In Our Time - Cicero

Episode Date: January 25, 2018

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas developed by Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43BC) to support and reinvigorate the Roman Republic when, as it transpired, it was in its final years, threatened by civil wars, the rule of Julius Caesar and the triumvirates that followed. As Consul he had suppressed a revolt by Catiline, putting the conspirators to death summarily as he believed the Republic was in danger and that this danger trumped the right to a fair trial, a decision that rebounded on him. While in exile he began works on duty, laws, the orator and the republic. Although left out of the conspiracy to kill Caesar, he later defended that murder in the interests of the Republic, only to be murdered himself soon after.With Melissa Lane The Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University and 2018 Carlyle Lecturer at the University of OxfordCatherine Steel Professor of Classics at the University of GlasgowAndValentina Arena Reader in Roman History at University College LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, in 63 BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero was elected as one of the two consuls in Rome, the highest political position, a remarkable rise for someone born outside the establishment. One of his goals was stabilised the Republic, which was under threat,

from armed conspirators, aristocrats who claimed to be men of the people, and generals who would be tyrants. He suppressed a revolt to greater claim, executing the ringleaders without trial, only to be exiled for this act once their supporters were in power. Exile gave him time to develop his ideas about the form the republic should take, if it were to survive, how the powers would be balanced within it, how to reconcile duty with self-interest, and how to deal with tyrants, the true enemies as he saw it, of the people. With me to discuss Cicero's life and political philosophy, I'm Melissa Lane, the class of 1943 professor of politics at Princeton University, Catherine Steele, Professor of Classics at the University of Glasgow,

and Valentina Arina, Rina, reader in Roman history at University College London. Melissa Lane, what was Cicero's background? Cicero came from a town outside Rome that had only recently been given the privileges of full citizenship. So he was a Noah's homo, he was a new man, whose family had been. had historically political power or political office in Rome. So he really had to make his way on his own merits. But what did his family have? They were wealthy enough. Can you give us a bit more than that? Yeah. They were wealthy enough to be able to give him a good education, to support his desire to study first philosophy in Athens and then to move to Rome. But they didn't have the

history, the legacy. They didn't have the patrician standing that would have made his path in politics easier. They didn't have the network in Rome is what mattered, didn't it? Yeah, not to that extent. Interesting, they went to Greece, isn't it? They're going back to Greece to learn. It's fascinating. It is. It was a thing that many, or some, anyway, ambitious and intellectually

ambitious young Romans wanted to do. And Cicero traveled throughout Greece. He studied in Athens, but went elsewhere to meet leading philosophers in Rhodes and in other places. And he later sent his son to do the same. In Athens, would he have been in some sort of

contact. I know they're all dead. I'm not talking about anything spooky. In some sort of contact with the great Greeks we're very often talking about on this program. Yes, so he studies all the schools of Hellenistic philosophy that were alive at the time and with some of their great figures. So the Stoics, the Epicureans, his own allegiance was more to the skeptics. So he took the view that you could support whatever arguments seemed most plausible. But of course, he became a great admirer of Plato and his political works are very much written in dialogue with Plato. So he got cracking, learned a lot there,

and then he, as I said in the introduction, by the age of 42, which was young at the time, and he became a consul, one of the two consuls, in Rome. How did he get that so quickly? So he had to climb the ladder, as it were, run the course of offices of honors, which was a series of elections. They weren't elections quite as we know them.

They're first past the post, but by groups of classes organized by wealth. So there's a different structure to Roman elections. But what really made his name actually was a legal prosecution that he brought in the year 70 against a former governor of Sicily, who was being accused of extortion, bribery, murder, corruption on a vast scale. And Cicero prosecuted this man. He went to Cicely where he had previously served in a lower office. this collected amazing trunks and depositions of evidence,

came back and won the case against Rome's greatest advocate at the time. And that was really the moment that he stepped out from the ranks of strivers and became someone to be reckoned with. Winning's rather a mild word. He was so strong that the chap Beres fled the city before the end of the trial. No, that's right. And Cicero being Cicero in Fainabon still published all that he was going to say had the man stayed there. That's right.

I like that bit. But that set him off. So you set off as a lawyer, a very successful lawyer. Why was that city so intrigued and pleased by someone who came up through the law? Well, the law was the place where you could speak in public. So the prosecutions, the courts were held in public so the citizens could attend. And it was a chance to really make your oratorical powers felt. You know, it was really a gladiatorial duel of a conversation. And so he was able through that both to impress some of the leading men in the Senate, but also to win favour among the people. Catherine Stale, we come on the Catalan conspiracy soon after that. What was the Catalan conspiracy? How did it come to be a conspiracy?

