Cicero (In Our Time)

this is the BBC thanks for downloading this episode of in our time there's a reading list to go with it on our website and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter that's BBC in our time I hope you enjoyed the programmes hello in 63 BC Marcus Tullius Cicero was elected as one of the two consuls in Rome the highest political position a remarkable rise for someone born outside the establishment one of his goals was to stabilize the Republic which was under threat from armed conspirators aristocrats who claimed to be men of the people and generals who would be tyrants he suppressed a revolt to great acclaim executing the ringleaders without trial only to be exiled for this act once their supporters were in power Hecht I'll give him time to develop his ideas about the form the Republic should take if you were to survive how the powers would be balanced within it how to reconcile duty with self-interest and how to do with tyrants the true enemies as he saw it of the people win me to discuss Cicero's life and political philosophy are melissa lane in the class of 1943 professor of politics at Princeton University Katherine steel professor of classics at the University of Glasgow and Valentina Erina reader in Roman history and University College London monitor lain what was Cicero his background Cicero came from a town outside Rome that had only recently been given the privileges of full citizenship so he was a nois homo he was a new man his family hadn't had historically political power or political office in Rome so he really had to make his way on his own merits but what did his family have them well they were they were wealthy enough can you give us a bit more than that yes they were they were wealthy enough to be able to give him a good education to support his desire to study First Philosophy in Athens and then to move to Rome but they didn't have the history the legacy they didn't have the patrician standing and that would have made his path and politics easier they didn't have the network in Rome is what mattered you know not to that extent interesting I went to Greece isn't there going back to Greece to learn it's fascinating they it it is it was a it was a thing that many or some anyway of ambitious and intellectually ambitious young Roman wanted to do and Cicero traveled throughout Greece he studied in Athens but went elsewhere to meet leading philosophers and roads and in other places and he later sent his son to do the same in Athens would he have been in some sort of contact I know they're all dead I'm not talking anything spooky in some sort of contact with the great Greeks were very often talking about in this program yes so he he studies all the schools of Hellenistic philosophy that were alive at the time and with some of their great figures so the Stoics the Epicureans he his own allegiance was more to the sceptics so he took the view that you could you could support whatever argument seemed most plausible but of course he became a great admirer of Plato and his political works are very much written in dialogue with Plato so he got cracking learned a lot there and then he as I said in the introduction by the age of 42 which was young at the time find it born the youngest-ever he became a consul one of the two consuls in Rome how did how did he get that so quickly so he had to climb the ladder as it were the run the course of offices of honors which was a series of elections they weren't elections quite as we know them they're first-past-the-post but by groups of classes organized by wealth so there's a different structure to Roman elections but what really made his name actually was a legal prosecution that he brought in the year 70 against a former governor of Sicily who was being accused of extortion bribery murder corruption on a vast scale and Cicero prosecuted this man he went to Sicily where he had previously served in a lower office collected amazing trunks and depositions of evidence came back and won the case against Rome's greatest advocate at the time and that was really the moment that he stepped out from the ranks of strivers and and became someone to be reckoned with winnings rather a mild word he was so strong that the the Chuck Barris fled that's right and Cicero in pain of what he done still published all that he was going to say has the man stayed though that's right but that set him up so you've set off as a lawyer a very successful lawyer why was that city so intrigued and and pleased by someone who came through the law well the law was the place where you could speak in public so he the prosecution's the courts were held in public so the citizens could attend and it was a chance to really make your oratorical powers felt you know it was really a gladiatorial duel of a kind and so he was able through that both to impress some of the leading men in the Senate but also to win favor among the people still we come on the Catalan conspiracy soon after that what was the cut line controversy and how did it come to be a conspiracy well one of the difficulties in getting to grips with the Catalan Aryan conspiracy is that much of our initial evidence for it comes from Cicero who of course had suppressed it and therefore has a very particular story to tell about the wickedness of Cataline and the extent to which this is a threat to the Republic can you give us a bit about Catalan first Catalan was a patrician politician like Cicero he was aspiring to highest office but he failed to get there and one of the origins of the conspiracy seems to have been his failure to be elected as consul and looking therefore to widen his support base with a view to a second attempt on the Consul trip and when that failed in the summer of 63 that seems to be the point at which he explored other routes to power logically all the sermon well that's that's one of things that Caesarea said he was planning to do certainly there's there's more substantial evidence of a military uprising in etruria and to use military force in order to acquire power in Rome and that was what Cicero was was trying to warm the Senate was the danger and eventually convinced them was the danger and then a process was set in motion which ended both in military action but also the deaths of some of cat alliance co-conspirators the way in which he got to know shows that he was a man who had enormous contacts