Cicero continues his philosophical writing with a cosmological work, On the Universe, which he seems to have abandoned in favor of the dialogue On the Nature of the Gods, which set out and refuted the theologies of the Epicureans and Stoics. This was supplemented by On Divination, a dialogue between Cicero and his brother, Quintus. He also wrote the short dialogue On Old Age to honor his friend Atticus on his sixty-fifth birthday. His last quasi-forensic speech was a defense before Caesar of the Galatian tetrarch Deiotarus; the matter was still pending at Caesar’s death. He continued to attend meetings of the senate but was privately critical of the hollowing out of republican institutions under Caesar’s dictatorship. Caesar’s assassination on the Ides of March raised brief hopes of a return to republican patterns of government, but Mark Antony, who had been Caesar’s co-consul, was quickly able to reassert control.

Cicero set a new tone by curbing exactions made by previous governors, investigating corruption, and demanding restitution, measures that restored the cities of Cilicia to solvency. A feared invasion by the Parthians was averted by their defeat in Syria by C. Cassius Longinus and again in the following year by a court intrigue. Cicero saw some military action against rebels in his province, but his triumph was never realized. When Cicero returned to Italy, he found civil war brewing between Caesar and Pompey. After long hesitancy, he joined the latter but saw little action. After Pompey’s defeat at Pharsalus, Cicero returned to Italy but remained bottled up in Brundisium for over a year until Caesar finally granted permission for him to return home. But there were now domestic troubles, leading to the divorce of Terentia and marriage to Publilia, a teenager.

Though his family background was a disadvantage, Cicero compensated through his education and hard work, building his own support network with successful advocacy in court. He ascended the cursus honorum to consulship in the minimum time. As consul, he quashed Catiline’s conspiracy. But his efforts to memorialize his consulship had mixed success. His position was brittle, as was shown when P. Clodius forced Cicero into exile for executing captured Catilinarians without a trial. Recalled the following year, Cicero became subservient to the power brokers. After service as a provincial governor and in Pompey’s army in the civil war, he made his peace with Caesar and slipped into the role of courtier while expressing resentment in correspondence. After Caesar’s assassination, Cicero thought he could revive the republic when D. Brutus and Octavian took up arms against Antony. But the unstable coalition soon fell apart, and Cicero’s death entailed.

A rumbling that was heard in Latium led the senate to consult the haruspices, Etruscan seers, for their opinion. They declared this a portent, listing the offended deities and possible dangers. Meanwhile, P. Clodius claimed that the destruction of the temple of Libertas had prompted the divine anger. In the senate, Cicero countered Clodius’ claims and put his own “spin” on the diviners’ opinion. Another senate speech deals with the allocation of consular provinces, with Cicero arguing that Caesar should retain his Gallic provinces. Continuing his forensic work, Cicero defended Cornelius Balbus, Cn. Plancius, and M. Aemilius Scaurus. In the senate, he exchanged invectives with L. Calpurnius Piso. He also wrote On the Orator and drew closer to Caesar, receiving a sizable loan of 800,000 sesterces. Toward the end of 54, he penned a letter to his political patron Lentulus Spinther defending his changed policies.

Political monuments are characterized by visual materiality that allows for and indeed invites engagement; the claim for permanence; and the force of visual presence. Caesar’s monuments, especially on the Capitol, signalled a decidedly new quality of presence irreconcilable with the fine balance of individual achievement and public recognition. The rules behind this balance were flexible, but collective consensus always retained the upper hand. The balance tipped only with Pompey’s enormous theatre complex on the Campus Martius. The complex created a new type of public space, and it set the precedent for Caesar, who took on the challenge of competition with his own Forum project. Such an omnipresent dynamic of increase provoked heavy polemics and fierce conflict, but this violence was not only tolerated but reckoned with as a possibility from the very start. It appeared more appropriate to accept repeated violation of tradition while still affirming it than to develop a fundamentally different, new ‘system’ of norms and behaviours. The mode of permanent transgression was indicative not only of a political culture in crisis but also of a culture of crisis.

