"Cicero" by Anthony Everitt

Cicero had reached the heights of office when he became consul in 63 B.C. The two consuls were Rome's supreme wielders of executive power, elected to serve jointly for one year. He was bursting with sometimes boastful pride and boundless energy (he had already proven his mettle as a scrupulously honest grain supply supervisor in Sicily). At this auspicious moment, the radical Catilina -- a restless nobleman who had decided to undertake what he once called "the championship of the oppressed" -- decided to stage a coup d'état. The assassination of Cicero was among his plans.

The young consul was therefore suddenly faced with a life or death crisis: Should he call on the Final Act (or senatus consultum ultimum), a fierce emergency powers provision, or try to buy Catilina off in some other way? The Final Act was somewhat akin to the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act currently being wielded by John Ashcroft in the war against terrorism; it gave a consul the right to modify and even suspend certain civil liberties. But faced with the Catilinarian Conspiracy, Cicero didn't hesitate to use it. Roman politics, after all, was not a polite chess game: Losers frequently had their severed heads nailed to the Speaker's Platform in the Forum, the very place where Cicero conducted his daily business.

At Cicero's instigation, Catilina was easily crushed by a loyal army and the leading conspirators executed without trial. Cicero emerged as the hero of the hour. His mistake was to boast about it eloquently for the rest of his life, claiming raisons d'état. After his consulship, in fact, his career went through endless vagaries as he continued to make his name as a public speaker and lawyer. He wrote immensely popular compendiums of Greek philosophy that became one of the main transmitters of Greek thought to later centuries. He wrote bad poetry, self-aggrandizing propaganda tracts, nitric speeches against enemies, defenses of the constitution and many affectionately witty letters to his brother Quintus and his old friend Atticus in Athens.

Meanwhile, Cicero fretted. Had he used dictatorial methods to quell a would-be dictator? In fact, Catilina was only one in a long succession of charismatic populares. Another was the mercurial and violent Clodius, a wealthy member of the raffish circle of the poet Catullus. These discontented bohemians loathed and feared Cicero, and Clodius eventually waged a kind of crazy street war against him, hiring gangs to burn down his house on the Palatine Hill. Interestingly, the two sides also espoused opposing schools of rhetoric. Rather surprisingly, Catullus' group favored the so-called Attic Style, which emphasized simplicity, purity of diction and plainness; Cicero, on the other hand, advocated a style that was florid, emotional and sometimes ridiculously histrionic -- but far more demagogically potent, as his numerous successful lawsuits proved.

Rather like Weimar Germany in the 1920s, late republican Rome was a society where the street was an often lawless place. With no standing police force and troops forbidden to enter the city, Rome was frequently prostrate before the whims of political gangs. Cicero himself seems not to have understood how ineffective and self-deluding the republican government had become as it lurched blindly from crisis to crisis. Fundamentally, it had no answer to the intelligent (or even unintelligent) use of violence. The richer Rome became, the greater the temptation to seize power through force. To us, the struggles of this period have a slight Keystone Kops quality, with the warring parties brawling like saloon toughs in the Forum and frequently burning down the Senate House, but the consequences of such commotions were momentous -- they affected an empire that ruled 100 million people, or a quarter of the world's known population at the time.

Clodius was eventually murdered himself in just such an unseemly brawl, but after him came pretenders who were more cunning and better organized. Chief among these was Caesar himself. Caesar is an enigmatic figure, and an appealing one at that. Handsome, wily, charming, intelligent -- something of an ancient JFK -- Caesar made his name as a successful general in the conquest of Gaul (about which he wrote a much-admired history). He spurned the revolutionary antics of Catilina and Clodius, but clove to their underlying sympathies. His relations with Cicero were curious and cautious. Caesar, says Everitt, liked the easygoing and jocular orator and admired his intellect. They sent each other their books for mutual comment.

Caesar tried ceaselessly to co-opt Cicero to his cause, without success. In some ways, this was the central political relationship of Cicero's life. (He had been invited to join Caesar's First Triumvirate, the joint dictatorship set up in 60 B.C., but refused.) When Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in the year 44 B.C., the conspirator Marcus Junius Brutus famously cried out Cicero's name as he proclaimed the reestablishment of the republic. But Cicero quickly fled the scene. His feelings remained ambivalent. Only at the very end of his life did his temperament harden as he realized that the republic was dying and that Caesar had indeed been its executioner. (Caesar had long realized, perhaps fatalistically, that the chaotic government overseen by the Senate could no longer administer a vast empire.)

Next Page: The great orator's tongue pierced with hatpins

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