and networks of power he kept being tipped off division he did yes he kept talking about the the information that had been given to him about the conspiracy and the trigger for the famous debate in which the decision to execute Catalans co-conspirators is taken was being tipped off that they were in negotiation with a Gallic tribe and then Cicero was able to catch them red-handed with letters which indicated the the scope of those negotiations juice him being very proactive or some knew that people wanted to curry favor with and beyond the cider which was it well I think it's a bit of both similarly yes I mean he's developing his networks but because he's consul he has he has things to offer people who bring him information yes but you got key information key times with a day or two to go he had it and he talked him he talked him out as he were inside the Senate yes yes because then he was able to set up this dramatic revealing of the evidence in which the conspirators were brought in with the letter still unsealed so he took the gamble that they would contain what he thought thought those letters would contain and then they're opened in the Senate and they do and he can take things forward on that basis so suppress this conspiracy make some of the conspirators had another go and he rounded them up he he he and he had them executed but he did not give them a trial but nevertheless when he executed them and cleared cleared the decks of the conspirators he was lauded in Rome wasn't he at the time yes and well again we're dependent on Cicero for the accounts but the being escorted back home by the torchlight procession being acclaimed in the Senators patter Patra I father of his fatherland and of course one of the reasons that Cicero was so pleased about all of this was that his career had been entirely civilian and Rome was a society in which some of the highest rewards tended to be restricted to those who had been militarily victorious so as a civilian consul who nonetheless saved the race pública that was tremendously exciting as a basis for further reputation but of course it does all go horribly wrong for him yes we can come to that in a moment but you prepared this for it going horribly wrong but at that time it was a fair height of his powers wasn't there he it was extraordinary rise and we mustn't gloss over this because he gets to be more and more important but being that important and that influential and that effective not young in those terms was terrific well yes melissa has already pointed to the the way that cicero built his career through effective oratory in order to put together a coalition of supporters there's the possibly spurious comentario lamperti onus the commentary little book about electioneering which may be written by his brother it may not be but it seems to capture the advice to give Cicero that in order to be elected as consul which was this huge challenge for somebody without the political and historical background at Rome he needed to appeal to his broader possible and audience and we can see in Cicero's oratory up until the consulship the great care not to offend anybody so and indeed early in 63 he claims to be a popularised consul a consul who's speaking for the populace Monti an era now can we tell can we develop that he's he's maneuvering is very good he's political with a small pea and a big bee seems to be very good and but did he at that early stage early in his career as we know and body ideals which appealed to people because in his later essays and that he certainly did well yet that's a sort of as a man of idea as a man of vision yes certify by 63 he was a man of vision and but mainly his vision at that stage was the one that of the that what he calls the Concordia Auden him so the concrete the harmony amongst the members of the elite so what he claims in in that his great achievement in having suppress that Catalan I the cation conspiracy was very much to have United behind him the elite and for him that was perhaps the most important achievement in terms of the world of ideas there was I mean if you think about Concordia is whom Corso is a cause the heart the moves in the same direction as a few know the members of the elite feel in the same way they move in the same direction for the well-being of the community of the for the good but of course it doesn't last long as Katherine has her ID he did indeed capture them and they were a smaller legion he was not part of them and the one thing he lacked was always not being part of the in a big sense the political family in Rome and he got them on his side that yeah he wasn't he wasn't in the sense that he he was an equestrian so he that meant in essence I'd late Republic that he his family heads was of substantial wealth and the the equities by the late Republic indeed play a key political role as well alongside the the Senators so throughout his life he does battle consistently the the being the new mentor be and the outsider the one who doesn't have a consular ancestor in his family in a hinnies background but he is a consul he has become a console himself at that stage and he is one of the equities and therefore for he thinks and he does make sure that we don't forget it that he now has made it and not only is made it is made a big time as as Katharine said it also as Catherine alluded to we must places now after a short time this very victory term turned against him because he had not he sent these people sentenced these Roman citizens to death without judging them and this was considered in itself to be a terrible thing to do and the the elite a lot of really turned against sympathetic yes yes I did in putting the Catalan conspirators to trial to death without trial war he did he violated one of the essential civic rights of Roman citizens and there was the right to provoke a tear so the right to trial by doing so what he did was violating the one of the liberties of the Roman people and that could not be considered acceptable within a Republican framework therefore by the time he and and the mood the particular mood mood because of that turned against him quite straight away at the end of his consulship already he was not allowed to do he needs a final speech when he finishes when he lay down the office he was not allowed to carry out the full speech where he could therefore you know both of these activities and it didn't