Well, one of the difficulties in getting to grips with the Catalanarian conspiracy is that much of our initial evidence for it comes from Cicero, who of course had suppressed it and therefore has a very particular story to tell about the wickedness of Catalan. and the extent to which this is a threat to the Republic. Can you give us a bit about Catalan? Cataline was a patrician politician. Like Cicero, he was aspiring to highest office,

but he failed to get there. And one of the origins of the conspiracy seems to have been his failure to be elected as consul and looking there to widen his support base with a view to a second attempt on the consulship. And when that failed in the summer of 63, that seems to be the point at which he explored other routes to power. Like killing all the Senate?

Well, that's one of the things that Cicero said he was planning to do. Certainly there's more substantial evidence of a military uprising in Etruria and to use military force in order to acquire power in Rome. And that was what Cicero was trying to warn the Senate was the danger and eventually convinced them was the danger. And then a process was set in motion which ended both in military action but also the deaths of some of Catalines co-conspirators. The way in which he got to know shows that he was a man who had enormous

contacts and networks of power. He kept being tipped off, didn't he? He did, yes. He kept talking about the information that had been given to him about the conspiracy and the trigger for the famous debate in which the decision to execute Catalans co-conspirators was taken was being tipped off that they were in negotiation with a Gallic tribe and then Cicero was able to catch them red-handed with letters which indicated the scope of the negotiations. It shows him being very proactive or somebody that people wanted to curry favour with and be on the side of. Which was it? Well I think it's a bit of both. Right. Always is, isn't it, when you ask a question like that? Yes. I mean, he's developing his networks,

but because he's consul, he has things to offer people who bring him information. Yes. But you've got key information at key times with a day or two to go. He had it and he talked him, he talked him out as he were inside the Senate and so on. Yes, yes, because then he was able to set up this dramatic revealing of the evidence in which the conspirators were brought in with the letters still unsealed. So he took the gamble that they would contain

what he thought those letters would contain and then they're opened in the Senate and they do and he can take things forward on that basis. So suppress this conspiracy. Some of the conspirators had another go and he rounded them up and he had them executed but he did not give them

a trial. Nevertheless, when he executed them and cleared the decks of the conspirators. He was lauded in Rome, wasn't he? At the time, yes. And, well, again, we're dependent on Cicero for the accounts, but being escorted back home by the torchlight procession, being acclaimed in the Senate as Patea Patriae, father of his fatherland. And, of course, one of the reasons that Cicero was so pleased about all of this

was that his career had been entirely civilian. And Rome was a society in which some of the highest rewards tended to be restricted to those who had been militarily victorious. So as a civilian consul who nonetheless saved the Rays Publica, that was tremendously exciting as a basis for further reputation. But of course, it does all go horribly wrong for him. Yes. We can come to that in a moment, but you prepared it for it going horribly wrong.

But at that time, he was at a fair height of his powers, wasn't he? And it was an extraordinary rise. We mustn't go so over this because he gets to be more and more important, but being that important and that influential and that effective, that young in those terms was terrific. Well, yes. And I think Melissa has already pointed, to the way that Cicero built his career through effective oratory

in order to put together a coalition of supporters. There's the possibly spurious commentarioleum petitonus, the commentary, little book about electioneering, which may be written by his brother, it may not be. But it seems to capture the advice to give Cicero that in order to be elected as consul, which was this huge challenge for somebody without the political and historical background at Rome,

he needed to appeal to as broad a possible an audience. And we can see in Cicero's oratory up until the consulship the great care not to offend anybody. So, and indeed early in 63, he claims to be a popularist consul, a consul who's speaking for the populace. Valentina Arana, can we develop that? His manoeuvring is very good.

He's political with a small bee and a big bee seems to be very good. But did he, at that early stage, earlier in his career as we know, embody ideals which appealed to people, because in his later essays and that he certainly did? Was he at that stage sort of as a man of ideas, a man of vision? Yes, certainly by 63, he was a man of vision. But mainly his vision at that stage was the one that, what he calls the Concordia Ordinum.

So the concrete, the harmony, amongst the members of the elite. So what he claims, that his great achievement in having suppressed the Catalan conspiracy, was very much to have united behind him the elite. And for him, that was perhaps the most important achievement in terms of the world of ideas. There was, I mean, if you think about Concordia, is Comcores, so is a, course the heart that moves in the same direction

as if the members of the elite feel in the same way they move in the same direction for the well-being of the community, for the common good.

