Did Rome’s Greatest Orator Live Up to His Own Ideals?
How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Who was Cicero? Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) has been hailed as Rome’s greatest orator. Lawyer, statesman, philosopher, and master of prose, he shaped not only the Latin language but the ideals of rhetoric, public service, and civic education for centuries to come. More than any other Roman, he sought to unite wisdom with eloquence.
But can someone understand virtue without consistently practising it? Cicero wrote brilliantly about virtue, duty, and the public good, yet struggled with ambition, anxiety, and political compromise. Admired by saints, humanists, and the American Founding Fathers, he remains one of the most influential—and most contradictory—figures in Western intellectual history.
A Frail Body for a Formidable Mind
Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in Arpinum, around 60 miles south of Rome, into a wealthy equestrian family. His cognomen, or personal surname, derives from the Latin for ‘chickpea’ (cicer), by which his ancestors may have prospered. He lived through a time of great civil unrest, famously decrying, O tempora, O mores (‘Oh the times, oh the customs’). Despite his frail and sickly constitution, he served in the army in 89–88 BCE, notably under Pompey’s father, Pompeius Strabo. But what he lacked in virility and nobility he more than made up in study and oratory.
In 87 BCE, Philo of Larissa, the last undisputed scholarch of Plato’s Academy, arrived in Rome, and Cicero came to sit at his feet—later opining that, if Zeus were to speak, it would be in none other than the language of Plato. He studied law under Quintus Mucius Scaevola, who founded the study of law as a systematic discipline. Scaevola also served as Pontifex Maximus (High Priest of Rome) before falling victim to the power struggle between Marius and Sulla. In 82 BCE, he was murdered in the Temple of the Vestal Virgins.
Cicero began practising the law in around 83–81 BCE and, in 80, made his reputation on the back of his brilliant defence of Sextus Roscius against a fabricated charge of patricide. In 79, partly on account of his health, he travelled to Greece, Asia, and Rhodes, meeting with several leading philosophers, including Antiochus of Ascalon in Athens. While in Greece, he asked the oracle at Delphi how he might attain the greatest glory. The pythoness (priestess of Apollo) replied, ‘By making your own genius and not the opinion of the people the guide of your life.’
Pater Patriae
In the next period, Cicero climbed the cursus honorum, or ‘ladder of offices’, holding each office at or near the youngest possible age: quaestor in 75 BCE, aedile in 69, praetor in 66, and consul in 63. He became consul at the age of just forty-two, making him the youngest non-patrician to serve in the office in the five-hundred-year history of the Republic.
As quaestor in western Sicily, Cicero seemed so formidable that the locals asked him to prosecute Gaius Verres, who, as governor, had plundered the province. He fought the case with such aplomb that he came to be regarded as the greatest orator in Rome. While in Sicily, he took it upon himself to rediscover the forgotten tomb of Archimedes, which he described as surmounted by a sphere and cylinder. He then chided the Syracusans for leaving it to a man from Arpinum to remember their most illustrious citizen.
As praetor, Cicero made his first great speech in the Senate, arguing that Pompey should be given the command of the campaign against Mithradates VI, King of Pontus. But the crowning glory of his political career came during his consulship, when, by the force of his four Catiline Orations, he exposed and crushed Catiline’s conspiracy to overthrow the Republic. He had five of the conspirators executed and announced their deaths to a cheering crowd with the single word, Vixerunt (‘They lived’). For ‘saving the Republic’, as he liked to boast, he received the honorific Pater Patriae (‘Father of the Fatherland’) from his ally Cato the Younger, but lived forever after in fear of reprisal for having put Roman citizens to death without trial.
Exile and Return
In 62 BCE, Cicero added a large townhouse on the Palatine Hill to his portfolio of properties. The house, which he described as ‘in sight of nearly the whole city’ (in conspectu prope totius urbis), had belonged to Rome’s richest citizen, Crassus, and cost him 3.5 million sesterces.
When Julius Caesar pressed him to join his alliance with Pompey and Crassus—the First Triumvirate—Cicero refused, believing that their arrangement undermined the Republic. He also declined Caesar’s offer of a place on his staff in Gaul, leaving himself exposed to the many enemies that his sharp tongue had made.
When Publius Clodius Pulcher became tribune in 58 BCE, he passed a law, with retroactive effect, to exile any official who had executed a Roman citizen without trial. The law was squarely aimed at Cicero. He fled to Greece while Clodius’ supporters ransacked his house on the Palatine and his villas at Formiae and Tusculum.
Writing to his friend Atticus, he lamented:
I say this deliberately—that no one was ever afflicted with so heavy a calamity, that no one had ever greater cause to wish for death; while I have let slip the time when I might have sought it most creditably. Henceforth death can never heal, it can only end my sorrow.
It is difficult to imagine Socrates—or indeed Cato—ever saying such a thing. In his Life of Cicero, Plutarch put his finger on the discrepancy between the man and his learning:
He was become so poor-spirited, so humiliated and dejected by his misfortunes, as none could have expected in a man who had devoted so much of his life to study and learning… But the desire for glory has great power in washing the tinctures of philosophy out of the souls of men.
