Cicero, the greatest public speaker of the Roman Republic, started life with a handicap. The name “Cicero” was obscure. While Rome was a republic, with all of its magistrates selected in annual elections, a hereditary nobility dominated politics. To be a Scipio, a Fabius, a Claudius – a descendant of one of the great families who had conquered the Mediterranean – brought incalculable advantage.
To rise to the top, as Cicero aspired to, he would have to make his name famous. And he did, through his successes as a trial lawyer. A later teacher of rhetoric, Quintilian, wrote that Cicero’s contemporaries called him “king” of the law courts and for posterity “Cicero was not the name of a person, but of eloquence itself.” Yet the power of his tongue brought not only acclaim but peril. Cicero lived in a chaotic, often violent, age. While that helped his legal practice by giving him many clients, he was sent into exile and eventually executed.
Cicero and the Courts
Cicero was born in 106 BC in the small hill town of Arpinum, a two or three days’ journey south of Rome. His talent shone even in boyhood, and his father took him to the big city for education. The Ciceros, who were wealthy, acquired a house in an upscale neighbourhood. They also built ties with some of the great noble families.
By his teenage years, Cicero was regularly visiting the swanky mansion of Lucius Crassus on the Palatine Hill, the city’s best address. Crassus, who was famous for his cutting remarks in senatorial debates, coached Cicero in speaking. Another mentor was Marcus Antonius, grandfather of the more famous Mark Antony. Antonius stood out for his performances in the criminal courts. Once when defending a former provincial governor on corruption charges he ripped off his client’s clothes to reveal battle scars. Antonius broke into tears as he recounted how the governor had been wounded fighting for the Roman people.
Trials in Rome were highly theatrical. They took place in the open air of the Forum, the heart of the city, with wooden benches set out for the parties in a case. Rome had no public prosecutor but relied on volunteers. Often young nobles took on the task, to launch their careers. The trial opened with a long speech from the prosecutor. No rules of admissibility operated. An orator could cite rumours picked up on the streets. Then came the defendant’s turn. To stir pity, he came to the court unwashed and dressed in dingy clothes. He spoke for himself or relied on more experienced advocates. Next came the interrogation of witnesses, and then the jurors, all high-ranking men, cast ballots to condemn or acquit.
Cicero showed great bravery when he made his debut in the criminal courts, aged twenty-six. For several years prior, Rome had been locked in civil war. The victor, the brutal general Sulla, secured his grip on power by posting lists of outlaws. Anybody who turned in the head of one of those proscribed received a cash reward. Hundreds were executed but then Sulla ended the proscriptions and reopened the courts. First to go on trial for murder was Sextus Roscius, a man in his forties from a small town north of Rome. He was accused of killing his own father, a crime Romans thought especially heinous.
As the trial got underway, the prosecution alleged that the younger Roscius had been on the point of being disinherited by his father. That gave him a strong motive to kill, and in Roman prosecutions, motive and opportunity often counted more than tangible evidence. The elder Roscius was stabbed walking home from a dinner party in Rome. The prosecution claimed that the son had hired an assassin.
Then rose Cicero from the defendant’s bench. Roscius had several noble supporters sitting with him, and so it was a surprise that the largely unknown Cicero would present the defence. Even more shocking was the story he proceeded to tell. Cicero explained that two relatives of the late Roscius had conspired with a freedman (a formerly enslaved person) of Sulla to seize the dead man’s valuable land holdings, as if he had been proscribed. They then accused Roscius of patricide, to get him out of the way.
Cicero heaped suspicion on the relatives for the murder, though he lacked real evidence. He lambasted Sulla’s freedman for growing rich off victims of the proscriptions. In an emotional climax, Cicero presented his client in the most pathetic light, “a country farmer, inexperienced in the ways of the world.”
While parts of Cicero’s case were little more than insinuations, he did expose some unsavoury activities of the sort that Rome had seen far too much of in the civil war. Cicero won the case and, by speaking out against abuse of power as even the nobles wouldn’t, he won fame. He later reminisced: “The first criminal case that I pleaded, on behalf of Sextus Roscius, drew such praise that no case afterwards seemed unworthy of my advocacy. Many followed in quick succession.”
Triumph and Tragedy
Cicero took on the defences of many influential men, earning favours he called in his as he advanced in politics. Already his defence of Roscius showed what would prove to be one of the keys of his success, his skill as a story-teller. He could take all of the facts in a case, or some of them anyway, and shape them into a narrative that was not only logically persuasive but emotionally moving.
Cicero was quick-witted and used humour to skewer opponents and win over juries. In 70 BC, he threw himself into his first prosecution, bringing to trial Verres, a Roman governor who had practically stripped Sicily bare of its artistic treasures. Verres had given his own advocate Hortensius a costly bronze sphinx in gratitude for taking on the defence. During Cicero’s examination of the witnesses, Hortensius said in annoyance, “I don’t understand these riddles.” Cicero retorted, “You should. You’ve got a sphinx in your house.”
