To what extent is it true that ‘the principal character
in Cicero’s speeches is always Cicero’?
(An offering to the Turnitin database)

There is no reasonable doubt that at least many of Cicero’s speeches are filled with a degree of self-promotion and outright vanity that would bring a modern speaker into ridicule and contempt. Though useful to his biographers, his frequent and extensive insertion of himself into his speeches is at once an embarrassment to his modern admirers and ammunition for his modern detractors. It was, indeed, noted by his early biographers. See, for example, Plutarch:

So at this time Cicero had the greatest power in the state, but he made himself generally odious, not by any base action, but by continually praising and magnifying himself, which made him hateful to many. For there could be no session either of senate or assembly or court of justice in which one was not obliged to hear Catiline and Lentulus endlessly talked about. Nay, he even went so far as to fill his books and writings with these praises of himself; and he made his oratory, which was naturally very pleasant and had the greatest charm, irksome and tedious to his hearers, since this unpleasant practice clung to him like a fatality. (Plutarch, 1919, pp. 141-3)

This is not, however, to agree that the principal character in his speeches is always or even frequently himself. Or, if there is a case to be made for this assertion, it is not a case that is at all connected with personal vanity or hunger for praise. Let us, however, leave this possibility aside for the moment, and continue with discussing the claim in the natural meaning of the words. Cicero died more than two thousand years ago, and he lived and worked in a moral and political environment radically different from our own. Before agreeing with so apparently damning a judgment on his achievement, we need to consider what he was trying to achieve, and we need to consider what was permissible and even expected in a political or forensic speech. We need to consider whether the judgement made by Plutarch is representative of ancient opinion.

My overall opinion is that Cicero appears in his own speeches no more and no less than he believes necessary to advance the interests of his various friends and clients, and that the known outcome of the causes in which he spoke indicates that his judgment was sound. And, to come back to the possibility I have just laid aside, such focus on himself as may be claimed in his speeches is both legitimate and even essential.

Let us turn to an examination of Cicero’s real or alleged self-promotion with his speech Pro Archia, delivered in 62 BC, just a few months before his Catiline speeches. The facts of the case are that a Greek writer and teacher called Archias had arrived in Rome in 102 BC, and in 93 BC had apparently been granted citizenship of Heraclea, a Greek-speaking city in southern Italy. As a citizen of Heraclea, he was soon eligible under the law passed in 90 BC, at the end of the Social War, that granted Roman citizenship to every citizen of any city in Italy who had not taken up arms against Rome in the war. In 62 BC, Archias was charged with having fraudulently claimed citizenship of Heraclea, and therefore that he was fraudulently laying claim to the status of a Roman Citizen, and was required to prove his eligibility. Cicero was among his former students and came to his defence.

If such a trial were to proceed under the sort of rules that determine the business of an English court, the defence would contain these points—and nothing else:

  • That there was no record for Archias as a citizen of Heraclea because those records had all been destroyed in the Social War;
  • That there was official testimony from the competent authorities in Heraclea, plus a Roman witness of high authority, that Archias had been enrolled as a citizen;
  • That Archias had a residence in Italy, as required by the law of 90 BC;
  • That his absence from the two relevant census returns was worthless as evidence, since it was common knowledge that Archias had been out of the City on official business;
  • That he did appear in one set of unusually reliable City records as a citizen;
  • That he had acted and been regarded as a Roman Citizen without challenge for nearly thirty years.

Cicero does make these points, and he makes them with what seems to be irrefutable persuasiveness. (Pro Archia, 2000, pp. 112-14) He also makes them very briefly. The great majority of Cicero’s defence is that Archias had been one of his teachers, and as such was partly responsible for the man of such learned brilliance arguing that day in court:

If I have any natural talent, members of the jury—and I am aware how limited it is; or if I have any experience in public speaking—in which I do not deny that I am moderately well practised; or if there is any technical skill in my oratory which has been derived from application and training in the liberal arts—and I admit that I have never at any period of my life been averse to such training: if I do have any of these capabilities, then Aulus Licinius [ie, the name used by Archias as a Roman Citizen] here is entitled almost as of right to be among the very first to claim fro me the benefits which they may bring. (Pro Archia, 2000, p. 110)

What relevance has this to the matter of an enrolment at Heraclea thirty years earlier, or the status of those testifying to that enrolment? What relevance has this:

[W]hy I am so delighted with this man [?] The answer is that it is he who enables my mind to recover from the din of the courts and gives my tired ears a rest from the shouting and abuse. How do you imagine I could find material for my daily speeches on so many different subjects if I did not train my mind with literary study, and how could my mind cope with so much strain if I did not use such study to help it unwind? (Pro Archia, 2000, p. 114)

Or what has this:

The measures which I took during my consulship, with your collaboration, for the security of this city and empire, for the lives of our citizens, and for the country as a whole, these have become the subject of a poem on which Archias has now started work. (Pro Archia, 2000, pp. 119-20)

Cicero refers here to his “passion for glory”. (Pro Archia, 2000, p. 120) No doubt of that, to be sure! Where this speech is concerned, we may justly regard Cicero as the principal character, and Archias himself as little more than an excuse for Cicero to show off to his audience about his literary accomplishments.

