Cicero: The Man Who Talked Too Much
Marcus Tullius Cicero was the greatest orator Rome produced, possibly the greatest the ancient world produced, and he was killed for it. His head and his right hand — the hand that had written the Philippics, the series of speeches attacking Mark Antony — were displayed on the Rostra in the Roman Forum by Antony’s orders in 43 BC. Antony’s wife Fulvia reportedly pushed hairpins through the tongue that had destroyed so many reputations with such elegance. The story may be exaggerated. The impulse it describes was not.
Cicero was a novus homo — a new man, the first in his family to hold senatorial office. He came from Arpinum, a provincial town south of Rome, with money enough for a good education but without the family connections that smoothed the path to Roman political eminence. He built his career on his legal ability and his oratory, establishing a reputation in the courts that translated into political capital. He reached the consulship in 63 BC, the peak of the Roman cursus honorum, entirely through his own abilities — which he spent the rest of his life making sure everyone understood and which his enemies spent the rest of his life using against him. The self-made man who knows he is self-made is rarely modest about it.
The defining event of his consulship was the Catilinarian conspiracy, in which a disgruntled aristocrat named Lucius Sergius Catilina organized a plot to overthrow the government after losing an election. Cicero uncovered the plot, arrested the conspirators, and had five of them executed without trial — a decision that was legally controversial and politically explosive. He considered it the greatest achievement of his life. His enemies considered it an illegal execution that should disqualify him from public life. Both were right, and the tension between those positions followed him for two decades until it killed him.
His output was staggering. Fifty-eight speeches survive complete or in substantial form, representing perhaps a third of what he delivered. His philosophical works — On the Republic, On the Laws, On Duties, the Tusculan Disputations — were attempts to translate Greek philosophy into Latin and make it applicable to Roman political life. His rhetorical treatises defined the theory and practice of Latin oratory for subsequent centuries. His letters — nearly a thousand survive — are the most intimate documentary record of late Republican political life that exists, written with an informality and psychological transparency that other ancient sources do not approach.
The letters are where Cicero becomes fully human and fully problematic. He is vain, anxious, inconsistent, occasionally cowardly, and intermittently magnificent. His letters to Atticus, his closest friend, show a man of genuine intellectual brilliance who could not always match his philosophical commitments with his political behavior. He praised Pompey and then Caesar and then the conspirators against Caesar in ways that can be read as opportunism or as genuine attempts to navigate an impossible political situation, depending on how generously you read him. His exile in 58 BC — driven by a law retroactively criminalizing the Catilinarian executions, pushed by the tribune Clodius Pulcher with the backing of Caesar and Pompey — broke him temporarily in ways that his letters document with painful honesty. He spent his exile writing letters of self-pity that embarrassed even his friends.
What redeemed him, or at least rehabilitated his reputation in his own lifetime, was his final political act. After Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, Cicero emerged from the semi-retirement that the dictatorship had imposed on him and launched a sustained rhetorical assault on Mark Antony through the Philippics — fourteen speeches modeled on Demosthenes’s attacks on Philip of Macedon. They were brilliant, lethal, and politically suicidal. Cicero had correctly identified Antony as the greatest immediate threat to whatever remained of republican governance; he had badly misjudged Octavian, whom he was trying to use as a counterweight and whom he described privately as a young man who should be praised, honored, and disposed of. Octavian was not disposed of. When Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus formed the Second Triumvirate in 43 BC, Cicero’s name was on the proscription list before the ink was dry.
He tried to flee and was caught. The sources agree that he faced his killers with composure, extending his neck from the litter in which he was traveling. He was sixty-three years old. The Republic he had spent his life defending was already effectively over; the Philippics had been his last attempt to make words do the work that armies had decided they would do themselves.
His reputation survived him in a way that his politics did not. Latin education for the next fifteen centuries was substantially organized around his prose style, which became the standard against which all Latin writing was measured. Medieval scholars who disagreed with everything he believed about politics and philosophy still copied his texts and imitated his sentences. His philosophical works transmitted Greek ideas to the Latin West in forms that shaped Christian theology and Renaissance humanism. Petrarch found letters of Cicero’s that had been lost for centuries and wept, reportedly, at the man’s inconsistency — a response that says as much about Petrarch’s investment in Cicero as about Cicero himself.
He was not, in the end, a great man of action. He was a great man of words who lived in a time when words were losing the argument to swords, and who understood this clearly and kept talking anyway. That combination of clear-eyed understanding and continued effort in the face of it is either heroic or futile depending on your disposition. Probably it is both.