But of course it doesn't last long as Catherine has already. No, but he did capture them and there were a small elite and he was not part of them and the one thing he lacked was always

not being part of the in a big sense the political family in Rome and he got them on his side Yeah, he was and he wasn't in the sense that he he was an equestrian. So he, that meant in essence by the late Republic that his family had was of substantial wealth. And the equitous by the late Republic did play a key political role as well alongside the senators. So throughout his life he does battle consistently the big.

being the new man to be the outsider, the one who doesn't have a consular ancestor in his family, in his background. But he is a consul. He has become a consul himself at that stage. And he is one of the equitous. And therefore, for he thinks, and he does make sure that we don't forget it, that he now has made it. And not only he's made it, he's made it big time, as Catherine said.

But also, as Catherine alluded to, we must face this now. After a short time, this very victory turned against him because he had sent these people sentenced these Roman citizens to death without judging them. And this was considered in itself to be a terrible thing to do and a lot of the elite turned against him for that. Yes, yes, it did. In putting the Catalan conspirators to trial to death without trial,

what he did, he violated one of the essential. civic rights of Roman citizens and that was the right to provocateur so the right to trial. By doing so what he did was violating one of the liberties of the Roman people

and that could not be considered acceptable within a Republican framework. Therefore, by the time he, and the political mood because of that turned against him quite straight away.

at the end of his consenship already, he was not allowed to, he needs a final speech when he finishes, when he lay down the office, he was not allowed to carry out the full speech where he could there for, you know, both of his activities.

And it didn't take long for his arch enemy, Claudius, to pass a law, according to which those who had killed Roman citizens without trial should go on exile. and he went on exile. Yes, he actually prevented it in a way.

As soon as the first law was passed, he went on voluntary exile. As soon as he left Rome, a second law was passed, and this time around the law had his name on it. So to a certain extent there are some degree of, there is a certain degree of questions about the, legality of this because that was a privilege him, so an ad nominum law, but regardless, he was already in exile and he clearly, this summer out of this, he had said,

right in a sense, that Claudius was certainly after him for that. And the result was that, because he was therefore presented as the tyrant because he had violated one of Roman liberty. and therefore he had, his house was raised to the ground, his properties was confiscated, and what was perhaps most astonishing, Claudius built on the grounds of his house and the foundation a temple to the goddess liberty. It might not have been a temple, may not be an edicula, but.

Minister, who was this Claudius who was such an enemy of Cicero? The irony was that he had been a younger man whom Cicero had befriended in earlier years. And then at a certain point, there was a political parting of the ways. Clodius was someone who flirted with violating and ultimately transgressively violated Roman civic norms. So the nadir of his career was being found out to have dressed up in women's clothing and insinuated himself into the inner sanctum where religious rights were being practiced that only women. we're supposed to witness. But at this moment, he's able to, he's quite popular in the city. He has a lot of following among the plebeians, and he's able to wield that power against Cicero. What did Cicero do in Exile? And how did he organize his return? What did you do, first of all?

He moaned quite a lot. He wrote letters to lots of people trying to figure out what he might do and whether he might be able to go. So he went off to Asia Minor. And, um, he went off to Asia Minor. And, kind of actually had quite a lot of difficulty at the beginning, finding anyone who was even willing to receive him because it was thought to be, you know, a difficult thing to do. Ultimately, he is able to come back and even some years later holds another governorship of a province. So he doesn't, you know, he's able to come back for a certain period into the fold. Has he begun writing his essays and reflections at this stage? Not quite yet. Not quite yet. It's not.

not the major period of his literary production. That comes a few years later once he's returned to Rome but then found himself in more political difficulties and ends up spending quite a lot of time outside the city itself on one of his estates and that's the first major period of his writing. Catherine Steele, so he comes back and this turbulence in it. Can you just describe the state of Rome, the state of the Romand Republic? Well, turbulence indeed. A number of factors are coming together. Claudius has been slightly eclipsed. He's no longer holding the office of Tribunate of the Pledbs, which gave him the legal authority to challenge Cicero back in 58. But the popular politics that he's espousing, he still has support. He's looking to rise up

the curses himself, hold the preacheship, eventually hold the consulship, though that never happens. At the same time, there is the military power, translating into political power, of Pompey and Caesar. and effectively Pompey and Caesar had joined forces in 59 in order to support their mutual interests. And that relationship had got a bit rocky. And the relationship is getting a bit rocky at precisely the time that Cicero returns in 57. So initially he thinks, aha,

I can resume my position of authority guiding the raised publicer. But in the spring of 56, after a period about eight months in which Cicero is very active and is very much trying to be an independent politician, getting his house back, quite part from anything else. Caesar and Pompey patch it up and that's the point at which they say to Sisvo look back off

you do what we tell you or you're not going to do anything and that's the point at which he very reluctantly acknowledges that perhaps his service to the raised publicer has to take a different form and he starts writing the great political treatises of the mid-50s.

