Cicero Read online

  The good public speaker recognized that he had to be a performer, like an actor. Later in his life Cicero wrote books on oratory and in them he underscored the point:

  A leading speaker will vary and modulate his voice, raising and lowering it and deploying the full scale of tones. He will avoid extravagant gestures and stand impressively erect. He will not pace about and when he does so not for any distance. He should not dart forward except in moderation with strict control. There should be no effeminate bending of the neck or twiddling of his fingers or beating out the rhythm of his cadences on his knuckles. He should control himself by the way he holds and moves his entire body. He should extend his arm at moments of high dispute and lower it during calmer passages.… Once he has made sure he does not have a stupid expression on his face and or a grimace, he should control his eyes with great care, for as the face is the image of the soul the eyes are its translators. Depending on the subject at hand they can express grief or hilarity.

  Students were taught how to turn fables and other kinds of stories into simple narrative; to develop arguments from quotations from famous poets; and to compose speeches inspired by actual or fictional situations and events. They would declaim them to the class. Although by Cicero’s day the teaching of rhetoric had been reduced to a complicated and arid system of rules, it lay at the heart of the curriculum. At one level rhetoric was a vocational subject, for it was the key to a political career, to which all men of good birth should aspire. They would be able to do so only if they acquired the necessary skills to persuade people of the rightness of their point of view. In Rome reputations were made not only at public meetings and in the Senate but also in the law courts. Ambitious young men in their early twenties often appeared as prosecutors in criminal trials in order to make a name for themselves, not just as lawyers but as potential future politicians.

  Both rhetoric and the study of literature were also intended to give students an ethical grounding, a moral education which inculcated the virtues of fortitude, justice and prudence.

  Public speaking in this complex sense is extinct and it is difficult now to conceive of its power, immediacy and charm. Just as Samuel Pepys in seventeenth-century England would spend a Sunday going from sermon to sermon for the sheer pleasure of it, so crowds of Romans would pack the Forum, where trials were held in the open air, to listen to and applaud the great advocates of the day as they presented their cases. The “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar gives a hint of how the real thing must have been.

  In 90 Cicero reached the age of sixteen, the Roman age of majority, by which time his secondary schooling ended. A special rite of passage marked the moment when a boy became a man, not on his birthday but on or around March 17, the feast day of Liber, the god of growth and vegetation. We do not know where the ceremony took place in Cicero’s case, but bearing in mind his family’s ambitions for him, it would most likely have been in Rome.

  About the time Marcus came of age, his father decided that his sons should complete their training in public speaking and study law in the capital. Higher education was exclusively devoted to debate and declamation and was in the hands of a rhetor, a specialist teacher of public speaking. He and other learned men, philosophers or scholars, had much the same status as university professors. However, as academic institutions such as universities did not exist, such men were freelance and often lived in the household of a leading political figure, where they acted as advisers and added to their employers’ prestige. Elder statesmen were also willing to impart their experience and legal and constitutional knowledge to the younger generation.

  Access for a couple of provincial teenagers to these informal and exclusive finishing schools was difficult. It could be achieved only through the web of personal connections called clientship (clientela). Society was a pyramid of matching rights and obligations; the basic principle was summed up in the religious formula “do ut des”—“I give so that you give.” A wealthy and powerful man acted as a “patron” for many hundreds or even thousands of “clients.” He guaranteed to look after their interests. He welcomed them to his home and occasionally gave them meals and provided very needy followers with food handouts. He was a source of advice and of business and political contacts. If a client got into trouble with the law his patron would offer his support. In return, a client (if he lived in Rome) would regularly pay a morning call and accompany his patron as he went about his business in the town. He could be recruited as a bodyguard or even a soldier in his army. Neither party could go to law against the other. These networks of mutual aid cut across the social classes and linked the local elites in the various Italian communities, not to mention those in the Empire as a whole, to the center. Clientship was a binding contract and, for lack of other administrative instruments, it was an essential means of holding the Empire together. A family’s client list survived from one generation to the next. Durable bonds could, of course, also be established between equals. Amicitia or “friendly alliance” meant more than personal affection and referred to formal networks between superiors and inferiors.

