Cicero (2 page)

Some guidance on the value of money may be helpful, although it is a vexed and difficult topic. The Roman unit of account was the
sestertius
or
sesterce
. Four
sesterces
equaled one denarius, a silver coin. A bronze coin, the
as
, was worth one tenth of a denarius (the word means a “tenner”). A
talentum
, talent, was worth 24,000
sesterces
. It is almost impossible today to ascertain the real worth of Roman money and its relation to the standard of living. A
S
a very rough-and-ready estimate, one might say that 1
sesterce
would be worth about $1.50, or perhaps a little more.

My greatest anachronism has been to use the Christian chronology. Until the late Republic the Romans dated years according to the names of Consuls. Atticus and other antiquarian scholars established, or at least decided, that the city had been founded by Romulus in 753
BC
and thenceforward that year was used as the point of departure for chronology. So Cicero was born in
AUC
(
ab urbe condita
or “from the City's foundation”) 648, not 106
BC
, and Caesar's assassination took place in
AUC
710, not 44
BC
. It seemed to me, though, that the reader would find this more confusing than helpful.

Wherever possible I allow Cicero to tell his own story, often quoting from letters, speeches and books. Scattered through them are characterizations of his contemporaries, memories of his youth and political analysis. His courtroom addresses bring back to life the social and moral attitudes of ordinary Romans.

Sadly, what cannot be conveyed is the quality and contemporary impact of his Latin; not only do his melodious periods, which have the grandeur of classical architecture, fail to translate well, but his style of oratory is a vanished art. When quoting from Cicero's letters or other ancient texts I have been guided by published translations and am grateful for permission to quote them. They are listed at the end of this book under
Sources
. However, I have translated a few texts myself. Cicero peppered his correspondence with Greek phrases; these are usually rendered in French.

There have been so many biographies of Cicero that it would be tedious to list them all. They range from Plutarch in the first century
AD
to Gaston Boissier's charming
Cicéron et ses amis
of 1865 and the 1939 study by Matthias Gelzer, one of the twentieth century's greatest scholars of the late Republic. The most recent full-length lives by English authors are by the indefatigable editor of Cicero's correspondence, D. R. Shackleton Bailey (1971) and Elizabeth Rawson (1975). Much indebted to my predecessors, I enter the lists only because I believe that each generation should have a chance to see a giant figure of the past from the perspective of its own time and circumstances.

This book is an exercise in rehabilitation. Many writers from ancient times to the present day have seriously undervalued Cicero's consistency and effectiveness as a politician. Too often tactical suppleness has been judged to be indecisiveness. His perspective was narrower and less imaginative than that of Julius Caesar, but Cicero had clear aims and very nearly realized them. He was unlucky, a defect for which history has no mercy but for which historians are entitled to offer a discount.

More generally, I shall be happy if I have succeeded in showing, first, how unrecognizably different a world the Roman Republic was from ours and, second, that the motives of human behavior do not change. Concepts such as honor and
dignitas
, the dependence on slavery, the fact that the Romans ran a sophisticated and complex state with practically none of the public institutions we take for granted (a civil service, a police force and so forth) and the impact of religious ritual on the conduct of public affairs make ancient Rome a very strange place to modern eyes. But, as we feel the texture of their daily lives, we can see that its inhabitants are not alien beings but our neighbors.

BC

T
he spring weather was unsettled in Rome. The fifteenth of March was a public holiday, marking the end of winter. From the early morning, crowds of people had been streaming out of the city. It was almost as if Rome were being evacuated. Families abandoned the busy streets and huddled houses and crossed the River Tiber. In the countryside, in huts made of branches or makeshift tents, they would set up picnics and consume large amounts of alcohol. It was said that the drinkers would live for as many years as they downed cups (in that case, as one wit had it, everyone ought to live for as long as Nestor, the classical equivalent of Methuselah).