- Cicero And Rome
(By Miriam Griffin)This chapter is devoted to the period which opens with the dictatorship of Sulla in 82 BC and closes with
that of Caesar in 44 BC. It is concerned with the political life and death of the later Roman Republic.
Cicero
If we know more about these years than about any other period of Roman history, it is due principally to
one man, Marcus Tullius Cicero. We have an abundance of speeches and letters written when he was
deeply involved in day-to-day politics, either holding the highest offices of state or in contact with the
men who were settling the future of the Mediterranean world. But it is not only political history that his
works illuminate so brilliantly. When not at the centre of the stage, Cicero turned to literature of a more
reflective sort and composed a corpus of theoretical works on philosophy and rhetoric richly adorned
with contemporary examples and redolent of contemporary attitudes. Precisely because he was not an
original thinker, Cicero helps us to recapture the intellectual habits of his generation.
The voluminous correspondence which Cicero maintained throughout all the vicissitudes of his adult life
remains, however, his most valuable legacy to the historian. Some letters were private and not intended
for publication; others were clearly written with a wider circulation in mind. Over 900 in number, they
concern personal and cultural matters, as well as providing official and unofficial, public and private,
views of the most important political events of the day. Of Cicero's most candid letters, those to his
intimate friend Atticus, a younger contemporary was to write: 'Whoever reads the eleven books of the
correspondence hardly feels the need of an organized history of the time.'
There is a dark side, however, to this picture. Cicero was an intelligent observer, but he was not
detached; he was perceptive, but mercurial in mood and outlook; he was interested in other people, but,
above all, obsessed with his own reputation. Moreover, his contemporaries have left little to serve as a
corrective to his version of things. Their speeches, their works on philosophy and rhetoric have not
survived intact, and much of what we know of them comes from Cicero. Over seventy letters from
friends and acquaintances are preserved with Cicero's, but as they are mostly letters to him, they throw
little light on matters outside his concerns. If it were not for Caesar's account of the Gallic and Civil
Wars, Varro's antiquarian and agricultural writings, and some Roman legal documents preserved on
stone or bronze, we might almost believe that the life of late-republican Rome, as we conceive it, was a
creation of Cicero's fertile imagination.