The speech that killed Cicero
One of Europe’s most revered statesmen, the Roman heir to Demosthenes and a master of his native prose, Marcus Tullius Cicero has cast a long and influential shadow over the course of Western history. His career enveloped the final and fateful days of the republic and his death marked the symbolic diminishing of senatorial power and the rise of the Roman emperors. Famed as the foremost orator of his age, arguably Cicero’s considerable oratorical talents ensured his own demise, demonstrating how victory can covertly determine self-destruction.
Cicero hailed from a wealthy equestrian family based in the Arpinum, his illustrious cognomen actually means “chickpea” in Latin and was probably applied to his ancestors because they farmed that nourishing food. By the age of 26, Cicero was already noted as a competent lawyer and gifted speaker. This reputation allowed the young man to advance his ambition of eventually leading a political life.
He soon acquired administrative responsibilities in the provinces where he reportedly conducted his career with a rare honesty and probity. During this time, he continued to act as a legal advocate and extended his notoriety for forensic examinations of complex cases. Through his thirties he rose rapidly through the roles of quaestor, aedile and praetor before being elected Consul aged 42.
As Consul, he famously thwarted a conspiracy conceived by his rival, Catiline, to overthrow the republic with the assistance of mercenaries. He summarily had the plotters put to death without trial, garnering him a mixed reception of praise for his endeavours to quall the rebellion and disdain for having ignored the conspirator’s rights to litigation. After his consulship ended, Cicero’s adversaries waged a public relations war, chasing him into exile and rendering him a social pariah and political outcast.
One of those many adversaries was Julius Caesar who’s ascension to the top of Roman politics, alongside Crassus and Pompey, posed a threat in Cicero’s eyes to the integrity of the republic. During the following years, the unstable and uncertain events of the civil war gave Cicero an opportunity to champion the enemies of Caesar’s tyrannical intentions. He sided with Pompey against Caesar, but received a pardon from Caesar after Pompey was defeated. Though he was not involved in the assassination of Caesar, he nonetheless supported the assassins and took a rigid stance in opposition to Caesar’s trusted lieutenant, Mark Anthony. Three days after the assassination, the senate ratified a set of acts, proposed by Anthony, supposedly in accordance with Caesar’s wishes.
In the same year, Anthony coerced the senate to ratify further acts in the presence of an armed troop of guards. Disillusioned by the political direction of post-Caesar Rome, Cicero departed and left for Greece but suddenly stopped in his tracks and turned back to re-enter the Machiavellian maelstrom. On the 1st September 44 BC, Anthony gave a speech in the senate and openly attacked Cicero, criticising his absence from the legislative chamber. The next day, Cicero arrived back at the senate and responded to Anthony’s accusations of abandonment, cowardice and neglect. He fired an eloquent and stinging rebuttal, the first speech of 14, which together came to be known as the Philippics.
The Philippics was the collective name given to Demosthenes’ rhetorical attacks on Philip II Macedonia when he campaigned against Athens. From September 44 BC to April 43 BC, Cicero channelled the paragon of Athenian rhetoric in his verbal assaults on Mark Anthony. He criticised the respects paid to Caesar and compared Anthony to his old nemesis, Catiline, thereby branding him a traitor. Fearing prosecution, Anthony left Rome with an army and marched to Cisapline Gaul. Cicero persuasively pleaded for military action against the iniquitous fugitive and lobbied for a policy of solidarity with Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian.
In December 44, Cicero denounced Anthony as a public enemy and thereafter maintained the necessity for war by continually praising champions of the republic and chastising enemies of freedom. In his final, epic peroration against Anthony, Cicero successfully convinced the senate to declare Anthony an enemy of the people. Unfortunately for Cicero, events on the battlefield meant far more than votes in the assembly. Offended by the prospect of having to work with one of his adopted father’s murderers, Octavian decided to join forces with Anthony to avenge Caesar’s death. With Octavian supporting Anthony and the senatorial legions defeated or depleted, Cicero and the senate were left defenceless.
As soon as terms were agreed between Anthony and Octavian, they proscribed their enemies and moved swiftly to eliminate any obstacle to their progress. Cicero was hunted down with great determination by the agents of Anthony. It is alleged that when he at last met his murderers, Cicero said “there is nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier, but do try to kill me properly.” He accepted his death with grace and serenity but his head and hands were gruesomely displayed in the forum as was the custom for official traitors. Anthony is supposed to have specifically requested the lobbing-off Cicero’s hands, because they were the instruments that penned such effective attacks against his cause. In the vein of gory Roman revenge dramas, Anthony’s wife Fulvia is said to have been presented with the head of Cicero. To mock Cicero’s verbal genius, she allegedly pulled out its tongue and plunged her hairpin repeatedly through the lifeless slab of flesh, a particularly egregious end to a markedly distinguished head.
Cicero, like Demosthenes, made use of short sentences, woven with a vivid vocabulary. He repeated his thesis to impress its veracity upon his audience and always aspired to delight and move his listeners. He explored the utility of numerous rhetorical devices and pioneered methods of rational inducements to cajole the unswayed and reassure the engaged. His genius was undoubtably in the design of speeches and his stylistic use of the Latin language. Ironically, his unrivalled ability ushered him to death.
Many contemporaries marked his brashness and mercurial mentality, with one saying; “Would that he had been able to endure prosperity with greater self-control, and adversity with more fortitude!” Perhaps Cicero’s relied too much on the dexterity of his tongue and forgot the lethal reality of politics in Rome. A passion for the principles of the Roman Republic and too much faith in his own abilities ensured his undoing.
As Aeschylus wrote in the Orestian Cycle “Shameless, self-willed infatuation, emboldens men to dare damnation.” But quixotic as he was, his exemplary efforts to preserve the republic deserves a more complimentary epitaph, one which commends his career. Shakespeare’s Anthony says over the body of Brutus on the battlefield “the elements mixed so well in him, that nature could stand up and say to all the world, “This was a man.”” The same should be said of Cicero.
‘the elements mixed so well in him that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, “This was a man.”’