In the event, Cicero’s exile lasted little more than a year. In 57 BCE, he was recalled by the Senate, with Clodius casting the single vote against the motion. He was met by cheering crowds all the way from Brundisium (modern-day Brindisi) to the Capitol, and his destroyed properties were rebuilt at public expense.
Caesar and Civil War
He took to opposing Cæsar, but this only drove Cæsar closer to Pompey and Crassus. So he swallowed his principles and made a show of supporting the triumvirs, before quietly withdrawing into his library. In 53 BCE, the year that Crassus died, he freed Marcus Tullius Tiro ‘to be our friend instead of our slave’, and it is Tiro who, after his death, collected his letters and speeches for publication. In 51 BCE, Tiro, himself a prolific writer, accompanied him to Cilicia (in modern-day Turkey) after he reluctantly accepted the governorship of the province. He restored calm and order to the entire region, repulsing Parthian incursions, suppressing brigands, and stemming corruption. He stopped in Rhodes and Athens on the return to Rome, where the Senate granted him a supplicatio, or period of public thanksgiving—instead of the full-blown triumph that he had been hoping for.
Only six days after Cicero’s return to Rome, Cæsar crossed the Rubicon into Italy, thereby declaring war on the Senate. Cicero hesitated in picking between putative tyrants, but in the end crossed the Adriatic to join Pompey’s camp. After Pompey’s defeat to Cæsar at Pharsalus, Cato offered him the command of the Pompeian forces, but he preferred to return to the Eternal City to be pardoned by Cæsar.
He had divorced Terentia in 51, and in 46 or 45 wedded a wealthy girl called Publilia, who had been his ward, and who jealoused the great love that he bore for his daughter Tullia. The marriage did not withstand Tullia’s sudden death in 45, with Cicero writing to Atticus that he had ‘lost the one thing that bound me to life’. For solace, Cicero went to Atticus, and in his library mined the Greek philosophers, especially Crantor, to write his Consolatio. Sadly, the Consolatio has largely been lost, as has Crantor’s On Grief, which, according to Panætius, deserved to be learnt by heart.
The Philippics and Death
Cicero was not a party to Cæsar’s assassination in 44, although Brutus did call out his name upon raising his blood-stained dagger, beseeching him to ‘restore the Republic’. He later wrote to one of the conspirators, ‘How I wish that you had invited me to that most glorious banquet on the Ides of March.’
Mark Antony, as consul, leader of the Caesarian faction, and unofficial executor of Cæsar’s public will, began throwing his weight around. Cicero, who had been hoping to restore the Republic, responded by playing the young Octavian, Cæsar’s grandnephew, adopted son, and heir, against Antony. More than that, he overtly and vehemently attacked Antony in a series of speeches which he referred to as the Philippics, after the speeches delivered by Demosthenes to rouse the Athenians into fighting Philip II of Macedon. But this strategy failed when Octavian and Antony reconciled and joined forces with Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate.
Estimating that Cæsar had been undone by his clemency, the Second Triumvirate brought back the ruthless proscription, the legally sanctioned murder of opponents and rivals. The proscription also served to fund the Triumvirate’s war, the so-called Liberators’ Civil War, against Brutus and Cassius, who were finally defeated at the Battle of Philippi in 42. When Antony put Cicero at the head of the proscription list, Octavian tried to have him removed, but did not insist or prevail. Also on the list were Cicero’s son, brother, and nephew. The Triumvirate, in the words of Plutarch, ‘let their anger and fury take from them the sense of humanity, and demonstrated that no beast is more savage than man, when possessed with power answerable to his rage.’
On 7 December 43, Cicero, betrayed by a freedman of his brother, was intercepted near his villa at Formiæ, travelling down to the coast in a bid to escape to Greece.
He literally bowed to his assassins, extending his neck out of his litter to ease their task.
After killing him, they hacked off his head and hands so that Antony could have them displayed on the Rostra in the fashion of Marius and Sulla. According to the historian Cassius Dio, Antony’s wife Fulvia took up Cicero’s severed head, pulled out his tongue, and jabbed it repeatedly with her hairpin.
Cicero’s brother and nephew were also murdered, but his son, who was then in Greece, escaped unscathed.
Twelve years later, in 31, Cicero the Younger took part in the Battle of Actium, in which Octavian defeated Antony; and in 30, he had the satisfaction, as consul, of announcing Antony’s suicide to the Senate.
Many years later, Octavian, now Augustus, chanced upon one of his grandsons reading a book by Cicero. The boy tried to hide the book in his gown, but the emperor took it from him and stood a long time leafing through its pages. Finally, he handed it back, saying, ‘My child, this was a learned man, and a lover of his country.’
Cicero as Philosopher
Was Cicero a Stoic, as is sometimes claimed? The answer, as with all things Cicero, is complicated. He studied, at various times in his life, under philosophers from all four major schools: Academic Skeptic, Peripatetic, Stoic, and Epicurean. But he saw himself primarily as a statesman, and his philosophical output, prolific though it is, mostly owes to those periods in which he was unable to partake in the cut and thrust of politics.
