Cicero had absolute power in his hands. He hesitated, but not for moral reasons. He was, as always, thinking of his reputation. His wife, Terentia, proved an unexpected but decisive vote, interpreting a sacrifice that had frightened some others as a sign that her husband must wield the power that had been given to him.
The conspirators were put to death without trial by his order, and thousands more in their supporting armies died. In thanks, the Senate would bestow on him the title of “Father of His Country,” but the extreme measures and the lives touched by so many deaths would hang over him for the rest of his life—and indeed, all of history.
What remained untouched through the ordeal was Cicero’s sense of his own destiny and greatness. Plutarch tells us that within days, Cicero began a campaign to burnish his accomplishments. “One couldn’t attend a Senate or public meeting,” Plutarch wrote, “nor any session of the courts, without having to listen to the endless repetitions. . . . This unpleasing habit of his clung to him like fate.” No amount of credit or praise was enough.
Cicero enshrined what he believed to be his own magnificence in writing as well. He tried to induce Posidonius to cover his consulship in his great fifty-two-volume history. When Posidonius declined, Cicero wrote a letter “the size of a book” to Pompey in 62 BC on the subject of his own achievements. Pompey acknowledged it with no more than a shrug. Cicero was undeterred—he was convinced he had saved the country. History, he thought, was in his debt.
The historian H. J. Haskell captures the contradictions in Cicero’s character well. He was talented, he was brilliant, he was steeped in the wisest philosophy of every school, and yet “he was too sensitive, too vain, too dominated by personal feeling, too open to impression, to become a great leader of men. At times he saw both sides of public questions too vividly to enable him to make up his mind, close it to all doubts, and drive ahead. At other times, when his hatreds became engaged—and he was a fierce hater—he would plunge forward recklessly.”
Cicero knew what the Stoics warned of the passions, but he did little work on reining in his own. And so, time and time again, they would come back to cause exactly the kind of suffering that the Stoics since the days of Zeno had been warning against.
Like the figures in Posidonius’s writings, Cicero would get nearly everything he wanted . . . and come to regret it.
Cicero’s consulship and brief moment of crisis leadership were the high-water mark of his life. It would be a staggered series of downhill declines from there. The country moved on, and as the oracle had predicted, the gratitude of the crowd was not enduring. Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus would form their Triumvirate in 60 BC, creating a front of enemies opposed to Cicero. The next consul, in 58 BC, turned openly against Cicero, passing a proscription against him for having condemned citizens to death without a trial. Cicero had to flee Rome in exile, while his property was destroyed.
It was Seneca who observed how quickly time and fate would afflict on Cicero “everything that a victorious Catiline would have done.” In fact, his banishment was repealed a year later, but still, change—or dissolution—was in the air.
For the most part, Cicero steered clear of the city. He turned, as much as he could, back to writing and philosophy. He pored over the books at the library of Faustus Sulla near his villa in Cumae, which was once the home of the Stoic teacher Blossius. He worked on a book, On Oratory (56 BC), where he compared Cato’s use of rhetoric to that of Rutilius Rufus, showing how Rufus’s decision to maintain his Stoic brevity in the face of his accusers failed him at precisely the moment good rhetoric could have saved him. Worried about the future of Rome, he wrote two works, Republic and Laws, which drew on the Stoics Diogenes of Babylon and Panaetius.
But like many historians, and even readers today, he was missing what was staring him in the face: the lives these figures had lived. He was missing the common thread through those four Stoics. Character. Commitment. Purpose.
In 51 BC, Cicero was awarded the governorship of Cilicia—a position well out of the fray of Roman politics, which helped to reburnish his reputation. Really, though, it was a brief respite from the chaos fate had in store for him and for Rome.
Cicero once wrote that the beginnings of things are small. He would also find in those few short years that the ends of things are surprising and fast. In early 49 BC, Caesar—Cicero’s former friend and peer—would cross the Rubicon. Caesar’s ambition had been slower burning than Cicero’s, less self-aggrandizing, but far more aggressive and unbending—and it was backed by the wealth produced by an unmatched and deeply feared army in Gaul. Civil war ensued. By September 48 BC, Pompey—whom Cicero had praised in his first major political speech, and whom his teacher Posidonius had tried to instruct about virtue—would be dead.
Who could stop Caesar now? One would think that this would be the pivotal moment for such a student of philosophy, and a master orator like Cicero—when fate met the man whose time had come. But Cicero, the ambitious striver, was not prepared to meet it. We have, with the benefit of hindsight, the perspective to see that he had wasted himself on the wrong crisis. Thinking that the Catiline conspiracy was his moment to perform for history, he had moved too soon, too severely. He gained fame from it, but the victory was Pyrrhic.
Now the Republic really was hanging in the balance. Never before had Cicero’s talents—his ability to persuade, to move the crowd, to tell a story that would drive people to the barricades—been more needed, but he could not summon an audience that would listen. He was impotent too, without much power. Spent, he could do nothing.
Or was he a coward? Offered a command of troops in the Republican cause, Cicero inexplicably turned it down.
Only Cato—the Stoic who wrote less but lived the ideas—was willing to fight. But it was not enough. By 46 BC, with Caesar ascendant, Cato committed suicide in Utica, forever a martyr to the Republican cause. Cicero eulogized him, attempting to capture in words the power of this Stoic he both admired and judged, but whose commitment to principles he lacked. He, along with the rest of Rome, was ready to yield to Caesar and “accept the bridle,” as Plutarch puts it.
Cicero’s eulogy of Cato is a case in point—although only fifty words of the tribute survive, we know he censored himself for fear of angering Caesar and Caesar’s supporters. Both Cato and Cicero cared about what was right—but Cicero cared about himself a little bit more. Cato believed in courage. Cicero believed in not getting killed.
The choice earned Cicero a few years of life, but the Stoics would ask—as we should ask of all self-preserving compromises—“At what cost?”
The one upside of Cicero’s capitulation and his fair-weather commitment to philosophy is that by living he was able to continue writing, and to serve as a kind of bridge between Greek and Latin philosophical thought, especially in the area of ethics. And when it came to ethics, he knew of no better source in all of Greek and Latin literature than the Stoics. In the end it wasn’t the accomplishments of public office that made his glory, or how Cicero lived his life, but what he set down in writing—wisdom from the Stoics that would endure to our own time.
In 46 BC, Cicero published the Stoic Paradoxes, dedicated to Marcus Brutus, who himself had strong Stoic leanings. In what was more a rhetorical exercise than a serious philosophical treatment, he explored six of the primary Stoic paradoxes:
that virtue is the only good;
that it is sufficient for happiness;
that all virtues and vices are equal;
that all fools are mad;
that only the sage is truly free;