Cicero

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The Empire in Crisis: First Century BC

To understand Cicero’s life, which spanned the first two thirds of the first century BC, it is necessary to picture the world in which he lived, and especially the nature of Roman politics.

Rome in Cicero’s day was a complex and sophisticated city, with up to a million inhabitants, and much of its pattern of life is recognizably familiar, even at a distance of two millennia. There were shopping malls and bars and a lively cultural scene with theater and sport. Poetry and literature thrived and new books were much talked about. Leading actors were household names. The affluent led a busy social round of dinner parties and gossip, and they owned country homes to which they could retreat from the pressures of urban living. Politics was conducted with a familiar blend of private affability and public invective. Speech was free. Everyone complained about the traffic.

The little city-state, hardly more than a village when it was founded (according to tradition) in 753 BC, gradually annexed the numerous tribes and statelets in the Italian peninsula and Sicily. The Romans were tough, aggressive and, to reverse von Clausewitz, inclined to see politics as a continuation of war by other means. They came to dominate the western Mediterranean. First, they gained a small foothold in the Maghreb, the province of Africa which covered roughly the territory of modern Tunisia. From here the great city of Carthage ruled its empire, until it was twice defeated by Rome and later razed to the ground in the second century BC. Spain was another prize of these wars and was divided into two provinces, Near Spain and Far Spain. In what is now Provence, Rome established Transalpine Gaul (Gallia Transalpina), but the rest of France was an unconquered and mysterious mélange of jostling tribes. Northern Italy was not merged into the home nation but was administered as a separate province, Italian Gaul (Gallia Cisalpina).

Then Rome invaded Greece and the kingdoms of Asia Minor, enfeebled inheritors of the conquests of Alexander the Great. In the first century BC, along the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean, now named with literal-minded accuracy “our sea” (Mare Nostrum), Rome directly governed a chain of territories: Macedonia (which included Greece), Asia (in western Turkey), Cilicia (in southern Turkey) and Syria (broadly, today’s Syria and Lebanon). Beyond them, client monarchies stood as buffers between Rome’s possessions and the unpredictable Parthian Empire, which lay beyond the River Euphrates. Pharaohs, although now of Greek stock, still ruled Egypt, but their independence was precarious.

This empire, the largest the western world had so far seen, was created more through inadvertence than design and presented Rome with a heavy and complicated administrative burden. This was partly because communications were slow and unreliable. Although a network of well-engineered roads was constructed, travel was limited to the speed of a horse. The rich would often travel by litter or coach, and so proceeded at walking pace or not much faster. Sailing ships before the age of the compass tended to hug the coast and seldom ventured beyond sight of land.

There being no public postal service, letters (which were scratched on waxed tablets or written on pieces of papyrus and sealed) were sent at considerable cost by messengers. The state employed couriers, as did commercial enterprises, and the trick for a private correspondent was to persuade them, or friendly travelers going in the right direction, to take his or her post with them and deliver it.

The greatest underlying problem facing the Republic, however, lay at home in its system of governance. Rome was a state without most of the institutions needed to run a state. There was no permanent civil service except for a handful of officials at the Treasury; when politicians took office or went to govern a province they had to bring in their own people to help them conduct business. The concept of a police force did not exist, which meant that the public spaces of the capital city were often hijacked by gangs of hooligans in the service of one interest or another. Soldiers in arms were absolutely forbidden to enter Rome, so all the authorities could do to enforce law and order was to hire their own ruffians.

The Republic was governed by the rule of law but did not operate a public prosecution service, and elected politicians acted as judges. Both in civil and criminal cases it was left to private individuals to bring suits. Usually litigants delegated this task to professional advocates, who acted as private detectives, assembling evidence and witnesses, as well as speaking at trials. Officially these advocates were unpaid, but in practice they could expect to receive favors, gifts and legacies in return for their services.

There was no penal system, and prisons were used for emergencies rather than for housing convicts. (Distinguished foreign captives and state hostages were exceptions and could be kept under lock and key or house arrest for years.) Penalties were usually exile or a fine and capital punishment was rare: no Roman citizen could be put to death without trial, although some argued that this was permissible during an official state of emergency.

