Cicero and the Fall of the Roman Republic Book Reviews

Cicero and the Fall of the Roman Republic by J.L. Strachan-Davidson Book Summary

The purpose of this volume to tell the story of Cicero’s life and at the same time to set forth from his writings a presentation of the concluding age of the Roman Republic and to record the disastrous but not inglorious failure of the last Free State of the ancient world. 
So far as may be, I propose to let Cicero himself speak to my readers. The “most eloquent of all the sons of Romulus,” as a contemporary poet calls him, committed his orations to writing after their deliver and gave them to the world. These speeches are public documents which were a living force in the practical politics of Rome; we must not expect absolute candor in words thus spoken and written for a purpose; but it is much to know what were the assertions, the sentiments and the reasonings which rang in the ears of the Romans themselves at this momentous crisis of their fate. Still more important for the purpose of our story are the private letters, and especially the letters to Atticus. We have before us the very words in which Cicero recorded his thoughts from day to day in all the confidence of intimate friendship. Cicero was not a man of cool and cautious temperament, afraid to commit himself to opinions, accurately weighing and discounting probabilities beforehand, or occupying by anticipation the province of the philosophical historian. From the letters of such a one we should have learnt comparatively little. We have to deal with a man of lively mind, quick to receive impressions rushing to conclusions, garrulous in expression and sensitively responsive to the prevailing temper or drift of opinion. In communing with Atticus he never pauses to make his writing self-consistent or plausible. Reasons “plentiful as blackberries” crowd through his mind as he writes and the reasons of today will often not fit in with those of yesterday. There is no reticence, no economy of statement; every passing fancy, every ebullition of temper, every varying mood of exultation and depression, every momentary view of men and things, finds itself accurately mirrored in these letters. The time lives again before us in the pages of Cicero and thanks to him, he and his contemporaries are for us not mere lay figures but actual flesh and blood. 
Marcus Tullius Cicero was born on the third of January in the year 106 B.C., about the end of the war with Jugurtha. His forefathers had inhabited from time immemorial the town of Arpinum in the Volscian mountains which part Latium from Campania. Cicero was therefore a tribesman of the hardy race whose wars with Rome filled the early pages of Latin history. Some would have it that he was a descendant of Aufidius or Attius Tullius, the Volscian partner and rival of Coriolanus. The struggle with Rome had ended more than 200 years before Cicero was born; after regenerations of gallant resistance, the Volscians of Arpinum were reduced to the lowly position of “citizens without the right of suffrage” living under Roman law and serving in the Roman legions without political privileges either in their own town or in the capital. But the races predestined to political greatness possess the faculty of forgetting that which it is best not to remember; and this invaluable gift of character was not wanting to the Volscians. The memory of their alien origin faded away and they frankly accepted their place as humble members of the great Roman commonwealth. Their ambition now was to attain the full Roman citizenship and Rome at the beginning of the second century before Christ, was still wise enough to encourage and reward such aspirations. The full franchise was granted to the Arpinates in the year 188 B.C., shortly before the death of Hannibal and of Scipio Africanus. In the next generation the Romans deliberately set aside the wisdom of their ancestors, and adopted a system of harsh and rigid exclusion in the place of the liberal practice of gradually elevating aliens to the citizenship by which the greatness of Rome had been built up...

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