Cicero

2

“ALWAYS BE THE BEST, MY BOY, THE BRAVEST”

From Arpinum to Rome: 106–82 BC

Looking back towards the end of his life, Marcus Tullius Cicero recalled the scenes of his childhood in the countryside near the town of Arpinum with much affection. “Whenever I can get out of Rome for a few days, especially during the summer, I come to this lovely and healthful spot, although I can’t often manage it,” he tells a friend in one of the fictional dialogues he wrote on philosophical themes. “This is really my country, and my brother’s, for we come from a very old local family. It is here we have our sacred rituals, it is here our people came from, it is here you can detect our ancestors’ footprints.”

Cicero could not claim to be a native Roman. In fact, he did not want to. He held Roman citizenship and owed Rome his primary loyalty, but his origins lay in a Volscian tribe that had fought for many wars with the fledgling city-state on the Tiber before accepting defeat, assimilation and ultimately full civic rights: “We consider both the place where we were born and the city that has adopted us as our fatherland.” His dual nationality is central to an understanding of Cicero’s personality. He had that passionate affection for Rome and its traditions which many newcomers feel when they join an exclusive club and was deeply hurt when the feeling was not invariably reciprocated. But he could always recharge his self-confidence with a trip to the place of his birth.

Arpinum was (and, now called Arpino, still is) a picturesque hill town some seventy miles or so south of Rome. It was an out-of-the-way spot, and it took up to three days to journey to the capital in comfort. Cicero’s family was part of the local aristocracy; they were landowners and farmers and may also have run a fulling business. Fullers were the Roman equivalents of laundry and dry-cleaning firms: soap had not been invented and clothes were bleached with human and animal urine and various easily found chemicals, such as potash and carbonate of soda, before being washed thoroughly in water and dried. It was an unpleasant job and not one to boast about—just the kind of detail in his past that anyone who was upwardly mobile would wish to forget and an unfriendly critic to expose.

Cicero’s paternal grandfather was a civic worthy and played a leading part in local politics. He was obviously not much of a democrat, for he opposed a motion to adopt secret ballots on the town council. But he had a gift for public administration which a leading Roman statesman of the day recognized: “With your courage and ability, Marcus Cicero, I wish that you had preferred to be active at the political center rather than at the municipal level.” However, like his ancestors, he had no ambitions for a national career and kept his distance from the busy, competitive hub of the Republic’s political life. There was no pressing need to do otherwise, for the central authorities interfered as little as possible in provincial life. Arpinum carried on more or less as it had always done with little fear of external busybodies.

Marcus Cicero had two sons. They both seem to have reacted against his stuffy provincialism and political conservatism. The younger, Lucius, had progressive ideas and was, his nephew said, a humanissimus homo—a most cultivated man. Apparently he aimed to make a mark on the national stage and accompanied the distinguished Roman orator and politician Marcus Antonius (grandfather of the man we know as Mark Antony) on a campaign against pirates in the eastern Mediterranean. His ambitions came to nothing, for he probably died soon after his return.

Lucius’s brief career is an illustration of the importance of connections for anyone wanting to rise up the political ladder. A glance at the Cicero family tree shows how even a relatively undistinguished provincial family far from the center of events was linked by marriage to leading aristocratic clans and ultimately to senior personalities in Rome. Lucius probably got his posting through the good offices of his maternal uncle, Marcus Gratidius, who was a senior officer on Antonius’s staff. Gratidius was a member of another leading local family, but its political leanings (unlike those of the Ciceros) were left-wing and popularis. He married a sister of Arpinum’s most celebrated son, Caius Marius, hammer of the German tribes and a gate-crasher into Roman politics without a drop of noble blood in his veins. Marius himself married a certain Julia, a noblewoman whose later claim to fame was that she was Julius Caesar’s aunt.

Lucius’s elder brother Marcus, our Cicero’s father, was held back from greater things by poor health and was something of a scholar. He lived on the family estate near Arpinum on the River Liris, where he spent much of his time in retirement and enlarged the rather poky house into a grand villa. It was a beautiful spot with poplars and alders lining the river and plenty of opportunity for pleasant walks. Promenades were laid out with seats where, “strolling or taking our ease among these stately poplars on the green and shady riverbank,” family and friends could exchange political gossip or engage in philosophical debates. The Liris had a tributary, the Fibrenus, with an island in the middle which was a quiet retreat for thinking, writing and reading.

We do not know what crops were grown on the estate, but for wealthier landowners olives and grapevines were popular. Grain would have been sown on the plain below Arpinum, and grass fields would have supported sheep, goats and oxen. Timber was a valuable commodity and it is likely that willows were cultivated by the river to provide baskets and panniers for transporting agricultural products. Oak was a useful source of acorns for pigs. Doubtless, there would have been an orchard and a vegetable garden near the house.

The Ciceros lived out a grand version of the Roman ideal of the good life, although, with the arrival of empire, untold wealth and urbanization, it was more honored in the breach than the observance. This ideal consisted of a small farm which a man could manage himself or with the help of a steward and which would provide most of his family’s food. For the well-to-do, of course, the hard work of tilling the land and bringing in the harvest was done by slaves and local farm laborers. But the myth was a tenacious plant and, half a century after Cicero’s death, the poet Horace showed that it still exerted a persuasive force. “This is what I prayed for!” he wrote. “A piece of land not so very large, with a garden, and near the house a spring of ever-flowing water, and up above these a bit of woodland.”

It was in such easy, calm surroundings that Marcus Tullius Cicero was born on January 3, 106 BC. His arrival was easy and quick and apparently his mother, Helvia, suffered few labor pains. About two years later he was joined by a younger brother, called Quintus.

Roman names conveyed in quite a complicated way a good deal of information about their bearers. First came the praenomen, or personal name. There were only a few in general currency: Marcus was one of the most popular, but so were Caius or Gaius, Lucius, Quintus, Sextus and Publius. Annoyingly for historians, eldest sons usually bore the same first names as their fathers. Next came the nomen or family name: Tullius was an ancient name borne by Rome’s sixth king; a legendary leader of the Volscians, familiar from the story of Coriolanus, was called Attius Tullus.

