Cicero - Anthony Everitt [185]
In Macedonia, Brutus received the news of his friend’s murder with equanimity. He said that he felt more ashamed by the cause of Cicero’s death than grief at the event itself. He had been baffled by Cicero’s willingness, after a lifetime of constitutional rectitude, to defend the Republic by its enemies’ methods. The relationship with Octavian had been unforgivable. However, he reluctantly exacted retribution by finally accepting Cicero’s advice and executing Antony’s brother, Caius, whom, as coincidence would have it, young Marcus had played an active part in capturing.
These contemporary assessments do not do full justice to their subject. In our eyes Cicero was a statesman and public servant of outstanding ability. He had administrative skills of a very high order and was the preeminent orator of his age, if not of any age. In a society where politicians were also expected to be good soldiers, he was preeminently a civilian and this makes his success all the more remarkable. That his career ended in ruins and that for long years he was a bystander at great events was not due to lack of talent but to a surplus of principle. The turning point in his career was his refusal to join Julius Caesar, Pompey and Crassus in their political alliance during the 50s. He declined the invitation to do so because it would have betrayed his commitment to the Roman constitution and the rule of law. In his eyes that was totally unacceptable.
Cicero acquired a reputation for vacillation and compromise. It is true that he sometimes found it difficult to decide on a particular course of action, as his letters reveal. But his maneuvering was invariably tactical and he never sold his beliefs. His basic aim—to restore traditional political values—remained unchanged throughout his life, although in his last two years his character hardened and he became willing to adopt unconstitutional methods.
Cicero’s weakness as a politician was that his principles rested on a mistaken analysis. He failed to understand the reasons for the crisis that tore apart the Roman Republic. Julius Caesar, with the pitiless insight of genius, understood that the constitution with its endless checks and balances prevented effective government, but like so many of his contemporaries Cicero regarded politics in personal rather than structural terms. For Caesar the solution lay in a completely new system of government; for Cicero it lay in finding better men to run the government and better laws to keep them in order.
His personality was insecure and nervous. This had two important consequences. First, he needed continuity and stability to thrive and it was his misfortune to live in an age of change; he was a temperamental conservative caught in the nets of a revolution. Second, he never stopped boasting of his successes. Roman politics was extremely competitive: where a man like Brutus had generations of ancestors stretching back to the foundation of the Republic with which to maintain his prestige, Cicero had only his own record. If he did not talk about it, nobody else would. His correspondence with Atticus shows that he did not take himself too seriously in private and was amused by his habit of talking up his achievements.
We know something of Cicero’s domestic life, but not nearly enough to come to a firm judgment about it. His divorce of Terentia and marriage to Publilia may well have been justified, but they leave him in a rather poor light. It is hard to avoid the impression that he was insensitive to the feelings of his brother, Quintus, whom he treated as a political extension of himself rather than as an independent figure in his own right. Tullia seems to have been the only member of his family who engaged his deepest feelings; otherwise, if we may judge by the surviving evidence, his affections centered on male friendships.
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