Cicero's Letters: The Ancient World in Real Time
Nearly a thousand letters written by Cicero survive, along with approximately ninety letters addressed to him from other correspondents. They span the period from 68 BC to his death in 43 BC and constitute the most intimate documentary record of any figure from the ancient world. They were not written for publication. They were written to friends, family members, political allies, and enemies, in the urgency of specific moments, and they reveal a man whose public persona — the great orator, the defender of the Republic, the statesman who executed the Catilinarians — was inhabited by someone considerably more anxious, vain, inconsistent, and human than the published speeches would suggest.
The letters to Atticus are the core of the collection and the most important. Titus Pomponius Atticus was Cicero’s closest friend for forty years, a wealthy businessman who had managed the unusual feat of maintaining good relations with every faction in Roman political life by staying out of politics himself. Cicero wrote to him with a frankness that he could not deploy in any other correspondence: complaining about his wife, fretting about his finances, expressing political opinions he could not safely utter in public, and occasionally allowing the gap between his stated positions and his actual assessments to become visible in ways that subsequent readers have found embarrassing on his behalf.
The letters written during the civil war between Caesar and Pompey are the most historically significant. Cicero was attempting to navigate an impossible position — he had personal loyalty to Pompey, constitutional preference for the republican cause, genuine respect for Caesar’s abilities, and a rational understanding that Caesar was probably going to win. His letters from this period show a man thinking in real time about questions that have no good answers, revising his position as events develop, occasionally reaching conclusions he almost immediately abandons. This is political thinking as it actually occurs, under pressure and without the benefit of knowing how things will turn out. It is more instructive than any formal treatise.
The letters also document the private texture of Roman elite life in ways that the formal literary sources do not. The economics of a senator’s household — the management of estates, the movement of money, the social obligations that required constant attention — are present throughout. The relationships between patron and client, the management of political alliances through favor and obligation, the specific mechanisms by which influence was cultivated and deployed: all of this is documented in passing as Cicero writes about the daily business of Roman political life. His letters are incidentally the best source for how the late Republic actually functioned.
Petrarch found a collection of Cicero’s letters in Verona in 1345 — letters that had been unknown in the medieval West — and wrote a famous reply to Cicero expressing his disappointment at the gap between the philosophical writings and the letters. The Cicero of the philosophical treatises preached Stoic equanimity and political disengagement; the Cicero of the letters was anxious, ambitious, and deeply invested in the political world he had theorized about abandoning. Petrarch found the inconsistency scandalous. Modern readers generally find it humanizing. The question of whether a man should be judged by the standards he articulates or the conduct he demonstrates is one the letters pose without resolving, which is part of what keeps them interesting.
The collection’s survival is itself a matter of literary history. Cicero’s secretary Tiro, a freed slave who had invented a shorthand system still named after him, collected and published the letters after Cicero’s death. Without Tiro’s editorial work, the correspondence would not exist. The man who recorded the ancient world’s most intimate correspondence was the man Cicero had owned, which is the kind of historical irony that Cicero himself would have found worth noting, had he been in a position to note it.