Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) came into the world with a penchant for eloquence, and over the years he developed, honed, and polished it to the point where he became the most renowned of Roman orators. Much of his oration was displayed in the courts. If in the later days of the Roman Republic, you wished to be defended, or have an enemy prosecuted, Cicero was your man.
As a young man, Cicero traveled to the island of Rhodes, where he put himself under the tutelage of Apollonius Molon, a famed orator of the day. There, in Cicero’s words, "Molon devoted himself, if only he could achieve it, to curbing my overabundance and superfluity and to controlling the flow of speech that overflowed its banks with the unbridled audacity of youth." Cicero would go on to become a Molon in his own right, providing instruction about oratory in his Brutus and other of his books. Even today, more than two millennia later, there is much to be learned from these writings about the uses of tact, clarity, humor, and power in formal speech.
During the years of the Republic, Rome had no regular police force, prison system, or official public prosecutors. As late as 81 B.C. the dictator Sulla established seven courts to try crimes of treason, extortion, electoral malpractice, embezzlement, forgery, assault, and murder. Courts were often used as organs of revenge. Courtroom procedures were vastly different than those we know today: Rough attacks on character were permitted, standards of evidence were less rigid, and perjury was not a crime.
In his Lawless Republic Josiah Osgood, a professor of classics at Georgetown University, recounts several of Cicero’s trials, including his first and last, and does so with quiet authority and impressive lucidity. His chief sources are Cicero’s printing of his own courtroom speeches and other writings. Cicero has been fortunate among ancient Romans in having a vast amount of his writing—no fewer than 29 books in the Loeb Classical Library—survive. Much of what we know about the late Roman Republic we know from Cicero. From these writings it also emerges that Cicero was the first pure type of the intellectual.
Perhaps the most interesting of the trials in which Cicero participated is the one occasion on which he served as prosecutor. This was the case against the magistrate Gaius Verres, who openly plundered the Sicilians he was sent to govern. A thief with a strong aesthetic sense, Verres was a man who couldn’t bear anyone else to possess any objects of beauty. Wherever possible he stripped the homes of the wealthy and the temples of their statues and paintings. Had you a decent set of silverware, you would have been mistaken to have invited him for dinner for he was certain to return to take it from you. Cicero won, and Verres was sent into exile. In this case Cicero had defeated Verres’ defender Quintus Hortensius, and thereby established himself as the leading advocate in Rome. Verres, pleasing to report, was later proscribed by Mark Antony and divested of all his beloved stolen possessions.
One does not ordinarily think of Cicero as an amusing man, but Osgood shows him to be, more than amusing, witty. Much of the wit arrived in the form of courtroom put-downs of figures prosecuting his various clients. (He could also, at heightened moments, bring tears in the courtroom.) During his examination of Verres, for example, when Hortensius claimed not to understand Cicero’s supposed riddles, Cicero replied, "You should; you’ve got a sphinx [given to him by Verres] in your house." He was also not above using an opponent’s homosexuality against him in court, for, as Osgood notes, Cicero along with most Romans of the day, linked "gender deviance and political subversion, as he often did in attacking those he deemed a threat to public order."
Cicero’s ambition went well beyond the courtroom. While he had neither skill nor a taste for military life—"I refer a court to the sword," he wrote to his friend Atticus—he could not resist the lure of politics. Owing to his success in court, Cicero fairly quickly climbed the cursus honorum, or Roman ladder of political status, from quaestor to aedile to praetor, and in 63 B.C. became one of the two annually elected consuls, or leaders, over all of Rome and its provinces.
The cursus honorum was generally available only to the senatorial class. Cicero’s family was of the class known as equestrian, or less than noble. As such he was a so-called new man, which is to say one without substantial family history in Rome. But, as Osgood explains, because Cicero defended so many wealthy nobles in court, he was given a pass. Once a consul, he and his descendants themselves qualified as noble. Cicero believed that the political life was life lived at its zenith. In his De re publica, he wrote: "For all men who persevered, aided, and increased the fatherland there is a certain place reserved in heaven, where, blessed, they enjoy eternal life."