Finally, the cognomen, a personal surname, was particular to its holder or his branch of the family. It often had a jokey or down-to-earth ring: so, for example, “Cicero” is Latin for “chickpea” and it was supposed that some ancestor had had a wart of that shape on the end of his nose. When Marcus was about to launch his career as an advocate and politician, friends advised him to change his name to something less ridiculous. “No,” he replied firmly, “I am going to make my cognomen more famous than those of men like Scaurus and Catulus.” These were two leading Romans of the day, and the point of the remark was that “Catulus” was the Latin for “whelp” or “puppy,” and “Scaurus” meant “with large or projecting ankles.”

Sometimes individuals were granted additional cognomina to mark a military success. So the famous Publius Cornelius Scipio was given the additional appellation of “Africanus” after he defeated Hannibal at the battle of Zama in Africa.

As the young Cicero grew up he gradually learned the realities of the Roman world. In the first place, he was fairly lucky to survive; as many as one in five children died in their infancy and only about two thirds of those born reached maturity. By another stroke of good fortune, he was one of about 400,000 Roman citizens. He found himself near the top of the socioeconomic pyramid. Aristocrats stood at the apex. Rural gentry (like the Ciceros), businessmen and merchants, made up the second tier in Roman society; they tended to avoid entering national politics, for members of the Senate were not allowed to accept public contracts or to engage in overseas trade. Originally a military class, they were called equites or knights—that is, men who were rich enough to buy a horse for a military campaign.

Beneath them were the mass of the people: shopkeepers, artisans, smallholders and, at the bottom of the pile, landless farmworkers. Living standards could be low and uncertain and the struggle against poverty was unremitting. Competition for jobs was fierce.

However, there was one group even less fortunate than the plebs: the slaves. Slavery was endemic in the classical world and huge numbers of men, women and children, the captives of Rome’s ceaseless wars, flooded into Italy. Slaves provided a cheap workforce, contributing significantly to unemployment among free-born citizens. In the city of Rome it is estimated that slaves amounted to about a quarter of the population in Cicero’s day. Many household servants were slaves. In the case of the Cicero family, the surviving evidence suggests that they were treated kindly.

Both Cicero and his brother followed the common practice of freeing domestic slaves as a reward for good service or allowing them to buy their freedom. This automatically gave them Roman citizenship and the sons of freedmen were eligible for public office. Most ex-slaves continued to work for their former owners, for whom emancipation had a number of advantages. The hope of eventual freedom helped to discourage slave revolts; and allowing a slave to purchase his liberty either from his savings or by mortgaging his future labor ensured a return on the owner’s investment, which would not be forthcoming in the event of the slave’s (perhaps costly) illness and death.

The dominant figure in the lives of Marcus and Quintus was their father. By tradition the paterfamilias was the absolute master of his family. On his own property he could act as he pleased. He was entitled to torture or kill his slaves and to put his wife or children to death. His word went and there was no right of appeal.

By contrast, women were cast as demure, silent and usually unseen helpmeets. They managed the household and devoted much time to spinning or weaving (the classical equivalent of knitting). They were not given personal names and even sisters were known simply by their nomen—by today’s standards, not only demeaning but extremely confusing. Their essential function was to find a husband and they could be married off as young as twelve years of age (although consummation was usually delayed for a couple of years or so). Most marriages were arranged and in the upper classes were a means of forging political and economic alliances.

Romantic attachment was felt to be beside the point. If a wife was seen in public with her husband, any display of affection was universally felt to be indecent. Less than a century before Cicero’s birth, Cato the Censor, self-appointed guardian of traditional Roman values, expelled a candidate for the Consulship from the Senate on the grounds that he had kissed his wife in broad daylight and in front of their daughter.

Unsurprisingly, Helvia is a shadowy figure, although she seems to have been a sharp-eyed housewife. Quintus recalled “how our mother in the old days used to seal up the empty bottles, so that bottles drained on the sly could not be included in the empties.” It is curious that throughout his copious writings Cicero himself never once mentions her: this may simply be a consequence of the low status of women, but perhaps his silence reflects some unhappiness in his childhood, which may in turn have helped to create the adult man with all his multiple insecurities.

In practice, Roman society was not exactly as it seemed on the surface. In the final years of the Roman Republic old conventions were decaying and bonds were loosening. Young men were more rebellious than their fathers had been; those who lived in Rome increasingly left home before marriage and set up house in small apartments in the city center, where they learned how to have a good time on little money.

Women were much more influential than their formal position would suggest. In the upper classes they were expected to be cultivated and could study with tutors at home; and it was possible for girls to attend primary school. Crucially, they were able to retain their own property on marriage and so did not fall completely under their husbands’ sway. In fact, men were often absent on public duties in the army or in the provinces, and wives were expected to take on the management of the family estate and financial affairs. Some of them acted as political brokers behind the scenes. Cato, who was as blunt as he was censorious, reportedly remarked, “We rule the world and our wives rule us.”

We do not know exactly where the Cicero boys spent their preschool years; presumably for most of the time they stayed in the villa outside Arpinum. But the family had a house in Rome in the respectable but not very fashionable quarter of Carinae on the Esquiline Hill, not far from the center. Marcus and Quintus may well have been taken on visits to the big city, perhaps for extended stays.

The better type of Roman house, such as the Ciceros’, had a small courtyard at the back. It was usually a garden with a colonnade running around it. This part of the building was reserved for the family and contained bedrooms, a kitchen (usually tiny), a larder and a bathhouse with a steam room. There were no nurseries or special spaces for children and, when they were not out playing in the fields of Arpinum or being shown the sights of Rome, little Marcus and Quintus must have spent a good deal of their time in the garden under the watchful eyes of slaves.

Cicero’s father had high ambitions for his two sons and made sure they were given a good schooling. Like other upper-class children, they may have been taught by a tutor at home, but what evidence we have suggests that they were sent to school. Roman education in the late Republic typically fell into three distinct phases. From seven to twelve years boys and girls could attend a ludus litterarius, where they learned reading, writing and elementary arithmetic.

Cicero’s schoolmates seem to have admired him for his academic ability. He was always in the middle of the group when out walking and was the focus of attention. Some fathers visited the school to witness the infant prodigy at work, although others were irritated by his dominance over their children. Brains are seldom liked and this popularity may have been the product of hindsight. However, it is possible that Cicero had already developed the strong sense of humor he showed as an adult. He could well have won friends through laughter rather than cleverness.

