Cicero. The Lawyer Who Invented the West

Begin at the end. December of 43 BCE, the coast road near Formiae. An old man is carried in a litter toward the sea, toward a ship at Caieta that will take him out of Italy. As the boat is rowed to the beach, ravens rise cawing from the temple of Apollo above the shore and settle on the yard-arm, pecking at the ropes; one flies down to the litter and tugs the covering from his face with its beak, and the slaves, ashamed that wild birds should defend a man when they will not, take up the litter and hurry on. When the soldiers catch them, the party is led by Popillius Laenas, a tribune Cicero had once defended on a charge of murdering his own father; the man who does the killing is a centurion named Herennius. Cicero clasps his chin in his left hand, the way he always did, and looks at them, filthy and worn with fear, then stretches his neck out of the litter for the sword. He is sixty-three. He asks only that the head be taken off cleanly, and then, thinking of the men this same executioner had botched before him, says: "What if you had come to me first?" Herennius cuts his throat; it takes three strokes and some sawing to sever the head.

Then the part you need to hold. Antony has the head and the hands brought to him – the hands that wrote the Philippics, the speeches against him – and nails them to the Rostra, the speaker's platform in the Forum from which Cicero had delivered the words that made and unmade him. There is a further scene, and it belongs to Cassius Dio, writing a generation later, rather than to Plutarch: Fulvia, Antony's wife, took the head onto her lap, drew the tongue from the mouth, and pierced it with the pins from her hair. So Dio tells it; whether or not it happened, the tradition kept it, because it says exactly what the killing meant.

Understand what is being killed here, because it is not only a man. The most dangerous thing Cicero owned was his tongue, and Rome made a show of destroying that specifically. A republic is a machine that runs on speech – on argument and counter-argument, on law read aloud in a public square. Antony answered speech with a sword, and for a while the sword won. The republic of words ended with the orator's tongue pierced by a woman's hairpins on the platform where the words had been spoken. Work backward from that image.

Now go back to the beginning, because the death only means something if you know what was killed. Cicero was not born to any of this. He came from Arpinum, a hill town some hundred kilometres from Rome, from a family that had never held high office. In the vocabulary of the Roman aristocracy he was a novus homo, a new man, and it was not a compliment. It meant a man with no ancestor on the walls and no consul in his line, nothing behind him but himself. The men who ran Rome had names that went back centuries. Cicero had a voice.

That turned out to be enough. In a city where power was inherited, he took the one road that could not be inherited and climbed it faster than anyone in living memory. He studied law until he was the best advocate in Rome, and used the courts as a ladder. By 63 BCE, at the youngest age the law allowed, he was consul – a man from nowhere at the top of a world built to keep men from nowhere out.

His consulship handed him his one great scene. A bankrupt aristocrat named Catiline was assembling a conspiracy to seize the state by force. Cicero, with the evidence in hand, rose in the Senate and turned on him to his face: Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? How long, Catiline, will you go on abusing our patience? Schoolchildren across Europe would memorise that opening for two thousand years. The conspiracy broke, the state held, and a grateful Senate gave Cicero a title no one had held before: pater patriae, father of the fatherland. He was the man who had talked the republic out of a knife fight, and he never once let anyone forget it.

The talking could not save the republic. In the years after Cicero's consulship the strongmen closed in – Pompey and Crassus, and above all Julius Caesar, who in 49 BCE crossed the Rubicon with an army and made the whole apparatus of debate beside the point. When a man has legions, he need not persuade the Senate. Caesar won, made himself dictator, and pushed Cicero, who had backed the losing side, into a kind of internal exile in his own country.

Here is where the second Cicero is born, the one this course cares about. In February of 45 his daughter Tullia died, a few weeks after childbirth, and the loss broke him. He fled to a lonely estate at Astura and withdrew from the world like a sick animal; all day, as he told his friend Atticus, he hid in a thick and thorny wood and came out only at evening, his talk all with books and forever breaking off into fits of weeping he fought and lost. To treat the wound he did the only thing he knew: he wrote a Consolatio, a book of consolation addressed to himself, believing he was the first man ever to write one for his own grief. The grief converted rather than lifted. Shut out of the Forum and unable to mourn quietly, he turned the whole force of it onto the page, and in something under two years, at a pace that ought to be impossible, he produced a library. On the Republic and On the Laws on politics. On Duties on ethics. On the Ends of Good and Evil and the Tusculan Disputations on how to live and how to die. On the Nature of the Gods on theology. He did more than translate the Greeks; he argued with them in a new language and built something they never had – philosophy addressed to the ordinary educated man of affairs rather than to the specialist inside a school.

Plato had a cathedral and Aristotle had a library, and both spoke to insiders, to the young men of the Academy and the Lyceum. Cicero took philosophy out of the schoolroom and handed it to a civilisation. For him the writing was politics carried on by other means, and these books were his last campaign – the one he won.

