The savior of the day held the Consulship a record seven times, but, for all that, he was a clumsy politician. He made sure that his demobilizing veterans were given allotments of land by founding colonies in various parts of the Mediterranean. He was helped by an unscrupulous and radical Tribune, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. Marius’s popularity with the chauvinistic Roman mob fell sharply when it emerged that some of the colonies were to be for people from the Allied communities as well as for Roman citizens. In an illegal action that had bleak implications for the future, Marius brought soldiers into the Forum to put down a disturbance against the reforms.
In 100 BC Saturninus, bidding for a third year as Tribune, overreached himself and his chief rival in the election campaign was killed in a riot. Marius, who was in the last resort a constitutionalist, abandoned his ally. The Senate declared a state of emergency and Saturninus holed himself up on the Capitol Hill overlooking the Forum. Marius cut off the rebels’ water supply and forced their surrender. To protect them from being lynched, he locked them inside the Senate House. Probably without his sanction, some youths climbed up onto the roof and killed the prisoners by hurling roof tiles down on them.
Although he had not been directly involved in the killings, a young man called Caius Rabirius was reported to have gotten hold of Saturninus’s head and carried it around the table at a dinner party as a joke. It was an incident he would come to regret bitterly more than thirty-five years later when a new generation of radical politicians sought belated revenge. It would also cast a shadow across Cicero’s path.
The Senate, back in control, repealed Saturninus’s reforming legislation and a discredited Marius, out of favor both with the People and the ruling elite, withdrew into private life. The Republic subsided into an uneasy calm, which lasted from 99 to 91. The great political and constitutional issues of the time remained unsolved. The agricultural question had not been permanently answered: where would the land be found for the superannuated soldiers of Rome’s next war? The disgruntled Allied communities in Italy continued to agitate for their rights. Rome’s swollen population of unemployed immigrants from the countryside was a bonfire waiting to be lit. The ruling class resisted giving its most talented members long-term commands or postings for fear of creating overmighty citizens; as a result, deep-seated problems at home and abroad were left untended.
To the uninstructed eye, Rome was at the height of its power and wealth. It controlled a vast empire that stretched from Spain to Asia Minor. No serious external threat was in sight or could be imagined. However, behind the facade of this magnificent edifice the internal structure was unsound. The walls could not bear the weight they were carrying. Sooner or later collapse was inevitable.
This was the self-defeating political system that Cicero and his contemporaries inherited. AS boys and young men they witnessed the demolition gangs move in.
2
“ALWAYS BE THE BEST, MY BOY, THE BRAVEST”
From Arpinum to Rome: 106–82 BC
Looking back towards the end of his life, Marcus Tullius Cicero recalled the scenes of his childhood in the countryside near the town of Arpinum with much affection. “Whenever I can get out of Rome for a few days, especially during the summer, I come to this lovely and healthful spot, although I can’t often manage it,” he tells a friend in one of the fictional dialogues he wrote on philosophical themes. “This is really my country, and my brother’s, for we come from a very old local family. It is here we have our sacred rituals, it is here our people came from, it is here you can detect our ancestors’ footprints.”
Cicero could not claim to be a native Roman. In fact, he did not want to. He held Roman citizenship and owed Rome his primary loyalty, but his origins lay in a Volscian tribe that had fought for many wars with the fledgling city-state on the Tiber before accepting defeat, assimilation and ultimately full civic rights: “We consider both the place where we were born and the city that has adopted us as our fatherland.” His dual nationality is central to an understanding of Cicero’s personality. He had that passionate affection for Rome and its traditions which many newcomers feel when they join an exclusive club and was deeply hurt when the feeling was not invariably reciprocated. But he could always recharge his self-confidence with a trip to the place of his birth.
Arpinum was (and, now called Arpino, still is) a picturesque hill town some seventy miles or so south of Rome. It was an out-of-the-way spot, and it took up to three days to journey to the capital in comfort. Cicero’s family was part of the local aristocracy; they were landowners and farmers and may also have run a fulling business. Fullers were the Roman equivalents of laundry and dry-cleaning firms: soap had not been invented and clothes were bleached with human and animal urine and various easily found chemicals, such as potash and carbonate of soda, before being washed thoroughly in water and dried. It was an unpleasant job and not one to boast about—just the kind of detail in his past that anyone who was upwardly mobile would wish to forget and an unfriendly critic to expose.
Cicero’s paternal grandfather was a civic worthy and played a leading part in local politics. He was obviously not much of a democrat, for he opposed a motion to adopt secret ballots on the town council. But he had a gift for public administration which a leading Roman statesman of the day recognized: “With your courage and ability, Marcus Cicero, I wish that you had preferred to be active at the political center rather than at the municipal level.” However, like his ancestors, he had no ambitions for a national career and kept his distance from the busy, competitive hub of the Republic’s political life. There was no pressing need to do otherwise, for the central authorities interfered as little as possible in provincial life. Arpinum carried on more or less as it had always done with little fear of external busybodies.
Marcus Cicero had two sons. They both seem to have reacted against his stuffy provincialism and political conservatism. The younger, Lucius, had progressive ideas and was, his nephew said, a humanissimus homo—a most cultivated man. Apparently he aimed to make a mark on the national stage and accompanied the distinguished Roman orator and politician Marcus Antonius (grandfather of the man we know as Mark Antony) on a campaign against pirates in the eastern Mediterranean. His ambitions came to nothing, for he probably died soon after his return.
Lucius’s brief career is an illustration of the importance of connections for anyone wanting to rise up the political ladder. A glance at the Cicero family tree shows how even a relatively undistinguished provincial family far from the center of events was linked by marriage to leading aristocratic clans and ultimately to senior personalities in Rome. Lucius probably got his posting through the good offices of his maternal uncle, Marcus Gratidius, who was a senior officer on Antonius’s staff. Gratidius was a member of another leading local family, but its political leanings (unlike those of the Ciceros) were left-wing and popularis. He married a sister of Arpinum’s most celebrated son, Caius Marius, hammer of the German tribes and a gate-crasher into Roman politics without a drop of noble blood in his veins. Marius himself married a certain Julia, a noblewoman whose later claim to fame was that she was Julius Caesar’s aunt.
Lucius’s elder brother Marcus, our Cicero’s father, was held back from greater things by poor health and was something of a scholar. He lived on the family estate near Arpinum on the River Liris, where he spent much of his time in retirement and enlarged the rather poky house into a grand villa. It was a beautiful spot with poplars and alders lining the river and plenty of opportunity for pleasant walks. Promenades were laid out with seats where, “strolling or taking our ease among these stately poplars on the green and shady riverbank,” family and friends could exchange political gossip or engage in philosophical debates. The Liris had a tributary, the Fibrenus, with an island in the middle which was a quiet retreat for thinking, writing and reading.