A household slave, the paedagogus, would accompany his young master (or mistress) to school and carry his satchel. Classes were often held on an open porch or shop, which was protected from the noise of traffic and the inquisitive stares of passersby by only a sheet of tent cloth stretched between pillars at the front. The pupils sat on benches and wrote on wax tablets placed on their knees, with the teacher presiding on a dais. They learned the names of letters before their shapes, singing them in order backwards and forwards; they then graduated to combinations of two or three letters and finally to syllables and words. Knowledge was acquired through imitation and repetition, as when learning fencing or some other sport. Hence the Latin word for school, ludus, also means “game.”

Classes began at dawn, without breakfast, and went on into the afternoon. There were no physical sports, although the day ended with a steam bath. Summer holidays lasted from the end of July to the middle of October, but otherwise the school year was interrupted only by public holidays.

At twelve, a boy graduated to a secondary school. The curriculum was narrowly confined to the study of grammar and literature. Both Latin and Greek were taught. In Latin the archaic epic and dramatic poets (now lost to us except for fragments) were on the curriculum and in Greek the emphasis was mainly on Homer and the Athenian tragedians, especially Euripides. Another key document for study was the Twelve Tables, Rome’s primary code of laws established in about 450 BC. This “germ of jurisprudence” has not survived, but was the basis of civil law: one of its provisions suggests its down-to-earth, practical flavor. This was that each piece of land should include an untilled five-foot strip for the turning of the plow, but that no squatter could settle on it on the grounds that it was uncultivated.

At the best schools lessons were given in rhetoric, or the art of public speaking. The Romans and the Greeks before them believed that it was possible to establish a system of oratory that could be taught. They spoke of training public speakers under five traditional headings: inventio, seeking out ideas or lines of argument; collocatio, structure and organization; elocutio, diction and style; actio, physical delivery; and memoria, memory (speeches could last for hours and as they were spoken not read they had to be learned by heart). There were different opinions as to the best form of elocutio. Some advocated an elaborate, ornate style and others plainness and simplicity. There was a middle way, grand but not exaggerated, which the adult Cicero came to favor.

The good public speaker recognized that he had to be a performer, like an actor. Later in his life Cicero wrote books on oratory and in them he underscored the point:

A leading speaker will vary and modulate his voice, raising and lowering it and deploying the full scale of tones. He will avoid extravagant gestures and stand impressively erect. He will not pace about and when he does so not for any distance. He should not dart forward except in moderation with strict control. There should be no effeminate bending of the neck or twiddling of his fingers or beating out the rhythm of his cadences on his knuckles. He should control himself by the way he holds and moves his entire body. He should extend his arm at moments of high dispute and lower it during calmer passages.… Once he has made sure he does not have a stupid expression on his face and or a grimace, he should control his eyes with great care, for as the face is the image of the soul the eyes are its translators. Depending on the subject at hand they can express grief or hilarity.

Students were taught how to turn fables and other kinds of stories into simple narrative; to develop arguments from quotations from famous poets; and to compose speeches inspired by actual or fictional situations and events. They would declaim them to the class. Although by Cicero’s day the teaching of rhetoric had been reduced to a complicated and arid system of rules, it lay at the heart of the curriculum. At one level rhetoric was a vocational subject, for it was the key to a political career, to which all men of good birth should aspire. They would be able to do so only if they acquired the necessary skills to persuade people of the rightness of their point of view. In Rome reputations were made not only at public meetings and in the Senate but also in the law courts. Ambitious young men in their early twenties often appeared as prosecutors in criminal trials in order to make a name for themselves, not just as lawyers but as potential future politicians.

Both rhetoric and the study of literature were also intended to give students an ethical grounding, a moral education which inculcated the virtues of fortitude, justice and prudence.

Public speaking in this complex sense is extinct and it is difficult now to conceive of its power, immediacy and charm. Just as Samuel Pepys in seventeenth-century England would spend a Sunday going from sermon to sermon for the sheer pleasure of it, so crowds of Romans would pack the Forum, where trials were held in the open air, to listen to and applaud the great advocates of the day as they presented their cases. The “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar gives a hint of how the real thing must have been.

In 90 Cicero reached the age of sixteen, the Roman age of majority, by which time his secondary schooling ended. A special rite of passage marked the moment when a boy became a man, not on his birthday but on or around March 17, the feast day of Liber, the god of growth and vegetation. We do not know where the ceremony took place in Cicero’s case, but bearing in mind his family’s ambitions for him, it would most likely have been in Rome.

About the time Marcus came of age, his father decided that his sons should complete their training in public speaking and study law in the capital. Higher education was exclusively devoted to debate and declamation and was in the hands of a rhetor, a specialist teacher of public speaking. He and other learned men, philosophers or scholars, had much the same status as university professors. However, as academic institutions such as universities did not exist, such men were freelance and often lived in the household of a leading political figure, where they acted as advisers and added to their employers’ prestige. Elder statesmen were also willing to impart their experience and legal and constitutional knowledge to the younger generation.

Access for a couple of provincial teenagers to these informal and exclusive finishing schools was difficult. It could be achieved only through the web of personal connections called clientship (clientela). Society was a pyramid of matching rights and obligations; the basic principle was summed up in the religious formula “do ut des”—“I give so that you give.” A wealthy and powerful man acted as a “patron” for many hundreds or even thousands of “clients.” He guaranteed to look after their interests. He welcomed them to his home and occasionally gave them meals and provided very needy followers with food handouts. He was a source of advice and of business and political contacts. If a client got into trouble with the law his patron would offer his support. In return, a client (if he lived in Rome) would regularly pay a morning call and accompany his patron as he went about his business in the town. He could be recruited as a bodyguard or even a soldier in his army. Neither party could go to law against the other. These networks of mutual aid cut across the social classes and linked the local elites in the various Italian communities, not to mention those in the Empire as a whole, to the center. Clientship was a binding contract and, for lack of other administrative instruments, it was an essential means of holding the Empire together. A family’s client list survived from one generation to the next. Durable bonds could, of course, also be established between equals. Amicitia or “friendly alliance” meant more than personal affection and referred to formal networks between superiors and inferiors.

