular for the theories of Skepticism, which asserted that knowledge of the nature of things is in the nature of things unattainable. Such ideas were well judged to appeal to a student of rhetoric who had learned to argue all sides of a case. In his early twenties Cicero wrote the first two volumes of a work on “invention”—that is to say, the technique of finding ideas and arguments for a speech; in it he noted that the most important thing was “that we do not recklessly and presumptuously assume something to be true.” This resolute uncertainty was to be a permanent feature of his thought.
He learned about the doctrines of Stoicism from the philosopher Diodotus, who was a member of his clientela and, until his death in about 60, lived in Cicero’s house. Diodotus seems to have been an indomitable old man; when he became blind in his declining years, he took up geometry and played the lyre. His young employer was impressed by what he learned of a school of thought that saw the universe as an organic whole consisting of two indivisible aspects: an active principle (God) and that which it acts on (matter). Man’s duty was to live an active life in harmony with nature; that was the way to be virtuous, because virtue was the active principle that infused nature. It followed that the wise man was indifferent to fortune and suspicious of emotion. Cicero could not go this far, but he appreciated the modified Stoicism of his day, which sought to reconcile the notion of a divine spirit in the universe with conventional Greco-Roman religious ideas.
Cicero’s withdrawal into literary 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.
3
THE FORUM AND THE FRAY
The Birth of an Orator: 81–77 BC
Almost all the main incidents in Cicero’s career unfolded in a space hardly larger than two football fields, a square in the center of Rome. This was the Forum, where advocates addressed juries and politicians the People. In contemporary British terms, it combined the functions of Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, the City of London and a shopping mall. All the personal services of urban life could be found there, from food stores to rent boys.
Rome itself had a profound impact on a teenager who had spent his early years in a small provincial town. It was by far the largest city in the ancient world. Time-travelers from the present day who had only the gift of sight would be at home in a townscape recognizably like the ancient cities of the Maghreb—say, Marrakesh or Fez or the casbah of Algiers. But if they could hear and understand Latin, they would quickly realize that Rome was a city without any of the public facilities which today we take for granted (except for the water supply, channeled into the city on aqueducts and underground sewers). Life was lived in the daylight hours. There was no street lighting: when night fell, the only illumination came from individual torches carried by pedestrians or their servants. Most Romans found it safer to be indoors in the evening.
Town planning was an art in its infancy and Rome had no wide thoroughfares or avenues. It was a web of lanes and alleys. Cicero referred to the city as “planted in mountains and deep valleys, its garrets hanging up above, its roads far from good, merely narrow byways.” An urban district was, in effect, defined by a single street running through it. (The Latin word vicus meant both a quarter and a street.) The law required it to be at least five meters wide. At the end of each one there was a crossroads from which other roads and quarters led off. These central streets were the only ones that strangers were wise to visit. They were public spaces, but the urban hinterland beyond was essentially private and outside state control.
Different quarters specialized in particular industries or trades. So, for example, leather goods—books and sandals—could be found in the Argiletum. The Subura was known for its lowlife and brothels. The Aventine Hill, with its temple of Minerva, goddess of wisdom and the arts and sciences, on the summit, was an artists’ quarter, like the Left Bank in Paris or London’s Soho. Many playwrights and actors were based there, as was a community of poets. A self-help corporation of artists who lived and worked on the Aventine afforded a degree of mutual protection in what were, then as now, precarious professions. This was also a part of the city that attracted social misfits and victim
s of exclusion: foreigners, widows and prostitutes.
Rome was seriously overcrowded and, in an attempt to solve the chronic housing problem, blocks of apartments or insulae (literally, “islands”) were constructed. These high-rise buildings, usually with shops on the ground floor, had about five or six stories and could be as tall as twenty meters. They were usually jerry-built and frequently collapsed. Other risks that citizens, and especially the poor, faced were fires and periodic floods when the Tiber overflowed its banks. The state took little or no interest in such events and the only social intervention it made was to insure and subsidize the corn supply. Anything might happen to urban Romans, but at least they would not starve.
Cicero was to become a landlord and developer, once he had made his fortune and become a man of means; he wrote to Atticus with that combination of insouciance and greed that has marked the upper-class rentier throughout the ages: “Two of my shops have collapsed and the others are showing cracks, so that even the mice have moved elsewhere, to say nothing of the tenants. Other people call this a disaster, I don’t even call it a nuisance.… Heavens above, how utterly trivial such things appear to me! However, there is a building scheme under way … which should turn this loss into a source of profit.”
The smartest addresses were on the Palatine and Velia Hills, although the pressure on space was so great that the mansions of the rich were built on tiny plots of land with minuscule gardens. In his heyday Cicero was hugely proud to own one of the largest houses on the Palatine. Two winding streets, Victory Rise (Clivus Victoriae) and Palatine Rise (Clivus Palatinus), could accommodate carriages and led up from the valley below, from the Forum and the hurly-burly of urban life.
Although the Romans were a practical people, they believed that the foundation of a built community was a sacred act. The city’s boundary, the pomoerium, was holy and inviolable. According to legend, this was a furrow which a plow drawn by a white heifer and ox had traced at the time of Rome’s foundation and it was forbidden to cross it. Entrance was restricted to the gates or ianua where the plow had been lifted. Soldiers were denied access and became civilians when they came inside the ritual enclosure. Likewise burials were not allowed inside the pomoerium.
