On Life and Death (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

  Oxford World’s Classics

  Cicero on Life and Death

  Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 bc) was the son of a Roman equestrian from Arpinum, some 70 miles south-east of Rome. He rose to prominence through his skill in speaking and his exceptional success in the criminal courts, where he usually spoke for the defence. Although from a family that had never produced a Roman senator, he secured election to all the major political offices at the earliest age permitted by law. His consulship fell in a year (63) in which a dangerous insurrection occurred, the Catilinarian conspiracy; by his persuasive oratory and his controversial execution of five confessed conspirators, he prevented the conspiracy from breaking out at Rome and was hailed as the father of his country. Exiled for the executions by his enemy Clodius in 58 but recalled the following year, he lost his political independence as a result of the domination of politics by the military dynasts Pompey and Caesar. His governorship of Cilicia (51–50) was exemplary in its honesty and fairness. Always a firm Republican, he reluctantly supported Pompey in the civil war, but was pardoned by Caesar. He was not let into the plot against Caesar. After Caesar’s assassination (44), Cicero supported the young Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) and led the senate in its operations against Mark Antony. When Octavian and Antony formed the ‘Second Triumvirate’ with Lepidus in 43, Cicero was their most prominent victim; he met his end with great courage.

  Cicero’s letters, together with his speeches and his political and philosophical works, form the chief source for the history of the late Republic. His philosophical treatises, written in periods when he was deprived of his political freedom, are the main vehicle by which Hellenistic philosophy was transmitted to the West. His prose style raised the Latin language to an elegance and beauty that was never surpassed.

  John Davie is former Head of Classics at St Paul’s School, London and now a Lecturer in Classics at Trinity College, Oxford. He is the author of a number of articles on classical subjects and has translated the complete surviving plays of Euripides for Penguin Classics (four volumes). For Oxford World’s Classics he has translated Seneca’s Dialogues and Essays and Horace’s Satires and Epistles.

  Miriam T. Griffin is Emeritus Fellow of Somerville College at the University of Oxford. After her retirement, she edited for five years the Classical Quarterly. She is the author of a number of books on classical subjects including ed. with E. M. Atkins, Cicero on Duties for Cambridge University Press and Seneca on Society: A Guide to De beneficiis for Oxford University Press.

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  Oxford World’s Classics

  Cicero

  On Life and Death

  Translated by

  John Davie

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  Miriam T. Griffin

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

  Translation © John Davie 2017

  Editorial matter © Miriam T. Griffin 2017

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  First published as an Oxford World’s Classic 2017

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  ISBN 978–0–19–964414–8

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  Contents

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of Cicero

  TUSCULAN DISPUTATIONS

  Book 1

  Book 2

  Preface to Book 3

  Preface to Book 4

  Book 5

  ON OLD AGE

  ON FRIENDSHIP

  Appendix: Two Letters to Friends

  Explanatory Notes

  Introduction

  The fortunes of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Rome’s greatest orator, mirrored those of the city of Rome, which he first celebrated, then lamented. He was born at the end of the second century bc when Rome was a republic already ruling a large empire in the western Mediterranean and rapidly extending her power in the east. His career was one of intense activity in politics, the law courts, and the administration, mostly in Rome. It did, however, include a short period of exile in Macedonia and a spell as governor of the province of Cilicia in modern-day Turkey. He died as a victim of the Triumvirate, a legally constituted body comprising the trio of Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus: these men had defeated the Republican cause in the civil war that followed the death of Julius Caesar. After Cicero’s death in 43 bc, the three would fall out with one another and, after the ejection of Lepidus from the coalition, the remaining two would plunge Rome into more civil conflict, from which the Republic would never recover. Instead, the victor, Octavian, the youngest of the Triumvirate, would, as the Emperor Augustus, create the new political system of the Principate and unify the empire by a land route connecting east and west. Augustus was to call Cicero ‘a learned man and a lover of his country’.1