Cicero climbed the ladder of offices and he won election for the top office of consul in 63 BC, the earliest year he was eligible to serve. It was an extraordinary achievement for a new man. To secure victory, Cicero and his supporters smeared his competitors. One of these rivals, Catiline, came from an old but faded patrician family. Cicero accused him of repeated debauchery and claimed that during the proscriptions Catiline had carried the head of one victim, still showing signs of life, to Sulla.
Catiline bridled at his loss to the new man. He ran again for the consulship the next year, this time on a platform of debt relief. Many in Italy, from aristocrats such as Catiline on down to small-scale farmers, suffered high levels of debt. As consul, Cicero showed no interest in offering help and continued to attack Catiline. For a second time, Catiline lost his election. He then joined up with a militia that had formed in northern Italy. Associates of his, among them several senators, stayed behind in Rome with plans to destabilize the city with arson and assassinations.
Cicero got secret reports of these plots from the mistress of one of the conspirators and other spies. But he could only reveal so much without betraying his sources. Then his luck changed. Several ambassadors from Gaul (today’s southern France) had come to Rome on official business, and they were approached by one of Catiline’s associates, a fellow patrician, Lentulus. The Gauls revealed this to Cicero, and he instructed the ambassadors to ask for written pledges of support to take back home. The night the Gauls left Rome, Cicero had them arrested and the documents seized.
What followed was the greatest performance of Cicero’s life, at least as far he was concerned. At a meeting of the Senate, he called in the ambassadors as well as a Roman they were traveling with and interrogated them. Then he ordered the letters from the Gauls’ baggage brought out. The letters were written on hinged wooden tablets that were folded shut, tied with string, and affixed with a seal in wax made by a signet ring. One by one, Cicero cut the letters’ strings and read out the contents. When it was Lentulus’ turn, Cicero showed the patrician the tablet and asked if he recognized the seal. Lentulus nodded. “It is indeed a famous seal,” Cicero said, “a portrait of your grandfather, a most distinguished man who especially loved his country and fellow citizens.”
Nobody could doubt the conspirators’ guilt now. The Senate arranged for them to be taken into custody and voted a motion of thanks to Cicero. Two days later, the Senate moved that the five conspirators being detained should be executed as traitors. It fell to Cicero to carry out the punishment and he readily did so.
Cicero’s exposure of the conspirators had all the drama of a Roman trial. But it was not in fact a trial. And Roman law held that no citizen should be put to death without a trial. In the Senate debate, none other than Julius Caesar warned that if senators voted for execution, they would be hated by the Roman people for violating a right that all citizens valued.
Catiline’s militia was defeated and he fell in battle. But before Cicero even stepped down from office, politicians started criticizing him for the executions. He tried to shore up his position by writing memoirs and even an epic poem about his consulship. He took on more legal work to gain allies. Yet it wasn’t enough. In 58 BC, an opponent of Cicero passed a law banishing anyone who killed a citizen without a trial. An angry mob showed up at the house Cicero had recently moved to on the Palatine, looted it, then set it on fire. Cicero had already fled Rome.
“The Last Chapter of the Republic’s History”
Sixteen months later, Cicero earned a pardon and returned to Rome jubilant. But the rest of his life proved a series of disappointments. More and more Julius Caesar and another general, Pompey, dominated the Republic, and Cicero was forced to defend associates of theirs in the courts or face exile again. In 51 BC, the Senate sent him to govern an overseas province, a job he considered “a gigantic bore.” Then Caesar and Pompey turned on each other and civil war broke out. Cicero joined up with Pompey but his sole contribution to the war was a series of dark jokes at his own side’s expense. After Pompey’s defeat, Cicero sought Caesar’s pardon.
Cicero played no part in the assassination of Caesar in 44 BC but he took up the assassins’ cause afterwards. Later the same year, he embarked on a risky plan to defeat Caesar’s political successor, Mark Antony. In the Senate and the Forum, he boomed out what he called his Philippic Orations, borrowing the name from the speeches the Athenian freedom-fighter Demosthenes delivered against King Philip of Macedon. “If now the last chapter of the Republic’s history has come,” Cicero told the senators, “then, just as celebrated gladiators take care to fall with honour, let us, the foremost men of the world…take care that we die worthily.”
Cicero’s plan unravelled as Antony came into alliance with Caesar’s heir, the teenaged Octavian (later to be called Augustus). In November of 43 BC, the new allies tightened their grip on power with proscriptions like Sulla’s. Cicero was the most famous victim. A gang of soldiers tracked him down at one of his seaside villas. They cut off his head and hands and sent them to Rome, where they were displayed in the Forum, the scene of his early legal triumphs.
From antiquity onwards, many have seen Cicero’s last year as a failure – an inability to recognize that power now lay with generals and their armies, not civilians in Rome. But this verdict overlooks the main reason Cicero was killed: brave oratory like his was a key way to rally opposition to autocratic government. He was silenced, to silence others. And so, Cicero fulfilled his ambition. His name became synonymous with eloquence, his last struggle synonymous with the crushing of free speech. A poet of the early empire summed up the death: “Voice of the public, muted forever by savage arms.”
Josiah Osgood is professor of classics at Georgetown University and the author of Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome.