Can we begin on those great treatises Valentina and there are several of them and we won't have time to do to do all of them by any means what is he basically trying to do in his writing about the republic, about rhetoric, about public office, and so on. Well, of course, he started to do, specifically he started to do different things in different texts. However, overall, he certainly tried to find a kind of a recipe to restore a republic that might even never have existed in such a wonderful state that has this mixed and balanced constitution.

that he thinks at some point of Rome embodied in the 5th century BC but as far as we know as historians the only record we have comes from very late sources so you know was certainly part of the Roman intellectual tradition

more than perhaps the reality of things So what was it? What was this mixture he was going back to you and said this had happened once and we can make it happen again? What was it? So it was a balanced forum a form of constitution mixed of three main elements. There was a monarchical element

represented by the consul and an aristocratic element that was represented by the Senate and a democratic element that was represented by the Popular Assembly. To be precise, actually, Cicero, rather than talking about institutions to which he refers,

he also talks about political ideals. So he's actually a mixed and balanced constitution between octoritas, authority of the Senate, the protesters, the power of the magistrates, and the liberty of the people. And when these three elements, these three different components find an harmonious way of cooperating with each other, then the Republic could function properly. Did he think he was putting forward a viable prescription, something that was practical

that they would listen to and try to put into practice? Now, he is, when he's thinking and writing about the Republic and the specific case, and as well as the legibus, we are in the late 50s. So 54, the Republic was finished in 51. And it's very much the world that Catherine has described. So Rome was really a mess, was completely chaotic. In 52, even we have Pompey that was elected consul, seen a colleague, so Saul consul. So, you know, a republic that has.

has been based on this idea of the power-sharing element was no longer there. This is partly to do with the generals themselves becoming very powerful. The empire has expanded a great deal. They're coming back with great loot and great-nanned soldiers who are loyal to them rather than to the Republic, and that has tipped the balance quite strongly. Yeah, you certainly have a big, the army itself played a huge role, but we should not underestimate also this social and economic,

changes that happened throughout the Republic. Sorry, you want to come in? Well, I think one of the things that's always striking about the relationship between general and army, at least with Caesar, is that Caesar at least seems to have articulated the claim to follow him in terms of the army's own liberty. So we have generals who are certainly interested in the personal power they can gain by their relationship with the army,

but that relationship always seems to be articulated. in terms of the raised publicer rather than the naked ambition. It always needs to be dressed up in language which fits with the interests of the army. But you're talking about it being dressed up or real? I think in the case of Caesar, it's probably dressed up, but nonetheless, he needed to articulate those claims

in the language of popular liberty. How far he genuinely thought that that was an element that had been underplayed, I think is a really interesting question because he certainly, when he comes back to Rome in 49, he's doing it on the basis that an elite in Rome has hijacked the debate and are not listening to what the community as a whole wants,

which is to give honour to Caesar. So can we go into this constitutional conflict between the ideal and the real, Melissa? Can you just develop that a bit more? Yeah, so one of the major tensions in the decades before Cicero's playing a key role and then during that time is between the Senate and the consuls on the one hand and then the tribunes of the other. So it was mentioned that

Claudius was a tribune. The tribunes were elected directly by the people and they had the power to defend the people, to veto any decision of the consul to propose laws which would speak on behalf of the people. And that tension between popular power, especially as as instantiated in that forms of the grocci, for example, in the previous century, had used their power as tribunes to try to affect a kind of land redistribution. And this was remembered as by Cicero and his allies as one of the great moments of peril of the Republic earlier, which had only been solved in one case by the murder of one of its proponents. And so, and this is actually something to which Cicero returns again and again.

again, in his political writings, that moment. Is there a sense all around, not only Cicero, the Republic is shaky and is even shaking, and it has to be not only defended and shorter, but some way found to perpetuate it? Yeah, and I think what's so interesting to me about Cicero in this moment is that he still really believes in the norms that have governed the Republic, the traditions and the mores

that are associated with the offices, and then one after the other they're falling, so they're being violated. So one example is Cesar, actually at a relatively young age and with a lot of bad reputation standing to be the pontifax maximus, the chief priest of the republic, which would normally have been a sort of ancient, august man of unimpeachable reputation. And Caesar thinks, well, I can stand for that. Why not? And that's an example of the... Why was he unsuitable?