To get on in society, indeed to survive in it at all, a Roman had to be an effective member not only of his family but also of his town and village, his guild (if he was an artisan or tradesman) or his district. Each of these institutions had a patron, through whom a man was locked into the highest reaches of authority and power. In an age without a welfare state, a banking system and most public services, he had no alternative but to assure his future in these ways. This was why politics was largely conducted on a personal basis and was seen in moral rather than collective terms. The client-list system was not compatible with alliances based on political programs or manifestos of common action.

Like all provincial clients of good social status, the Ciceros had patrons in Rome and they made use of them when finding good teachers for Marcus and Quintus. They were connected in particular to the Leader of the Senate, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus; Marcus Antonius, a distinguished lawyer and politician (who had taken Cicero’s uncle Lucius with him on the expedition against the pirates); and an even more celebrated orator and statesman, Lucius Licinius Crassus, a conservative who understood the need for reform.

Strings were successfully pulled. One of Marcus and Quintus’s maternal uncles, Caius Visellius Aculeo, a legal expert, knew Crassus well and arranged a placement for them. The boys spent a good deal of time at the great orator’s house, an elegant building at an excellent address on the Palatine Hill, where there were columns of Hymettan marble and shade-giving trees—rare features in this city of tufa and brick. They often listened to him discussing contemporary politics and studied with his scholars-in-residence. Marcus was also much impressed by the pure, traditional Latin spoken by Crassus’s wife. In return, the brothers would doubtless have been expected to join the daily crowd of clientes who accompanied leading men when they appeared in public. The larger the following, the greater the prestige.

Cicero also became a pupil of Crassus’s father-in-law, Quintus Mucius Scaevola, then in his eighties and one of the earliest and greatest of Roman jurists. On Scaevola’s death Cicero transferred to a younger cousin of the same name, who was Chief Pontiff, the leading official of the state religion, and had shared the Consulship with Crassus in 95.

His father entrusted him to the care of an older fellow student, Marcus Pupius Piso, who acted as a kind of mentor and kept an eye on him. Later the historian Sallust, a near contemporary, presented this arrangement as a homosexual affair in a lampoon against Cicero: “Didn’t you learn your unbridled loquacity from Marcus Piso at the cost of your virginity?” But this was the kind of insult that Roman public figures routinely exchanged with one another and while something of the sort may have briefly occurred, it is just as likely that it did not.

It was during these years that Cicero’s ambition to become a famous advocate crystallized. He found he had a gift for writing and public speaking. He was swept along by the almost unbearable excitement of the trials in the Forum and the glamour of the lawyer’s job, very much like that of a leading actor.

There were a number of jury courts, specializing in different kinds of crime—treason, murder, extortion and so on. Temporary stands and seating were set up to accommodate those taking part in the proceedings. A Praetor usually presided and between thirty and sixty jurors were appointed by lot for each case, who voted in secret. They were originally Senators, but one of Caius Gracchus’s reforms transferred the right of jury service to equites. This was a highly disputatious issue, especially in cases where Senatorial or commercial interests were in any way at stake. Jurors voted by rubbing off either an A (for absolvo) or a C (for condemno) on either side of voting tablets. Verdicts were often biased and bribery of jurors was common.

Court procedures in ancient Rome are known only in broad outline. Prosecutors opened with a long speech, which the defense sought to rebut, at equal length. Addresses by supporting counsel followed. A water clock ensured that everyone kept to time. Witnesses for either side were then cross-examined. At some stage, the opposing advocates entered into a debate between themselves (altercatio). The case was then adjourned, probably resuming after a day’s interval. There were further speeches by either side and the calling of additional evidence was allowed. The verdict then followed.

Civil cases were heard in two parts; the first before a Praetor who defined the issues in question, and the second, for decision, before a judge or a jury to whom the Praetor had passed his opinion.

Cicero was amazed by the sensational impact a leading advocate could have on his hearers and looked upon his skills as being akin to those of an actor. Despite the fact that the theater was not regarded as a respectable profession, Cicero was fascinated by it and later became a close friend of the best-known actor of his day, Quintus Roscius Gallus. Although he always insisted that oratory and drama were different arts, he modeled his style on Roscius’s performances and those of another actor he knew, Clodius Aesopus (who once became so involved in the part he was playing—that of King Agamemnon, overlord of the Greeks—that he ran through and killed a stagehand who happened to cross the stage).

The attitudes Cicero acquired as a serious-minded, bookish boy lasted him all his life. He always loathed and feared physical aggression. He recalled, a little priggishly: “The time which others spend in advancing their own personal affairs, taking holidays and attending games, indulging in pleasures of various kinds or even enjoying mental relaxation and bodily recreation, the time they spend on protracted parties and gambling and playing ball, proves in my case to have been taken up with returning over and over again to … literary pursuits.”

Cicero wrote poetry in his adolescence and as early as the age of fourteen completed a work in tetrameters called Pontius Glaucus. Although it has not survived, we know that it told the story of a Boeotian fisherman who eats a magic herb and is turned into a fabulous sea divinity with a gift of prophecy. It was an apt subject for someone who had dreams of making his way in the world by means of his chief talent, a strikingly persuasive way with words.

AS a young man Cicero was as well known for his verse as for his oratory. His style was fluent and technically accomplished. He wrote quickly and easily, as many as 500 lines a night, and could turn his hand to unpromising subjects such as a translation of a Greek work on astronomy by Aratus. However, he did not really have a poetic imagination and readers found that verbal virtuosity was not enough. His reputation as a poet declined sharply and permanently with the arrival a generation later of a new, more personal and lyrical style of verse writing, pioneered by Catullus and his circle. Tacitus, the imperial historian of the following century, noted: “Caesar and Brutus also wrote poetry—no better than Cicero, but with better luck, for fewer people know that they did.”

AS his education proceeded, Cicero met the full force of an inherent schizophrenia in Roman culture. There was a widespread belief that traditional values were being undermined by foreign immigrants. The decadence that was perceived to permeate the Republic was attributed largely to slippery and corrupt Greeks and Asiatics who had come to Rome from the hellenized Orient. Cicero’s paternal grandfather, for one, would have nothing to do with them and deplored falling standards of Roman morality. “Our people are like Syrian slaves: the better they speak Greek, the more shiftless they are.” When speaking in public, senior Philhellenes such as Crassus and Antonius sometimes felt obliged to conceal their true beliefs.

