Cicero - Anthony Everitt [105]
AS we have already seen, Cicero did not fully appreciate the gravity of the political situation. In his judgment no more was required than a return to tried and tested traditions. “When we inherited the Republic from our forebears,” he wrote, “it was like a beautiful painting whose colors were fading with age. We have failed to restore its original colors and have not taken the trouble to preserve its overall composition or even its general features.” Cicero probably started On the State in May 54 and it was published about 51. Its subject, he told Quintus, was “the ideal constitution and the ideal citizen.” He found the work hard going, for it entailed a good deal of research both in the Greek authorities and in the history of Rome’s political development.
He chose to set the dialogue safely in a more glorious and perhaps more authoritative past, making his main speaker Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus, the adopted grandson of the great Africanus, who had defeated Hannibal at Zama outside Carthage in 202. He was a generous patron of the arts and letters and a Hellenophile. The action opens one morning during a public holiday in 129, not long before Scipio’s death at the end of a long life. This timing was not accidental, for the stormy career of Tiberius Gracchus was recent history. Cicero believed that his Tribuneship, which “divided one people into two factions,” had introduced the long constitutional crisis which now was coming to a head.
The scene is Scipio’s country estate, where the old man is found in his bedroom receiving callers. The conversation touches on the reported sighting of two suns in the sky. More visitors arrive, including his lifelong friend Laelius, whose cognomen, Sapiens, is a tribute to his scholarship and philosophical attainments. Scipio rises from his couch, dresses and puts on his shoes. The company moves to a portico of the house, where the talk turns away from the physical nature of the universe, on the grounds that it is unknowable, to the nature of good governance, about which truths can be ascertained.
Scipio’s thesis, which can be supposed to be Cicero’s, is that there are three basic systems of government: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. Each has its strengths and weaknesses and it is the unique distinction of Rome to have devised a constitution which combines elements of all three. Scipio’s personal preference is for the good king, father to his subjects, but the tendency towards tyranny is hard to eradicate. So “a moderate and well-balanced form of government which is a combination of the three simple good forms is preferable even to monarchy.” A substantial part of the book is devoted to a constitutional history of the early days of Rome and, through Scipio’s words, Cicero nostalgically evokes the Republic in its primitive, pure and thoroughly oligarchical form.
The government was so administered by the Senate that, though the People were free, few political acts were performed by them, practically everything being done by the authority of the Senate and in accordance with its established customs, and the Consuls held a power which, though only of one year’s duration, was truly regal in general character and in legal sanction. Another principle that was most important to the retention of the power by the aristocracy was also strictly maintained—namely, that no act of a popular assembly should be valid unless ordered by the Senate.