Well, because he was known to be a womanizer, an adulterer, probably to... He was very... He was a brilliant man and in many ways very interesting figure but was young. Not a priest, really. Yeah, not really a priest. No, perhaps. That's cut to the chase there, okay. What was, let's go and go back to the people now, Catherine. What was

his view of the people really, Cicero's view? Because in a sense, he was near of the people than the elite were, you could say, perhaps. Well, I'm not sure about that. I think his background economically and socially he's aligned with the elite. It's the broader elite, than that bit of it that stood previously for political office. So his view of the people, I mean,

I think there's a problem for him, because on the one hand, within the mixed constitution to which he is entirely wedded as a form, the people have an essential role. On the Republic, he articulates this as raised publica, raised popoli. The raised publica belongs to the people. And this fundamental authorising capacity of the people in electing offices and in passing legislation, it's fundamental to the republic. So on the one hand, he accepts and embraces that role and acknowledges that in a state that is governed by justice, there needs to be an element of equality, which is represented by the role that the people play. However, his own lived experience of Roman politics showed him very clearly that the people could do all sorts of things that he didn't like. So...

Such as. Well, sent him into exile. And a whole range of other things, obviously. Anything less, but no, that's a good response, but I'd like another one, but it's not just to do with him. You mean in terms of what was the... When you said, there did a whole lot of things that he didn't like, send him in exile and pint, that's just about him, but other things he didn't like as regards to the way they appeared in the state. Well, I think it's the popular trend within politics,

which particularly is concerned often with economic measures expressed in legislation. So landry distribution, distribution of food. They wanted landry distribution. And he didn't. Yeah. Because it's a challenged property rights. and because it's a spending of the state's resources on things which perhaps it shouldn't.

So there are those tensions and he tries to resolve them. In his oratory, he resolves it by saying that the people who voted aren't the real people. So they're an urban mob, they're a rabble, they've been misled. But in the political treatises, there's the theoretical response

which we've had in the Republic, but there's also the pragmatic sense of how do you give the people enough power that they will be satisfied. So on the laws, there's a rather odd and disturbing passage where he talks about voting systems and the tribunate of the plebs being enough to create the Spechiers libert artists, the appearance of freedom.

So he struggles with this tension between the ideal and what he actually saw in practice. But what we've got, Valentina, coming close to, maybe this is just hindsight. We've got the shadow of tyranny, the foreboding of the end of the great ideal of the Republic, however it was observed in the breach. It doesn't matter.

there it had gone and going in another direction in the terrible, terrible path of tyranny, which the Republic was deeply opposed to. Did Cicero sense this? What was he doing about it, given that he might have sensed it? Yeah, he's certainly

throughout, from the time he comes back from exile onwards, he keeps lamenting that the Republic is not there. It's no longer there. We might have, you know, we keep the name of the republic, but the true republic is not there. It is like a painting whose colours are now fading away.

However, somehow he has a gift to side always with the wrong people. But is this, can I just pause for a second if I may, just be clear. Is this because people like Caesar and Pompey are behaving in a way which he sees is tyrannical and therefore dangerous? Oh, yes, no, no, of course. So he supports Pompey. against Caesar because he saw in Caesar the tyrant and he rejoiced at the murder, the assassination of Caesar. He actually laments that he has not been invited to take part.

Yes, and they actually, it seems, you know, I was just also say that he was left out because he was renowned to be too nervous and, you know, it would go on with age, so it was not the case to have him around at that stage. So, but he was extremely pleased that the tyrant was killed and he justifies it by saying that the tyrant, so a Roman citizen who behaves tyrannically

renounce himself to his citizenship. What he does, he severs any links with human fellowships, and therefore it's like a limp of a body that no longer has blood circulating in it, so what we do, we amputate it. And therefore, this is what we have to do with a tyrant. He has to be eliminated. It justifies Tyrant by saying once he stepped out of the community is no longer in the community.