Look at the words in that last paragraph. Quality. Essence. Moral. Property, in the philosophical sense. Element. Definition. Individual. Species. You reach for them without thinking. Almost none of them existed as abstract terms before Cicero, because the language they belong to did not yet exist. The Greeks had done the thinking, but they had done it in Greek, and Latin – the mother of the Romance tongues and the working language of every European university for fifteen hundred years – had no vocabulary for it at all.

So Cicero made one. Faced with the Greek word for character or custom, ēthos, he coined moralis, from the Latin mos, and handed us the whole of "morality" and "moral philosophy." Faced with the Greek for being, he built essentia, "essence." He gave us qualitas for the quality of a thing, quantitas for its amount, and a dozen more. When he needed a word for the fullness of being humanly cultivated, he reached for humanitas, and named the thing you now call the humanities.

Before you can think a thought, someone has to build the words to think it in. The West did most of its thinking, for a thousand years and more, in a Latin that was to a startling degree the personal invention of one Roman lawyer working against a deadline in the wreck of his career. When Aquinas writes essentia, when a modern court speaks of a person's "quality" or a philosopher of "morals," they are using tools Cicero forged. He built the container Greek philosophy would travel west in, and the container shaped everything poured into it.

Now the sentence that matters most, the one for which everything else is prologue. In the third book of On the Republic, Cicero has a character lay out an idea the ancient world had circled but never stated with this force. Let me give it to you close to whole, because you have inherited it:

True law is right reason in agreement with nature. It is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people. There will not be one law at Rome and another at Athens, one law now and another in time to come, but one eternal and unchangeable law, valid for all nations and for all times.

A whole civilisation is folded up inside those lines. Above the law any particular state happens to write, Cicero says, stands a higher law, the same in every country and every century. A statute can be legal and still be wrong, judged by a standard above itself.

Follow where that goes. Thomas Aquinas builds his whole theory of law on it, setting natural law beneath the eternal law of God and above the human law of kings. Hugo Grotius takes it and founds international law – the claim that even sovereign states are bound by a law they did not make. The men who wrote the American Declaration open by appealing to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," quoting, at second and third hand, a dead Roman. And in 1945, when the survivors of the worst century in history needed a court to try men whose own nation had ordered their crimes, they reached for the same idea and named it "crimes against humanity." The whole of it – that there is a law above the decree, and that neither "it was legal in my country" nor "I was obeying orders" can make an atrocity lawful – runs back through Grotius and Aquinas to that passage in On the Republic.

This is no antiquarian point. You are living inside a test of it. When a great power declares that its neighbour has no right to exist and sends an army to prove it, it is asserting that law is only the will of the strong, that there is no bar above the decree of the Kremlin. The reason the world can name a war of aggression a crime, and hold someone to answer for it, rests on Cicero's claim that there is one law for all nations and all times, and that no dictator can repeal it. Every tribunal that will one day judge what was done to your cities stands on ground a Roman lawyer surveyed two thousand years ago.

Of all the books Cicero wrote in his defeat, one travelled furthest. On Duties, written in the last full year of his life as a letter of moral instruction to his son, asks a question you still argue about at three in the morning: when the useful and the right pull in opposite directions, which wins? Cicero's answer is unfashionable and bracing. The right wins, always, and the apparent conflict is an illusion – nothing genuinely dishonourable is ever genuinely useful. Your duty is fixed by what is honourable, and the outcome is not yours to bargain with.

Something in that answer would not let Europe put the book down. For most of the Middle Ages On Duties was the most copied secular text in existence, second only to scripture, worn smooth by the hands of monks who disagreed with half of Cicero's theology and could not do without his ethics. And when a Tuscan poet named Petrarch went hunting through cathedral libraries in the fourteenth century and found forgotten manuscripts of Cicero's letters, the shock of hearing that ancient voice speak so directly, across a thousand years of silence, was one of the sparks that lit the Renaissance. Petrarch half fell in love with Cicero and half quarrelled with him, and wrote him letters as though he were alive.

This is the thread the West later called humanitas, the conviction that a full human being is made by cultivation and moral reflection, and that this making is the point of education. He has a fair claim to two titles at once: father of Latin eloquence, the model every European learned to write from, and father of the humanities themselves. When you sat down in your first year to read old books that were never going to get you a job, you were enacting a wager Cicero made and named.

Follow one more spark, because it lands inside this course. Around the year 373, in North Africa, an ambitious, restless nineteen-year-old was working through the standard rhetoric curriculum when he was assigned a book by Cicero called the Hortensius. It was a protreptic, an exhortation to take up philosophy, and it has since been almost entirely lost – we have it only in fragments, most of them quoted by the young man it changed. Because it did change him, and writing of it decades later he still gives off heat.