The Forum was the city’s political, commercial and legal heart, but it was also its spiritual center, a space even more sacred than the city itself. A rectangular piazza, approaching 200 meters long by 75 meters wide, and flagged with stones, it lay in what had once been a marsh between the hills of the Capitol, the citadel where the great Temple of Jupiter stood, and the Palatine. Today it is a jumble of grass and stone rubble, where a few lucky pillars survive to recall the days of ancient Rome. However, with imagination and a guidebook, it is not very difficult to reconstruct in the mind’s eye the scene as it was when the young Cicero presented his first case as a counsel for the defense in 81 BC.
At one end, from 78 BC, the tall facade of the national archive, the Tabularium, lined the cliff of the Capitol. In front, from the point of view of an observer facing it, stood the Temple of Concord (Concordia) and on its left the Temple of Saturn with its large forecourt, which functioned as the State Treasury. Religion and daily life were not separated in the Roman mind and temples were regularly used for business and state purposes.
On the right, the Senate House and the Assembly Ground (Comitium) provided the setting for political activity. 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. Maintained and refurbished by the great families that had had them built, they contained shops and meeting rooms. Farther down just past the Basilica Sempronia, the Temple of Castor and Pollux (or Temple of the Castors) stood on a high podium under which were two rows of moneylenders’ booths—the nearest equivalents to modern banks. The building, which had a large speaker’s platform in front of the temple porch, also served as a political meeting place and the Senate was often convened there. Nearby, judicial proceedings were held at the Tribunal Aurelium, a stone dais surrounded by steps from the top of which Cicero was to harangue juries. Cases were conducted out-of-doors in various parts of the Forum and advocates had to speak in rain or shine, summer heat or winter cold.
Underneath the flagstones of the square itself was (and still is) a network of underground tunnels. These were where gladiators waited before emerging to fight in a temporary wooden arena where various kinds of spectacle were staged during festivals and on holidays.
The Forum was closed at its far end by a group of religious buildings—among them the circular Temple of Vesta, goddess of the hearth. Here an eternal flame was tended by a team of six free-born women dedicated to chastity, the Vestal Virgins, who lived in a large house beyond the Temple. They were appointed between the ages of six and ten and served for thirty years. If they broke their vows (happily, a rare event), they were buried alive outside the pomoerium, and their lovers were whipped to death on the Assembly Ground. The Vestal Virgins were symbolically married to the Chief Pontiff (pontifex maximus, a title later expropriated by the pope).
The Chief Pontiff chaired the highest religious council, the College of Pontiffs, and was responsible for the organization of the state religion. The College in turn was in charge of the calendar and decided the dates of festivals and public holidays. It also kept a record of the principal events of each year, the Annals. Overall, its task was to regulate the relations between gods and men. The Chief Pontiff lived next door to the Vestal Virgins in the State House (domus publica). Nearby was the somewhat extravagantly named Palace (regia), a poky little structure built centuries before, when kings still ruled the city. It contained a variety of sacred objects and housed the Annals and the official calendar.
Politics in the late Republic was grounded in a profound sense of what it was to be a Roman, a commitment to the mos maiorum, ancestral customs. This sense was, quite literally, embodied in the Forum’s layout and structures. There was hardly a spot that had not been the scene of some great event in the city’s legendary past as well as more recent, historical times.
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.
Beside the Basilica Fulvia Aemilia stood a little shrine to Venus Cloacina, just above the spot where a great subterranean drain, the Cloaca Maxima, ran beneath the Forum (the Cloaca survives to this day). Here in the dim past Roman and Sabine soldiers, about to do battle, had laid down their arms and purified themselves with sprigs of myrtle: they had quarreled after the Romans, facing a population crisis, had kidnapped some women of the neighboring Sabine tribe to provide themselves with more wives. A few yards away wa
s the Navel of the city (umbilicus Romae); this was considered to be the center of the city and the point at which the living world was in contact, through a deep cleft in the ground, with the underworld. The site that combined the historical and the sacred at their most vital was the Black Stone (niger lapis) next to the Assembly Ground. This was a sanctuary of great antiquity dedicated to the god Vulcan and nearby was the legendary site of the assassination of Rome’s founder, Romulus.
Plan of the Roman Forum, Cicero’s workplace as a lawyer, as it was from the mid-second to the mid-first century BC. The positioning of buildings indicated by broken lines is different from that of the present day. Trials were held in the open air with the presiding judge on a platform and jury seated nearby.
Speculative plan of the Senate House. The presiding Consul chaired meetings from the dais opposite the main door. Former Consuls sat in the front rows.
A reconstruction of the main features of the Roman Forum in Cicero’s day. It was crowded with statues, an altar here and a shrine there, historical paintings near the Assembly Ground, a stone lawyers’ platform, and the impedimenta of temporary stands and notice boards.
It was not only the Forum that was sacred but also most of the activities that were conducted there. Political and indeed private life was governed by a web of religious rules and procedures, predictions and omens. 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.
Cicero Page 7