Or perhaps this would not be a just regard of Cicero or of his speech.

Before we move to this point, however, let us look at another of his forensic speeches, this one for the defence of  Marcus Caelius Rufus, and given in 56 BC. The facts of this case are less easily summarised than those in the case of Archias, but are connected with the arrival of King Ptolemy XII, the father of Cleopatra, in Rome to beg the Senate to order his restoration following a coup in Alexandria. He was opposed by a legation of one hundred Alexandrians. Dio, the head of this legation, was murdered, and, after much political intrigue, Caelius was charged with the murder.

Cicero’s defence has little, on the face of it, to do with Cicero. To be sure, he spends the opening of his speech with a patronising reference to the main prosecutor:

If he brought the charge voluntarily, I put it down to his sense of filial duty, if he was acting under orders, I put it down to compulsion, and if he expected to gain something from it, I put it down to his youthful naïvety. (Pro Caelio, 2000, p. 129)

The clear implication is that the prosecutor is a silly young man who presumes too much to cross legal and oratorical swords with the Great Cicero. This done, though, nearly the whole of the speech is an extended character assassination of the defendant’s former mistress and one of the chief witnesses for the prosecution. This was Clodia, the sister of Publius Clodius Pulcher. In the first chapter of his speech, he calls her “a prostitute.” (Pro Caelio, 2000, p. 129) By chapter 32, he has cast aside all restraint and accused her of incest with her brother. (Pro Caelio, 2000, p. 141) She is the main character in his speech – a woman of astonishing and licentious evil. She crowds out the defendant. Cicero himself has no place here. Surely not?

But yes, there is a place for Cicero. While Consul in 63 BC, he had ordered the execution of the Catiline conspriators without trial. In 59 BC, Clodius, while a Tribune, had procured a law that punished Cicero for this with banishment. He had then procured another law, confiscating Cicero’s property. His sister, Clodia, had helped in the looting of Cicero’s house. After this, Cicero took strongly against both Clodius and Clodia. (Dorey, 1958, p. 178) For much of the next decade, Cicero and Clodius were deadly rivals. It was a rivalry ended only by the murder, in 52 BC, of Clodius – a murder that Cicero himself suggests he had procured, and that Dio Cassius puts as an accusation by the supporters of Mark Antony. (Cassius, 1917, p. 7) This speech, then, can be taken as part of Cicero’s vendetta against the Clodius siblings. Therefore, while he does not mention himself in every line, Cicero’s can be seen lurking in every savage aside against the sister of the man who shattered his political career.

So much, however, for the case that Cicero was a vindictive braggart who regularly filled his speeches with matter that would get him taken before the English Bar Council. Let us look again at Pro Caelio. Even as he accuses her of incest, Cicero makes it clear why he is attacking Clodia:

[I]f this woman is eliminated from the case, the prosecution are left with neither charges nor resources with which to attack Marcus Caelius. (Pro Caelio, 2000, p. 141)

Clodia was the main prosecution asset. Perhaps he was killing two birds with one stone. He was a politician as well as an advocate. He had a vendetta to pursue as well as a case to win. Even so, it was Cicero’s professional duty – by the standards of Roman advocacy, at any rate – to destroy Clodia as a reliable witness. Without her, the case would collapse. It might have been pulled apart by some other means. But, as T.A. Dorey argues,

[E]ven if Caelius were acquitted, there was the chance of his emerging … discredited…. (Dorey, 1958, p. 176)

Turning back to Pro Archia, let us take up the doubt that the suggested view is “a just regard of Cicero or of his speech.” By the standards of an English court, that whole line of defence would be outrageous and irrelevant. But the supposed purpose of a criminal trial in England is to establish the truth. In Rome, truth was important – and observe that Cicero does deal with the relevant alleged facts. (Pro Archia, 2000, pp. 112-14) At the same time, Roman society was based around the relationship of client and patron. A Roman jury could be swayed by considerations of truth and falsehood. It would also pay attention to the matter of who was protecting a defendant. (Paterson, 2004, p. 94) The key point of Pro Archia may not be the bulleted points made above, but this:

You know who I am. I am a man of great authority. This little Greek is my man. I owe him a favour. Whatever he may have done, I require you to let him off.

We do not actually know the outcome of this case. But, win or lose, Cicero can now be seen not as using his client as an excuse to boast of his own greatness, but as making a possibly effective case for his client within the conventions of his day.

Speaking generally, we can say that, whether as advocate or as politician, Cicero argued in order to win. He put immense effort into his speeches, and they seem to have been more often successful than not. Plutarch, quoted above, insists that

he made his oratory… irksome and tedious to his hearers.