This book altered my affections, he wrote, and turned my prayers toward You, O Lord. Suddenly every vain hope became worthless to me, and with an incredible warmth of heart I longed for the immortality of wisdom. The young man was Augustine, and three lectures from now he will build the confessing self, the whole architecture of Western inwardness that runs down to every diary you have ever kept. The fire that started him was a lost pep talk by Cicero – a pagan Roman four hundred years dead reaching across the grave to set a Christian saint in motion.

Hold the chain in your hand: a book we no longer possess ignites Augustine, who builds the inner self Paul had opened and hands it to a thousand years of monks reading On Duties. Cicero is the junction box in the middle of it. Cut him out and the current does not reach us.

This course has a rule, and I keep it even for the men I admire: when we reach the dark page, we read it aloud and we do not soften it. Cicero has more than one.

Start with the vanity, because it is almost comic until it is not. The man could not stop talking about his own consulship. He wrote poetry celebrating it, one line so self-satisfied that Rome mocked it for a generation, and pestered friends and historians letter after surviving letter to write up his glory, and to write it up warmly, until the collected correspondence reads like the diary of a man who cannot pass a mirror. He was thin-skinned and desperate to be loved by posterity – which, to his eternal irritation, is exactly what he got. Plutarch, the closest of his ancient biographers, said it flatly: no wicked deed earned Cicero the hatred of Rome; it was his constant praising and glorifying of himself that did, and the vulgarity of it clung to his oratory like an everlasting doom.

Then the darker thing, the one that should trouble a man who worshipped law. During the Catiline crisis five of the conspirators were put to death without trial, and Cicero as consul carried it out – he led them down to the state dungeon himself and had them strangled in the dark. The Senate had voted it, on Cato's motion and against Caesar's furious objection; the decision was not Cicero's alone. Yet Roman citizens had an old right of appeal to the people against a death sentence, and here five of them died without it. The ancient sources do not call this illegal – that charge is ours, looking back – but they show a great defender of legality reaching, in an emergency, for the argument every government that has ever killed without trial has reached for: that the safety of the state required it.

And he wavered. When the strongmen forced the choice, Cicero dithered between Pompey and Caesar, weighed his safety against his principles in letter after agonised letter, backed the losing side late, and then flattered the winner. Then there was the boy. After Caesar's murder Cicero staked everything on Caesar's teenage heir, Octavian, adopting him in the Philippics as a weapon against Antony and calling him heaven-sent. In private he was less reverent, and let slip a pun that got back to the young man: the boy was to be praised, honoured, and lifted up – laudandum, ornandum, tollendum – where the last word means both "to exalt" and "to get out of the way." Octavian did not forget it. He marched on Rome, took the consulship at nineteen, made his peace with Antony, and let Cicero's name stand on the proscription list. The boy who owed him everything traded him for a season's advantage. He was often vain and he was frequently afraid. Hold that beside the natural law and the death on the road, because both are true, and the second is the more impressive precisely because the first is admitted. The words were braver than the man, and that is no reason to discount the words.

Return to the Rostra and the hairpins, because now you can read the scene. When Antony nailed Cicero's hands and tongue to the speaker's platform, he was making an argument of his own: that speech is nothing against force, that when the debate is over the man with the soldiers decides and the man with only words is meat. For a while he was right. Antony and then Augustus buried the republic, and Rome would not hold a free public argument again for a very long time.

But look at who won the longer war. The republic Cicero could not save died within his lifetime; the words he wrote to save it are still doing the work. Aquinas built on them, Grotius built on them, Jefferson quoted them, Nuremberg enforced them. The eloquence he invented is why you can write a Latin sentence at all, and the humanitas he named is why you are reading old books in your first year instead of only learning a trade. Antony's sword won a season. Cicero's tongue won the millennia. The tongue Fulvia pierced is still talking, and her name survives only because it is fastened to the crime against it.

The man who let him die said as much himself. Years on, Octavian – Augustus now, sole master of the Roman world – walked in on one of his grandsons reading a book of Cicero's; the boy tried to hide it under his cloak, afraid. Augustus took it, read a long while standing there, and handed it back. "An eloquent man, child," he said, "an eloquent man, and a lover of his country." It was the founder of the empire that killed him admitting, decades late, that the words and the man had been right. And when the Senate tore down Antony's statues and struck his honours from the record, the consul in office was Cicero's own son, whom Augustus had taken as his colleague. The last stroke of Antony's punishment fell to Cicero's family.

This is why a republic is worth the terrible price of defending. A republic is a wager that words – law, debate, persuasion, the patient business of convincing free people instead of commanding slaves – can stand against the argument of force. It is a fragile wager, it loses battles constantly, and it lost the one Cicero staked his neck on. You are living inside the same wager right now, in a country where free people are told by an empire of force that their words and their laws and their votes are nothing against tanks. Remember how it came out the first time. The empire took the man and displayed his severed tongue as a trophy, and two thousand years later the trophy is still speaking and the empire is a cautionary tale. The words won longer. They always have. Bet on the words.