Yes, no one. He wasn't treated as one of the community. Excellent. Melissa, Miss Elaine, he explores the difference between honor and personal advantage. We've got to try it in some way to interview the writings is doing, which are influential for what still are, 2,000 years. What does he argue there? So this is in his last great work, the Dei Fickees, which he's writing in the very last year

of his life, just about at the moment when he's about to stand up against Mark Anthony, which will ultimately lead to his death. And this is his final attempt to reconcile the ideals of the Republic. And the idea is that honor, which includes the moral virtues, the social virtues, such as justice, liberality, magnanimity, decorum, when properly understood, does not come into conflict with one's personal advantage. So it's the old great Greek platonic question, and what should I act for my own advantage, even if it involves me in doing injustice? And Cicero structures the day of Fickees with book one is about honor, book two is about advantage, and book three is about the seeming conflicts, only to show us that none of the seeming conflicts are real.

And two of the best examples, one is tyrannicide, which he reconciles by saying it's not murder because you're saving the community from the scangerness limb. But the other great example, there's some wonderful, much more practical example. So he has an example of if you're selling a house, is it honorable to conceal the faults in the house when you want to have a buyer? And he ultimately argues if you're deliberately silent so as to conceal the faults, you are yourself violating these duties of human fellowship. And so you would be behaving dishonorably, but it would also not be to your advantage because you would be violating human fellowship. So therefore he's always able to show that the honourable and the advantageous coincide. Catherine, before we move to more action, he wrote a lot about the orator, one of his great essays,

this was about being an orator and oration and so on. What were his priorities there? And he made his name, as you said earlier in the program, this great defense attack on Verres, the Sicilian who had cheated his country. so much. What were his priorities he, he, Cicero put at, for oratory? And why was it so important for him? Oratory

theoretically mattered for him within the context of the race publicer, because it's what enables the right decisions to be made. He accepts that rational argument on its own isn't going to be enough in situations where large numbers of people

are reaching a decision. So you need to have rational argument, and then you need to persuade people to do it. So It's this practical response. And we can see that right back in his very... So in regards democracy as a political act? I mean, sorry, oration as a, oratory is a political act. Oh, absolutely.

And in his very first published work, which is otherwise a not hugely interesting rhetorical handbook. I mean, you may pick me up on that. But it does nonetheless have a really interesting introduction in which the young Cicero says, oratory is fundamental to human society. That's what creates human society. We can't come together and live together

and enjoy all the benefits. until we have somebody who can speak and persuade us to do that. Otherwise, we're all in a state of bestial nature. And that thread, I think, goes through. He articulates it. It becomes much more nuanced and exciting as a model of the good life and the skills that the orator needs to have. But that's the basic theoretical point.

Oratory helps communities function. In fact, it's essential for communities to function. And again, he's going back to Greece with Demosthenes. Very much so. And his oratorical theory, as he develops it, is very much looking back to more philosophically informed oratory, as opposed to the rather mechanical rhetorical treatises and handbooks that seemed to be quite dominant in rhetorical education at Rome at this time.

But there's also the personal side to this. Cicero was not a soldier, and therefore he didn't have access to all the power and the glory and the reputation-enhancing excitement of military victory. So he sets up oratory as the civilian, alternative by which you can serve and indeed save the state. Thank you. Valentina, what risks was Cicero facing in 43 BC?

Death. Is that the beginning in the end, or can we develop it a little bit? Can we abstract the final execution for a moment of it? So yet again, he chose the wrong side. So what happened in 44, 43, he thought that the new enemy that should be really eliminated was Mark Anthony. Why is that? Because he saw the directly, which actually was also there,

between the Caesar, a direct link between Caesar and Mark Anthony. So he thought that Mark Anthony wanted to become the next tyrant. And he found in Octavian, who then is going to become Augustus. Octavian, his adopted son is 19 at the time. Yes. And he found in him as a potential antidote. And he thought, therefore, that he could support, by supporting Octavian and pushing the Senate to act against Anthony,

he might have eliminated, created some action to eliminate the new threat. Did he think, please, you're going to take me wrong, did you think that that great speech of Mark Anthony, in a sense saying that, Caesar was not a tyrant. Those who, as a word, did for him were tyrants, and what Caesar did was honorable and fine, and basically he was going to go and do that. Do you think that he thought that?

I very much, does it. In a sense, throughout Caesar's life, you see him at some stage supporting a line of argument, which, you know, in ten years later, he might reject completely. So, you know, in the 60s, he's in favor of extraordinary powers given to Pompey. in 44-43, that is absolutely the end of the Republic. And therefore, from this point of view, he's a good politician in the sense of, you know, he works on the basis of expediency. So in terms of, even for Octavian in the letters, he's clearly, he has doubts about Octavian.

