Cicero

• 1. The Severed Hands

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  On the 7th of December 43 BC, soldiers caught Marcus Tullius Cicero leaving his villa in Formiae in a litter, heading for the coast and a ship bound for Macedonia. By tradition, his last words were a command to his killer: "I go no further: approach, veteran soldier, and, if you can at least do so much properly, sever this neck." He leaned his head out of the litter in a gladiatorial gesture and bared his throat. A centurion named Herennius cut off his head. Then his hands were severed too, the hands that had written speeches against Mark Antony. By Antony's order, the head and hands were nailed to the Rostra in the Forum Romanum, where Romans gave their speeches. He was the only victim of that wave of proscriptions displayed in such a manner. So who was this man, born a chickpea-named provincial in a hill town, whose words made him worth this much hatred? Why did a Roman consul end up hunted across Italy by the very heir he had championed? And how did a statesman strangled in obscurity become, centuries later, the figure a Polish historian would call the heart of the entire Renaissance?

• 2. Chickpea And Cursus

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  Cicero's cognomen comes from the Latin cicer, meaning chickpea. Plutarch explains the name was first given to an ancestor with a cleft in the tip of his nose shaped like the legume. The family names Fabius, Lentulus, and Piso likewise came from beans, lentils, and peas. When advisers urged him to drop the deprecating name as he entered politics, he refused. He vowed to make Cicero more glorious than Scaurus, meaning Swollen-ankled, and Catulus, meaning Puppy. He was born on the 3rd of January 106 BC in Arpinum, a hill town a hundred kilometers southeast of Rome. His father was a wealthy member of the equestrian order with good connections, though poor health and inflamed eyes kept him from public life. Little is known of his mother Helvia, whom his brother Quintus described in a letter as a thrifty housewife. Cicero was neither a patrician nor a plebeian noble. He was a novus homo, a new man, and an Italian eques climbing into the political class from outside it. He ascended the cursus honorum, the ladder of Roman offices, at or near the youngest legal age for each rung. He became quaestor in 75 BC at thirty, aedile in 69 BC at thirty-six, and praetor in 66 BC at thirty-nine. Three years later, a man with no famous ancestors would be elected consul, the highest office in the Republic.

• 3. The Greek Apprenticeship

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  In 90 BC, at the age of fifteen, Cicero served under Pompey Strabo and later Sulla in the Social War between Rome and its Italian allies. He was more drawn to words than weapons. The plebeian tribune Publius Sulpicius Rufus impressed him deeply with his oratory in 88 BC, even though Cicero disagreed with his politics. He studied with Greek academics who had fled the First Mithridatic War, and wrote a youthful pamphlet on rhetorical argument titled On Invention. In 87 BC, Philo of Larissa arrived in Rome as head of the Platonic Academy that Plato had founded in Athens roughly three centuries earlier. Cicero, in his own description inspired by an extraordinary zeal for philosophy, sat at his feet and absorbed academic skepticism. Plutarch records that his learning drew attention from across Rome and won him the chance to study law under Quintus Mucius Scaevola. Among his fellow students was Titus Pomponius, later nicknamed Atticus, whose sister married Cicero's brother and who became, in Cicero's words, as a second brother through a lifelong correspondence. In 79 BC he left for Greece, Asia Minor, and Rhodes. In Athens he studied under Antiochus of Ascalon, the Old Academic. On Rhodes he reunited with his teacher Apollonius Molon, who trimmed the excesses of his style and trained his body and lungs for the strain of public speaking. Charting a middle path between the Attic and Asiatic styles, he would come to be ranked second only to Demosthenes among the orators of history.

• 4. Making A Reputation In Court

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  Pro Quinctio, delivered in 81 BC when Cicero was twenty-six, was his first major appearance in the courts, a speech defending certain commercial transactions. The following year he entered criminal court with Pro Roscio Amerino, defending Sextus Roscius of Ameria against a charge of parricide. He accused Chrysogonus, a freedman of the dictator Sulla, of faking the proscription of Roscius' father to seize the family's property. He won, and tactfully avoided pinning any wrongdoing on Sulla himself. In 70 BC, at the age of thirty-six, Cicero launched his first high-profile prosecution against Gaius Verres, the corrupt governor of Sicily. He had served as quaestor in Sicily in 75 BC, where he won local gratitude and personally financed the rediscovery of the lost tomb of Archimedes. Verres hired Quintus Hortensius, then known as the best lawyer in Rome, for his defense. Cicero had spent a long period in Sicily gathering testimony and persuading witnesses, and he won in a series of dramatic court battles. In one line from In Verrem he told the jury that with Marcus Acilius Glabrio as president of the court, he could not understand what Verres could hope to achieve. Beating Hortensius brought exactly the prestige a new man needed. On the conclusion of the case, Cicero came to be considered the greatest orator in Rome.