  A New Man in the Senate

  For Cicero, Rome was both a magnificent city and a cosmopolitan hub of empire. Still more important for him, it was identified with the Republic, a political system that centred on the senate house and the forum, where political speeches were made and important trials held. Elections and legislative decisions also took place exclusively in Rome, so that the increasing number of Roman citizens in Italy and the provinces were without representation, unless they travelled to the capital. Cicero himself was born on 3 January 106 bc in the town of Arpinum, a citizen community for which he retained considerable affection. He was what the Romans called a ‘new man’  —  that is, the first in his family to achieve h
igh public office  —  rising through the requisite series of magistracies to the highest, the consulship. His mother, Helvia, came from a family that could boast senatorial office holders early in the previous century. His paternal grandfather had held local office, but his father was not very robust and remained a rather bookish gentleman of leisure. He saw to it that his son had a good education, studying at the house of Lucius Licinius Crassus, one of the great orators and statesmen of the day. Another of the boys to appreciate the tutors gathered there was probably Titus Pomponius Atticus, who remained a close friend of Cicero for life. The two then went on to study law with Quintus Mucius Scaevola Augur, a great jurist. All of this was wonderful preparation for a career in public life, where the two chief means of achieving prominence were oratorical skill and military prowess. It was in the senate house and the forum that the aristocrats of Rome devised and enforced the laws, as well as inculcating in the newcomers their own code of behaviour.

  Cicero’s Friend Atticus

  Atticus was born at the end of 110 bc and was three years older than Cicero. The two had been friends since their schooldays. As a well-connected gentleman of equestrian status, Atticus could probably have embarked on a senatorial career had he wanted to do so. But he chose to remain an eques, a gentleman of non-senatorial rank, and did not even participate in the activities of public life for which equites were eligible. As his biographer Cornelius Nepos wrote:

  He never took part in a public auction of taxes or other state services.… the post of prefect, offered him by many consuls and praetors, he accepted on condition that he accompany no one to his province, be content with the honour alone, and despise the profit to his estate; not even with Quintus Cicero (Cicero’s younger brother) had he wanted to go to Asia, though he had the chance of a legate’s position on his staff, for he said that it was not seemly, when he had refused to hold a praetorship, to be a praetor’s assistant.2

  Cicero and Atticus between them arranged Quintus’ marriage to Atticus’ sister Pomponia, which turned out to be more convenient for the two friends than happy for the wedded pair.

  Atticus spent many years away in Athens, where he became involved in civic affairs, and in 68 bc he acquired an estate at Buthrotum in Epirus, to which he also made frequent visits. To the long separation of the two friends, in fact, we owe the wonderful series of letters that Cicero wrote to Atticus. These letters suggest that the emotional balance of the friendship was on Atticus’ side: his job was to calm down the volatile Cicero and give him good advice. He also looked after his business and financial affairs, especially when Cicero was out of Rome. From those letters of Cicero that were replies to his friend’s missives, we can sometimes infer what Atticus had written to Cicero, given that the letters composed by Atticus are not preserved. That we do not have them seems to fit his reticent personality. He outlived Cicero, and we may surmise that he had his own letters destroyed.

  Cicero, by contrast, loved the limelight and was determined from the start to have a public career. His education had prepared him well, and he went on to share and relish the excitement of senatorial debate, popular oratory, and the forensic arena in which his peers played out their rivalries and hostilities. Cicero also went through the standard military training and served in 90 bc under Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, the father of his contemporary Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (hereafter ‘Pompey’), in the Social War, the conflict in Italy that finally brought Rome to grant its citizenship to most of the Italian peninsula. Thus equipped in youth with the relevant military experience, Cicero later, during his governorship of Cilicia, was to fight several campaigns, and he would probably have earned a triumph, the ambition of all Roman commanders, had the civil war not intervened.

  The Senatorial Career

  Having pleaded his first public cases in the courts, Cicero spent a year in Athens and Rhodes studying oratory and philosophy, sitting at the feet of Apollonius Molon the rhetorician, the Academic philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon, the Stoic philosopher Posidonius, and the Epicureans Zeno and Phaedrus. Although Cicero regarded history and law as essential parts of the orator’s education, it was philosophy that he would later particularly recommend in his theoretical works, not only because of the wisdom it lends to the speaker’s subject matter, but because of the training that dialectic offers in argument.

  On his return to Rome, Cicero successfully campaigned for his first magistracy, the quaestorship. This office he shared with nineteen other young hopefuls also bent on senatorial careers. As the quaestor at Lilybaeum (now Marsala), he was a subordinate of the governor specifically charged with financial duties. During the year that he spent in Sicily (75 bc), he found or made time to visit the tomb of Archimedes, the great Greek scientist, who was buried at Syracuse. When he returned to the capital, he realized that no one had noticed his absence, and he resolved never to leave Rome again, except when necessary.3 That promise he largely kept, his principal absences being limited to his exile, his governorship, and his later service in the civil war between Pompey and Caesar. Back home again, he pleaded in 70 bc the prosecution case against Gaius Verres for practising extortion as governor of the province where Cicero had served as quaestor. His opening speech was so powerful that Verres left the city without waiting for the jury’s verdict, though Cicero was not to be cheated of his glory and published four more speeches castigating the scoundrel. Next, as aedile in 69, he gave the expected games, though not on as lavish a scale as some other aediles did. Expensive as this office was, it was preferable for someone of Cicero’s political convictions to that of tribune of the plebs, the other office leading to the praetorship, for, as tribune, he would have been forced to choose between demagogic prominence and conservative insignificance. Next, duly elected top of the poll as praetor for 66 bc, he chaired the extortion court, where corrupt governors like Verres were brought to trial. He also delivered his first political speech in public. This was in support of a tribunician bill, the Lex Manilia, which conferred a command on Pompey, with extensive powers and resources, to conquer King Mithridates VI Eupator. The enemy was the aggressive and imperialistic king of Pontus, who had massacred Roman and Italian merchants and other businessmen in Asia.

