It is a hot, grueling day in late August. Five of us sit in a seminar room. One (that would be I) is armed with a cup of coffee from the Burger Dungeon; another has a cigarette; another brims with health after a wholesome breakfast; a stammering freshman has joined our ranks: and a spaced-out graduate student in English seems bored and negligent, presumably because he needs to study for his comps.
And then the professor strolls into the room.
Like all graduates of college prep schools, who go on to earn Ph.D’s. at Ivy League universities, he refers to us as “Miss” and “Mr.” (Never Ms. or Mrs.) He is a chain-smoker who lines up the cigarettes on the chalk ledge. We wait for him to mistake a cigarette for chalk. He explicates the political and personal background of Cicero’s racy speech, Pro Caelio, which we will read in Latin, marveling over convoluted grammar and figures of speech.
The professor likes to tease us. He says, weeks later, referring to me: “Miss ___ has a BBC accent.” Is it a compliment or an insult? (I think it was affection.) He also exchanges witty, affectionate repartee with the smoking student, who flippantly refers to particles as “throwaway words.” Like us stoic classics majors, Smoking Student just smiles.
Alas, this brilliant, even likable, professor is vicious to the weak. When the freshman translates peior avis as “worse bird,” rather than “worse than our ancestors,” he rips him to shreds. And truly, avis (nominative singular) can mean “bird”; just as avis, from avus, means “than our ancestors.” The Latin vocabulary is sparse, and the same words, and forms of words, have a dozen different meanings. It all has to do with context. I was sorry for the freshman, who did not belong in the seminar (yet).
In recent years, I have reread Pro Caelio with great pleasure: Cicero deflects attention from his client, Caelius, to Clodia, allegedly Caelius’s former girlfriend, and embarks on a sexist attack. He says that Clodia is an older woman, an adulteress who strolls around the pleasure gardens and preys on young men, and that Caelius has dropped her. Thus, she is getting revenge. Very little is known about Clodia: it is supposed that she was also the model for the poet Catullus’s girlfriend, who is known as Lesbia in his poems. But historians forget that there is a persona of the poems, that the “I” is not necessarily the poet, and that many such “loose” women are portrayed in Greek and Latin poetry.
Decades later, I appreciate Cicero’s sophistication and brilliant sentences even more. And yet I constantly worry about him. The republic is dead. He has powerful friends, and serves as consul and in other political positions, but he also collects many enemies along the way.
Even in his early oration, In C. Verrem, “Against Gaius Verres,” I am terrified for him. He is attacking the powerful Verres for corruption during his governorship of Sicily, where he extorted money and confiscated valuable art works from the Sicilians. He also killed many Sicilians.
Cicero goes to Sicily and investigates, and finds damning evidence, but there are delaying tactics in Rome to keep the case from going to trial, and a plot to keep Cicero from being elected aedile.
Fortunately, he does have friends: one of them comes to report on the politics behind the scenes. A powerful Roman official looks into the bribery, and sends some Sicilians home who should have testified in the case.
Cicero writes,
You may be sure that this incident did not please me. I understood very well what I must fear from it. Trustworthy friends and allies reported everything; that baskets were full of Sicilian money, and transferred by a certain senator to a Roman equestrian; and from these, as it were, baskets, ten were left for the senator, on account of my associates. The companies of all the voting tribes were called at night.
One of these men, who thought that he owed everything for my sake, came to me that same night. He explained the points of the speech: the corrupt politician had reminded them how liberally he had treated them before, when he sought the praetorship (office of governor), with many close friends among consuls and praetors. Then he went on to offer a huge bribe, whatever amount they wished, to keep Cicero from procuring the aedileship.
Cicero was known by all the famous people of his day. Catullus addresses a short poem to Cicero. I interpret it as a satire of Cicero’s style, though some think it is a heartfelt thank you (not Catullus’s style).
It is impossible to duplicate the effects of Catullus’s spare, elegant, comical Latin in our verbose English, and I don’t write poetry anyway. But calling himself “the worst of all poets” and Cicero “the best of all patrons” is hyperbolic and fulsome, very much in the style of Cicero’s letters.
This is essentially what Catullus says, but is NOT the poem.
Marcus Tullius, most fluent of Romulus’s descendants, as great as they are and were, so great will your descendants be: Catullus thanks you; Catullus, the worst of all poets, as much the worst of all poets as you are the best of all patrons.
And now I will end my homage to Cicero with a historian’s viewpoint. Anthony Everitt says in Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician:
If few people read his speeches today for pleasure, his philosophical writings are masterpieces of popularization and were one of the most valuable means by which the heritage of classical thought was handed down to posterity. Cicero was not an original philosopher, but all his life he read philosophy and his writings are infused with a humane skepticism that reflects his character more than his age. In that sense, his greatest gift to European civilization was the man himself – rational, undogmatic, tolerant, law-abiding and urbane.