Cicero

by Anthony Everitt

  Tiro was the man who looked after confidential financial matters. Every month he chased up debtors and pacified creditors. He checked the management accounts of the steward Eros, which were sometimes incorrect. He negotiated with moneylenders on the not infrequent occasions when Cicero found himself embarrassed for ready cash. Once he was even commissioned with the sensitive task of pursuing an aristocratic debtor for a repayment. He was also involved in superintending building works, watching over the upkeep of gardens and generally harassing workmen. He looked after Cicero’s social life and organized the guest lists for dinner parties, often a delicate matter. “See about the dining room,” Cicero once instructed him. “Tertia will be there—provided that Publilius is not invited.”

  But Tiro’s main duties were secretarial and even editorial. He devised a shorthand which allowed him to write as fast as Cicero dictated. It is reported that he even helped Cicero with his writing and this is confirmed by a letter his master sent him in 53 when he was unwell. “My (or our) literary brainchildren have been drooping their heads missing you.… Pompey is staying with me as I write, enjoying himself in cheerful mood. He wants to hear my compositions, but I told him that in your absence my tongue of authorship is tied completely.”

  Tiro’s health was poor and Cicero often had reason to be seriously worried. “Aegypta arrived today,” Cicero once wrote to him solicitously. “He told me you were quite free of fever and in pretty good shape but said that you had not been able to write to me.… You cannot imagine how anxious I feel about your health.” Cicero told Atticus that Tiro “is extraordinarily useful to me when well in all sorts of ways, both in business and in my literary work, but I hope for his recovery more because he is such a nice, modest fellow than for my own convenience.” Although he was always complaining about Quintus’s overdependence on his freedman, Statius, his relationship with Tiro was just as close and trusting.

  Tiro seems to have been popular with other members of the family too. In the following decade, when he had saved up enough money to buy a small farm, young Marcus congratulated him in a letter that is full of affection and good humor. “Well, you are a man of landed property! You must shed your town-bred ways—you are now a Roman squire! How amusing to picture the delightful sight of you now. I imagine you buying farm tackle, talking to the bailiff, hoarding pips at dessert in your jacket pockets!”

  The past few years had been deeply unsatisfactory for Cicero, who felt he had been unfairly sidelined by the rise of the First Triumvirate. He did not anticipate the future with any greater confidence. Diehards in the Senate were determined to take revenge on Caesar for the illegalities of his Consulship. Political stability hung on the permanence of his partnership with Pompey and there were signs that this was coming under strain. In one sense, a breakdown in relations between the two men would be welcome to Cicero, for it would lift what he saw as a serious threat to the rule of law; but, from another perspective, it might transform civil discord into civil war.

  8

  THE IDEAL CONSTITUTION

  Writing about Politics: 55–43 BC

  Now that he was no longer able to play an active role in the conduct of affairs, Cicero decided to find time for another kind of political intervention. It took the form of extended critiques of the crisis facing the Republic, in which he offered his own proposals for reform. By writing books, he believed he could still influence the course of events. If he could no longer promote his cure-all for the Republic’s ills, the “harmony of the classes,” in the Senate House and the Forum, then he would do so from the study.

  Nothing like the modern publishing industry existed in ancient Rome, of course, 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.

  Readers had to work hard. Characters took one form only, without differentiation into capital and lowercase letters. There were no spaces between words or punctuation, and texts were unparagraphed.

  Like many Romans, Cicero was a great collector of books. He was proud to acquire rare editions and enjoyed visiting other people’s libraries. Despite the technical production difficulties, upper-class Romans were eager to buy the latest works of contemporary writers, which were carefully studied and much discussed. Political pamphlets were an accepted part of public life. 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. It was as an orator that he really made his reputation as a writer. He understood that a speech was a one-time, live event like an actor’s performance and that, in the public eye, he would be only as good as his latest appearance. So, like other successful public speakers of his day, he took great pains to work up his speeches on paper and publish them as books. In this way, past rhetorical triumphs became permanent records of achievement.

  But he had long been acknowledged as a leader, if not the leader, in this field and he sought a new, more demanding challenge. His first step was to set out his views on political education. This he did in The Ideal Orator (De oratore), a substantial work which he first mentioned to Atticus in November 55. What Cicero had in mind was a justification of rhetoric not as a technique but as an approach to the morally good life, a means of expressing and enforcing morality. Ever since his student days when he toured Greece and Asia Minor and studied both philosophy and rhetoric, he had been convinced that the two disciplines were intertwined. This was the proposition he now sought to demonstrate.

