Molon changed the way politicians spoke. Rejecting the long-winded type of oratory known as “Asiatic” — which had been dominant for generations and was exemplified by Cicero’s great rival at the Roman bar, Quintus Hortensius — Molon taught his clients the virtues of simplicity. Once a speaker had roused his audience to a pitch of emotion, he always advised him to sit down quickly, “for nothing”, he asserted, “dries more quickly than a tear”.
From Molon among others Cicero learnt the essential tricks of the political trade: how to memorise a two-hour speech and deliver it without notes, how to acquire the physical stamina to speak outdoors in all weathers, how to hold the body still and use the arms and hands to gesture with maximum effect, how to project one’s words for a full 80 yards — the maximum range of the speaking voice — and how to hold the attention of a restless audience of 3,000 or 4,000 in the Forum or 600 in the Senate. It was not what a man said that counted so much as the way that he said it. Cicero was fond of quoting the maxim of the Greek orator Demosthenes: only three things count in public speaking: “delivery, delivery, and again, delivery”.
According to Plutarch, Molon regarded Cicero as the greatest pupil he ever taught. After listening to the young man speak, he supposedly “sat for a long time lost in thought” before finally offering his verdict: “Cicero, I congratulate you and I am amazed at you. It is Greece and her fate that I am sorry for. The only glories that were left to us were our culture and our eloquence. Now I see that these too are going to be taken over in your person by Rome.”
Even allowing for a degree of exaggeration, it is clear that Cicero was an orator of astonishing power. Of the 106 set-piece speeches we know that he delivered either in the Senate or the law courts (there must have been many more) we still have 58. They combine something of the forensic brilliance of Enoch Powell with the passion and wit of Aneurin Bevan, and show why Cicero eventually eclipsed Hortenius to become the most sought-after advocate in Rome. His assault on the corrupt Roman governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, who had ordered the crucifixion of a Roman citizen named Gavius, despite his victim’s repeated cry of “I am a Roman citizen” (“Civis Romanus sum”), remains one of the most devastating courtroom attacks of all time:
"If you, Verres, had been made a prisoner in Persia or the remotest part of India, and were being dragged off to execution, what cry would you be uttering, except that you were a Roman citizen? What then of this man whom you were hurrying to his death? Could not that statement, that claim of citizenship, have saved him for an hour, for a day, while its truth was checked? No it could not — not with you in the judgment seat! And yet the poorest man, of humblest birth, in whatever savage land, has always until now had the confidence to know that the cry ‘I am a Roman citizen’ is his final defence and sanctuary. It was not Gavius, not one obscure man, whom you nailed upon that cross of agony: it was the universal principle that Romans are free men!”
IF MOLON was arguably the world’s first political image consultant, the Greek historian Plutarch describes Cicero as the world’s first professional politician. “Now that he was beginning to go in for politics more seriously, he came to the conclusion that it was a disgraceful thing that, while a craftsman who uses inanimate tools and materials still knows what each of these is called, where it can be found, and what it can do, the statesman, who uses men as his instruments for public action, should be slack and indifferent where knowledge of his fellow-citizens is concerned. He therefore trained himself not only to memorise names, but also to know in what part of the city every important person lived, where he had his country houses, who were his friends and who his neighbours. And so, whatever road in Italy Cicero happened to be travelling on, it was easy for him to name and to point out the estates and the villas of his friends.”
He had the dedicated single-minded drive to succeed that one encounters in all politicians who reach the very top, and which most normal men and women simply do not possess, or even comprehend. Elected a senator at the youngest possible age, 31, he spent a year as a magistrate in Sicily and returned to the Italian mainland expecting, as he wryly observed in a courtroom speech long afterwards, “that the Roman people would lay all their distinctions at his feet”. It was April, during the senate recess, and all the fashionable people were on the Bay of Naples when he landed. No one had even noticed he had been away, and he was humiliated.
“This experience, gentlemen, I am inclined to think was more valuable to me than if I had been hailed with salvoes of applause. From that day I took care that I should be seen personally every day. I lived in the public eye; I frequented the forum; neither my door-keeper nor sleep prevented anyone from getting in to see me. Not even when I had nothing to do did I do nothing. Those speeches, Cassius, which you tell us it is your custom to read in your hours of leisure, I have spent festivals and holidays in writing, and consequently absolute leisure was a thing I never knew.”
By the time he stood for the consulship in the summer of 64BC at the age of 42 the size of the Roman electorate, which was all male, was close to a million. Cicero fought a surprisingly modern campaign, which included a three-month swing through the crucial towns of northern Italy. Although the great majority of these citizens never voted — a man was obliged to cast his vote in person on the Field of Mars, the vast open space just outside Rome’s walls, and most never bothered to make the journey — nevertheless much of the modern vocabulary of politics is derived from these campaigns, including senate, suffrage, rostrum and candidate. Even the word ambition originally comes from the Latin ambitio, or trailing around after votes, which eventually hardened into a more specific meaning: “desire for popularity, fame, display, pomp”.
The Roman senate in Cicero’s day consisted of 600 senators, the majority of whom had no hope of being elected to high office. These passed-over backbenchers were lobby-fodder, obliged to move to one side of the chamber or the other when a division was called to register their vote, and hence were known as pedarii: those who voted with their feet. And just as much of the business of modern politics is done outside the debating chamber — in the smoking room of the House of Commons, or the Senate cloakroom on Capitol Hill — so in Rome it was conducted in the senaculum, or “little senate”: a space beside the main building where the senators milled around waiting until they constituted a quorum.
This is where I imagine Cicero was to be found most days, constantly circulating in the manner of Lyndon Johnson when he was majority leader of the US Senate: a touch on the arm here, a word in the ear there, with this man a joke, with that a solemn word of condolence. And all around him, doing exactly the same lobbying, would have been the other great figures of the Roman republic: Marcus Porcius Cato, the original neoconservative, who believed that the rigid theories of stoic philosophy could be obliged to the chaos of politics (“He behaves as if he were living in Plato’s Republic,” Cicero once complained, “rather than Romulus’s shithole”); Marcus Licinius Crassus, the Roman equivalent of the American billionaires Ross Perot or Steve Forbes, who tried to use his money to buy supreme political power; Pompey the Great, the military hero turned inept politician, a General Colin Powell regularly outwitted by less glamorous but more cunning men; Publius Clodius Pulcher, the aristocratic proto-fascist, a kind of Sir Oswald Mosley with a gang of street thugs always ready to intimidate his enemies; and finally of course Julius Caesar, the restlesss, patrician womaniser who had something of John F Kennedy’s youthful glamour among the plebs of Rome.
Only rarely in history — in 18th-century America, perhaps, or 19th-century Britain — can there have been such a concentration of political brilliance within one elected assembly as these six men embodied: Cicero, Cato, Crassus, Pompey, Clodius and Caesar. They and their families all lived within a mile or so of one another. All knew one another and dined with one another. All were at various times friends and bitter enemies. All grasped for supreme power — imperium, as the Romans called it: the power of life and death — and all six died violently in its pursuit, dragging down with them the whole ancient structure of the Roman republic: a form of democracy, albeit flawed and biased towards the wealthy, which did not begin to emerge again in Europe for 1,600 years.