Walter Allen dismisses this line of attack as

…of little or no value… and [not representing] independent judgments or a point of view contemporary with Cicero. (Allen, 1954, p. 141)

Robert A. Kaster further observes that

…there is no evidence that contemporaries generally regarded Cicero as conspicuously exceeding those limits, no evidence that any but his enemies found much occasion to criticize his self-praise, no evidence—where his forensic speeches are concerned—that his self-praise was counterproductive (for example, in alienating juries), and no reason to suppose that he would have persisted in it had it been counterproductive. (Kaster, 2005, p. 3)

All this, however, deals with the question in the natural meaning of its words. I turn to a deeper claim that “the principal character in Cicero’s speeches is always Cicero.” Because nearly everything else is lost, Cicero is our main contemporary source for the last century of the Roman Republic. We have fifty-seven speeches by him, and his more philosophical writings, plus eight hundred letters written by him and another hundred written to him. In terms of bulk, he flattens Julius Caesar, our next main contemporary source. It is through Cicero that we follow the turns in the downward spiral of the Republic. But we do not follow these turns as if we were reading the partial archive of a newspaper. Every word of reportage, every word of comment, is directed to establishing a particular view of Rome. Indeed, according to John Lobur:

The Roman way of viewing and expressing things would, shortly after his death, come very much to be framed by Cicero. (Lobur, 2008, p. 54)

Seen in this way, we do not see the Late Republic through Cicero’s eyes because his works have, by chance, survived: his works have survived because his vision of the Late Republic was already hegemonic in the time of Augustus. His vision can be summarised in De Legibus, that a state is

made harmonious by agreement among dissimilar elements, brought about by a fair and reasonable blending together of the upper, middle, and lower classes, just as if they were musical tones. What the musicians call harmony in song is concord in a State, the strongest and best bond of permanent union in any commonwealth; and such concord can never be brought about without the aid of justice. (Cicero, 1928, p. 69)

We see this in his speech De Imperio Cn Pompei, delivered in 66 BC. (Cicero, 2006, pp. 110-40) Rome, he says, has grown corrupt and lazy. Mithridates in the East is endangering “[t]his whole system of credit and finance which operates here at Rome. (p.116) He is able to endanger this because Rome is hated “because of the greed and corruption of the men we have sent out to govern them in recent years. (p.131) It is necessary go back to a time “when the Roman people used typically to conduct their wars in distant lands, and to use the bulwarks of their power for the defence of their allies.” (p.120) The Romans now must go back to their better selves. They must appoint a man of “exceptional ability, responsibility, and integrity.” (p.129) He alone can be trusted to bring this war to a swift and victorious end. He is the one who can be trusted not to abuse the exceptional powers that are proposed for him. He will be an Alexander, but one who respects the authority of the Senate. (Steel, 2002, p. 119) He will bring Rome back to its older and better self.

We can see that, except at the beginning and end, this is a speech in which Cicero hardly ever mentions himself. At the same time, Cicero is there in every sentence. Just as Virgil manages to mention Augustus just three times in the whole of The Aeneid, and yet make the poem all about Augustus, so Cicero barely mentions himself, but presents the matter of renewing the command of Pompey in terms of his own project for renewing the Republic around an agreement of the better classes and a revived conception of Rome as an historical force.

According to this view of the question, “the principal character in Cicero’s speeches is always Cicero.” He is there whether or not he makes much of a formal appearance, because we are at all times viewing Rome and its problems through his eyes. Can we say that we do not see Rome in those speeches, but Cicero? Possibly not. But, at all times, in all his speeches and other writings. Cicero is there, shaping and mediating our vision of Rome. We see what he sees. We see it as he sees it. What he does not see, or choose to see, we do not see. He is the principal character.

Bibliography

Allen, W., 1954. Cicero’s Conceit. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Volume 85, pp. 121-144.

Cassius, D., 1917. Roman History. Harvard: Loeb.

Cicero, M. T., 1928. De Legibus. Harvard: Loeb.

Cicero, M. T., 2000. Pro Archia. In: D. Berry, ed. Cicero: Defence Speeches. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 110-26.

Cicero, M. T., 2000. Pro Caelio. In: D. Berry, ed. Cicero: Defence Speeches. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 129-78.

Cicero, M. T., 2006. De Imperio Cn Pompei. In: D. Berry, ed. Cicero: Political Speeches. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 110-140.

Dorey, T., 1958. Cicero, Clodia, and the Pro Caelio. Greece and Rome, 5(2), pp. 175-80.

Kaster, R. A., 2005. Self-Aggrandizement and Praise of Others in Cicero, Princeton: Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics.

Lobur, J. A., 2008. Consensus, Concordia, and the Formation of Roman Imperial Ideology. London: Routledge.

Paterson, J., 2004. Self-Reference in Cicero’s Forensic Speeches. In: J. Powell & J. Paterson, eds. Cicero the Advocate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 79-96.

Plutarch, 1919. The Parallel Lives. Harvard: Loeb.

Steel, C., 2002. Cicero, Rhetoric and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

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