“We follow the narrative of the fall of the Roman Republic through the excited, anxious eyes of a participant who twice held the reins of power – and who did not know how the story would end…In Cicero’s correspondence, noble Romans are flesh and blood, not marble.”
Cicero is one of the most influential figures of antiquity, in large part because so many of his writings survive. We have hundreds of letters, some of them written on a daily basis, several books, and large numbers of speeches from his time as an advocate and in various political roles, including as Consul during which time he suppressed an attempted coup and was awarded the title of Father of his Country by the Senate. He also coined several words which serve as the base of words we use today; moral, quality, essence, and swan song, among others.
Perhaps above all, Cicero was a great speaker, likely the greatest of his day. Even without Latin, that brilliance carries through translation; his quick wit gets him both in and out of trouble. In one case, Cicero prosecuted a former governor of Sicily for corruption, and the defending lawyer was paid with an ivory sphinx that had been stolen from Sicily. The defending lawyer at one point claimed he didn’t understand Cicero’s riddles, and Cicero whipped back “Oh, really? In spite of having a sphinx at home?”
At heart, Everitt is a Cicero apologist. Cicero’s reputation today is mixed; by his peers at the time he was seen as cowardly and indecisive (though a genius), and that perception has to some extent continued today. Everitt argues that the truth is much more positive. To be blunt, I’m not sure I buy it. Renaming indecisiveness “tactical suppleness” doesn’t make it so, and the book can sometimes feel like a hagiography, not a biography. As a result, the strength of the book is its history of the 1st century BCE, as seen through Cicero’s eyes, not biography.
To defend Cicero and focus on the good, the book unfortunately misses opportunities for insight into his full character. In the end, Cicero is perhaps best captured by Julius Caesar, who remarked that Cicero had won greater laurels than a general, because it meant more to have extended the frontiers of Roman genius than her empire. Cicero, and the first century BCE, are topics critical to antiquity: of the two, Cicero does a better job capturing the latter, and to my mind, a worse job capturing the former.
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