The Republic became enormously rich on the spoils of empire, so much so that from 167 BC Roman citizens in Italy no longer paid any personal taxes. However, banking was in its infancy, and there were no major commercial financial institutions. Moneylenders (silversmiths and goldsmiths) laid cash out at interest and it was even possible to hold private accounts with them; but most people felt it safer to borrow from and lend to their family and friends. Without a bureaucracy the government was not in a position to collect taxes, selling the right to do so to the highest bidder. Tax farmers and provincial governors often colluded to make exorbitant profits.

All these things, in their various ways, were obstacles to effective administration. However, the constitution, which controlled the conduct of politics, was the Republic’s greatest weakness.

Rome was an evolutionary society, not a revolutionary one. Constitutional crises tended to lead not to the abolition of previous arrangements but to the accretion of new layers of governance. For two and a half centuries Rome was a monarchy that was very much under the thumb of neighboring Etruria (today’s Tuscany). In 510 BC King Tarquin was expelled in circumstances of great bitterness; according to legend, his son, Sextus, had raped a leading Roman’s daughter, Lucretia. Whatever really happened, the citizenry was determined that never again would any single man be allowed to obtain supreme power. This was the main principle that underpinned constitutional arrangements which, by Cicero’s time, were of a baffling complexity.

For generations the system worked well. It created a sense of community. To be a Roman citizen did not confer equality, but it did mean that one lived under the rule of law and felt a personal stake in the Republic’s future. Rights, of course, were accompanied by duties and one of the secrets of Rome’s strength was that even in moments of military catastrophe the state could call on all its citizens to come to its rescue. Another was pragmatism: for most of its history Rome’s leaders showed a remarkable talent for imaginative improvisation when they met intractable problems. These were the qualities that assured the triumph of the Republic’s legions and the creation of its empire.

After the fall of the monarchy, royal authority was transferred to two Consuls who alternated in executive seniority month by month. They were elected by the people (that is, all male Roman citizens within reach of the capital city, where elections took place) and held office for one year only. There was a ladder of other annual posts (called the cursus honorum, the Honors Race) up which aspiring politicians had to climb before they became eligible for the top job, the Consulship. The most junior of these brought with it life membership of a committee called the Senate and led on to glittering privileges: in Cicero’s words, “rank, position, magnificence at home, reputation and influence abroad, the embroidered robe, the chair of state, the lictors’ rods, armies, commands, provinces.” The number of Senators varied; at one point, in Cicero’s youth, there were only 300, but half a century later Julius Caesar packed the Senate with his supporters, and the membership reached 900.

On the first rung of the ladder were twenty Quaestors, who were responsible for the receipt of taxes and payments. The next stage for an aspiring young Roman was to become one of four Aediles, who handled—at their own expense—various civic matters in the capital: the upkeep of temples, buildings, markets and public games. Lucky for those with limited means or generosity, the Aedileship was optional, and it was possible to move directly to the Praetorship.

The eight Praetors, like the two Consuls, stood above the other officeholders, for they held imperium—that is to say, the temporary exercise of the old power of royal sovereignty. Imperium was symbolized by an official escort of attendants, called lictors, each of whom carried fasces, an ax and rods signifying the power of life and death. Praetors acted as judges in the courts or administered law in the provinces. Only after he had been a Praetor might a man stand for the Consulship.

The constitution had a safety valve. In the event of a dire military or political emergency, a Dictator could be appointed on the nomination of the Consuls. He was given supreme authority and no one could call him to account for his actions. However, unlike modern dictators, his powers were strictly time-limited: he held office for a maximum of six months. Before Cicero’s day, one of the last Dictators had been Quintus Fabius Maximus in 217, whose delaying tactics had helped to drive the great Carthaginian general Hannibal out of Italy. Soon afterwards, the post fell into disuse.

Life after the high point of the Consulship could be something of a disappointment. Former Consuls and Praetors were appointed governors of provinces (they were called Proconsuls or Propraetors), where many of them used extortion to recoup the high cost, mostly incurred by bribing voters, of competing in the Honors Race—and, indeed, of holding office, for the state paid no salaries to those placed in charge of it. After this point, for most of them, their active careers were to all intents and purposes over. They became elder statesmen and wielded influence rather than power through their contribution to debates in the Senate. The only political job open to them was the Censorship: every five years two former Consuls were appointed Censors, whose main task was to review the membership of the Senate and remove any thought to be unworthy. Circumstance or ambition allowed a few to win the Consulship again, but this was unusual.