In this chapter, my aim is to characterize settlement patterns and social organization from the end of the second century BC to the middle of the first century AD in the areas of Britain which became the Roman Province of Britannia. The aim is not to provide a detailed account of the archaeology of the period, for it is already the subject of a considerable and growing specialist literature which deserves a fuller synthesis than space here allows. Instead the salient characteristics are discussed and themes introduced which are to be taken up in the remainder of this volume. These themes are particularly related to the development of the agricultural economy and its productive capacity; regional variations in the settlement pattern, and thus perhaps social formation; and the organization of social power. These aspects will be treated in more detail than has been customary in recent studies of Roman Britain, as to understand its Romanization we must first understand what pre-Roman Britain was like.

The Introduction outlines crucial intellectual contexts and frameworks for thinking about how Cicero's Brutus is a crucial intervention in the the civic crisis and the writing of literary history. It also surveys the scholarship to date and examines how Cicero's project reflects general trends in academic inquiry and civic government.

Chapter 8 turns to the famous judgment of Julius Caesar’s commentarii (nudi, recti, venusti, 262). Not only textual aesthetics but also visual analogies and the plastic arts underlie Cicero’s judgments. An analysis of statuary analogies and of the fuller contexts for Cicero’s statements suggests a deft ploy on his part. He portrays himself as Phidias crafting a statue of Minerva (the Parthenon Athena) and Caesar as Praxiteles crafting a statue of Venus (the Aphrodite of Knidos). The fundamentally different symbolic resonances of the goddesses simultaneously challenge Caesar’s military accomplishments and underscore Cicero’s civic achievements. Cicero thereby promotes his vision of the need to restore the Roman republic once the civil war has concluded.

Chapter 3 examines the Brutus as an intervention in contemporary politics. It begins by revisiting the preface but focuses on its discussion of the contemporary civic crisis and the immediate history of the civil war (1–25). In both the preface and the digression on Julius Caesar (254–57) Cicero presents an alternative civic vision as a response to the crisis. The chapter concludes by considering the portrayal of the younger generation of orators: Curio (filius), Caelius, Publius Crassus, and Marcellus. The last figure merits special attention because Cicero’s oratorical canon includes only two living figures: Marcellus and Caesar. Marcellus is accorded a prominent role as part of Cicero’s attempt to offer a coherent vision of the republic, one based on the restoration of the senatorial elite and the reinstatement of the traditional institutions of government.

Scholarship on De Officiis tends to place the emphasis on those aspects of the treatise that outline the building blocks of a functioning commonwealth. What tends to receive rather less attention is Cicero’s theorizing of what to do in situations of communal breakdown. But in De Officiis he is as interested in injustice as he is in justice, in the ability of humans to inflict massive damage on each other, in the insufficiency of legislation to ensure harmonious co-existence, in fraud and abuse of power. To address the problem of harm and injustice Cicero calls for vigilance and intervention on the part of all members of the community and endorses ‘protective violence’ up to and including the license, indeed the duty, to kill tyrannical figures that threaten the fabric of communal life. This chapter argues that Cicero’s ethical extremism animates the entire treatise. To render this claim plausible it explores the historical circumstances that gave rise to it and traces its ubiquitous presence within De Officiis, with a particular focus on the conceptual strategies used to justify murder.

At the beginning of the second book of Cicero’s De re publica (54–51 BC) we find a remarkable passage: Scipio Aemilianus, one of the dialogue’s interlocutors, cites Cato the Elder’s statement on the superiority of the res publica. Cato attributes the success of the Roman Republic to its gradual evolution thanks to the combined wisdom of many Romans through many generations. Cato rates the Roman constitution much more highly than the ones of Crete, Sparta and Athens because the laws and institutions of these Greek polities have been crafted by only a few, albeit ingenious, persons.

The early history of Rome has long been subjected to various forms of criticism. I am told that public-school boys in the United Kingdom used to read whole books of Livy’s history, which they (in turn) were told was the work of his imagination, and this view has become a communicative memory still propagated by many historians. This unstable construct began to shake under the weight of Ogilvie’s voluminous commentary (and its continuation by Oakley).1 A serious modern reconsideration began with Tim Cornell’s monograph The Beginnings of Rome in which he argued for the internal consistency of the traditions on early Rome.2 Cornell made the case that the main body of narrative is likely to go back a long way and shows a structure that could not simply be invented by historians of the late Republic and early Principate. Given that Roman historiography started only in the second half of the third century BC, there is a gap of several centuries between this and the regal period (traditionally dated 753–509 BC).3 Accordingly, if there was any earlier material, it must have been transmitted by means other than formal historiography, and oral tradition seems like the obvious candidate.

