Cicero - Anthony Everitt [7]
Later, when he had time to reflect, Cicero thought back to the heyday of his political career nearly twenty years previously. During his Consulship he had put down an attempted coup by a dissolute nobleman, Lucius Sergius Catilina, a friend of Caesar’s but a much less talented politician, and had enforced the execution of his leading followers. Although he had been a member of the Senatorial oligarchy, Catilina had wanted to pull it down. Where he had tried and failed, Caesar had succeeded. But now he too had been destroyed and the Republic had been saved again. Brutus’s cry linked the past with the present and was an implicit invitation to Cicero to return to active politics.
Giving the lie to his critics, the old orator was happy to respond. In the days and months that followed, he stepped back eagerly into the dangerous limelight.
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The Empire in Crisis: First Century BC
To understand Cicero’s life, which spanned the first two thirds of the first century BC, it is necessary to picture the world in which he lived, and especially the nature of Roman politics.
Rome in Cicero’s day was a complex and sophisticated city, with up to a million inhabitants, and much of its pattern of life is recognizably familiar, even at a distance of two millennia. There were shopping malls and bars and a lively cultural scene with theater and sport. Poetry and literature thrived and new books were much talked about. Leading actors were household names. The affluent led a busy social round of dinner parties and gossip, and they owned country homes to which they could retreat from the pressures of urban living. Politics was conducted with a familiar blend of private affability and public invective. Speech was free. Everyone complained about the traffic.
The little city-state, hardly more than a village when it was founded (according to tradition) in 753 BC, gradually annexed the numerous tribes and statelets in the Italian peninsula and Sicily. The Romans were tough, aggressive and, to reverse von Clausewitz, inclined to see politics as a continuation of war by other means. They came to dominate the western Mediterranean. First, they gained a small foothold in the Maghreb, the province of Africa which covered roughly the territory of modern Tunisia. From here the great city of Carthage ruled its empire, until it was twice defeated by Rome and later razed to the ground in the second century BC. Spain was another prize of these wars and was divided into two provinces, Near Spain and Far Spain. In what is now Provence, Rome established Transalpine Gaul (Gallia Transalpina), but the rest of France was an unconquered and mysterious mélange of jostling tribes. Northern Italy was not merged into the home nation but was administered as a separate province, Italian Gaul (Gallia Cisalpina).
Then Rome invaded Greece and the kingdoms of Asia Minor, enfeebled inheritors of the conquests of Alexander the Great. In the first century BC, along the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean, now named with literal-minded accuracy “our sea” (Mare Nostrum), Rome directly governed a chain of territories: Macedonia (which included Greece), Asia (in western Turkey), Cilicia (in southern Turkey) and Syria (broadly, today’s Syria and Lebanon). Beyond them, client monarchies stood as buffers between Rome’s possessions and the unpredictable Parthian Empire, which lay beyond the River Euphrates. Pharaohs, although now of Greek stock, still ruled Egypt, but their independence was precarious.
This empire, the largest the western world had so far seen, was created more through inadvertence than design and presented Rome with a heavy and complicated administrative burden. This was partly because communications were slow and unreliable. Although a network of well-engineered roads was constructed, travel was limited to the speed of a horse. The rich would often travel by litter or coach, and so proceeded at walking pace or not much faster.