  To get on in society, indeed to survive in it at all, a Roman had to be an effective member not only of his family but also of his town and village, his guild (if he was an artisan or tradesman) or his district. Each of these institutions had a patron, through whom a man was locked into the highest reaches of authority and power. In an age without a welfare state, a banking system and most public services, he had no alternative but to assure his future in these ways. This was why politics was largely conducted on a personal basis and was seen in moral rather than collective terms. The client-list system was not compatible with alliances based on political programs or manifestos of common action.

  Like all provincial clients of good social status, the Ciceros had patrons in Rome and they made use of them when finding good teachers for Marcus and Quintus. They were connected in particular to the Leader of the Senate, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus; Marcus Antonius, a distinguished lawyer and politician (who had taken Cicero’s uncle Lucius with him on the expedition against the pirates); and an even more celebrated orator and statesman, Lucius Licinius Crassus, a conservative who understood the need for reform.

  Strings were successfully pulled. One of Marcus and Quintus’s maternal uncles, Caius Visellius Aculeo, a legal expert, knew Crassus well and arranged a placement for them. The boys spent a good deal of time at the great orator’s house, an elegant building at an excellent address on the Palatine Hill, where there were columns of Hymettan marble and shade-giving trees—rare features in this city of tufa and brick. They often listened to him discussing contemporary politics and studied with his scholars-in-residence. Marcus was also much impressed by the pure, traditional Latin spoken by Crassus’s wife. In return, the brothers would doubtless have been expected to join the daily crowd of clientes who accompanied leading men when they appeared in public. The larger the following, the greater the prestige.

  Cicero also became a pupil of Crassus’s father-in-law, Quintus Mucius Scaevola, then in his eighties and one of the earliest and greatest of Roman jurists. On Scaevola’s death Cicero transferred to a younger cousin of the same name, who was Chief Pontiff, the leading official of the state religion, and had shared the Consulship with Crassus in 95.

  His father entrusted him to the care of an older fellow student, Marcus Pupius Piso, who acted as a kind of mentor and kept an eye on him. Later the historian Sallust, a near contemporary, presented this arrangement as a homosexual affair in a lampoon against Cicero: “Didn’t you learn your unbridled loquacity from Marcus Piso at the cost of your virginity?” But this was the kind of insult that Roman public figures routinely exchanged with one another and while something of the sort may have briefly occurred, it is just as likely that it did not.

  It was during these years that Cicero’s ambition to become a famous advocate crystallized. He found he had a gift for writing and public speaking. He was swept along by the alm
ost unbearable excitement of the trials in the Forum and the glamour of the lawyer’s job, very much like that of a leading actor.

  There were a number of jury courts, specializing in different kinds of crime—treason, murder, extortion and so on. Temporary stands and seating were set up to accommodate those taking part in the proceedings. A Praetor usually presided and between thirty and sixty jurors were appointed by lot for each case, who voted in secret. They were originally Senators, but one of Caius Gracchus’s reforms transferred the right of jury service to equites. This was a highly disputatious issue, especially in cases where Senatorial or commercial interests were in any way at stake. Jurors voted by rubbing off either an A (for absolvo) or a C (for condemno) on either side of voting tablets. Verdicts were often biased and bribery of jurors was common.

  Court procedures in ancient Rome are known only in broad outline. Prosecutors opened with a long speech, which the defense sought to rebut, at equal length. Addresses by supporting counsel followed. A water clock ensured that everyone kept to time. Witnesses for either side were then cross-examined. At some stage, the opposing advocates entered into a debate between themselves (altercatio). The case was then adjourned, probably resuming after a day’s interval. There were further speeches by either side and the calling of additional evidence was allowed. The verdict then followed.

  Civil cases were heard in two parts; the first before a Praetor who defined the issues in question, and the second, for decision, before a judge or a jury to whom the Praetor had passed his opinion.

  Cicero was amazed by the sensational impact a leading advocate could have on his hearers and looked upon his skills as being akin to those of an actor. Despite the fact that the theater was not regarded as a respectable profession, Cicero was fascinated by it and later became a close friend of the best-known actor of his day, Quintus Roscius Gallus. Although he always insisted that oratory and drama were different arts, he modeled his style on Roscius’s performances and those of another actor he knew, Clodius Aesopus (who once became so involved in the part he was playing—that of King Agamemnon, overlord of the Greeks—that he ran through and killed a stagehand who happened to cross the stage).

