Cicero - Anthony Everitt [1]
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This work was previously published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., in 2002.
This work was originally published in Great Britain by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd. in 2001.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Everitt, Anthony.
Cicero: the life and times of Rome’s greatest politician / Anthony Everitt.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-034-2
1. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. 2. Statesmen—Rome—Biography. 3. Orators—Rome—Biography. 4. Rome—Politics and government—265–30 B.C. I. Title.
DG260.C5 E94 2002
937′.05′092—dc21s
[B] 2001048531
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
v3.1
PREFACE
With the disappearance of Latin from the schoolroom, the greatest statesman of ancient Rome, Marcus Tullius Cicero, is now a dimly remembered figure. He does not deserve this fate and it is time to restore him to his proper place in the pantheon of our common past.
One powerful motive for doing so is that, nearly two thousand years after his time, he became an unknowing architect of constitutions that still govern our lives. For the founding fathers of the United States and their political counterparts in Great Britain, the writings of Tully (as his name was Anglicized) were the foundation of their education. John Adams’s first book and proudest possession was his Cicero.
Cicero wrote about how a state should best be organized and decision-makers of the eighteenth century read and digested what he had to say. His big idea, which he tirelessly publicized, was that of a mixed or balanced constitution. He favored not monarchy nor oligarchy nor democracy, but a combination of all three. His model was Rome itself, but improved. Its executive had quasi-royal powers. It was restrained partly by the widespread use of vetoes and partly by a Senate, dominated by great political families. Politicians were elected to office by the People.
This model is not so very distant from the original constitution of the United States with the careful balance it set between the executive and the legislature, and the constraints, now largely vanished, which it placed on pure, untrammeled democracy. When George Washington, meditating on the difficulty of ensuring stable government, said, “What a triumph for the advocates of despotism, to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious,” he could have been quoting Cicero.
Towards the end of his life Cicero distinguished himself in his battle to save the Roman Republic. Through sheer force of character he took charge of the state during the months following Julius Caesar’s assassination, despite the fact that he held no public office, and organized a war against the dead Dictator’s friend and supporter, Mark Antony. Cicero came to stand for future generations as a model of defiance against tyranny—an inspiration first to the American and then the French revolutionaries.
The triumphs and catastrophes of Cicero’s stormy career were not the end of his story, for he has enjoyed a long life after death. His speeches and philosophical writings have had an incalculable influence on western civilization throughout its history, as his great contemporary Julius Caesar foresaw.
For the Christian Fathers he was a model of the good pagan. St. Jerome, ashamed of what he felt was an excessive partiality for a heathen author, would undertake a fast, so that he could study Cicero afterwards. Petrarch’s rediscovery of his works gave a powerful steer to the Renaissance and by the age of sixteen Queen Elizabeth had read nearly all his works. Cicero