take long for his archenemy colleges to pass a law according to which those who had killed Roman citizens without trial should go on Exile he went directly yes he actually prevented it in a way as soon as he the first law was was passed and he went on the voluntary voluntary exile as soon as he left room a second law was passed and this time around the law had his name on it so to a certain extent there are some degree of there is a certain degree of questions about the legality of this because that was a pretty like him so an ad Norman M law by regardless he was already in exile and and he clearly this summer Odyssey had said he writes in a sense that claudia was solely after him for that and the result was that because he was therefore presented as the tyrant because he had violated roman one of room and liberties and therefore he had his house was razed to the ground his properties was confiscated and what was perhaps most astonishing Claudius built on the grounds of his house and a foundation a temple to the goddess Liberty may or may not have been a temple man being a decrepit minister who was Claudius it was such an enemy of Cicero the irony was that he had been a younger man whom Cicero had befriended in earlier years and then at a certain point they there was a political parting of the ways and Claudius was someone who violated I flirted with violating and ultimately transgressive Lee violated Roman civic norms so the the nadir of his career was being found out to have dressed up in women's clothing and insinuated himself into the inner sanctum where religious rites were being practiced that only women were supposed to witness but at this moment he's able to he's quite popular in the city he has a lot of following among the the pipiens and he's able to wield that power against Cicero what did Cicero do in exile and how did he organized his return what did you do first of all and he moaned quite a lot he wrote letters to lots of people I'm trying to figure out what he might do and whether he might be able to go so he went off to Asia Minor and kind of actually had quite a lot of difficulty at the beginning finding anyone who was even willing to receive him because it was thought to be you know a difficult thing to do ultimately he is able to come back and even some years later holds another governorship of a province so he doesn't you know he's able to come back for a certain period into into the fold has he begun writing his essays and reflection was at this stage not quite I'm not quite yet or not it's not the major period of his literary production that comes a few years later once he's returned to Rome but then found himself in more political difficulties and ends up spending quite a lot of time outside the city itself on one of his estates and that's the first major period of his writing Katherine Steele sake he comes back and this turbulence in can you just describe the state of Rome the state of the Roman Republic well turbulence indeed a number of factors are coming together Claudius has been slightly eclipsed he's no longer holding the office of Tribune of the plebs which gave him the legal authority to challenge Cicero back in 58 but the popular politics that he's espousing he still has support he's looking to rise up the curses himself hold the preacher ship eventually hold the consulship there that never happens at the same time there is the military power of translating into political power of pomp and Caesar and effectively Pompey and Caesar had joined forces in 59 in order to support their mutual interests and that relationship had got a bit rocky and that the relationship is getting a bit rocky at precisely the time that Cicero returns in 57 so initially he thinks AHA I can resume my position of authority guiding the Rays Publica but in the spring of 56 after a period about eight months in which sister is very active and is very much trying to be an independent politician getting his house back quite apart from anything else Caesar and Pompey patch it up and that's the point at which they say to Cicero look back off you do what we tell you you kind of you're not going to do anything and that's the point at which he very reluctantly acknowledges that perhaps his service to the race Publica has to take a different form and he starts writing the great political treatises of the mid 50s can we begin on those great treaties Valentino there are several of them and we won't have time to do all of my any means what do you see basically trying to do in his writing but the Republic about rhetoric about public office and so on well of course it's so today mmm specifically so to do different things in the context however overall he certainly tried to find a kind of a recipe for to restore a republic that might even never have existed in the such a wonderful say that has this mix and balanced Constitution that he thinks at some point a room embodied in the fifth century BC but but you know that as far as we know as historians the only record we have it comes from very late sources so you know it was certainly part of the room and intellectual tradition more than perhaps the reality of things so what was it what was this mixture he was going back here and said this had happened once and we can make it happen again what was it so was a balanced forum in forum of Constitution mixed of three main elements there was a monarchy cannot a mechanical element represented by the console and in aristocratic element there was represented by the Senate and a democratic element that was represented by the popular assemblies to be precise actually Cicero rather than talking about institutions to which he refers he also talks about political ideals so he's actually a mixed and balanced Constitution between October Tasso authority of the Senate the protesters the power of the magistrates and the liberty of the people and when these three elements these three different components find in the moenay's way of cooperating with each other then the republic could function properly did you think he was putting forward a viable prescription something that was practical that they would listen to and try to put into practice now he is when he's thinking and writing about the Republic in the specific case and as well as the legatus we are in the in deflate 50s so 54 the Republican was finished in 51 and he's very much the world that