He thinks he's too young. he's politically naive. Yes. So why did he go try to woo him and against Mark Anthony? I think he thought that he was the list of the two evils. But then he got it wrong. And therefore when in 43 the so-called second triumvirate is created by the Lexiti. So what happens is that therefore the first act that Mark Anthony, Octavian and Levitus carry out,

are proscribing Cicero But before that Cicero had let out a yell of invective Against McAntony He's not only backed the wrong horse But Attacked the wrong enemy Very much so

And even Did you attack him on grounds Invective as a word used Did you attack him on grounds Which were consonant with his philosophy I Beware the Tyrants Yeah, yeah no I see what you mean

Yes, yes and no yet again. So Invective was an essential part of rhetoric and political life. And so Invective was mainly personal. So Invective was also about the way you looked, your sexual taste, habits, desire for food. And he was, and Anthony has all the trace of excessiveness of a tyrant. so he's all part of the same picture. Is that slightly out of character?

Is this really going off the scale here, Melissa? Well, it's interesting. I think he realizes that it's his last great act of political life. He actually says in one of the Philippics, I have laid the basis for a new constitution. So I think he sees it as the last throw of the dice to try to rid the republic of this new tyrant and thereby refound the Roman constitution,

although he knows that it's very unlikely to succeed. Was it, did he know the danger he was in, or was it, did he think that he was going to get away with it, and he and Octavian were going to live happily ever after and start the Republic again? Well, I think until Octavian makes the common cause with Antony and Lepidus, he may have that fantasy, but at the moment that that happens, he knows he's done for. One of the interesting things, of course, is that many of his allies at that point had committed suicide. Cato, as a Stoic, had committed suicide when the battle against Caesar was a crucial battle, had been lost. And it's interesting that Cicero never really seems to have considered that path. I mean, he is not a stoic. He, I think, ultimately does recognize that death is a kind of evil,

although he debates that question with himself and some of his other writings. So he's willing to suffer death bravely, but he doesn't take that act of suicide. But as soon as that comes out, Mark Antony is after him, and Cicero escapes to one of his houses and they find him and they slaughter him. Yeah. How efficient, and how was that done, the sloth? slaughtering. Knives.

No, but what was left of him? Well, the stories are that his head and his hands were cut off, and they were taken to Rome, and Fulvia, who was Anthony's wife, but had been previously married to Claudius, pinned them up on the speaker's platform. Right. And the hand mattered, because it was the hand that had written the Philippic.

The Philippic being the diatribe against her. And she stuck a hairpin through his tongue. She had a hairpin through his tongue. I think that's enough for the present. I think we can move on now to very briefly. I'm sorry to spring this name. What do you think his legacy was? I mean, I was reading him at school in the 20th century.

I'm sure people are staggering through it, 21st century. So his legacy has gone on a fairly long time. Yes, for sure. Well, perhaps there are, as a CIT, there are, I would say, three main areas. His language, as you said, people are still reading Cicero and learning, Latin through his texts. We read Cicero as an historical source. if you want to know about the history of the late Republic.

But we also read Cicero as a political thinker. He has not only influenced a number of political thinkers throughout the centuries, but even nowadays with a renaissance of republicanism and their republicanism, the idea of Cicero and how a republic should be governed is very much upfront in our thinking. Very, Melissa. He also translated Greek philosophy into Latin, and left us with an enriched vocabulary for what it is to think philosophically.

He's a wonderful writer, and almost whatever you're interested in about how to be a civilised human in society, you can find something interesting in him. Yes, because his essays cover a wide range. Old age, friendship, a whole range of more technical philosophical Greek chitises, and we haven't even started talking about the letters.

That will have to be another time. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Catherine Steele, Mr. Lane, Valentina Aron. Next week we'll be discussing the world of Cuthlerpods, the octopus, squid, cuttlefish and nautilus. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Right, now you're back on again. Do you think we got to the heart of what we set out to do? I think we did. I think we did. But when I was thinking about this programme and during it, it seemed to me that it's interesting that when we talk about Cicero's political philosophy one thing we never even touch on is slavery.

And it does seem to me extraordinary that we can talk about political philosophy within a society that's based on slavery. And is that because Cicero has just never talks about it? That's my sense. It's just not a problem for him. However much he's interested in Libetaz. Now, why is that?

