Marcus Tullius Cicero was one of the genuine all-rounders of history - what is often called a "Renaissance man" though there is no proof that the Renaissance had any monopoly of men of versatile talents. Our age is essentially a specialist one, hostile to multi-faceted men or women, but in the classical world a man might be many things in one, and in some cases had to be, especially if the state demanded it. Cicero was a lawyer (a very famous and successful one), a voluminous writer and scholar, a politician, a holder of various public offices, even something of a statesman. Yet he died a proscribed and hunted man, whose severed head was stuck up in the Roman forum as a warning to those who threatened the new ruling elite.
This was not due to any failing in his character, since he was largely a victim of events and of a changing society. Rome - the old puritan, republican Rome, governed overwhelmingly by custom (mos maiorum) and precedent - had willy-nilly become a multi-lingual empire which stretched existing political structures far beyond their limit. The city-state was still tribal and class-ridden, suspicious of change, trying against the odds to hang on to archaic, complex institutions which could no longer serve it, chauvinistic in the face of foreign influences (even Greek), loudly declaiming against the new corruption yet itself hopelessly corrupt. Anthony Everitt's is a shrewd, scholarly guide to the period. In this unstable world Cicero, a convinced but pragmatic republican, was rather like an old-style European liberal faced with the new, faceless Europe of bureaucrats and businessmen.
In spite of his dedicated Roman patriotism, Cicero was not a native Roman though he held Roman citizenship. He was born in 106 BC in Arpinum (now Arpino), about 70 miles from the capital, the son of a provincial landowner who was ambitious for his two sons. Cicero was given a good education, becoming fluent in Greek which was the language of culture, and studying the law and public speaking as a way to success in public life. The Roman legal code was a loose, ad-hoc affair, and eloquence in court counted heavily; Cicero, though sometimes mocked by his enemies for poor delivery, soon became a leading advocate and also held various public posts. He won fame for his denunciation of Verres, a Roman governor with a reputation for extortion, who was driven into exile by his eloquence. As consul, Cicero further advanced his career by his suppression of the conspiracy by Catalina, a frustrated nobleman who had planned to murder the whole Senate and take over power. By middle age, in spite of being cold-shouldered by most of the overbearing Roman nobility, he was a wealthy man who owned estates, city property (he owned several insulae or apartment-blocks in Rome, in fact almost a slum landlord), a noted host and dutiful husband, a writer, bibliophile and gentleman philosopher, whose country villa was celebrated for its fountains and gardens. Though a man of his time and no plaster saint, he resisted public corruption and won respect for his political courage at a time when violence was becoming endemic in Roman life.
One of the organisers of that violence was Julius Caesar, almost the only man who had read the times with clairvoyance and saw that only a form of decentralised autocracy could rule the growing empire effectively. In the power struggle between him and Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey), Cicero was out of his depth as a politician and was virtually forced out of public life. Meanwhile Caesar, victorious over Pompey in the civil war, pushed aside the dissident Roman nobility and made himself legally a dictator, though he stopped short of crowning himself king or emperor. The conservative republicans, in turn, struck back at what they saw as tyranny and Caesar was assassinated at a meeting of the Senate which he had been warned not to attend. Cicero, who happened to be innocently present, found himself hailed as a voice for liberty by the conspirators headed by Brutus, with whom he had nothing at all to do. This, it appears, largely sealed his doom. He already had many enemies and when the triumvirate of young Caesar Augustus (Octavian), Mark Antony and Lepidus took power and duly punished Caesar's killers, he and his brother Quintus were on the long list of those proscribed as traitors to the state. As in the previous bloody regimes of Marius and Sulla, much of this was simply a settling of personal scores and feuds, some of them going back decades. Cicero, attempting half-heartedly to flee, was tracked down in his litter and beheaded - a fate he met with dignity and courage. The head was taken to Rome where Mark Antony's notorious wife Fulvia, who had various grudges against the dead orator, took it in her hands, spat upon it, then opened the mouth and stuck her hairpins through the eloquent tongue which had formerly denounced her and her brutal, amoral husband.
FUTURE events did not vindicate Cicero's political judgement since Rome became officially an empire and remained so for several centuries until the barbarian inundations swamped it for ever. Today he lives for us almost entirely as an author - not a writer of out-and-out, original genius, but an urbane, erudite, intelligent stylist and man of letters, particularly in his correspondence, which contains the essence of his genial, deeply humane personality. Though not an original thinker, he could enter generously into the ideas of others and was particularly open to Greek philosophy and poetry (he did translations from Euripides and others which are good enough to figure in the Oxford Book of Latin Verse). Schoolboys have often groaned at having to parse their way through his legal orations, which are probably the least interesting things he wrote (those dreary periods built upon the formula non modo . . . sed etiam !). Cicero is perhaps best taken as a kind of Roman Montaigne, a follower of the via media whose liberal, questioning agnosticism is very close to modern sensibility.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic