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IV. An Aspect of Cicero’s Personality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2016
Extract
No increase in the mere quantity of information—we have plenty— nor deeper study of the evidence—there has been plenty—will ‘solve’ the problem of Cicero’s personality. One can only recommend an approach based on common sense, imagination, a sense of humour, and even humility, qualities unevenly distributed among scholars as among the rest of mankind, and suggest a final consideration.
We may strike off the nineteenth-century charge-sheet item after item, yet one obstinately survives. Grant that Cicero was unlike most of the great men of his time, not cruel, nor avaricious, nor bloodthirsty, not sexually lax or perverse, yet every schoolboy knows, and even Cicero’s ‘friends’ maintain, that he was ‘conceited’. The survival of this one not too serious charge is perhaps not surprising: it goes back to antiquity, even to Cicero’s own day. Yet few have observed in this evidence a peculiarity: all these passages refer to the consulship. If one examines the speeches and correspondence, it is here and only here that the charge sticks. Anything else in the speeches merely confirms the principle that politicians do not say (ever): ‘I admit all my policies have been misguided in conception, unscrupulous in operation, and disastrous in outcome’. As for the letters, the one place where occasional swagger might be thought venial, they reveal a man rarely boastful, except in a half-ironical tone, much more often seeking reassurance, rueful or critical in his attitude to himself.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1968
References
page no 24 note 1 In addition to Balsdon (in Dorey) and Tenney Frank, Kumaniecki, K., Acta Sessionis Ciceronianae (Warsaw, 1960), 9 ff.Google Scholar, has some good observations.
page no 24 note 2 Brutus (Ad M. Brutum, i. 17) observed that Cicero in 43 talked more about his ‘Nones’ (the execution of the Catilinarians on 5 Dec. 63) than the conspirators against Caesar about their ‘Ides’. Seneca, dial. x (brev. vit.) 5. 1. made the famous allusion to the consulship ‘non sine causa sed sine fine laudatus’. Plut. Cic. 24. 1, Dio xxxvii. 38. 2 tell the same story.
page no 24 note 3 e.g. of a speech ‘with all the stops out’: nosti illas ληκύθοι/s (Att. i. 14. 3), and the whole context.
page no 24 note 4 e.g. of his unfulfilled hopes of optimate support against the ‘triumvirate’ after his return from exile: scio . . . me asinum germanum fuisse (Att. iv. 5. 3).
page no 24 note 5 Best is Allen, W., TAPA lxxxv (1954), 121 ffGoogle Scholar.
page no 24 note 6 So too when he depicts himself in the Brutus, indirectly but unmistakably, as the culmination of Roman eloquence, he was meeting attacks (p. 37 below).
page no 25 note 1 Jal, P., RÉA lxv (1965), 53 ffGoogle Scholar.
page no 25 note 2 Syme, p. 144, who, however, sees it only in the context of the struggle against Antony.
page no 25 note 3 The actions against Catiline can be defended, cf.Last, H. M., JRS xxxiii (1943), 93 ffGoogle Scholar. (in a review of H. J. Haskell’s excellent This was Cicero [New York, 1942])Google Scholar. Hutchinson, L., The Conspiracy of Catiline (London, 1966)Google Scholar is not the first unsuccessful attempt to make a hero out of Catiline. But, despite Frisch, H., Cicero’s Fight for the Republic (Copenhagen, 1046)Google Scholar, the attacks on Antony are less easily justified. There are recent parallels to this kind of misreading of a situation in the light of past ‘traumatic’ experiences.
page no 25 note 4 Graff, P., Ciceros Selbstauffassung (Heidelberg, 1963)Google Scholar.
page no 26 note 1 Cf.Earl, D. C., Moral and Political Tradition, 30, 81 ff.Google Scholar; Sullivan, F. A., TAPA lxxii (1941), 382 ffGoogle Scholar.
page no 26 note 2 Att. v. 14. 2; 17. 2; vi. 1. 8.