Member-only story
Book review: Cicero, the life and times of Rome’s greatest politician
It doesn’t happen very often that a single book makes you seriously reevaluate a position you had held for many years, but that’s the effect that reading Anthony Everitt’s Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician had on me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always admired Cicero, ever since I translated him from Latin back in high school. His prose is gorgeous, his intellect cunning, and — despite being an Academic Skeptic — he was also very sympathetic to the Stoics.
But I always bought the common stereotypes about him: that he was more of a lawyer than a statesman, a bit of sophist more than a philosopher, a flip-flopper who alternatively backed Caesar, Pompei, Octavian, and in the end got killed by order of the vindictive Mark Anthony. Turns out, the story is far more complex, and fascinating, than the stereotype.
Marcus Tullius Cicero was indeed both a lawyer (an advocate, as the Romans put it) and a statesman. He excelled at both, without question. His speeches in the Forum were renowned at the time, and are still studied today as excellent examples of rhetoric — understood not as an insult, but as the art of persuasion, as described by Aristotle.
His statesmanship shone through at several points of his tumultuous life. For instance, and perhaps most famously, in…
