"Cicero" by Anthony Everitt

Ancient Rome's greatest politican and public speaker lived a life of intrigue, betrayal and violence -- and no American leader today can hold a candle to him.

By Lawrence Osborne

Aug 27, 2002 | The opening sequence of Ridley Scott's "Gladiator" shows Rome from the air as if seen from a passing helicopter. The city is made to look like Manhattan, a forest of towers and canyon streets. The subliminal message is clear enough: If Rome was the Manhattan of the ancients, then we naturally enough are the Romans of today. Americans have always modeled themselves on the Romans. And the Romans -- pragmatic, ruthless, patriotic, engineering-obsessed -- certainly look like the Americans of antiquity, a comparison made only the more alluring by what we perceive to be their pathological violence, their taste for lurid spectacle and their imperial overreach. Moreover, didn't the Romans face many of the same problems we do? If Rome seems cool to Americans, no wonder.

Obviously, the Romans gave us our most glamorous symbols of democracy and public virtue -- our Senate and much of our municipal architecture -- a style that is largely derived from the Roman Maison Carree in Nîmes, France, a building beloved by Thomas Jefferson. But whether we choose to admit it or not, what we also like about the Romans is their flashy talent for power, their imperial chutzpah. And, we might add, their ability to run a complex, multiethnic world society with consummate skill. Or perhaps, like the Romans themselves, we simply want to have it both ways, to be republican imperialists or imperialist republicans, and we see the Romans as being mired in much the same dilemma.

Anthony Everitt, in his suave and gripping biography of Cicero, the famed orator of the late republic, reminds us that things were certainly not simple for the Romans themselves. He never makes the Rome-America analogy explicit, but reading his book one cannot help making it anyway. For few Romans were more admired by early Americans than Marcus Tullius Cicero, the defender of the doomed republic. And few ancient careers strike such ominous chords with our own era.

Cicero's life (he was born in 106 B.C., in Arpinum, and died in 43 B.C.) coincided with the last golden age of the Roman republic before it was dismantled and turned into an empire. A brilliant and sometimes scathing lawyer from a well-to-do provincial family, Cicero found himself unwillingly at the heart of a 100-year civil war that pitted the traditional oligarchy of the Senate -- known as the optimates -- against a new breed of fiery class-war demagogues known as populares. Like our left and right, Democrats and Republicans, both parties were drawn from much the same social class, attended the same dinner parties and often saw politics as a personal power trip. But they had two radically different visions of the Roman state. The optimates yearned for a moderate republican status quo; the radicals wanted reforms that would eventually lead to a completely different kind of state, one ruled by a purportedly enlightened despot.

Deeply influenced by Greek culture, Cicero was by temperament still firmly wedded to Roman tradition. Socially, he was among the "new men" of the first century B.C. -- a host of provincial upstarts making legal and professional careers for themselves in the booming imperial city. This duality haunted him throughout his life, for Cicero could never find a comfortable home for himself in either political camp. To the optimates he was a suspect arriviste; to the populares he was a dangerous reactionary. Like many well-educated Romans, he had a passionate nostalgia for the countryside, for the simple life of the farm, most famously expressed in his "Conversations in Tusculum," which celebrate his idyllic villa at Tusculum (near today's Frascati just south of Rome). His attachment to conservatism was also aesthetic: Manners and taste, like decency and morality, were to him products of the Roman past.

But ironically (and fatally for them), Rome's bungling and stubborn aristocrats could never admit such a provincial outsider into their ranks. He wasn't a true Roman and he wasn't a blue blood, though he did have connections by marriage to important families. This meant that the hungry young lawyer and public speaker making his way up the treacherous Roman political ladder had to do some nifty acrobatics. Was he on the "left" or the "right," with the optimates or the populares? Often nobody could tell. One day he was a client of the conservative dictator Sulla and an enemy of the populist dictator Marius; the next he was enjoying dinner with populares sympathizers like the millionaire Crassus and his cunning protégé the young Julius Caesar. Moreover, Cicero was a vain, voluble, wisecracking sort of guy -- in short, he would forgive much for a good joke and a good dinner.

It's perhaps difficult for modern Americans to grasp that Roman democracy -- that remarkable phenomenon of the ancient world, with its intricate system of constitutional checks and balances -- was defended by aristocratic conservatives and eventually destroyed by men preaching reformist revolution. One such revolutionary was Catilina, Cicero's mortal enemy.

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