Katherine has described so Rome was really a mess was completely chaotic in 52 even we have Pompey there was elected consul see Nicole Eggert so so consul so you know a republic that has been the base that on this idea of the power sharing elements was no longer there the generals themselves becoming very powerful the Empire's expanded a great deal they're coming back with great loot and great known soldiers who were loyal to them rather to the Republic and that is tipped the balance quite strongly yeah you certainly have a big the the arm itself played a huge role but we should not underestimate also there's the social and the economic changes that happened throughout the Republic sorry coming well I think one of the things that's always striking about the relationship between general and Army at least with Caesar is all is that it that Caesar Lee seems to have articulated the claim to follow him in terms of the Army's own Liberty yeah so we have generals who are certainly interested in the personal power they can gain by their relationship with the army but that relationship always seems to be articulated in terms of the raised pública rather than the naked ambition it always needs to be dressed up in language which which fits with the interests of the army but you told him only being dressed up or real I think in the case of Caesar it's probably dress up but nonetheless he needed to articulate those claims in the the language of popular Liberty how far how far he genuinely thought that that was an element that had been underplayed I think is a really interesting question because he certainly when he comes back to Rome in 49 he's doing it on the basis that an elite in Rome has hijacked the debate and they're not listening to what the community as a whole wants which is to give all that to Caesar so can we go into this constitutional conflict between the ideal and the real Melissa can you just develop that a bit more yeah so one of the major tensions in the decades before Cicero's playing a key role and then during that time is between the Senate and the consuls on the one hand and then the tribunes of the other so it was mentioned that Claudius was a Tribune the tribunes were elected directly by the people and they had the power to defend the people to veto any decision of the consul to propose laws which would speak on behalf of the people and that tension between popular power especially as as instantiated in that forms of the Gras key for example in the previous century had used their power as Tribune's to try to effect a kind of land redistribution and this was remembered as by Cicero and his allies as one of the great moments of peril of the Republic earlier which had only been solved and in one case by the murder of one of its proponents and so and this is actually something to which Cicero returns again and again in his political writings that moment is there a sense all around not only Cicero the Republic is shaky and is even shaking and it has to be not only defended in shorter but some way found to perpetuate it yeah and I think what's so interesting to me about Cicero in this moment is that he still really believes in the norms that have governed the Republic the traditions and the mores that are associated with the offices and then one after the other they're falling so they're being violated so one example is Caesar actually at a relatively young age and with a lot of bad reputation standing to be the Pontifex Maximus the chief priest of the Republic which would normally have been a sort of ancient Auguste man of unimpeachable reputation and Caesar thinks well I can stand for that why not you know and that's an example of it which is largely unsuitable well because he was known to be a womanizer and adulterer probably too he was very um he was a brilliant man and in many ways very interesting figure but was was yeah I'm not really a Greece no perhaps let's cut to the chase there okay what was let's go back to the people now and Catherine what what was his view of the people really Cicero's view in a sense he was neared the people in the elite were you could say perhaps was fighting I think I think his background economically and socially he's aligned with the elite it's it's it's the broader elite rather than that bit of it that stood previously for critical office so it's is view of the people I mean I think there's a there's a problem for him because on the one hand within the mixed Constitution to which he is entirely wedded as a form the people have an essential role in on the Republic he articulates this as raise public arrays properly the raised public have belongs to the people and this this fundamental authorizing capacity of the people in electing offices and in passing legislation is fundamental to the Republic so on the one hand he accepts and embraces that role and acknowledges that in a in a state that is governed by justice there needs to be an element of equality which is represented by the role that the people play however his own lived experience of Roman politics showed him very clearly that the people could do all sorts of things that he didn't like so such as well send him into exile and a whole range of other things obviously anything less but no no that's a good but unlike another one it is not just to do it him you mean in terms of what a lot of things that he didn't like send him in exile plan that's just about him but other things who didn't like his regards to the way they appeared in the state well I think it's the it's the popular trend within politics which particularly is concerned often with economic measures expressed in legislation so land redistribution yes and he didn't yeah because it's a challenge to property rights and because it's a spending of the state's resources on things which are perhaps it shouldn't so there are there are those tensions and he he tries to resolve them in his oratory he resolves it by saying that the people who voted on the real people so they're an urban mob they're a rabble they've been misled but in the in the political treatises there's the theoretical repeal in Republic but there's also the pragmatic sense of how do you give the people enough power that they will be satisfied so in on the laws there's a rather old and disturbing passage where he talks about voting systems and the Tribune of the plebs being enough to create the speck yeas