Cicero - Anthony Everitt [21]
The attitudes Cicero acquired as a serious-minded, bookish boy lasted him all his life. He always loathed and feared physical aggression. He recalled, a little priggishly: “The time which others spend in advancing their own personal affairs, taking holidays and attending games, indulging in pleasures of various kinds or even enjoying mental relaxation and bodily recreation, the time they spend on protracted parties and gambling and playing ball, proves in my case to have been taken up with returning over and over again to … literary pursuits.”
Cicero wrote poetry in his adolescence and as early as the age of fourteen completed a work in tetrameters called Pontius Glaucus. Although it has not survived, we know that it told the story of a Boeotian fisherman who eats a magic herb and is turned into a fabulous sea divinity with a gift of prophecy. It was an apt subject for someone who had dreams of making his way in the world by means of his chief talent, a strikingly persuasive way with words.
AS a young man Cicero was as well known for his verse as for his oratory. His style was fluent and technically accomplished. He wrote quickly and easily, as many as 500 lines a night, and could turn his hand to unpromising subjects such as a translation of a Greek work on astronomy by Aratus. However, he did not really have a poetic imagination and readers found that verbal virtuosity was not enough. His reputation as a poet declined sharply and permanently with the arrival a generation later of a new, more personal and lyrical style of verse writing, pioneered by Catullus and his circle. Tacitus, the imperial historian of the following century, noted: “Caesar and Brutus also wrote poetry—no better than Cicero, but with better luck, for fewer people know that they did.”
AS his education proceeded, Cicero met the full force of an inherent schizophrenia in Roman culture. There was a widespread belief that traditional values were being undermined by foreign immigrants. The decadence that was perceived to permeate the Republic was attributed largely to slippery and corrupt Greeks and Asiatics who had come to Rome from the hellenized Orient. Cicero’s paternal grandfather, for one, would have nothing to do with them and deplored falling standards of Roman morality. “Our people are like Syrian slaves: the better they speak Greek, the more shiftless they are.” When speaking in public, senior Philhellenes such as Crassus and Antonius sometimes felt obliged to conceal their true beliefs.
But the fact is that while the ferocious city-state on the Tiber was able to defeat them in war, it had nothing to rival the Greeks culturally. Greek literature, philosophy and science were a revelation to people who had little more than ballads and primitive annals as their literary heritage. They immediately started borrowing what they found and the history of Roman literature in the third and second centuries BC is essentially one of plagiarism. Even in Cicero’s day there was a good deal of catching up to be done.
Cicero’s father seems to have reacted against his own father’s anti-Greek views. Like many other bien-pensants of the time, he believed that the future for his sons lay in a grounding of Greek literature, philosophy and rhetoric. So it is no wonder that the young Cicero was given access to a well-known Greek poet of the day, Archias, from whom he gained much of his knowledge of the theory and practice of rhetoric. Archias was a fashionable figure in leading circles and mixed with many of the best families in Rome. Cicero recognized the debt: “For as far as I can cast my mind back into times gone by, as far as I can recollect the earliest years of my boyhood, the picture of the past that takes shape reveals that it was [Archias] who first inspired my determination to embark on these studies, and who started me on their methodical pursuit.”
Cicero became so addicted to all things Greek