Cicero (6 page)

Finally, the
cognomen
, a personal surname, was particular to its holder or his branch of the family. It often had a jokey or down-to-earth ring: so, for example, “Cicero” is Latin for “chickpea” and it was supposed that some ancestor had had a wart of that shape on the end of his nose. When Marcus was about to launch his career as an advocate and politician, friends advised him to change his name to something less ridiculous. “No,” he replied firmly, “
I am going to make my
cognomen
more famous than those of men like Scaurus and Catulus.” These were two leading Romans of the day, and the point of the remark was that “Catulus” was the Latin for “whelp” or “puppy,” and “Scaurus” meant “with large or projecting ankles.”

Sometimes individuals were granted additional
cognomina
to mark a military success. So the famous Publius Cornelius Scipio was given the additional appellation of “Africanus” after he defeated Hannibal at the battle of Zama in Africa.

As the young Cicero grew up he gradually learned the realities of the Roman world. In the first place, he was fairly lucky to survive; as many as one in five children died in their infancy and only about two thirds of those born reached maturity. By another stroke of good fortune, he was one of about 400,000 Roman citizens. He found himself near the top of the socioeconomic pyramid. Aristocrats stood at the apex. Rural gentry (like the Ciceros), businessmen and merchants, made up the second tier in
Roman society; they tended to avoid entering national politics, for members of the Senate were not allowed to accept public contracts or to engage in overseas trade. Originally a military class, they were called
equites
or knights—that is, men who were rich enough to buy a horse for a military campaign.

Beneath them were the mass of the people: shopkeepers, artisans, smallholders and, at the bottom of the pile, landless farmworkers. Living standards could be low and uncertain and the struggle against poverty was unremitting. Competition for jobs was fierce.

However, there was one group even less fortunate than the
plebs:
the slaves. Slavery was endemic in the classical world and huge numbers of men, women and children, the captives of Rome's ceaseless wars, flooded into Italy. Slaves provided a cheap workforce, contributing significantly to unemployment among free-born citizens. In the city of Rome it is estimated that slaves amounted to about a quarter of the population in Cicero's day. Many household servants were slaves. In the case of the Cicero family, the surviving evidence suggests that they were treated kindly.

Both Cicero and his brother followed the common practice of freeing domestic slaves as a reward for good service or allowing them to buy their freedom. This automatically gave them Roman citizenship and the sons of freedmen were eligible for public office. Most ex-slaves continued to work for their former owners, for whom emancipation had a number of advantages. The hope of eventual freedom helped to discourage slave revolts; and allowing a slave to purchase his liberty either from his savings or by mortgaging his future labor ensured a return on the owner's investment, which would not be forthcoming in the event of the slave's (perhaps costly) illness and death.

The dominant figure in the lives of Marcus and Quintus was their father. By tradition the
paterfamilias
was the absolute master of his family. On his own property he could act as he pleased. He was entitled to torture or kill his slaves and to put his wife or children to death. His word went and there was no right of appeal.

By contrast, women were cast as demure, silent and usually unseen helpmeets. They managed the household and devoted much time to spinning or weaving (the classical equivalent of knitting). They were not given personal names and even sisters were known simply by their
nomen
—by
today's standards, not only demeaning but extremely confusing. Their essential function was to find a husband and they could be married off as young as twelve years of age (although consummation was usually delayed for a couple of years or so). Most marriages were arranged and in the upper classes were a means of forging political and economic alliances.

Romantic attachment was felt to be beside the point. If a wife was seen in public with her husband, any display of affection was universally felt to be indecent. Less than a century before Cicero's birth, Cato the Censor, self-appointed guardian of traditional Roman values, expelled a candidate for the Consulship from the Senate on the grounds that he had kissed his wife in broad daylight and in front of their daughter.

Unsurprisingly, Helvia is a shadowy figure, although she seems to have been a sharp-eyed housewife. Quintus recalled “
how our mother in the old days used to seal up the empty bottles, so that bottles drained on the sly could not be included in the empties.” It is curious that throughout his copious writings Cicero himself never once mentions her: this may simply be a consequence of the low status of women, but perhaps his silence reflects some unhappiness in his childhood, which may in turn have helped to create the adult man with all his multiple insecurities.

In practice, Roman society was not exactly as it seemed on the surface. In the final years of the Roman Republic old conventions were decaying and bonds were loosening. Young men were more rebellious than their fathers had been; those who lived in Rome increasingly left home before marriage and set up house in small apartments in the city center, where they learned how to have a good time on little money.

Women were much more influential than their formal position would suggest. In the upper classes they were expected to be cultivated and could study with tutors at home; and it was possible for girls to attend primary school. Crucially, they were able to retain their own property on marriage and so did not fall completely under their husbands' sway. In fact, men were often absent on public duties in the army or in the provinces, and wives were expected to take on the management of the family estate and financial affairs. Some of them acted as political brokers behind the scenes. Cato, who was as blunt as he was censorious, reportedly remarked, “We rule the world and our wives rule us.”

We do not know exactly where the Cicero boys spent their preschool years; presumably for most of the time they stayed in the villa outside Arpinum. But the family had a house in Rome in the respectable but not very fashionable quarter of Carinae on the Esquiline Hill, not far from the center. Marcus and Quintus may well have been taken on visits to the big city, perhaps for extended stays.