• 5. The Conspiracy And The Price

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  Lucius Sergius Catilina plotted to overthrow the Republic during Cicero's consulship in 63 BC, reportedly with the help of foreign armed forces. Cicero secured a senatus consultum ultimum, a Senate recommendation meant to legitimize the use of force, and drove Catiline from the city with four vehement speeches. He delivered the first in the Temple of Jupiter Stator, after which Catiline hurriedly left the Senate. Catiline tried to draw in the Allobroges, a tribe of Transalpine Gaul, but Cicero seized letters that incriminated five conspirators and forced their confession before the Senate. In the debate over punishment, Decimus Junius Silanus first spoke for the extreme penalty. Julius Caesar argued instead for life imprisonment in Italian towns, warning of the precedent. Cato the Younger rose for the death penalty, and the Senate agreed. Cicero had the conspirators taken to the Tullianum, the notorious Roman prison, where they were strangled, and he personally walked the former consul Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura there. The Senate granted him the honorific pater patriae, father of the fatherland. He had executed five Roman citizens without a trial, and the fear of that act would shadow him for the rest of his life. Shortly after his consulship he bought a townhouse on the Palatine Hill once owned by Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome. It cost an exorbitant 3.5 million sesterces, partly financed by a loan of some two million from Publius Cornelius Sulla, whom Cicero had defended in court. He boasted that the house stood in sight of nearly the whole city.

• 6. Exile, Cilicia, And Civil War

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  In 58 BC the price came due. Publius Clodius Pulcher, adopted into a plebeian family and elected tribune with the backing of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, passed a law making it illegal to give fire and water to anyone who had executed a Roman citizen without trial. Cicero, who had done exactly that, was the obvious target. He grew out his hair, dressed in mourning, and toured the streets while Clodius' gangs pelted him with stones and excrement. When Clodius banned him from coming within four hundred miles of Rome, Cicero went into exile, arriving at Thessalonica on the 23rd of May 58 BC. Clodius had his Palatine house demolished and consecrated the land with a temple of Liberty. In despair he wrote to Atticus that only his friend's pleas had stopped him from suicide. After the tribune Titus Annius Milo intervened on Pompey's behalf, the Senate voted to recall him, with Clodius casting the lone vote against. He landed at Brundisium on the 5th of August 57 BC and was met by a cheering crowd and his beloved daughter Tullia. He persuaded the College of Pontiffs that the consecration of his land was invalid and rebuilt his house. In 51 BC he reluctantly served as proconsul of Cilicia. There he governed mildly, recovered embezzled public property, and proved active in the field. He relieved the threat of the Parthian prince Pacorus, took the mountain fortress of Pindenissum after a forty-seven-day siege, and was hailed imperator by his troops. When the war between Pompey and Caesar broke out, Cicero sided with Pompey as a defender of the Senate. After Caesar's victory at Pharsalus on the 9th of August 48 BC, he refused to take command of the surviving Pompeian forces and returned to Rome, where Caesar pardoned him.

• 7. The Philippics And Octavian

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  Marcus Junius Brutus lifted his bloodstained dagger after the assassination of Caesar on the ides of March, 44 BC, and called out Cicero's name, asking him to restore the Republic. Cicero had not been part of the conspiracy, though the Liberatores were sure of his sympathy. He later wrote to Trebonius, one of the killers, wishing he had been invited to that most glorious banquet on the ides of March. He had no respect for Mark Antony, who was consul and unofficial executor of Caesar's will. To rally opposition, Cicero turned to Octavian, Caesar's adopted heir, praising him and declaring he would not repeat his father's mistakes. He attacked Antony in a series of speeches he called the Philippics, named after Demosthenes' denunciations of Philip II of Macedon. At the time his popularity as a public figure was unrivalled. He urged the Senate to name Antony an enemy of the state, and Antony was so declared after refusing to lift the siege of Mutina held by Decimus Brutus. The plan collapsed. Antony and Octavian reconciled and joined Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate, made official by the lex Titia passed on the 27th of November 43 BC. The triumvirs began proscribing their enemies, and Cicero was among the most viciously hunted of all. Octavian, the heir Cicero had elevated, argued against adding him to the list for two days, then acquiesced. A freedman of his brother Quintus, named Philologus, gave away his hiding place to the soldiers.

• 8. The Father Of Latin Prose

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  Quintilian declared that Cicero was not the name of a man, but of eloquence itself. He is credited with turning Latin from a modest utilitarian language into a literary medium able to express abstract and complicated thought with clarity. He coined a large portion of Latin philosophical vocabulary, with neologisms such as evidentia, qualitas, and quantitas, nearly a hundred and fifty of them produced by translating Greek terms. Caesar said it mattered more to have extended the frontiers of the Roman spirit than the frontiers of the Roman empire. The English words Ciceronian and cicerone both derive from his name. A graffito at Pompeii warned readers that they would like Cicero or be whipped. Augustine of Hippo credited Cicero's lost work Hortensius for his conversion to Christianity, and Jerome dreamed he was accused of being a follower of Cicero and not of Christ. More of his writing survived than that of any other Latin author. Of his speeches, 88 were recorded but only 52 survive, and of his books, six on rhetoric and parts of seven on philosophy remain. Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters helped spark the searches through European monasteries that led to the Renaissance. The Polish historian Tadeusz Zielinski wrote that the Renaissance was above all a revival of Cicero, and only after him and through him the rest of Classical antiquity. After Gutenberg's press, his On Duties, De Officiis, was the second book printed in Europe, following the Gutenberg Bible. Enlightenment thinkers including John Locke, David Hume, Montesquieu, and Edmund Burke drew on him. John Adams wrote that the ages of the world had produced no greater statesman and philosopher united than Cicero. Even Copernicus credited him, saying he first found in Cicero that Hicetas supposed the earth to move.