In theory the Senate was an advisory committee for the Consuls, but in practice, largely because it was permanent and officeholders were not, it became the Republic’s ruling instrument. It usually met in the Senate House in the Forum (Curia Hostilia, named after its legendary founder king, Tullus Hostilius) but was also convened in temples and other public buildings, sometimes to ensure the Senators’ safety. It gained important powers, especially over foreign affairs and money supply. The Senate could not pass laws; it usually considered legislation before it was approved by the People at the General Assembly. But to all intents and purposes it decided policy and expected it to be implemented. The proud wielders of imperium knew that they would soon have to hand it back and as a rule thought twice before irritating the one body in the state that represented continuity.

Another remarkable device inhibited overmighty citizens. This was the widespread use of the veto. One Consul could veto any of his colleagues’ proposals and those of junior officeholders. Praetors and the other officeholders could veto their colleagues’ proposals.

At bottom, politics was a hullabaloo of equal and individual competitors who would only be guaranteed to cooperate for one cause: the elimination of anybody who threatened to step out of line and grab too much power for himself. It follows that there was nothing resembling today’s political parties. Governments did not rise and fall and the notion of a loyal opposition would have been received with incredulity.

However, there were two broad interest groups: the aristocracy, the oldest families of which were called Patricians, and the broad mass of the People, or the plebs. Their political supporters were known respectively as optimates, the “best people,” and populares, those who favored the People. The high offices of state were largely in the hands of the former and, in practice, were the prerogative of twenty or fewer families. With the passage of time, some plebeian families were admitted to the nobility. But only occasionally did a New Man, without the appropriate blue-blooded pedigree, penetrate the upper reaches of government. Cicero was one of these few.

Since the fall of the monarchy in 510 BC, Roman domestic politics had been a long, inconclusive class struggle, suspended for long periods by foreign wars. During one never-to-be-forgotten confrontation over a debt crisis in 493 BC, the entire population withdrew its labor. The plebs evacuated Rome and encamped on a neighboring hill. It was an inspired tactic. The Patricians were left in charge—but of empty streets. They quickly admitted defeat and allowed the creation of new officials, Tribunes of the People, whose sole purpose was to protect the interests of the plebs. In Cicero’s day there were ten of these. While everybody else’s term of office ran till December 31, theirs ended on December 12.

Tribunes could propose legislation and convene meetings of the Senate, of which they were ex officio members, but they had no executive authority and their basic role was negative. Just as the Consuls had a universal power of veto, so a Tribune could forbid any use of power that he judged to be high-handed and against the popular will. Tribunes could even veto one anothers’ vetoes. No doubt because their purpose in life was to annoy people, their persons were sacrosanct.

Different kinds of popular assembly ensured a degree of democratic control. The Military Assembly (comitia centuriata) elected Consuls and Praetors through voting blocs called “centuries” (the word for an army platoon), membership of which was weighted according to citizens’ wealth. The more important Tribal or General Assembly (comitia tributa) voted by tribes, which were territorial in composition rather than socioeconomic. It had the exclusive power to declare peace or war and it approved bills, usually after consideration by the Senate. The General Assembly could only accept or reject motions and, except for speeches invited by the officeholder who convened the meeting, debate was forbidden. Despite these restrictions, the General Assembly was a crucial mechanism for enforcing change against the Senate’s wishes. An informal assembly meeting (contio) could also be called, at which reports could be given but no decisions taken.

A serious problem of unfairness arose as Roman citizenship was increasingly conferred on Italian communities at a distance from Rome. Democratic participation in Roman political life was direct and not based on the representative principle: the General Assembly was not a parliament. Those who lived more than a few hours’ travel from the city (say, twenty miles or so) were effectively disfranchised and “rural” communities were often represented by a handful of voters, who therefore exerted considerably more influence than members of city wards. Well-targeted bribes could easily swing bloc votes.

