"Cicero" by Anthony Everitt

Paradoxically, then, after a lifetime of political disappointments, Cicero's greatest hour was also his last. In the final culminating act of the century-long civil war, the old orator finally nailed his colors to the disintegrating republic. Cassius and Brutus, the killers of Caesar, took the eastern half of the empire and faced off against Caesar's heirs: his drunken henchman, Mark Antony, whom Cicero despised, and Caesar's 18-year-old adopted son, the blond and icy-nerved Octavian, whom Cicero both rather admired and fully distrusted.

Antony and Octavian were destined to become uneasy allies, for both wanted to avenge Caesar's death, but in fact they hated each other, and Cicero cleverly played them off against one another. Against Antony he waged a personal and political vendetta, writing 13 famous Philippics against him -- a Philippic being a jeremiad modeled on the Athenian orator Demosthenes' attacks on Philip the Great, whom Demosthenes portrayed as a tyrant. Antony was not amused.

After the republicans were crushed (Brutus and Cassius were later defeated at the Battle of Philippi in Greece and committed suicide), Antony extracted the ultimate revenge on the meddling old firebrand. For, despite all of Cicero's oratorical conniving, military force -- not to mention the force of outsize personalities demented with ambition -- had brought 500 years of Roman democracy to an end. The new dictatorship (familiar to us from Shakespeare) was a Second Triumvirate formed by Octavian, Antony and a general of Caesar's named Lepidus. It immediately declared hundreds of senators to be public enemies and put bounties on their heads. Unsurprisingly, one of them was Cicero himself.

Cicero's final drama was a favorite subject of ancient historians, who on the whole were rather cool in their assessments. (They were writing under emperors, after all.) Fleeing from one of his country villas in a litter, Cicero was caught by the assassins in a wood and beheaded on the spot. The historians offer us a stirring vignette: the elderly statesman coolly sticking his head out from the litter so that his throat can be slit. As was customary, his head and severed hands were later nailed to the Speaker's Platform and it is said that a vindictive noblewoman with a grudge named Pomponia pierced his dead tongue with hatpins. It was a grimly ironic end for someone who had made his career as a silver-tongued speaker on the Platform -- though after Octavian finally seized total control, Cicero's son Marcus had the satisfaction of pulling down all of Mark Antony's statues. Could Cicero have ever predicted that Octavian, the 18-year-old boy he had once considered tutoring, would metamorphose into the Emperor Augustus, first engineer of the Roman Empire?

What is Cicero's significance to us today? To the Middle Ages and the Renaissance he transmitted the ultimate work: himself. He gave to Europe the ideal of what could be called non-ideological man. Urbane, tolerant, humane, deeply learned and skeptical, Cicero is not only the anti-Catilina, he is also by extension hostile to all fanatics. What Cicero hated and feared was not only revolutionaries who were outright dictators (for the two words are always connected) but also what could be called the degeneration -- that is, the personalizing -- of political discourse itself.

This might seem strange praise for a man so adept at the ad hominem attack; but Cicero's attacks were more often than not motivated by a serious moral concern: Whither the state? One wonders what he would make of today's political TV chat shows, with their idiotically obvious partisan bigotry and their hysterically intolerant tone. One wonders, too, what he would make of our inability to write great speeches, and the fact that our commemoration at ground zero of the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks will feature readings of well-known American speeches, but nothing original drafted for this occasion alone. For the Romans, articulateness was a virtue in a politician because it revealed something deep in the latter's mind; it's not hard to guess what Cicero would think of a people who have chosen a president who can barely manage a rudimentary public speech. Eloquence was not something suspicious to them, as it often is with Americans. It was an outer sign of inner character. The republic, Cicero argued, rested on the quality of its words -- it is in empires that words don't matter.

Everitt underlines this point by ending his excellent book with a little anecdote. When the aging Emperor Augustus caught one of his grandsons secretly reading one of Cicero's presumably banned books, the emperor gently took it from the boy, mused for a while and then ruefully commented: "An eloquent man, my child, an eloquent man, and a patriot."

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