Book review: Cicero, the life and times of Rome’s greatest politician

Cicero, by Anthony Everitt

It doesn’t happen very often that a single book makes you seriously reevaluate a position you had held for many years, but that’s the effect that reading Anthony Everitt’s Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician had on me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always admired Cicero, ever since I translated him from Latin back in high school. His prose is gorgeous, his intellect cunning, and — despite being an Academic Skeptic — he was also very sympathetic to the Stoics.

But I always bought the common stereotypes about him: that he was more of a lawyer than a statesman, a bit of sophist more than a philosopher, a flip-flopper who alternatively backed Caesar, Pompei, Octavian, and in the end got killed by order of the vindictive Mark Anthony. Turns out, the story is far more complex, and fascinating, than the stereotype.

Marcus Tullius Cicero was indeed both a lawyer (an advocate, as the Romans put it) and a statesman. He excelled at both, without question. His speeches in the Forum were renowned at the time, and are still studied today as excellent examples of rhetoric — understood not as an insult, but as the art of persuasion, as described by Aristotle.

His statesmanship shone through at several points of his tumultuous life. For instance, and perhaps most famously, in his defense of the Republic against the Catilinian conspiracy in 63 BCE. Everitt devotes chapter 5 of his book to that episode, and Mary Beard begins her excellent SPQR with the same. She calls it Cicero’s finest hour.

But in fact in my mind his finest hour came near the end of his life, after he had retired and his beloved daughter Tullia had died in childbirth. In the year 43 BCE Cicero went back to public life and made a last-ditch, desperate attempt to save the Republic from tyranny by identifying and going after what he thought was the major threat to the authority of the Senate: Mark Anthony (chapter 15 of Everitt’s volume). He wrote the famous “philippics,” a total of 14 speeches condemning Mark Anthony, so-called in an explicit nod to the speeches delivered by Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon in the 4th century BCE.

It took a lot of courage and a principled mind to do this, and Cicero paid for it with his life. When later…