But the fact is that while the ferocious city-state on the Tiber was able to defeat them in war, it had nothing to rival the Greeks culturally. Greek literature, philosophy and science were a revelation to people who had little more than ballads and primitive annals as their literary heritage. They immediately started borrowing what they found and the history of Roman literature in the third and second centuries BC is essentially one of plagiarism. Even in Cicero’s day there was a good deal of catching up to be done.

Cicero’s father seems to have reacted against his own father’s anti-Greek views. Like many other bien-pensants of the time, he believed that the future for his sons lay in a grounding of Greek literature, philosophy and rhetoric. So it is no wonder that the young Cicero was given access to a well-known Greek poet of the day, Archias, from whom he gained much of his knowledge of the theory and practice of rhetoric. Archias was a fashionable figure in leading circles and mixed with many of the best families in Rome. Cicero recognized the debt: “For as far as I can cast my mind back into times gone by, as far as I can recollect the earliest years of my boyhood, the picture of the past that takes shape reveals that it was [Archias] who first inspired my determination to embark on these studies, and who started me on their methodical pursuit.”

Cicero became so addicted to all things Greek that he was nicknamed “the little Greek boy.” However, he also made sure that he learned about Rome and its history. To this end he cultivated the acquaintance of Lucius Aelius Stilo. Rome’s first native-born grammarian and antiquarian, Aelius was a fund of knowledge about the history of the Republic, which he made available to his friends for use in their political speeches. His patriotism rubbed off on the precocious adolescent from Arpinum, who developed a lifelong fascination with the details of Rome’s inadequately recorded past.

It was while studying with Scaevola at the house of Crassus that Cicero met other contemporaries in the little world of upper-class Roman society. Two boys in particular stood out from the crowd. Caius Julius Caesar was six years younger than Cicero, but both he and Quintus knew him personally. Through Marius’s marriage to Caesar’s aunt Julia they were, after all, distant relatives. Cicero also struck up a friendship that would last a lifetime with a boy named Titus Pomponius, who came from an old but not strictly noble family. They met at the Scaevolas’ and found that they shared a passion for literature and Roman history. Cicero’s friendship with Atticus, as he later called himself, was to be central to his life. Years later when he was adult, he wrote: “I love Pomponius … as a second brother.”

The three youngsters were not allowed to pursue their education without interruption. The few years of relative calm that had followed the assassination of the radical Tribune Saturninus came to end when Cicero was fifteen. The Republic was now battered by a succession of crises that set the scene for the politics of the boys’ adult lives. Cicero, Caesar and Pomponius watched events in the Forum and on the streets.

While most of the Senate was unwilling to countenance any constitutional change, a few of its more farsighted members realized that the status quo could not last and that it was wiser to anticipate events than react to them. It fell to yet another aristocrat to pick up the battered baton of reform. Marcus Livius Drusus was a wealthy and ambitious nobleman who became Tribune in 91. He was a friend of Cicero’s mentors, Scaurus and Crassus, and we can presume that the young student witnessed some of the events that followed at firsthand. Drusus’s main project was a renewal of the plan to extend Roman citizenship to the Italians, but the Senate, with typical shortsightedness, threw out his legislation. They were profoundly suspicious of him from the most self-interested of motives: if the Italians were enfranchised, they would join Drusus’s clientela in huge numbers and that would make him far too powerful.

The outcome was predictable. The Allied communities lost all hope that the Republic would ever share the profits of empire with them. The mood in the countryside became tense and feverish. Drusus was known to have entertained one of the Allied leaders at his house in Rome and public opinion suspected him of disloyalty. There were reports that the Italians had vowed allegiance to Drusus.

It was about this time that Crassus made his last contribution to a Senatorial debate. Cicero left a detailed account of what took place. Furious with one of the Consuls, Lucius Marcius Philippus, for criticizing the Senate, Crassus launched a tirade against him. The Consul lost his temper and threatened to fine him. The old man refused to back down: “Do you imagine that I can be deterred by the forfeit of any of my property?” The Senate unanimously passed a motion in his support. Crassus had made a fine speech, but the effort had weakened his strength and he was taken ill while delivering it; he contracted pneumonia and died a few days later. Cicero and the other boys were probably at Crassus’s house when the great orator was brought home. They were deeply upset, and Cicero describes them as going later to the Senate House to look at the spot where that last “swan song” (a phrase he popularized) had been heard.

The incident illustrates an attractive aspect of Cicero’s personality: his predisposition to admire. He was not a cynic and, although he was much concerned with his own glory and had a fair share of hatreds and dislikes, he was appreciative of the achievements of others and liked to praise them if he could.

It was another death soon after that caused the conflagration that set Italy alight. Drusus knew that he was at personal risk and seldom went out of doors, conducting business from a poorly lit portico at his house on the Palatine Hill. One evening as he was dismissing the gathering he suddenly screamed that he had been stabbed and fell with the words on his lips. A leather worker’s knife was found driven into his hip, but the assassin was never caught.

Drusus’s murder was the final blow to Italian aspirations. Communities across the peninsula rose in revolt. The struggle, called the War of the Allies, was bloody and bitter. Young, well-connected and ambitious Romans were expected to serve on military campaigns; although Cicero seldom showed any interest in soldiering, the war was too close to home for him to ignore. He temporarily abandoned his studies to serve in the army of Cnaeus Pompeius Strabo as a member of his general staff. He met the commander’s son for the first time, young Cnaeus Pompeius (whom we know as Pompey). Exact contemporaries, they were about sixteen or seventeen years old—and of course without an inkling of how closely their destinies were to be interlinked in future years.

Rome sustained some serious defeats and there was a distinct risk that the rebellion, which was centered on the Adriatic side of Italy, might spread. The neighboring Etruscans and the Umbrians seemed on the point of secession. So in 90 the Senate, facing disaster, gave way. They awarded Roman citizenship to all those Allies who stayed loyal and, it seems, also to those who surrendered. This was decisive, and, although fighting continued for some time at a terrible cost in human lives and suffering, Rome emerged the military victor—and the political loser.

Italy was now united and very gradually the old cultural divisions and languages of the peninsula gave way to an overall Latinity. In the short run, the shock to the Republic’s stability and to the self-confidence of its ruling class was great. And there was worse to come. The War of the Allies signaled a new bloodier spiral into social and political chaos. Soldiers in the Forum, elder statesmen massacred, half the Empire in revolt—nothing like it had been seen in the history of the Republic. It was nearly ten years before something approaching normality returned, in 82; during this period, according to a modern estimate, 200,000 lost their lives from a free population in Rome and Italy of about 4,500,000.

