Cicero (54 page)

Terentia lived to the great age of 103 and took a third husband.

Despite his wealth, Atticus managed to avoid being listed in the proscription, although he went into hiding for a time. He took care to be on excellent terms with both Octavian and Antony, whose family he placed under his protection in Rome. His daughter, the little girl who had so delighted Cicero, grew up to marry Agrippa; and their daughter was betrothed in her infancy to the future Emperor Tiberius. At the age of seventy-seven, Atticus was taken ill with ulcerated intestines; rather than endure a painful disease, this imperturbable disciple of Epicurus starved himself to death.

During his lifetime Atticus allowed people to read his collection of Cicero's correspondence. Probably at some time during the first century
AD
, this was published alongside other collections of letters to Quintus, Brutus and various other recipients (the so-called
Letters to His Friends
). Some collections—regrettably, his correspondence with Julius Caesar and his heir—have not survived.

The Emperor Augustus assiduously cultivated the memory of his adoptive father. The assembly hall in Pompey's theater was walled up, the fifteenth of March was named the Day of Parricide and the Senate resolved never to meet on that date again. However, the “heaven-sent boy” remembered with admiration one of the Dictator's greatest critics, in whose murder he had colluded. Many years later he happened to pay a visit to one of his grandsons. The lad was reading a book by Cicero and, terrified of his grandfather, tried to hide it under his cloak. Augustus noticed this and took the book from him. He stood for a long time reading the entire text. He handed it back with the words: “An eloquent man, my child, an eloquent man, and a patriot.”

This book would not have seen the light of day without the advice and support of Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson and the generous temerity of Grant McIntyre at John Murray in taking on a greenhorn. A special debt of gratitude goes to Antony Wood, with whose kindly but ruthless editorial support a shapeless bundle of pages was put into good order, and to Joy de Menil of Random House, whose sharp-eyed enthusiasm refocused the biography for the American reader. However, whatever is flawed in my study of Cicero is nobody's responsibility but my own.

I am deeply indebted to D. R. Shackleton Bailey for permission to reproduce passages from his translation of
Cicero: Letters to Atticus and to His Friends
in the Penguin Classics edition.

I am grateful to the Publishers and Trustees of the Loeb Classical Library for their kind permission to reprint passages from
Cicero
, vol. XVI, Loeb Classical Library Volume L213, translated by Clinton Walker Keyes, pp. 167, 245, 317, 345, 347, 361, 367, 373, 375, 499, 503, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1928. (The Loeb Classical Library is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.)

I should also like to thank Penguin Books, Ltd., for permission to reproduce passages from the following translations of works by Cicero which appeared in Penguin Classics:
Letters to Atticus and to His Friends
, Copyright © D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 1978;
Selected Political Speeches
, Copyright © Michael Grant Publications, Ltd., 1969; Sallust,
The Jugurthine War; Conspiracy of Catiline
, Copyright © the Estate of S. A. Handford, 1963; and Plutarch,
Fall of the Roman Republic
, Copyright © Rex Warner, 1958.

For the illustrated reconstruction of the Roman Forum, I am indebted to John E. Stambaugh,
The Ancient Roman City
, p. 112. © 1988 [Copyright holder]. Reprinted with permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.

By classical standards the sources for the period of Cicero's life are voluminous, although many histories written within a generation or so of his time are lost. Much has been translated and, for the reader who would like to know more at firsthand about Cicero and the fall of the Roman Republic, some accessible literature is cited below. Titles of classical works are given in translation; see under Abbreviations for original Latin titles.

The most important documentary sources are Cicero's own writings (all of which are available in Latin alongside translations in the Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press). Many of his speeches, which he revised and issued himself, survive, as do his books on philosophy and oratory. So do about 900 letters; some were designed for publication or for judicious circulation by the recipient, but others, a large proportion of the correspondence with Atticus, were not. They are organized into a number of different collections: the so-called
Letters to His Friends
and
Letters to Brutus
and
Letters to Quintus
are mainly, but not entirely, communications to politicians and public figures; they include letters from Julius Caesar and Pompey and other politicians of the day. They were probably published before the
Letters to Atticus
, which appeared some time in the first century
AD
. The complete correspondence was edited and translated in the 1960s by D. R. Shackleton Bailey; he reordered the letters in one continuous sequence, which is cited first in the references below (followed by the traditional numbering).