  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 that he was nicknamed “the little Greek boy.” However, he also made sure that he learned about Rome and its history. To this end he cultivated the acquaintance of Lucius Aelius Stilo. Rome’s first native-born grammarian and antiquarian, Aelius was a fund of knowledge about the history of the Republic, which he made available to his friends for use in their political speeches. His patriotism rubbed off on the precocious adolescent from Arpinum, who developed a lifelong fascination with the details of Rome’s inadequately recorded past.

  It was while studying with Scaevola at the house of Crassus that Cicero met other contemporaries in the little world of upper-class Roman society. Two boys in particular stood out from the crowd. Caius Julius Caesar was six years younger than Cicero, but both he and Quintus knew him personally. Through Marius’s marriage to Caesar’s aunt Julia they were, after all, distant relatives. Cicero also struck up a friendship that would last a lifetime with a boy named Titus Pomponius, who came from an old but not strictly noble family. They met at the Scaevolas’ and found that they shared a passion for literature and Roman history. Cicero’s friendship with Atticus, as he later called himself, was to be central to his life. Years later when he was adult, he wrote: “I love Pomponius … as a second brother.”

  The three youngsters were not allowed to pursue their education without interruption. The few years of relative calm that had followed the assassination of the radical Tribune Saturninus came to end when Cicero was fifteen. The Republic was now battered by a succession of crises that set the scene for the politics of the boys’ adult lives. Cicero, Caesar and Pomponius watched events in the Forum and on the streets.

  While most of the Senate was unwilling to countenance any constitutional change, a few of its more farsighted members realized that the status quo could not last and that it was wiser to anticipate events than react to them. It fell to yet another aristocrat to pick up the battered baton of reform. Marcus Livius Drusus was a wealthy and ambitious nobleman who became Tribune in 91. He was a friend of Cicero’s mentors, Scaurus and Crassus, and we can presume that the young student witnessed some of the events that followed at firsthand. Drusus’s main project was a renewal of the plan to extend Roman c
itizenship to the Italians, but the Senate, with typical shortsightedness, threw out his legislation. They were profoundly suspicious of him from the most self-interested of motives: if the Italians were enfranchised, they would join Drusus’s clientela in huge numbers and that would make him far too powerful.

  The outcome was predictable. The Allied communities lost all hope that the Republic would ever share the profits of empire with them. The mood in the countryside became tense and feverish. Drusus was known to have entertained one of the Allied leaders at his house in Rome and public opinion suspected him of disloyalty. There were reports that the Italians had vowed allegiance to Drusus.

  It was about this time that Crassus made his last contribution to a Senatorial debate. Cicero left a detailed account of what took place. Furious with one of the Consuls, Lucius Marcius Philippus, for criticizing the Senate, Crassus launched a tirade against him. The Consul lost his temper and threatened to fine him. The old man refused to back down: “Do you imagine that I can be deterred by the forfeit of any of my property?” The Senate unanimously passed a motion in his support. Crassus had made a fine speech, but the effort had weakened his strength and he was taken ill while delivering it; he contracted pneumonia and died a few days later. Cicero and the other boys were probably at Crassus’s house when the great orator was brought home. They were deeply upset, and Cicero describes them as going later to the Senate House to look at the spot where that last “swan song” (a phrase he popularized) had been heard.

  The incident illustrates an attractive aspect of Cicero’s personality: his predisposition to admire. He was not a cynic and, although he was much concerned with his own glory and had a fair share of hatreds and dislikes, he was appreciative of the achievements of others and liked to praise them if he could.

  It was another death soon after that caused the conflagration that set Italy alight. Drusus knew that he was at personal risk and seldom went out of doors, conducting business from a poorly lit portico at his house on the Palatine Hill. One evening as he was dismissing the gathering he suddenly screamed that he had been stabbed and fell with the words on his lips. A leather worker’s knife was found driven into his hip, but the assassin was never caught.