With typical, tricky mean-mindedness, the Senate corralled the new Italian citizens into a small number of the tribus, or voting groups, into which the General Assembly was divided, thus reducing their electoral impact. A radical Tribune, Publius Sulpicius Rufus, now intervened; he had been a friend of the dead Drusus and promoted a policy of fair play for the newly enfranchised Italians. In 88, he brought forward a proposal to distribute the new citizens across the complete range of the tribus. Uproar ensued among the optimates and Sulpicius, the latest in the line of civilian reformers, recruited 600 young equites as bodyguards; they were nicknamed the “anti-Senators.”

One of the Consuls in 87 was Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, a descendant of an old but impoverished family who had arrived comparatively late on the political scene. Sulla had misspent his youth among a demimonde of actors and hustlers and first made a name for himself on the battlefield when he was thirty-one. His appearance was remarkable, for his face was disfigured by a birthmark which people said looked like a mulberry with oatmeal sprinkled on it. A conservative, he aimed to restore the Senate’s traditional authority. His Consulship was a reward for signal achievements in the War of the Allies. He was given a military command once his Consular year was over to deal with a serious crisis that had overtaken Rome’s territorial possessions in Asia Minor.

Mithridates, King of Pontus, on the southern coast of the Black Sea, had been scheming for years to free the entire region from Roman control. He was an able and ambitious man, of remarkable physical strength and mental stamina. Fearful of the plots endemic in an oriental court, he was reputed to consume small regular doses of poison to build up his resistance. The War of the Allies gave him a one-time opportunity to act while Rome’s back was turned, and he seized it. His army invaded the region and his fleet sailed into the Aegean. Democrats in Athens invited him to liberate Greece.

Mithridates’ advance was so swift and total that about 80,000 Roman and Italian businessmen and their families found themselves unexpectedly marooned in enemy territory. Mithridates’ solution to the problem of what to do with them was final. He sent secret instructions to local authorities in every town to kill all strangers who spoke Latin. In general the order was obeyed with enthusiasm, clear evidence of the unpopularity of Roman rule. In one town, the executioners planned their work with sadistic ingenuity: children were killed in front of their parents, then wives in front of their husbands and lastly the men. All Italian property was confiscated and handed over to the king.

The massacre was a terrible blow to the Republic’s authority and added greatly to its economic difficulties, because a regular flow of tax and trading revenues was abruptly cut off. Bankruptcies became common and indebtedness in every social class reached very high levels. Senators, much of whose wealth was locked up in land, found themselves with few liquid assets; the aftermath of the War of the Allies was no time to sell real estate to raise cash. Everyone agreed that it was crucial to retrieve Asia Minor. The future of the Empire was in the balance and, whatever Rome’s internal problems, dealing with the threat in the east came first.

At this point, Marius, the great general who had saved Rome from the Gauls, unexpectedly reappeared. He had served in the War of the Allies but had spent a number of years out of public view. Now nearly seventy, he was old and embittered by what he saw as the Republic’s ingratitude and was out for vengeance. The Tribune Sulpicius unwisely turned to him for support. In return, he arranged for Sulla’s eastern command to be taken from him and given to Marius. The Consuls tried to stop Sulpicius by suspending public business and in the riots that followed Sulla was forced to take refuge in Marius’s house.

This was an unbearable humiliation. Sulla decided to rejoin his army not far from the city, where it was waiting for him to lead them eastwards. But he had a score to settle and did not set off at once. Instead he turned his legions on Rome, which he captured after a few hours of street fighting. Sulpicius was hunted down and killed, but Marius, after a series of hair-raising adventures, made his escape to Africa where many of his old troops had been settled. Sulla quickly passed laws which invalidated Sulpicius’s legislation and would make it difficult for reformers to have their way during his absence. He then marched off to fight the King of Pontus, who would not wait.

Sulla’s entry into Rome was a watershed. He had broken one of the Republic’s greatest taboos by marching soldiers inside the city limits. Worse than that, the army had shown decisively that its loyalty was to its leader, not to the state. The rule of law had been overturned, and a legally elected Tribune, whose person was meant to be sacrosanct, had been put to death. Others would lose little time in exploiting these fatal precedents.

Sulla’s plans to contain the situation in Rome fell apart almost as soon as his back was turned. One of the Consuls for 87, Lucius Cornelius Cinna, a ruthless popularis, promptly proceeded to repeal Sulla’s measures. Marius, deranged and in poor health, staged his own invasion of Rome and let his men run amok during five days of slaughter and looting. The victims included friends of the Cicero family, among them one of his mentors, the orator and elder statesman Marcus Antonius.

Marius did not survive to enjoy his triumph for long. Bad news from abroad brought on an illness, perhaps a stroke, and he died in 86 at the beginning of his seventh Consulship. Cinna was left in charge; he brought the killings to an end and retained the Consulship for two more years, until he was killed in 84 by mutinous troops.

Meanwhile, Sulla won his war with Mithridates despite also having had to cope with a Roman army sent out against him. Anxious to return to Rome, he did not have time to insist on an unconditional surrender. He met the king near the ruins of Troy and signed a peace treaty. Mithridates got off quite lightly, merely agreeing to evacuate Asia and pay a moderate indemnity. In return he was confirmed as King of Pontus and recognized as an Ally—in today’s terms, he was awarded “most favored nation status.”

In 83 Sulla was back at last after an absence of three years. He landed in Brundisium (modern-day Brindisi) and marched inexorably up Italy like an avenging angel. The popularis regime that had been governing the Republic fought back. However, having brushed aside one army in the north, Sulla resoundingly defeated another outside one of the gates of Rome and, in 82, entered the city. He regulated his position by reviving the disused post of Dictator, which gave him supreme authority in the government. He had himself appointed for an indefinite period, instead of the traditional six months, and set himself the task of reforming and restoring the institutions of the Republic.

Another massacre of the ruling class now took place. Under Marius, men of the political right had been struck down. Now it was the turn of the left. After a period of indiscriminate slaughter, a young Senator complained to Sulla, “We are not asking you to pardon those you have decided to kill; all we ask is that you free from suspense those you have decided not to kill.”