These were not the only obstacles to orderly process. Meetings were often convened at the Assembly Ground (Comitium), a circular open space looking like a gigantic sundial, in the Forum, Rome’s central square, although elections were held on the Field of Mars, a stretch of open land just outside the city limits, also the venue for military exercises. This was a matter of some tactical importance. The Assembly Ground had limited space and it was easy for the authorities or armed groups of toughs to take control of a meeting—or, for that matter, of the entire Forum. Public opinion as expressed through the medium of a General Assembly often represented no more and no less than the view of a particular faction.

The main trouble with the Roman constitution was that it contained too many checks and balances, whether to restrain ambitious power-seekers or to protect ordinary citizens from the executive. It is somewhat surprising that anything was ever decided. However, so long as the different forces in the Republic were prepared to resolve disputes through compromise, the system worked well enough. AS far as it could, the Senate allowed events to take their course, intervening only when absolutely necessary.

Most Romans believed that their system of government was the finest political invention of the human mind. Change was inconceivable. Indeed, the constitution’s various parts were so mutually interdependent that reform within the rules was next to impossible. AS a result, radicals found that they had little choice other than to set themselves beyond and against the law. This inflexibility had disastrous consequences as it became increasingly clear that the Roman state was incapable of responding adequately to the challenges it faced. Political debate became polarized into bitter conflicts, with radical outsiders trying to press change on conservative insiders who, in the teeth of all the evidence, believed that all was for the best under the best of all possible constitutions.

Towards the end of the second century BC, disputes led to bloodshed, and, unprecedentedly, leading personalities found themselves at personal risk. The long crisis that destabilized and eventually destroyed the Republic opened in the 130s, more than two decades before Cicero’s birth. A repetitive pattern emerged of civilian reformers (mostly dissident members of the ruling class), who argued for reform and were usually assassinated for their pains, and successful generals, who imposed it.

The problem was twofold: an agricultural crisis and the changing role of the army. In Rome’s early days the army was a militia composed of citizen-farmers who went back to their fields as soon as a campaign was over. However, the responsibilities of empire meant that soldiers could no longer be demobilized at the end of each fighting season. Standing forces were required, with soldiers on long-term contracts. In Cicero’s childhood the great general Caius Marius supplemented and largely replaced the old conscript army with a professional body of long-service volunteers. When their contracts expired, they wanted to be granted farms where they could settle and make livings for themselves and their families. Their loyalty was to their commanders, whom they expected to make the necessary arrangements, and not to the Republic.

Unfortunately, land was in short supply. AS the second century BC proceeded, a rural economy of arable smallholdings gave way to large sheep and cattle ranches, owned by the rich and serviced largely by slave labor. Many peasants were forced off the countryside and swelled Rome’s population; jobs were scarce and they soon became dependent on supplies of subsidized, cut-price grain. The state owned a good deal of public land (ager publicus) throughout Italy and in theory this could be distributed to returning soldiers or the urban unemployed, but much of it had been quietly appropriated by wealthy landowners. These eminent squatters were extremely difficult to dislodge. Many of them were Senators and they fiercely resisted any proposals for land reform.

Even before Marius’ army reforms, wiser heads in the Senate realized that the land question had to be addressed. They backed a leading aristocrat, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, who was elected Tribune in 133 BC, to introduce a land-redistribution scheme. During riots in and around the Forum, a group of Senators lynched him. A Roman historian wrote in the following century: “This was the first time in Rome’s history that citizens were killed and recourse had to brute force—in both cases without fear of punishment.… From now onwards, political disagreements which had previously been resolved by agreement were settled by the sword.”

Ten years later Tiberius’s brother, Caius, returned to the fray. In addition to land reform, he tried to address another challenge facing the Republic, to which diehards in the Senate were turning blind eyes. The conquered and partly assimilated communities in Italy were becoming more and more envious of the rising tide of wealth flowing exclusively into Rome from its imperial possessions.

Italy was a patchwork quilt of communities and ethnic groups. Many of them had their own non-Latin languages—among them the civilized Etruscans, who had once dominated Rome when it was little more than a village, the fiercely independent Samnites in the impregnable Apennines, and the Volscians to the south of Rome. In the heel of Italy there were a number of well-established city-states founded by Greeks in the preceding four centuries. Some communities were granted Roman citizenship, but this was a comparatively rare privilege; others were given only what were called Latin Rights, a package of legal entitlements and duties which allowed a limited degree of involvement in the political process. Certain city-states or tribes kept a theoretical independence and were honored as Allies but exercised only a local autonomy. AS a security measure, a network of citizen settlements, coloniae, peopled by army veterans, was established across the peninsula.