Cicero subordinated philosophy to public life because he believed that the purpose of philosophy is to enlighten political action, not least by encouraging virtue in political actors and the population at large. (He even subordinated philosophy to rhetoric, arguing, in essence, that an orator is a philosopher with the benefit of style.) Thus, his overarching project outside of immediate politics was to bring Greek philosophy to a Roman audience by writing expository works in Latin and, to a lesser extent, translating Greek texts into Latin. By coining Latin equivalences for specialised Greek terms, he enriched the Latin language and endowed it with an abstract vocabulary which is at the root of modern English words such as appetite, essence, humanity, individual, infinity, image, instance, moral, notion, property, quality, quantity, science, species, temperance, and vacuum.
In epistemology (theory of knowledge), Cicero favoured the Academic Skeptics, which afforded him the fluidity and flexibility to practise law, and, in politics, to privilege conciliation and expediency over principle or dogma. In his writings, he often imitated Plato in adopting the dialogue form, in which each speaker represents a different philosophical outlook and the reader is left to make up his or her own mind. For example, in On the Nature of the Gods, he pits an Epicurean spokesman and a Stoic spokesman against the Academic Skeptic Gaius Aurelius Cotta. Similarly, in On Ends, he expounds and critiques, in dialogue form, the central tenets of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and the Platonism of Antiochus of Ascalon. (The ubiquitous Lorem ipsum placeholder text, used to demonstrate the visual form of a template or typeface without imputing meaning, is a corrupted extract of On Ends.)
But Cicero felt that such relativism and amoralism would not do for the Senate and People of Rome, so that when it came to the spheres of ethics and political philosophy, he turned instead to the Peripatetics and especially to the Stoics, who emphasized virtue and offered positive doctrines.
Stoic or not, books such as On the Nature of the Gods, On Ends, On Duties, and Stoic Paradoxes make Cicero one of our most important sources on ancient Stoicism.
Cicero as Rhetorician
At the age of just sixteen or seventeen, Cicero wrote a handbook of rhetoric entitled On Invention, which in later life he dismissed as youthful work. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, On Invention became the standard textbook of rhetoric, alongside the anonymous Rhetoric for Herennius, which also came to be attributed to Cicero.
Although practical in scope, On Invention opens with a preface in which Cicero reflects upon the relationship between dialectic and rhetoric, concluding from the height of his teenage years that ‘wisdom without eloquence has been of little benefit to states, but eloquence without wisdom has for the most part been a great hindrance and never an advantage’. Until recently, everyone who was anyone would have read this.
Cicero’s mature works on rhetoric, On the Orator, Brutus, and Orator were little known until the Renaissance. Eloquence, he argued in these works, is not merely a gift of language but the culmination of a broad education. The ideal orator has a good grasp of philosophy, history, literature, and law, and speaks not merely to persuade but to guide the state.
His ideal of the educated citizen-orator shaped Western education for centuries. Rhetoric formed one of the three subjects of the trivium, alongside grammar and logic, and generations of students learnt to think, write, and speak by reading Cicero.
The rediscovery of his letters by Petrarch in 1345 sparked a search for other lost classical texts that helped kindle the Renaissance. Later, his writings profoundly influenced Enlightenment thinkers and the American Founding Fathers. John Locke, for instance, owned no fewer than nine editions of On Duties.
His influence endured well into the twentieth century, and it was not until the 1960s that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge dropped the matriculation (entry) requirement for an O level in Latin.
Did Cicero Live Up to His Own Ideals?
In an age that often prizes confidence over judgement and persuasion over truth, Cicero’s ideal of the orator as a philosopher and statesman remains as relevant as ever. But how well did he himself live up to that ideal?
Cicero had studied under and corresponded with the greatest minds of his day and written countless books on oratory and philosophy. Yet he seemed quite unable to control his passions, seeking always after fame and fortune, and coping poorly with adversity and hardship. Clearly, he did not need to have so many villas. His villa at Tusculum did not need to have two exercise areas. And these exercise areas did not need to be called the Academy and the Lyceum. Such grandeur, and his boastfulness, debased him, his learning, and his achievements.
The extraordinary oratory that had made him also unmade him. He loved to make an impression, so that he spoke more, and more forcefully, than he needed to, and often fell to attacking the person rather than the problem. As a result, he had not just adversaries but enemies.
In mitigation of the man, he lived through troubled times. The Roman Republic was collapsing around him, and political moderation had become almost impossible. His repeated reversals, compromises, and hesitations were not always signs of weakness, but sometimes the price of trying to preserve a constitutional order that others had already abandoned.
As a novus homo, or self-made man, he might also have harboured a deep-seated inferiority complex, explaining his need for achievement and affirmation.
Seneca once observed that Cato seemed more virtuous than wise. The converse might be said of Cicero: he could seem more wise than virtuous.
Unlike Cato, Cicero may not have met the standard of a Stoic sage. But for all his failings, the people loved him, because they knew him, at heart, to be a good man.
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