Because it's not that the Romans have a total blind spot on this. Look at Seneca. No, you're right. He doesn't mention that. He does, however, does consider the liberty, so the freedmen, as a political entity, because one thing I think we have missed out

is actually the proceseo. So what happens just before the Deripulica, so the great political city, when he writes this speech in defense of Cestius, halfway through the speech, it almost forgets the case of the legal case, and he embarks in a redefeifferently, definition of the political entities, the political players of Rome. And in doing so, when he claims

the optimatus, include. Not only, you know, the members of the elite, the senators, the equiters, but also people from the municipal towns, of course, like him, but even the liberty, so what is talking about, even acts as slaves. So contrary to Greece, we are talking about a society that allows a slave to become a citizen and actually not only then to be entitled to vote, but even according to this redefinition, to be considered an optimist, so around a political, active player

around whose consensus it becomes essential from his point of view to rebuilding a res publica around the Senate. Yes, I think that's right. And I think one of things that, that we could have looked at in more detail, is this question of language to re-describe the different entities within the state.

So this massive broadening of what elite means that he does in Procesio, because he's so keen to create a consensus of everybody who isn't Claudius and his followers and to kind of restrict Clodius and his followers into a small gap. We didn't talk about hostis. The way that, and Cicero isn't the first person to do this,

the way that the Roman elite uses the word hostess, an external enemy to somehow solve internal crisis by expelling the offending members from the state and thus sidestepping the whole legal problem of how do you exercise, how do you deal with, execute whatever your own citizens? If you call them host days, you kind of solve the problem. And I think there's a link there between the way that you can,

that Cicero can then say that the tyrant is not part of the state. Yes. I think the other point about slavery to go back, to that is that in the Delegabus, the idea of the multiple layers of law. So we have natural law, but then we have the Eus Gentian, the law of all the nations, and then we have the civil law of a nation like Rome. And so I think he's very willing to accept that the customs, on the whole, the legal customs and traditions and institutions of Rome have a kind of validity and standing. And so he's not going to question something like slavery, which is part of those traditions.

What do you think he could have done to save himself at the end? I don't think he wanted to. I didn't merely not. I don't think he wanted to. That act he did. Did he know? He must have known. He must have.

Was an act as a foolhard in us? Well, I think in a sense, you know, as Valentina said already for many years, he had thought that the Republic that he had lived in was dead. All the great figures of his kind of youth and early career, most of them were dead by the stage. You mentioned Kato, who else was dead? Well, by this time. Caesar. is dead, you know, Brutus, well, it was a little bit later after Cicero, but, you know,

the sort of great figures of the age have all, have mostly fallen Pompey, Crosis, obviously. And so, and so in a sense, I think, you know, in a sense he has nothing else to play for, and he wants to go down fighting, and he makes that choice. And I think, as Valentina said, one of the really striking things is he was, in some ways, a good judge of principles, but a terrible judge of character. And I think because he couldn't understand people whose ambition was not just to be first among equals, as his was, but to really break with equality altogether.

So men like Caesar and Antony and Octavian, that driving ambition that led them to destroy the forms of the republic that in some way maintained equality, he could just never understand that. He thought he could control them. He thought it wasn't real, and then he was wrong every time. time. And there's a sense too that, I mean, if we want to, if we want to try and

if we want to personalise this in terms of what kind of a person Cicero was, there is that sense that he was always being called back to a sense of a personal ideal. That letter at the end of 60 when he's been asked to join Caesar and Pompey in this, you know, this informal compact that they're going to run Rome with. He's asked to join and he refuses and he quotes Homer at that point. And it's a, you know, this informal compact that they're going to run Rome with. He's asked to join. And he's, you know, it's a personal line he can't step over. It's not consonant with his own self-conception. And so he's not able to join Caesar in 49, although at some level I think he knows that prudentially that might be the thing to do because of what Caesar stands for in breaking

the Republic rather than trying to operate within it in some way, though, as Pompey did. Though, I mean, the other thing about it is he had no illusions about Pompey either. I mean, he's quite clear that had Pompey won, there would have been prescriptive. The military generals were really sort of, well, I know producers trying to bang on the door trying to get in to break up this little republic. But basically, in one way you could say that the might of these military generals was the biggest distorting factor. I think so. And the failure to find a way of controlling it. I mean, it had always been a destabilising factor, but the Senate had always somehow managed to keep it in check. Well, here's the producer with news for us all.

I need the offer of tea and coffee. Pretty good. Coffee, please. Thank you. Coffee, me too, thank you. Can we come back and do the cuttlefish? In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hi, I'm Rihanna Dillon, and I just wanted to let you know about another podcast that I think you might like. It's called Seriously. And twice a week, we bring you incredible documentaries from BBC Radio 4.

We like to say they're seriously interesting stories told a little sideways. From politics to fashion, arts to current affairs, I'm sure there will be something that takes your fancy. So join me there. Just search for Seriously in your favourite podcast app.