  By this time Cicero had married Terentia, a wealthy and well-born woman, and fathered a daughter, Tullia, born in 78 bc, who was to be his beloved soulmate until she died in childbirth at the age of thirty-three. His only son was born in the same year as Cicero’s praetorship, 66. Young Marcus was to prove a good soldier but not a very good student, though Cicero sent him to Athens in his twenties to study with the Peripatetic philosopher Cratippus, and tried to present philosophy to him in the accessible form of the treatise On Duties, written in the Stoic vein. He seems to have become an alcoholic later in life,4 but lived to become consul in 30 bc after the victory of Octavian at the Battle of Actium. That wish of his father, at least, he fulfilled.

  The Active Consul

  For someone of Cicero’s non-senatorial background, reaching the praetorship was a substantial achievement, but Cicero had his eye on becoming one of the consuls, the two chief magistrates of Rome. Cicero was the only candidate of the seven standing in 64 bc who was a new man, in the sense mentioned above. Although he had retained contacts with his equestrian peers and had cultivated his new senatorial associates, it was the reputation he had acquired as an orator that must have tipped the balance, and he was elected at the earliest age the law allowed, to serve with C. Antonius, the son of a consul. During his consulship of 63 bc, Cicero first defeated a whole battery of reform bills brought by the tribunes of the plebs, and was then, later in the year, faced with armed insurrection. It was his proudest claim, throughout the rest of his career, that he had saved the Republic from the conspiracy of L. Sergius Catilina, a disgruntled aristocrat whom he had defeated in the consular elections. Cicero’s rhetoric on the subject, with which he inundated senate and people, is so copious and powerful that it is difficult to estimate the true size of the threat to Rome, the roo
ts of which lay deep in the eighties bc, in the civil war between Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that our fullest ancient source, the historian Sallust, writing a generation later, clearly accepted Cicero’s estimation of the Catilinarian conspiracy, even as he shone a glamorous spotlight on the villain rather than on the consul who defeated him. It is another source who tells us that men could still remember Catiline carrying the head of one of Marius’ kinsmen through the streets of Rome to present it, still ‘full of life and breath’ to the dictator Sulla himself. Now, dispossessed farmers, partisans of the murdered general, joined with the disgruntled veterans of Sulla, who had been settled on their confiscated land, and with spendthrift aristocrats hoping for the cancellation of debts, while slaves naturally took advantage of the resulting chaos to seize their liberty. After two Roman armies had finally repressed the rebellion, Cicero made manifest for the first, but not the last time, the strong view he took of the senate’s powers: he used a senatorial decree of emergency, followed by a senatorial vote, to execute the conspirators without trial.

  Not everyone agreed that this action was in keeping with the Roman constitution, which was a matter of unwritten custom and tradition and subject to various interpretations. As a result, Cicero found himself driven into exile in 58 bc through the attacks of a tribune of the plebs who disapproved, taking the negative popularis (democratic or left-wing) view of his procedure. The tribune was Publius Clodius Pulcher, a member of the ancient Claudian family who had given up his patrician status to become eligible for this plebeian office but had not given up his aristocratic pride along with it. He resented having once been made a fool of on the floor of the senate by Cicero’s wit. Cicero in despair left Rome for the east before Clodius passed his measure sending into exile anyone who had put Roman citizens to death without trial. Cicero was devastated but unrepentant. In his absence, his house on the Palatine, a source of great pride to him, was plundered and burned, and a temple of Liberty was built on the site; but he was recalled after a year and a half through Pompey’s belated efforts on his behalf. After incompetent tribunician efforts, one of the consuls of 57, Lentulus Spinther, proposed the bill for Cicero’s recall to the centuriate assembly, the popular assembly in which wealthier voters had great voting power. Not surprisingly, the bill passed, and Cicero at once set sail, reaching Italy on 4 August to a tumultuous welcome and making a triumphant entry into Rome a month later.