Cicero - Anthony Everitt [189]
The most important documentary sources are Cicero’s own writings (all of which are available in Latin alongside translations in the Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press). Many of his speeches, which he revised and issued himself, survive, as do his books on philosophy and oratory. So do about 900 letters; some were designed for publication or for judicious circulation by the recipient, but others, a large proportion of the correspondence with Atticus, were not. They are organized into a number of different collections: the so-called Letters to His Friends and Letters to Brutus and Letters to Quintus are mainly, but not entirely, communications to politicians and public figures; they include letters from Julius Caesar and Pompey and other politicians of the day. They were probably published before the Letters to Atticus, which appeared some time in the first century AD. The complete correspondence was edited and translated in the 1960s by D. R. Shackleton Bailey; he reordered the letters in one continuous sequence, which is cited first in the references below (followed by the traditional numbering).
Cicero’s speeches need to be treated with caution, for he is always arguing a case. On the one major occasion where an alternative version exists to the story he is telling, his defense of Milo, we find that he is almost certainly promoting a tissue of untruths. The letters are an invaluable resource, a reliable guide to day-to-day events even if we do not always agree with their author’s political analyses.
Contemporary or near-contemporary histories include the following: Sallust’s two surviving monographs, The Conspiracy of Catilina and The Jugurthine War, give useful if highly colored and sometimes chronologically haphazard accounts. Caesar’s lapidary, accurate but not always truthful Conquest of Gaul and The Civil War are essential reading. A short life of Atticus was published by a friend of his, Cornelius Nepos. Two sections from a Life of Augustus by Nicolaus of Damascus about his subject’s youth (edited and translated by Jane Bellemore, Bristol Classical Press, 1984) give interesting details about Caesar’s assassination. An Augustan Senator, Quintus Asconius Pedianus, wrote intelligent and well-informed commentaries on some of Cicero’s speeches, in one of which he gives a detailed account of Clodius’s death (Commentaries on Five Speeches by Cicero, ed. and trans. Simon Squires, Bristol University Press and Bochazy-Carducci Publishers, 1990).
Diodorus Siculus, a Sicilian writing in Greek, was a near-contemporary of Cicero. He wrote a history of the Mediterranean world, Library of History, in forty volumes from mythological times up to his own day. He is useful on his native island of Sicily. Unfortunately most of the book survives only as excerpts or paraphrases from Byzantine and medieval times. He was an uncritical compiler and only as good as his sources.
Plutarch, a Greek biographer and essayist of the second half of the first century AD, is one antiquity’s most charming authors. His Parallel Lives include biographies of Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Cato, Crassus, Brutus, Caesar, Mark Antony and Cicero. They are full of fascinating personal detail, but he was interested in character rather than history and was indiscriminate in the use of his sources.
Suetonius was a slightly later contemporary of Plutarch and, as the Emperor Hadrian’s secretary, had access to the imperial archives; this makes his short biographies of Julius Caesar and Augustus, in The Twelve Caesars, of particular interest, although, like Plutarch, he is no historian and concentrates his attention on his subjects’ private lives. Velleius Paterculus lived during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius and wrote a patchy History of Rome from earliest times to 30 AD.
Lines from Catullus, whose poetry movingly expresses the way of life of the younger set who simultaneously attracted and repelled Cicero, are quoted in Peter Whigham’s translation (Penguin Classics,