The Dictator took the point and agreed to put some order into the mayhem. He posted proscription lists on white tablets in the Forum, which gave the names of those he wanted dead. Anybody was legally entitled to kill a proscribed person and on the presentation of convincing evidence (usually a head) could claim a substantial reward of 1,200 denarii. AS a rule, the heads of those killed were displayed in the Forum.

A cousin of Cicero’s, the Praetor Marcus Marius Gratidianus, was one of those who suffered. He was handed over to Quintus Lutatius Catulus, a leading conservative, because he had been implicated in the forced suicide of Catulus’s father during Marius’s reign of terror. With the help of a young aristocrat named Lucius Sergius Catilina, Catulus flogged Gratidianus through the streets to the tomb of the Catulus clan. There his arms and legs were smashed with rods, his ears cut off, his tongue wrenched from his mouth and his eyes gouged out. He was then beheaded and his corpse was offered as a sacrifice to the spirit of Catulus’s dead father. In a grim postscript, an officer fainted at the horror of what he was seeing and was himself executed for disloyalty. Catilina was then said to have carried Gratidianus’s severed head “still alive and breathing” (according to Cicero in one of his more fanciful flights of rhetoric) into Rome to present to Sulla.

Many of the most senior figures of the day were liquidated. Forty Senators were proscribed at the outset and 1,600 equites, but the final death toll was far higher. According to one estimate there were 9,000 victims in all. The sons of those killed were sent into exile, their descendants barred forever from holding public office. One consequence of these massacres was that the Senate became seriously depleted. There were fewer than 200 survivors, not enough to run an empire.

At the time of the proscriptions, Cicero was twenty-four and his friend Pomponius was three years older. Julius Caesar was only eighteen. The terrible events of the War of the Allies and the bloodlettings of Marius and Sulla had taken place during their formative years. Their reactions to what they saw hardened over the years into mature political positions which, as it happened, covered the whole spectrum of the possible. Defense of Republican traditions, withdrawal from direct political activity, and commitment to radical reform—these were the various ways in which three very different personalities came to terms with the breakdown of the constitution and the decimation of the ruling class.

Of the trio, Caesar was in the greatest personal danger during this period. His family, although highly born, was not well-off and lived in the densely populated working-class district of Subura. He was fiercely proud of his Patrician ancestry, but Romans saw public life very much in personal terms; his aunt Julia’s marriage to Marius placed Caesar in the thick of revolutionary politics and made him an enemy of Sulla.

Caesar was only fourteen in 86 when, under the Consulship of Cinna, he was chosen to be a Priest of Jupiter (flamen dialis), a religious post reserved for Patricians; the previous incumbent had been forced to commit suicide during the troubles. It was not unusual for Priests to be appointed when they were young, fresh enough to learn all they had to about religious rules and procedures. Perhaps, too, Cinna’s government found it hard to find a more prominent Patrician willing to take the job.

In any event, Caesar would not be able to assume office until he reached his majority and, perhaps thanks to the fact that in due course Sulla annulled all Cinna’s acts, it seems he never had to do so. This was a stroke of luck, for, theoretically at least, the appointment would have prevented him from ever leading a political career. The Priest of Jupiter, who held office for life, was forbidden to mount a horse, set eyes on armed soldiers or spend more than two nights in succession outside Rome. But nominated as he was to the post, Caesar was now obliged to marry a Patrician; so he broke off his engagement with the daughter of a rich equestrian family and married Cinna’s daughter, Cornelia.

Caesar did not take part in the civil war that broke out after Sulla’s return from Asia Minor. The victorious Dictator did not harm him, insisting only on one point—that he divorce his wife, perhaps because he had someone more suitable in mind. The young man rejected out of hand this apparent sign of goodwill. Fearful of Sulla’s anger, Caesar slipped out of Rome and, he hoped, out of sight, but he fell seriously ill with malaria and was picked up by a Sullan patrol. He managed to buy his way out of trouble for the sum of 3,000 sesterces and eventually well-connected relatives persuaded a reluctant Sulla to leave him alone. Relieved, Caesar set off for Asia Minor to do some soldiering.

Why was he so steadfast in his resistance? It is hard to be sure, but his actions anticipate what we know of the mature man. He would not be bullied. He was loyal even when it was inconvenient to be so. (He stayed faithful to Cornelia until her death in 69.) He was energetic and cool-headed in a crisis. Caesar’s views were governed by a profound impatience with the aristocracy, not just for its selfishness but for its incompetence. He had been brought up a popularis and would remain one for the rest of his life. While he held his first political position ten years or so later, a Quaestorship, his aunt Julia died. The Sullan constitution was still in place and the Senate very much in charge. Nevertheless, Caesar delivered the funeral oration and, in defiance of the law and with some personal courage, brought out effigies of Julia’s husband, Marius, and his son to display in the procession. No action was taken against him, but he had nailed his radical flag to the mast for all to see.

The second young man of the trio, Titus Pomponius, also had popularis connections, but he did not share Caesar’s flamboyant temerity. In fact, he turned his back on politics, throwing in his cards before they had even been dealt. Born in Rome into a wealthy and cultivated equestrian family, he was related to Sulpicius, and when the Tribune came to grief in 88 he saw he was in serious danger. Realizing that Sulla’s bloodletting was not just designed to eliminate opposition but was also a form of fund-raising, he decided to leave Italy and settled in Athens, taking good care to transfer all his assets to Greece at the same time. He may have heard the story of the rich man who, although having nothing to do with politics, read his name on the proscription lists in the Forum and remarked: “Things are bad for me: I am being hunted down by my Alban estate.” Pomponius had no more intention of losing his fortune than his life.

In fact, he wanted to become richer. He had inherited about 2 million sesterces and set about making his money grow. He bought a large amount of land in Epirus at a time when Mithridates had just ravaged Greece and prices were low. Noting the popularity of gladiatorial shows, he invested in fighters whom he kept on his estate and trained in the art of dying gracefully. He lent money at interest but on the quiet, as it was not felt to be a trade fit for a gentleman. He shared his father’s literary tastes and by collecting a large staff of skillful copyists in his house became, in due course, a successful publisher. He was a distinguished scholar, writing a summary of Roman history from the earliest times to his day and genealogical studies of some aristocratic Roman families.