During his year as consul, Cicero’s life radically changed. The first change was his encounter with Lucius Sergius Catiline. A man of patrician ancestry, Catiline twice lost election to the consulship, and much resented having done so. He resented it enough to call together a group to help him stage a military coup. One of the first projects of this group of conspirators was to kill Cicero, who had defeated Catiline for consul in 64 B.C. Osgood’s account of what has become known as the Catiline Conspiracy makes vivid an immensely complex plot of intrigue. In the end five of the conspirators were put to death without trial. "In the prison was an underground chamber, dark and foul-smelling, reached only by an opening in its stone ceiling," Osgood writes. "One by one, the conspirators were lowered into the chamber and strangled by a noose by the public executioners." Cicero would soon after be excoriated for having ordered these men put to death without trial, while others, among them the strong traditionalist Cato the younger, applauded Cicero’s quickness to take action and save the city. Catiline later died in battle against senatorial armies, his head, in the custom of the day, detached and sent to Rome.
The other trial to which Josiah Osgood gives full-court press attention is that against Publius Clodius Pulcher, a trial in which Cicero acted not as an advocate but as a witness for the prosecution. The occasion for the trial was the revelation that Clodius, a man of the distinguished aristocratic family of the Claudii, disguised himself as a woman and invaded the all-female religious rite known as the Good Goddess. He had apparently done so to hook up with a lover, and, when caught, caused a scandal great enough for him to be put on trial in a special court proceeding for impurity. In serving as a witness for the prosecution, Cicero acquired a powerful enemy for life in Clodius.
Osgood has no praise for Cicero’s politics. He holds that Cicero "can be faulted for having shown little consideration for the ordinary people of Rome and their struggles." Osgood cites a letter of Cicero’s to his friend Atticus in which he sides with the wealthy of Rome against "the dregs of the city populace … the wretched rabble that comes to meetings, treasury leeches." He adds that Cicero, far from unifying the Republic as he claimed, "showed more commitment to upholding the interests of the well-off than maintaining the rule of law." Nor did he have any difficulty living with slavery, though slaves were said at one point to have made up nearly half the population of Rome.
Brilliant in so many regards though he was, Cicero seems to have had a positive knack in political disputes for aligning himself with the wrong sides. Consider Julius Caesar. Six years younger than Cicero, Caesar came from one of the oldest of Roman families, so old he counted the goddess Venus among his ancestors. For some years, Osgood writes, "Cicero had been friendly with Caesar. [His brother] Quintus had joined Caesar’s staff in Gaul and grown wealthy from his service. Caesar lent money to Cicero, sent him many complimentary letters, and had even written a work on the Latin language and dedicated it to him." But with civil war brewing between Caesar and Pompey, and little as he wished to choose sides, Cicero, who had a longstanding relationship with Pompey, felt he must side with him. Wrong choice, for at the battle of Pharsalus (48 B.C.) Caesar’s forces devastated Pompey’s, whose head, decapitated in Egypt, was later brought to Caesar.
Caesar, who prided himself on his clemency, offered it to Cicero. But Caesar’s predilection toward dictatorship put Cicero off. Cicero turned out to be, as Osgood notes, one of the most emphatic defenders of the assassination of Caesar. Another mistaken choice. Cicero wrote philippics attacking Mark Antony. Later, after the battle of Philippi (42 B.C.), in which Octavian (later to be Augustus, first emperor of Rome) and Mark Antony defeated Brutus and Cassius, Cicero, captured by Antony’s henchmen, had his head and hands cut off and subsequently nailed up at the Rostra in the Forum in Rome.
Josiah Osgood ends his book quoting the Roman historian Livy on Cicero: "If one weighs his good qualities against his bad, he was a great and memorable man, and to sing his praises one would need a Cicero as eulogist." The moral of the story, if moral there be, is that the life of Cicero demonstrates that intellectuals do well to steer clear of direct participation in politics.
Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome
by Josiah Osgood
Basic Books, 384 pp., $32
Joseph Epstein is the author, most recently, of The Novel, Who Needs It? (Encounter Books).