Cicero: Defender of the Republic

Tom Holland (0:08)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another bonus here on The Rest Is History, where we are still in ancient Rome.

Hopefully, by now, you will have listened to most, if not all of the series that we've been doing on Marius and Sulla, and the first implosion of the Roman Republic into civil war.

At the end of Episode 4, I quoted Cicero, the great orator of the last decades of the Roman Republic, and he was looking back at Sulla and placing the great warlords of his own generation in the context of Sulla's example. He was essentially saying, these warlords are saying to themselves, Sulla did it, Sulla marched on Rome, Sulla made himself the master of Rome, so why can't I do it? I think it's a reminder that everything that happens in the more famous civil war that's fought between Julius Caesar and Pompey, and then subsequently Mark Antony, the tyrannicides and Octavian, who ultimately becomes Augustus, that all of these great players are very much aware of the context that Sulla had provided them. And so I thought that it would be interesting to talk to one of our greatest ancient historians, Catherine Edwards, who is Professor of Classics at Birkbeck at the University of London, but more generally for our purposes, has just published a fantastic book on Cicero. Orator, The Life of Cicero and the End of the Roman Republic came out a couple of months ago. Cannot recommend it highly enough. And so I can't think of anyone better to talk to about this. What perspective Cicero and his generation of power players in the Roman Republic might provide on these two terrifying great beasts, Marius and Salah. So Catherine, welcome to The Rest Is History.

Catharine Edwards (2:06)

Well, thank you very much, Tom. And thank you very much for having me. It's great to be here and have a chance to talk about Cicero with you. People perhaps don't recognize enough the huge importance of the sort of period of Marius and Salah for Cicero himself as well as for the kind of history of the kind of unraveling of the Roman Republic.

And the example that Salah set of marching on Rome was hugely disruptive to the Roman political fabric, even though he claimed to be restoring all sorts of things, you know, when he had established himself as dictator and he's restoring the Senate and so on. But actually, what he'd done in turning his armies on Rome was completely against the spirit of the Republic and set this hugely influential example for the warlords of later years.

Tom Holland (3:01)

Yes. So Cicero was born in 106 BC. So he is growing up in the 90s, which is a decade marked by the collapse of Roman Italy into a war between the Romans and the Italians, the social war, as it's called.

But Cicero himself, although he's a Roman citizen, he is not born in Rome. He is born in Arpinum, which attentive listeners to our series may remember as having been the birthplace of Marius as well.

Catharine Edwards (3:37)

Yes, indeed. If you go to Arpinum today, the little town of Arpino, you see in the main piazza there, statues of both Marius and Cicero, the two kind of great sons of Arpinum. So yes, it's really interesting to see how Cicero positions himself in relation to Marius, who is the most famous person from Arpinum. The families clearly knew one another quite well.

They were the sort of big local families in this small part of Italy. And Cicero, in some ways, sees Marius as a wonderful forerunner. Marius had become consul on multiple occasions from a family that hadn't previously had senators in it. And so in some ways, he's a great role model. But in other ways, Marius is very problematic as an example for Cicero.

Tom Holland (4:30)

Because as listeners to the series will know, basically he ends up this kind of terrifying lunatic slaughtering everybody and occupying Rome.

But also, I mean, Cicero comes to identify with the kind of the traditional political order. And Marius is seen as a bit of a disrupter, a bit of an outsider. And Cicero is always torn, isn't he, between his status as an outsider. He's very proud of the successes that he has, but he longs to be a part of the establishment.

Catharine Edwards (5:00)

I think that's absolutely right. There's a real paradox about Cicero. He knows he's kind of an outsider. He's constantly trying to justify himself. But one way he does that is by aligning himself with the traditional values, particularly of the Senate. And I think it's a sort of sense that some of the reforms of Marius were kind of a threat to the sort of powers of the Senate, even before Marius started turning into a terrifying lunatic in the streets of Rome.