Ciceroing

Robert A. Kaster, The Appian Way: Ghost Road, Queen of Roads (2012; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 101-103:

Marcus Tullius Cicero is unavoidable in my line of work, and not the sort of man who provokes mild emotions in those who make his acquaintance. Loathing and affection are the only choices. By now I have spent enough time in his company, through teaching and writing, to work past the first of those feelings and arrive at the second. Certainly, he is everything that those who loathe him say: an egotist who was impossibly high-maintenance as a friend; often blinkered and bloviating as a statesman; moody, inconstant, and self-dramatizing as a man; and—what finally did him in—not nearly as clever a political player as he thought he was, or as his enemies actually were. Yet he was also a loyal friend in his turn, and witty company, a man who (I think) really did try to do what he thought was right, and who along the way wrote some of the best prose ever composed in any language, with the same impact on the future of Latin that Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible have had on English. But above all he left himself exposed and accessible, and that is the thing in the end that moves me beyond simple respect.

A chief reason Cicero is so easy to loathe is that he left so much of himself on view. We know him better than we can know any human being in Western history before Saint Augustine, because no one in the West before Augustine left so large a written legacy of such a personal kind. The texts, and the body of commentary that has grown up around them, fill ten feet of shelving in my office, and my collection is not especially large: speeches, rhetorical treatises, philosophical tracts, and above all the correspondence, over twenty years' worth, that he carried on with family, friends, and enemies. Of course most of the writing is carefully calculated, intended to present the writer in the best possible light in whatever circumstance prompted the writing: that is one of the jobs that rhetoric is supposed to do, and Cicero was a master of the craft. But even though the writing may not offer a transparent window on his soul, it does give excellent access to his lively mind. You see the wheels turning, you come to understand the move that's being made and anticipate the move that's coming next, and in so doing you reach across more than twenty centuries in a way that is exhilarating and moving.

I've referred to Cicero (106-43 BC) in a number of posts, most recently in Mastering the Tides of the World, and even wrote about his birthplace.  Last year I read and wrote about Cicero And His Friends: A Study of Roman Society in the Time of Caesar, Marie Louis Antoine Gaston Bossier's study from the late 19th century, a book which prompted me to liken Cicero to the John Adams we see in the Jefferson-Adams correspondence of 1812-26, and I've read Robert Harris' trilogy of novels about Cicero's life and the last years of the Republic.

Coming across the quote from Kaster at Laudator Temporis Acti (the source for the Official Motto of this Blog - "The Value of Useless Knowledge") spurred me to think further about my interest in Cicero and, more broadly, in the Roman Republic and Empire.  For Cicero himself it is, as Kaster points out, that we can see him fully formed as an individual person in a way unlike other figures before him, and for several centuries thereafter (Augustine writes more than 400 years after the death of Cicero).  Certainly his writings seem, to an extent, relevant regardless of date, and his personality, with its strengths and glaring weaknesses evident in a way we can only infer in his contemporaries.  But that relatedness can only go so far and, in that respect, ties in with my interest and perspective on Rome.

With my fascination with history going back to childhood, Rome has always loomed large for me, with its unique place in western history.  It's a combination of fascination, recognition of its achievements, and the sheer expanse and duration of its domination imposing, on its own terms, a period of peace and stability not seen before and which disappeared in the wake of its collapse.  Moreover, as it moved from Republic to Empire it proved adaptable in creating a devotion to a common culture out of a patchwork of religions, tribes, and other groups as described in this post.  But it is not a desire to replicate or restore such a system and I am as fascinated with the costs of the republic and empire as with its achievements.

The classical world of Greece and Rome, and Cicero, while the source of some of the key ideas that have powered Western thought over the centuries, also represents a very different ethos from the modern world. The classical historian Tom Holland gets at this in his most recent book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World :

The more years I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilisation into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with — about how a society should properly be organised, and the principles that it should uphold — were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of 'human nature', but very distinctively of that civilisation's Christian past.

Holland's point is that even the non-religious in the West have absorbed basic concepts of the universality of all people from the Christian tradition, in fact the very basis of the Western concept of human rights, something which did not exist in classical thought.  In advancing his thesis he does not downplay Christianity's contradictions and failures over the centuries but rather emphasizes that the aspirational starting places in classical and Christian thought are completely different.  I'm still mulling over Holland's thought-provoking book, which I recently read.

I write this as a non-Christian.  I'm Jewish.  On my first visit to Rome in 2006 I walked under the Arch of Titus, the Roman Emperor and conqueror of Jerusalem; the man responsible for the destruction of the Second Temple, located on the Temple Mount, and the subjugation of Judea.  As you pass through the arch you can't help but notice it is decorated with carvings of religious artifacts looted from the Temple and being carried away in triumph by Roman soldiers and if you are walking from the Forum through the arch you will be looking at the Colosseum, built in part with the labor of Jewish slaves captured in that war (66-70 AD).  The Emperor Hadrian (117-38 AD), a devotee of Hellenism and enemy of the Jews, decreed a temple honoring the gods of Rome should be placed on the vacant Temple Mount as a demonstration of Roman power, a decree that prompted one final great revolt, finally suppressed after three years, resulting in the banishment of all Jews from Jerusalem and the surrounding area and  changing the name of the province from Judea to Palestine.  Starting in the 4th century the Eastern Roman emperors placed increasing restrictions on Jewish life in Palestine, until finally in the aftermath of the great Roman-Persian War of the early 7th century, the triumphant Emperor Heraclius proclaimed the Jews would be forcibly converted. Before this could be undertaken in a large scale manner, an unexpected threat came out of the desert, sweeping the most prosperous part of the Roman Empire and all the Persian Empire away. The limited and scattered fragments of information that survive indicate those Arab tribesmen were supported by the Jews of Palestine.

So no big summation here, just some thoughts prompted by Cicero.  And I'll keep writing about Rome.  Speaking of which . . . 

UPDATE:  Found via Laudator Temporis Acti another quote from the Kaster book which captures my attitude:

Whereas earlier generations of British scholars and intellectuals tended to admire the Roman Empire as a forerunner of their own, the consensus in postimperial Britain has shifted, and there now seems to be broad agreement that the Romans were bastards. My view is that the Romans were what they were, and that understanding what they were does not advance by taking an attitude toward them, especially when the attitude is one of moral superiority.