The Italian communities were obliged to supply soldiers to fight the Republic’s wars, but they received nothing in return. The peninsula was becoming increasingly Romanized, but most of its inhabitants were not allowed to be Roman. Unless they were soon granted full rights of citizenship, an armed showdown was going to be unavoidable. Caius Gracchus’s attempt to give them what they wanted was a sensible move but deeply unpopular with public opinion in Rome. Suspecting that his brother’s fate awaited him, he armed a bodyguard and turned to violence. The Senate declared a state of emergency and he and some of his followers were summarily killed in a skirmish.

Now an external threat intervened. From 113 BC word filtered south that two huge Germanic tribes, the Cimbri and the Teutones, were on the move, traveling slowly from their homes in the Jutland area with their wives and children and without any ascertainable destination. It was feared that they intended to invade Italy.

A hero came forward to meet the hour: Caius Marius, who not only professionalized the army but also transformed its tactics. The basic unit was the legion, a body of between 4,000 and 5,000 men. It had traditionally fought in a formation of three lines; Marius changed that, dividing the legion into ten subgroups or cohorts. These were more mobile than the lines and could be deployed flexibly to meet threats on the battlefield as they arose. In 102 BC, when Cicero was still only a four-year-old child, Marius broke the Germanic threat in two colossal battles at Aquae Sextiae in southern France and Vercellae in northern Italy so completely that it was centuries before migrating tribes again dared to threaten Rome.

The savior of the day held the Consulship a record seven times, but, for all that, he was a clumsy politician. He made sure that his demobilizing veterans were given allotments of land by founding colonies in various parts of the Mediterranean. He was helped by an unscrupulous and radical Tribune, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. Marius’s popularity with the chauvinistic Roman mob fell sharply when it emerged that some of the colonies were to be for people from the Allied communities as well as for Roman citizens. In an illegal action that had bleak implications for the future, Marius brought soldiers into the Forum to put down a disturbance against the reforms.

In 100 BC Saturninus, bidding for a third year as Tribune, overreached himself and his chief rival in the election campaign was killed in a riot. Marius, who was in the last resort a constitutionalist, abandoned his ally. The Senate declared a state of emergency and Saturninus holed himself up on the Capitol Hill overlooking the Forum. Marius cut off the rebels’ water supply and forced their surrender. To protect them from being lynched, he locked them inside the Senate House. Probably without his sanction, some youths climbed up onto the roof and killed the prisoners by hurling roof tiles down on them.

Although he had not been directly involved in the killings, a young man called Caius Rabirius was reported to have gotten hold of Saturninus’s head and carried it around the table at a dinner party as a joke. It was an incident he would come to regret bitterly more than thirty-five years later when a new generation of radical politicians sought belated revenge. It would also cast a shadow across Cicero’s path.

The Senate, back in control, repealed Saturninus’s reforming legislation and a discredited Marius, out of favor both with the People and the ruling elite, withdrew into private life. The Republic subsided into an uneasy calm, which lasted from 99 to 91. The great political and constitutional issues of the time remained unsolved. The agricultural question had not been permanently answered: where would the land be found for the superannuated soldiers of Rome’s next war? The disgruntled Allied communities in Italy continued to agitate for their rights. Rome’s swollen population of unemployed immigrants from the countryside was a bonfire waiting to be lit. The ruling class resisted giving its most talented members long-term commands or postings for fear of creating overmighty citizens; as a result, deep-seated problems at home and abroad were left untended.

To the uninstructed eye, Rome was at the height of its power and wealth. It controlled a vast empire that stretched from Spain to Asia Minor. No serious external threat was in sight or could be imagined. However, behind the facade of this magnificent edifice the internal structure was unsound. The walls could not bear the weight they were carrying. Sooner or later collapse was inevitable.

This was the self-defeating political system that Cicero and his contemporaries inherited. AS boys and young men they witnessed the demolition gangs move in.