This is a tale of two Catos, the real-life man and the legend. The difference can be helpfully illuminated through two stories. Our first opens on 5 December 63 BC in Rome at the Temple of Concord where an important meeting of the Senate has been debating the fate of the Catilinarian conspirators.1 Should they face exile or death? Decimus Junius Silanus, the consul-elect for the following year, proposes execution and many others in the Senate agree. But Gaius Julius Caesar, the praetor-elect and new pontifex maximus, steps forth and makes a stirring speech against the death penalty, arguing instead for exile. The Senate is momentarily persuaded, but then something remarkable happens: Marcus Porcius Cato, only thirty-two years old and the tribune-elect, stands up and delivers a passionate, uncompromising speech against Caesar’s motion, articulating the need for decisive action to deter future treason. His speech sways his fellow senators back to a vote for execution of the conspirators. Everyone present takes note, for a new senatorial star is on the rise.

Ancient Greece, especially Athens, provides the best documented early example of mass democracy. With the democratic reforms of the fifth century, populism – the direct mobilization of the masses – becomes an effective path to power. This chapter looks at several examples from fifth- and fourth-century Athens, which demonstrate the use of demagoguery as an efficient, if much derided, alternative to patronage-based politics. Ancient Rome provides a somewhat different context. As a republic, Rome gave the masses a more limited and indirect role in politics. Typically, politics was a purely elite affair. Yet for those elites who found the normal insider path blocked to them, direct appeals to the masses could prove effective. However, given the limited formal role for the plebs in Roman politics, this direct mobilization could often lead to violence.

This chapter reexamines the question of Caesar’s putative Epicureanism. While there is no reason to believe that Caesar was a committed Epicurean, there exist tantalizing pieces of evidence that he may have adopted for himself a version of the tenet that “death is nothing to us.” These include his observation, in his speech about the convicted Catilinarians (as reported by Sallust), that death is not a punishment but the endpoint of all experience, and his late-in-life statement (versions of which are found in Cicero’s Pro Marcello and in Suetonius) that he had “lived enough.” The chapter concludes by considering the criteria scholars typically employ for gauging philosophical affiliation in antiquity, arguing for a broadening of definitions and for considering even a some-time Epicurean as Caesar as part of the history of Epicureanism.

The introduciton opens my exploration of Cicero’s notion of will. I argue that the will is an original Latin contribution to the Western mind. Cicero’s letters, speeches, and treatises show how his skill for language gave him a subtler take on events and a richer repertoire of persuasion. Practical uses of will are foremost: mapping alliances, winning elections, and navigating the “economy of goodwill.” From his earliest writings, however, voluntas emerges in normative claims about law and politics: that Rome’s mass of precedents could be rationalized through Greek ideas. Chief among these is Plato’s precept that reason must rule, and thus an alliance of philosophy and tradition can save the dying Republic. Transmuting political failure into philosophical innovation, Cicero lays the foundation for an idea – the will and its freedom – with tremendous consequences for Western thought. For Cicero, voluntas populi becomes the binding force of a nominally popular but functionally aristocratic constitution. If this state of affairs looks familiar in today’s “democratic” republics, we have Cicero in part to thank. Insistence on the singularity of popular will and mistrust of the common citizen lie at the heart of today’s political crisis and will require Ciceronian creativity to fix.

I propose that the young Roman orator Cicero, lacking a political base, cleverly positions himself as defender of the “people’s will”: It is fundamental, justifying all power wielded in its name; it is singular, despite the many conflicting “wills” within it; it is fallible, especially when misled by demagogues; and it is thus dependent on wise elites like Cicero. I then take up the treatises De republica and De legibus, which argue for popular sovereignty and against popular power. His theory differs from the mixed constitutionalism of Polybius and Aristotle. Cicero’s innovation is rational trusteeship: The people own all of the Republic, and the senate and magistrates represent all of the people. The trusteeship principle from Roman law (ius civilis), filtered through Platonic rationalism and Stoic natural law, creates an entirely new constitutional dynamic: A rational elite guides the people’s will, which elevates them in turn to high offices of state. He watches Caesar exploit his notion of voluntas populi to remake Rome around his own brutal will. Yet it is Cicero’s “will of the people” – reliant on a ruling class, limited to voting – with which, for better or worse, we find ourselves in modern democracies.