Cicero And His Friends

Of all excesses the most dangerous perhaps is the excess of good; it is at least that of which it is most difficult to correct oneself, for the culprit applauds himself, and no one dares to blame him.

- Gaston Boissier in Cicero And His Friends, writing of Cato the Younger.

I've just finished reading Cicero And His Friends: A Study of Roman Society in the Time of Caesar by Marie Louis Antoine Gaston Bossier (1823-1908), French classical scholar, professor of Latin Oratory at College de France, and permanent secretary of the most prestigious assembly of scholar in that country, the Academie Francaise.  His study of Cicero was originally published in the 1870s or 1880s (I found varying reference dates) and the version read by me is a 1897 English translation.

The work is a study of the personalities of Cicero (106-43BC) and several of his friends, some obscure to us today; Atticus and Caelius, while others retain their fame, their names still echoing through the corridors of history, Cato, Caesar, Brutus, Octavian (Augustus).

Cicero remains of interest today, both for his own works, thoughts, and career, but also for the window he allows us into a 2,000 year old world that in some aspects is incomprehensible to us, but in others very familiar.  It was Cicero's vast and constant correspondence over decades, significant portions of which have survived, that provide a glimpse of the events, personalities and motivations of those involved with the last days of the Roman Republic and the emergence of the Empire.  The sheer volume of Cicero's correspondence allowed for books containing it to be published in the centuries after his death; a death imposed by one of his last correspondents, Octavian.

It is also unique for the knowledge we are granted of the Roman world.  Prior to Cicero we have narrative histories by authors such as Polybius, and after Cicero we encounter Tacitus, Livy, and Suetonius among others.  But they are historians, compilers of events and anecdotes.  With Cicero we have a participant in world-shaking events and he and his friends are writing as those events occur.  It is as if for a brief moment a spotlight shines upon thirty years of the city's six centuries of dominance.  All the rest remains in shadow.

But what a time for that spotlight to shine!  We are in the final decades of the Republic, when factional fighting, bribery, and power struggles dominate the streets of Rome.  Bossier is very perceptive about the nature of that struggle, the frailty of the Republic, and both the problems and benefits of the coming Empire; benefits that depended on whether you were a Roman aristocrat or a resident of the conquered provinces which at that time were seen as opportunities for plunder by those aristocrats, a system reformed with the advent of Augustus.

Cicero resonates with modern readers because his own personality comes through so clearly in the letters.  He is scholarly, a brilliant orator, a defender of the Republic, able to foster relationships with both the fiercest defenders of the Republic and those who threaten it, as well as irresolute and vain.  Along the way we learn of his often fraught relationship with his wife, his concern for his daughter, whom he adores, difficulties with his son, and the latest scandalous gossip which he enjoyed so much.  Cicero reminds me of John Adams.  When reading the Adams-Jefferson letters one is struck by the contrast.  The cool, controlled, personally remote Jefferson writes one letter to every three of Adams, while Adams cannot contain himself; his personality, his volubility shine through - he comes alive in the deluge of words, unlike Jefferson.  So it is with Cicero.

Bossier's prose (or at least the translation) is a pleasure to read.  It flows effortlessly, like the finest of late 19th century and early 20th century historical writing, full of astute observations, and with a determination to cast all of Cicero's correspondents in full, trying to understand motivations, and not resorting to caricature.

In a reminder that feelings of living in troublesome times is not unique to us, Bossier writes near the closing of the book:

To the interest that the personality of Cicero gives to his letters, a still more vivid interest is added for us.  We have seen, in what I have just written, how much our time resembles that of which these letters speak to us.  It had no solid faith any more than our own, and its sad experiences of revolutions had disgusted it with everything while inuring it to everything.  The men of that time knew, just as we do, that discontent with the present and that uncertainty of the morrow which do not allow us to enjoy tranquillity or repose.  In them we see ourselves; the sorrows of the men of those times are partly are own, and we have suffered the same ills of which they complained.  We, like them, live in one of those transitional periods, the most mournful of history, in which the traditions of the past have disappeared and the future is not yet clearly defined . . .

For more on Cicero read The Dream of Scipio and Arpino.