In Athens, Pomponius went to great lengths to be popular. He learned to speak Greek fluently and soon acquired the cognomen Atticus—after Attica, the territory of which Athens was the capital. From now on this was the name by which he was known and is how he will be referred to in this book. He was generous to local charities and took the trouble to develop the common touch. His biographer, Cornelius Nepos, a younger contemporary whom he knew personally, wrote that Atticus “behaved so as to seem at one with the poorest and on a level with the powerful.”

Atticus had a nasty fright when Sulla called at Athens on his way back to Rome in 83. The general was sufficiently impressed by the young man to ask him to go back to Italy with him. His back to the wall, Atticus for once in his life refused to do a powerful man’s bidding. “No, please, I beg you,” he replied. “I left Italy to avoid fighting you alongside those you want to lead me against.” Sulla liked his candor and let the matter drop.

Atticus usually came back to Rome for elections and he made a profession of friendship. In his personal relationships, he was a kind and affectionate man and an excellent conversationalist. He insisted on high standards of personal behavior: according to Cornelius Nepos, “he never told a lie and could not tolerate lying in others.” He cultivated politicians of every persuasion, doing them favors and steering clear of any overt ideological commitment. He was often used as a go-between and could be relied on to carry messages discreetly hither and thither. Like Caesar, he was loyal but with this difference: he liked to do good by stealth, behind the scenes. Posterity is greatly in his debt, for his friendship with Cicero was maintained by a constant exchange of correspondence, much of which survives.

For all his excellent personal qualities, Atticus had an unerring instinct for the protection of his own interests. It is hard to warm to him. Gaston Boissier, who wrote in the mid-nineteenth century what is still one of the most charming and witty books on Cicero, observed:

He always belonged to the best party [i.e., the optimates] … only he made it a rule not to serve his party; he was contented with giving it his good wishes. But these good wishes were the warmest imaginable.… His reserve only began when it was necessary to act.… The more we think about it, the less we can imagine the reasons he could give [his friends] to justify his conduct.

Cicero agreed neither with Caesar nor with Atticus about the conclusions to be drawn from the years of bloodshed and confusion. In his eyes, the breakdown of civilized values was inexcusable. Physical timidity may have had something to do with it, but his deepest instincts were for the rule of law. What was needed, in his view, was a recall to order.

AS a fellow Arpinate, he had mixed feelings about Marius, whom he saw during his last agonized years. He wrote a poetic eulogy of Marius in epic hexameters and admired the superhuman achievements of the general who had destroyed the Cimbri and the Teutones and the tenacity that had raised him to the head of affairs, but he was not at all tempted by his popularis politics. He despised Cinna, whose reign he regarded as a black interlude of criminality. The time spent in the company of senior statesmen and jurists, two of whom, Antonius and Scaevola, had perished in the chaos, gave him a love of tradition he never lost. If only the good old ways could be restored, he thought, all would again be well.

At the same time, although he was on Sulla’s side ideologically, the memory of the Dictator’s vengefulness never left him. In a book published in the 40s he referred, one senses almost with a physical shudder, to “the proscriptions of the rich, the destruction of the townships of Italy, the well-known ‘harvest’ of Sulla’s time.” Cicero detested Roman militarism and came to the view that his old civilian patron, Scaurus, the Leader of the Senate and a forceful defender of the Senate’s authority, was in no way inferior to a general like Marius. “Victories in the field,” he commented, “count for little if the right decisions are not taken at home.”

While in the last resort he could be brave and decisive, Cicero did not have Caesar’s flamboyant coolness under fire. His brief military experience during the War of the Allies had not recommended a soldier’s life to him. So, not for the last time in his career, when confronted by brute force, he retreated from the bloodshed into his books. He feared that he would never realize his ambition to become a lawyer, for, as he recalled, “it appeared that the whole institution of the courts had vanished forever.” AS Plutarch, his biographer, who wrote around the turn of the first century AD, put it: “Seeing that the whole state was splitting up into factions and that the result of this would be the unlimited power of one man, he retired into the life of a scholar and philosopher, going on with his studies and associating with Greek scholars.”

An uncovenanted benefit of the war with Mithridates was that many intellectuals and thinkers fled to Rome. One of these was Philo of Larisa, head of the Academy in Athens, founded by Plato three hundred years before. He inspired Cicero with a passion for philosophy, and in particular for the theories of Skepticism, which asserted that knowledge of the nature of things is in the nature of things unattainable. Such ideas were well judged to appeal to a student of rhetoric who had learned to argue all sides of a case. In his early twenties Cicero wrote the first two volumes of a work on “invention”—that is to say, the technique of finding ideas and arguments for a speech; in it he noted that the most important thing was “that we do not recklessly and presumptuously assume something to be true.” This resolute uncertainty was to be a permanent feature of his thought.

He learned about the doctrines of Stoicism from the philosopher Diodotus, who was a member of his clientela and, until his death in about 60, lived in Cicero’s house. Diodotus seems to have been an indomitable old man; when he became blind in his declining years, he took up geometry and played the lyre. His young employer was impressed by what he learned of a school of thought that saw the universe as an organic whole consisting of two indivisible aspects: an active principle (God) and that which it acts on (matter). Man’s duty was to live an active life in harmony with nature; that was the way to be virtuous, because virtue was the active principle that infused nature. It followed that the wise man was indifferent to fortune and suspicious of emotion. Cicero could not go this far, but he appreciated the modified Stoicism of his day, which sought to reconcile the notion of a divine spirit in the universe with conventional Greco-Roman religious ideas.

Cicero’s withdrawal into literary pursuits was temporary; he had every intention of entering the law and politics once circumstances permitted. If he was out of sympathy with the more aggressive, military aspirations of his peers, he did share with them an unquenchable thirst for personal fame. This found its classic expression in Homer’s Iliad, in which Glaucus says to Diomedes that he still hears his father’s urgings ringing in his ears:

Always be the best, my boy, the bravest,

and hold your head high above the others.

It was a text that had inspired Alexander the Great and, once Homer appeared on their curriculum, many Roman boys were equally impressed, among them Marcus Tullius Cicero. Years later he told his brother that the lines had expressed his “childhood dream.” He was determined to be the best and the bravest, to join the ranks of the Republic’s greatest heroes. He planned to excel, however, not on the battlefield, but in Rome’s sacred center, the Forum.