The Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero is one of those curious historical figures of whom almost everyone has heard, yet almost no one can tell you anything about. At first glance this is not surprising. He was hardly a hero, certainly not in the conventional sense. He hated soldiering and was regularly accused of cowardice: he was too squeamish even to enjoy the deaths of the wild beasts in the games. He was prone to attacks of panic. He was an unromantic, workaholic prude married to a nagging wife. He could be devastatingly rude, both to the faces of his enemies and in catty remarks behind the backs of his so-called friends.
He was boastful, conniving, slippery, avaricious and devious: indeed, the astonishing archive of more than 800 of his letters that has survived, and which provides us with the most penetrating insight we have into any personality of the ancient world, may well have been published posthumously precisely in order to discredit him.
Shakespeare, contemptuously, gives him only nine lines in Julius Caesar. (When Cassius suggests involving Cicero in the plot to assassinate the dictator, Brutus briskly dismisses the idea: “He will never follow any thing / That other men begin.”) To the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen — who hero-worshiped Caesar as a Nietzschean superman — Cicero was “a weakling”: “a journalist in the worst sense of the word”. To Kingsley Amis, in Take a Girl Like You, he was simply a pain in the neck: “For a man so long and so thoroughly dead it was remarkable how much boredom, and also how precise an image of nasty silliness, Cicero could generate.” To scholars of ancient history Cicero may be a giant, but in the popular imagination he is merely a bit-player, not even as well known as such imperial psychopaths as Caligula and Nero.
And yet, having conceded all his flaws, there remains some bewitching quality about Cicero — a charm that dazzled his contemporaries and which one can still feel even now, across the chasm of 2,000 years. It is, I think, in part the charm of the consummate politicial operator, which might be defined as the ability to say things which both he and his audience know to be not quite the whole truth, and yet to say them so eloquently, and with such apparent sincerity, that all but the most hardened listeners are willing to suspend their disbelief in admiration of the performance.
Among contemporary politicians, Bill Clinton was a master of this talent, and so, until his touch began to desert him recently, was Tony Blair; David Cameron is already showing promising — or, depending on your point of view, alarming — signs of its presence. But Cicero had it before any of them. They are his heirs, so much so that when he writes breezily — as he did in 54BC — that “unchanging consistency of standpoint has never been considered a virtue in great statesmen . . . It is our aim, not our language, which must always be the same” — one hears the authentic voice of a Clinton, a Blair or a Cameron, exactly as they might have sounded five decades before the birth of Christ.
Cicero, in other words, was a recognisably modern political leader, gladhanding his way among the voters, ever alert to the shifting winds and tides of popular opinion. He made much of his undistinguished name — derived from cicer, meaning chickpea — which he recognised had the merit of being memorable, and he therefore had images of chickpeas engraved onto dishes, boasting that he would make it the most famous in Rome.
He is, if not exactly a hero for our times, a character astonishingly in tune with them.
ONE of the joys of studying the ancient world is to realise how little has changed. Read Catullus and you realise that the joys and agonies of love were experienced by men and women in exactly the same way. Study Caesar’s Gallic Wars — as soldiers still do — and you recognise that the basics of military tactics and strategy are unchanged. Write a novel about politics in republican Rome and you run up against the same types of politicians you still find in Washington or Westminster, all up to the same tricks and making the same mistakes as our contemporaries.
Cicero’s route to the top — as for so many politicians: one thinks again of Clinton and Blair — was the law. Born in 106BC in rough, mountainous country 80 miles southeast of Rome, he came from a respectable provincial family who lacked both great wealth and patrician blood. As a young man he was intensely ambitious but seems to have been something of a weakling, which closed off a proper military career: all his life he was pursued by rumours of the Roman equivalent of draft-dodging.
The law was his only way forward, yet even here he lacked the necessary stamina for the rough and tumble of the courts, six or seven of which were usually in session each day, crowded with spectators in the forum. Therefore, sometime around 78BC, on the verge of a physical and nervous breakdown, he travelled to the eastern Mediterranean in search of professional help, and come under the tutelage of a Greek teacher of rhetoric named Apollonius Molon.
Molon is one of those pivotal but shadowy figures in history of whom one would like to know more. A lawyer, from the town of Alabanda in modern-day Turkey, he was considered sufficiently brilliant an orator to be invited to address the Roman senate in Greek — an unheard-of honour for a foreigner. Retiring to the island of Rhodes around 80BC, he founded a school for the teaching of rhetoric. Among his pupils we know of at least four young men who went on to become consul — the supreme office in the Roman republic — including Cicero and Julius Caesar.
“He was distinguished not merely as a practical advocate and composer of speeches for others,” wrote Cicero many years later, “but was particularly skilful in criticising and correcting faults, and wise in his whole system of teaching. He made it his task to repress if possible the redundance and excess of my style, which was marked by a youthful impetuousness and lack of restraint, and to check it so to speak from overflowing its banks.”