  The book was written as a dialogue (following the Greeks, this was a common convention for philosophical writing) and was imagined as an actual event taking place some years earlier, in 91. The leading figures were two of the great political and legal personalities of his adolescence, Lucius Licinius Crassus and Marcus Antonius. 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.

  Modeling himself largely on Plato’s Republic, from which there is a substantial direct quotation, he then composed another dialogue. On the State (De re publica), which he followed in due course with On Law (De legibus). Both books have only partially survived; On the State was discovered as late as 1820, when fragments amounting to about one third of the original were found in a palimpsest also containing St. Augustine’s commentary on the Psalms. Even in truncated form, while purporting to give an account of states in general, these works provide a comprehensive analysis of the weaknesses of the Roman constitution and proposals for its reform.

  AS we have already seen, Cicero did not fully appreciate the gravity of the political situation. In his judgment no more was required than a return to tried and tested traditions. “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 published about 51. Its subject, he told Quintus, was “the ideal constitution and the ideal citizen.” He found the work hard going, for it entailed a good deal of research both in the Greek authorities and in the history of Rome’s political development.

  He chose to set the dialogue safely in a more glorious and perhaps more authoritative past, making his main speaker Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus, the adopted grandson of the great Africanus, who had defeated Hannibal at Zama out
side Carthage in 202. He was a generous patron of the arts and letters and a Hellenophile. The action opens one morning during a public holiday in 129, not long before Scipio’s death at the end of a long life. This timing was not accidental, for the stormy career of Tiberius Gracchus was recent history. Cicero believed that his Tribuneship, which “divided one people into two factions,” had introduced the long constitutional crisis which now was coming to a head.

  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, is a tribute to his scholarship and philosophical attainments. Scipio rises from his couch, dresses and puts on his shoes. The company moves to a portico of the house, where the talk turns away from the physical nature of the universe, on the grounds that it is unknowable, to the nature of good governance, about which truths can be ascertained.

  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. Scipio’s personal preference is for the good king, father to his subjects, but the tendency towards tyranny is hard to eradicate. So “a moderate and well-balanced form of government which is a combination of the three simple good forms is preferable even to monarchy.” A substantial part of the book is devoted to a constitutional history of the early days of Rome and, through Scipio’s words, Cicero nostalgically evokes the Republic in its primitive, pure and thoroughly oligarchical form.

  The government was so administered by the Senate that, though the People were free, few political acts were performed by them, practically everything being done by the authority of the Senate and in accordance with its established customs, and the Consuls held a power which, though only of one year’s duration, was truly regal in general character and in legal sanction. Another principle that was most important to the retention of the power by the aristocracy was also strictly maintained—namely, that no act of a popular assembly should be valid unless ordered by the Senate.

  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. However, it did not fit the circumstances of the last hundred years of the Republic as neatly as Cicero argued it did. For one thing, it took no account of the political significance of the equites, the business class. His ideas also ignored the unpalatable fact that the last attempt to reestablish the mixed constitution, Sulla’s reforms, had been dismantled soon after his death and had, in fact, been guaranteed by another power which receives little attention in On the State, military force.

  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. There had been a decline in moral standards and a corruption of old habits of responsibility in public life. All would be well if only there were a return to traditional values, a rediscovery of the “ideal” statesman and citizen. The constitution itself, properly interpreted, was perfect.

  On the State seems to have been an immediate success with the reading public. It contains some of Cicero’s most majestic prose. In the sixth book Scipio recalls a dream in which he met the shade of the long-dead Africanus. A virtuous life, Africanus told him,

  “is the highway to heaven, to that assembly of all those who have ended their terrestrial lives and been freed from the flesh. They live in that place over there which you now see” (it was the round of light that blazed brightest of all the fires in the sky), “which you mortals, borrowing a Greek term, call the Milky Circle.” When I looked all around me from that point, everything else appeared extraordinarily beautiful. There were stars invisible from earth, all larger than we have ever conceived. The smallest was the most distant and the one closest to the earth shone with a reflected light. The starry orbs were much larger than the earth. In fact, the earth itself seemed so small that I felt scornful of our empire, which is only a kind of dot.… Beneath the Moon there is nothing that is not mortal and doomed to decay, except for the souls which, by the grace of the gods, have been conferred on humankind. But above the Moon everything is eternal.

  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.

  The book’s sequel, On Law, also inspired by Plato, was started in 52. Yet Cicero was unable to finish it, if indeed he ever did, until the last year of his life. Only three volumes survive of what may have been intended to be, or were, at least five.

  The book is a dialogue, set in the countryside on Cicero’s estate at Arpinum, and the speakers are Quintus, Atticus and the author. The conversation opens with a general debate in which Cicero argues that law is inherent in the workings of the universe. 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.”

  A familiar Ciceronian theme reappears: the moral force of oratory. 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.” The mind “must employ not merely the customary subtle method of debate but also the more copious continuous style, considering, for example, how to rule nations, establish laws, punish the wicked, protect the good, honor those who excel [and] publish to fellow citizens precepts conducive to their well-being and credit, so designed as to win their acceptance.” This is necessary, for it is abundantly clear to Cicero that the actual legislation of states is not necessarily consistent with natural law. “The most foolish notion of all is the belief that everything is just which is found in the customs or laws of nations.”

  Volumes two and three proceed to outline in detail a legal code for an ideal state. Unsurprisingly, it has a close resemblance to the Roman constitution, with its more obvious flaws (as seen by Cicero) ironed out. So, for example, he recommends “two officeholders with royal powers,” very similar to the Consuls, but insists that they should not hold office again except after a ten-year interval, a Roman convention more honored in the breach than in the observance. Elsewhere in his writings, Cicero’s skepticism shows that his cast of mind was rational rather than religious and that he gave little credit to the validity of soothsaying and the like, but here he regards religious observance, ritual, the role of priests as the interpreters and controllers of prodigies and ancestral rites as the foundation of governance.

  In closing, Cicero examines the functions and powers of public officials. His object, as ever, is to assert his concept of the mixed constitution with rights for the People but with the Senate predominant. Thus, according to one of his proposed laws concerning suffrage, the ballot should be open to all citizens but the votes cast should be scrutinized by the “traditional leaders of the state.” His line is that senior figures in the state should be able to monitor how citizens vote on the grounds that “everyone knows that laws which provide secret ballots have deprived the aristocracy of all influence.”

  Cicero’s constitutional writings reveal a humane conservatism. It says a great deal for his intellectual tenacity that he maintained his beliefs during the years when Caesar�
��s astonishing career reached its climax and the pillars of the Republic finally came crashing down.

  9

  THE DRIFT TO CIVIL WAR

  52–50 BC

  During his sole Consulship in 52, Pompey put through a range of reforms. Some were sensibly designed to correct administrative abuses, but others were purely political and suggested that he was considering whether to align himself with Caesar, now within sight of the end of his labors in Gaul, or with the Senate. On the face of it, he still supported Caesar. Despite the displeasure of the optimates, he had arranged for legislation which gave Caesar permission to stand for a second Consulship in absentia. Caesar intended to hold office in 48—very properly observing the convention that a second Consulship could not take place until ten years had elapsed since the first.

  The law that had appointed Caesar as governor of Gaul did not allow the Senate to discuss his successor before March of 50. The allocation of provinces for a given year was decided in advance, before the Consuls and Praetors who would receive them were elected. This meant that Caesar could be replaced only by the senior officeholders of 49. Although it was technically feasible for a Consul to take up a governorship while still in office, it was unusual and so in all probability Caesar could count on remaining in his post until the beginning of 48, by which time he could expect to be Consul.

  It was essential that he be able to stay in his province until then. If any interval of time arose between the end of his governorship and the start of his Consular term, and if he were compelled to come to Rome and campaign in person, his legal immunity would lapse and his enemies in the Senate, led by Cato, would undoubtedly bring him to trial for alleged breaches of the law during his first Consulship in 59. If he was found guilty, his career would be brought to a rapid premature conclusion. So Pompey’s new law was vital for his political survival. Yet even if Caesar lost his immunity, few believed that he would actually appear in court. More probably, the matter would be settled by force: he would lead his legions into Italy.