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Voices from the Past

The End of the Republic

Cicero was an orator and the consul who defeated the conspiracy of Catiline. He was also a man of learning and culture who thought deeply about the political system of Rome. In 55 BCE he produced his first literary work, on oratory, and then in 54 began one of his most celebrated works De Republica, a study of the republican state, which now survives only in fragments. It was written as a dialogue set in the 120s and is an exercise in nostalgia, a lament for an idealized past when the various components of the Roman political system, the democratic, aristocratic, and monarchial, existed in harmony.

By the time he was writing Cicero's ideal world was no more. The Republic was disintegrating around him and he was acutely sensitive not only to its destruction but to his own deteriorating political position. Much is known of his feelings as some eight hundred of his letters have survived. They provide an incomparable insight into the period. Cicero's own personality, with its mixture of vanity and self-doubt, a love of peace and books:

set against a yearning for the approval of a public audience, captivates the reader.

The main recipient of Cicero's letters as an old school friend, Atticus, though many letters also survive to Cicero's brother, Quintus, and to Brutus, later to be one of the murderers of Caesar. Atticus (the name comes from Atticus' long residence as a young man in Athens) was a wealthy and cultured man who avoided politics and concentrated on his academic interests and friendships. When he later came to live in Rome he published Cicero's works. Cicero could write to him without reserve, yearning for his company and his advice when the two were separated. In the tense months when civil war broke out in 49 BCE Cicero's dependency on his friend becomes all the more acute. He writes in March 49:

I have nothing to write about, having had no news and having replied to all your letters yesterday. But since my distress of mind is such that it is not only impossible to sleep but torment to be awake. I have just started this scrawl without any subject in view, just in order as it were to talk to you, which is my only relief. (Translation by D. Shackleton Bailey)

Cicero was as much concerned with his own position as with that of the state. He was a republican by temperament, a believer in the ancient liberties of Rome, but had to admit, even in De Republica, that the breakdown of order required a strong man to take control. (Cicero had Pompey in mind) Yet strong men often act in a tyrannical way, and in another of his letters to Atticus, Cicero agonizes over what is the proper course to take in these situations. Is it right to risk the future of the state to oppose a tyrant? Is it legitimate to put the safety of oneself and one's family before one's duty to oppose tyranny? What measures can a ruler use to keep order without becoming a tyrant? As Caesar emerged as dictator in the 40s these questions took on a new urgency.

Cicero's letters are also remarkable for their accounts of the everyday life of a cultured and leisured man determined to create harmony and good taste around him. He writes to his brother Quintus in 54 BCE about progress on a new villa as Quintus was building:

At your Manilian place I found Diphilius [the architect] were going slow even for Diphilius. Still he had finished everything except for the baths, the cloister and the aviary. I liked the house enormously for the dignity of its paved colonnade, which I only realized when I saw the whole length open and the columns polished. It will all depend on the stucco harmonizing and I will see to that. The pavement seemed to be getting well laid. I did not care for some of the ceilings, and ordered them to be changed....I admired the topiary work; the ivy has so mantled everything, both the foundation wall and the spaces in the colonnade, that now those Greek statues look as if they were the topiary artists pointing it out for our approval. Again the bathing place is as cool and mossy as can be........ (Translation: L.P. Wilkinson)

Perhaps inevitably, as political and family affairs took their course, Cicero became burdened with his personal disappointments. He divorced his wife, Terentia, of many years of marriage when he found her meddling with his money. He saw his beloved daughter Tullia married three times, the first time to a man of integrity who died soon after, the third time to a rake. Then, in 45 BCE, she died in childbirth. It was a bitter blow. His son, Marcus, also proved to be a disappointment, ending up with a reputation of the hardest drinker in town. Yet is also clear from the letters that Cicero himself cannot have been easy to live with. He could be fussy, self pitying, and ambivalent in his loyalties. At the same time he displays an undoubted, if somewhat lofty, humanity in his distaste for the slaughter of animals in the shows, in his affection for his freedman, Tiro, who takes down his dictated letter and arranges for his books in a new home, and his concern over the deaths of those he loves. Cicero emerges as a fully human individual, one caught in a political turmoil over which he has no control and of which he eventually becomes a victim.