The better type of Roman house, such as the Ciceros', had a small courtyard at the back. It was usually a garden with a colonnade running around it. This part of the building was reserved for the family and contained bedrooms, a kitchen (usually tiny), a larder and a bathhouse with a steam room. There were no nurseries or special spaces for children and, when they were not out playing in the fields of Arpinum or being shown the sights of Rome, little Marcus and Quintus must have spent a good deal of their time in the garden under the watchful eyes of slaves.

Cicero's father had high ambitions for his two sons and made sure they were given a good schooling. Like other upper-class children, they may have been taught by a tutor at home, but what evidence we have suggests that they were sent to school. Roman education in the late Republic typically fell into three distinct phases. From seven to twelve years boys and girls could attend a
ludus litterarius
, where they learned reading, writing and elementary arithmetic.

Cicero's schoolmates seem to have admired him for his academic ability. He was always in the middle of the group when out walking and was the focus of attention. Some fathers visited the school to witness the infant prodigy at work, although others were irritated by his dominance over their children. Brains are seldom liked and this popularity may have been the product of hindsight. However, it is possible that Cicero had already developed the strong sense of humor he showed as an adult. He could well have won friends through laughter rather than cleverness.

A household slave, the
paedagogus
, would accompany his young master (or mistress) to school and carry his satchel. Classes were often held on an open porch or shop, which was protected from the noise of traffic and the inquisitive stares of passersby by only a sheet of tent cloth stretched between pillars at the front. The pupils sat on benches and wrote on wax
tablets placed on their knees, with the teacher presiding on a dais. They learned the names of letters before their shapes, singing them in order backwards and forwards; they then graduated to combinations of two or three letters and finally to syllables and words. Knowledge was acquired through imitation and repetition, as when learning fencing or some other sport. Hence the Latin word for school,
ludus
, also means “game.”

Classes began at dawn, without breakfast, and went on into the afternoon. There were no physical sports, although the day ended with a steam bath. Summer holidays lasted from the end of July to the middle of October, but otherwise the school year was interrupted only by public holidays.

At twelve, a boy graduated to a secondary school. The curriculum was narrowly confined to the study of grammar and literature. Both Latin and Greek were taught. In Latin the archaic epic and dramatic poets (now lost to us except for fragments) were on the curriculum and in Greek the emphasis was mainly on Homer and the Athenian tragedians, especially Euripides. Another key document for study was the
Twelve Tables, Rome's primary code of laws established in about 450
BC
. This “germ of jurisprudence” has not survived, but was the basis of civil law: one of its provisions suggests its down-to-earth, practical flavor. This was that each piece of land should include an untilled five-foot strip for the turning of the plow, but that no squatter could settle on it on the grounds that it was uncultivated.

At the best schools lessons were given in rhetoric, or the art of public speaking. The Romans and the Greeks before them believed that it was possible to establish a system of oratory that could be taught. They spoke of training public speakers under five traditional headings:
inventio
, seeking out ideas or lines of argument;
collocatio
, structure and organization;
elocutio
, diction and style;
actio
, physical delivery; and
memoria
, memory (speeches could last for hours and as they were spoken not read they had to be learned by heart). There were different opinions as to the best form of
elocutio
. Some advocated an elaborate, ornate style and others plainness and simplicity. There was a middle way, grand but not exaggerated, which the adult Cicero came to favor.

The good public speaker recognized that he had to be a performer, like an actor. Later in his life Cicero wrote books on oratory and in them he underscored the point:

Students were taught how to turn fables and other kinds of stories into simple narrative; to develop arguments from quotations from famous poets; and to compose speeches inspired by actual or fictional situations and events. They would declaim them to the class. Although by Cicero's day the teaching of rhetoric had been reduced to a complicated and arid system of rules, it lay at the heart of the curriculum. At one level rhetoric was a vocational subject, for it was the key to a political career, to which all men of good birth should aspire. They would be able to do so only if they acquired the necessary skills to persuade people of the rightness of their point of view. In Rome reputations were made not only at public meetings and in the Senate but also in the law courts. Ambitious young men in their early twenties often appeared as prosecutors in criminal trials in order to make a name for themselves, not just as lawyers but as potential future politicians.

Both rhetoric and the study of literature were also intended to give students an ethical grounding, a moral education which inculcated the virtues of fortitude, justice and prudence.

Public speaking in this complex sense is extinct and it is difficult now to conceive of its power, immediacy and charm. Just as Samuel Pepys in seventeenth-century England would spend a Sunday going from sermon to sermon for the sheer pleasure of it, so crowds of Romans would pack
the Forum, where trials were held in the open air, to listen to and applaud the great advocates of the day as they presented their cases. The “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech in Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar
gives a hint of how the real thing must have been.

In 90 Cicero reached the age of sixteen, the Roman age of majority, by which time his secondary schooling ended. A special rite of passage marked the moment when a boy became a man, not on his birthday but on or around March 17, the feast day of Liber, the god of growth and vegetation. We do not know where the ceremony took place in Cicero's case, but bearing in mind his family's ambitions for him, it would most likely have been in Rome.

About the time Marcus came of age, his father decided that his sons should complete their training in public speaking and study law in the capital. Higher education was exclusively devoted to debate and declamation and was in the hands of a
rhetor
, a specialist teacher of public speaking. He and other learned men, philosophers or scholars, had much the same status as university professors. However, as academic institutions such as universities did not exist, such men were freelance and often lived in the household of a leading political figure, where they acted as advisers and added to their employers' prestige. Elder statesmen were also willing to impart their experience and legal and constitutional knowledge to the younger generation.