Cicero's speeches need to be treated with caution, for he is always arguing a case. On the one major occasion where an alternative version exists to the story he is telling, his defense of Milo, we find that he is almost certainly promoting a tissue of untruths. The letters are an invaluable resource, a reliable guide to day-to-day events even if we do not always agree with their author's political analyses.

Contemporary or near-contemporary histories include the following: Sallust's two surviving monographs,
The Conspiracy of Catilina
and
The Jugurthine War
, give useful if highly colored and sometimes chronologically haphazard accounts. Caesar's lapidary, accurate but not always truthful
Conquest of Gaul
and
The Civil War
are essential reading. A short life of Atticus was published by a friend of his, Cornelius Nepos. Two sections from a
Life of Augustus
by Nicolaus of Damascus about his subject's youth (edited and translated by Jane Bellemore, Bristol Classical Press, 1984) give interesting details about Caesar's assassination. An Augustan Senator, Quintus Asconius Pedianus, wrote intelligent and well-informed commentaries on some of Cicero's speeches, in one of which he gives a detailed account of Clodius's death (
Commentaries on Five Speeches by Cicero
, ed. and trans. Simon Squires, Bristol University Press and Bochazy-Carducci Publishers, 1990).

Diodorus Siculus, a Sicilian writing in Greek, was a near-contemporary of Cicero. He wrote a history of the Mediterranean world,
Library of History
, in forty volumes from mythological times up to his own day. He is useful on his native island of Sicily. Unfortunately most of the book survives only as excerpts or paraphrases from Byzantine and medieval times. He was an uncritical compiler and only as good as his sources.

Plutarch, a Greek biographer and essayist of the second half of the first century
AD
, is one antiquity's most charming authors. His
Parallel Lives
include biographies of Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Cato, Crassus, Brutus, Caesar, Mark Antony and Cicero. They are full of fascinating personal detail, but he was interested in character rather than history and was indiscriminate in the use of his sources.

Suetonius was a slightly later contemporary of Plutarch and, as the Emperor Hadrian's secretary, had access to the imperial archives; this makes his short biographies of Julius Caesar and Augustus, in
The Twelve Caesars
, of particular interest, although, like Plutarch, he is no historian and concentrates his attention on his subjects' private lives. Velleius Paterculus lived during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius and wrote a patchy
History of Rome
from earliest times to 30
AD
.

Lines from Catullus, whose poetry movingly expresses the way of life of the
younger set who simultaneously attracted and repelled Cicero, are quoted in Peter Whigham's translation (Penguin Classics, 1966). Further verse quotations have been made from John Davie's translation of Euripides'
Medea
(Penguin Classics, 1996) and Robert Fagles' version of the
Iliad
(Viking, 1990).

Although the Greek historian Polybius wrote in the second century
BC
, his history of Rome's rise to dominance of the Mediterranean world gives a well-grounded account of the workings of the Roman constitution.

General histories of the period date from later in the Empire. The best of them is by Appian, who flourished in Rome in the middle of the second century
AD
. He wrote a history of Rome from the arrival in Italy of Aeneas to the battle of Actium in 31
BC
. Five books on the civil wars survive, of which the first two give a continuous account of events from the Tribuneship of Tiberius Gracchus to the aftermath of Caesar's assassination. For the first part of this narrative he depended on a very good source and, although his chronology is sometimes confused and his belief in the role of fate in human affairs unhelpful, Appian is invaluable.

Dio Cassius was a Greek historian, born about the middle of the second century
AD
, who wrote a
Roman History
from Aeneas to his own second Consulship in 229
AD
. The books that survive cover the period between the second war against Mithridates and the reign of Claudius. Although he had no way of evaluating his sources, he offers a useful complement to other earlier texts.