limit artists the appearance of freedom so he struggles with this this tension between the ideal and what he actually saw in practice but what we've gone Valentina coming close to maybe this is just hindsight we've got the shadow of tyranny the the the foreboding at the end of the great ideal of the Republic however however often it was observed in their breach it doesn't matter it had gone and going in another direction in the terrible terrible path of doing it which the public was deeply opposed to what did Cicero sense this what was he doing about it given the he might have sensed it he certainly threw out from from the the signal from the time he comes back from exile onwards he keeps lamenting that the Republic is not there is no longer there we might have you know we keep the name of a republic but the to the public is not there is is like a painting whose colors are now fading away however somehow he has a gift to side always with the wrong and I just if I may just be clear this is because people like Caesar and Pompey are behaving in a way he sees is tyrannical and therefore dangerous oh yes of course so he he supports Pompey against Caesar because he saw in Caesar the tyrant and you know he rejoiced at the murder the assassination of Caesar you actually laments that he has not been invited to take yes and that they actually it seems you know that I wasn't just also say that he was left out because it was renowned to be too nervous and you know a good on with AJ so it was the case to have him around at that stage so but he was extremely pleased that the tyrant was killed and he justifies it by saying that it's the tyrant or so in the area my citizen who behaves act ironically renounce himself - he's a citizenship what he does he severe czar any links with human fellowships and therefore is it's like a limp of a body that no longer has blood circulating in it so what we do we amputate it and therefore this is what we have to do with a tyrant he has to be eliminated he justifies times by saying once he stepped out of the community is no longer in the community doesn't be treated as one of the community except Melissa miss alone and he explores the difference between honor and personal advantage we put a try in some way to intervene that the writings is doing which are influential for still are yes what does he argue that so this is in his last great work the day of fica's which he's writing in the very last year of his life I'm at the just about at the moment when he's about to stand up against Mark Antony which will ultimately lead to his death and if this is his final attempt to reconcile the ideals of the Republic and the ideas that honor which includes the moral virtues the social virtues such as justice liberality magnanimity decorum when properly understood does not come into conflict with one's personal advantage so it's the old great Greek platonic question what should I act for my own advantage even if it involves me and doing injustice and Cicero structures the day of figis with book one is about honor but two is about advantage in book three is about the seeming conflicts only to show us that none of the seeming conflicts are real and two of the best examples one is tyrannicide which he reconciles by saying it's not murder because you're saving the community from the scam grimness limb but the other great example there's some wonderful much more practical example so he has an example of if you're selling a house is it honorable to conceal the faults in the house when you want to have a buyer and he ultimately argues if you're deliberately silent so as to conceal the faults you are yourself violating these duties of human fellowship and so you would be behaving dishonorably but it would also not be to your advantage because you would be violating human fellowship so therefore he's always able to show that the honorable and the advantageous coincide Catherine um before we moved to more action he he wrote a lot about the orator one of his great pleasures is about being an orator narration and so on what were his priorities then he made his name as you said earlier in the program at this great defensive attack on bearers the Sicilian who would cheated his country so much what would his priorities he he sis reported for oratory and why was it so important for him or she theoretically mattered for him within the context of the race pública because it's what enables the right decisions to be made he accepts that rational argument on its own isn't going to be enough in situations where large numbers of people are reaching a decision so you need to have rational argument and then you need to persuade people to do it so it's this practical response and we can see that right back in his amorous is a political act I mean sorry operation is apparent oratory is a political absolutely and in his in his very first published work which is otherwise a not hugely interesting rhetorical handbook I mean you may kick me out on that but but it does have nonetheless have a really interesting introduction in which the young Cicero says oratory is fundamental to in society that's what creates human society we can't come together and live together and enjoy all the benefits until we have somebody who can speak and persuade us to do that otherwise we're all in a state of bestial nature and that thread I think goes through he articulates it he it becomes much more newest nuanced and exciting as a model of the good life and the skills that the orator needs to have but that's the basic theoretical point oratory helps communities function in fact it's essential for communities to function because again he's going back to Greece with the most Musa me very much so and his oratorical theory as he develops it is very much looking back to more philosophically informed oratory as opposed to the rather mechanical rhetorical treatises and handbooks that seemed to be quite dominant in rhetoric education at Rome at this time but there's also the personal side to this Cicero was not a soldier and therefore he was he didn't have access to all the the power and the glory and the reputation enhancing excitement of military victory so he sets up oratory as the civilian alternative by which you can serve and indeed save the state Thank You Valentina but risks what risk was sister are facing in 43 BC so yet again he chose the wrong side so what happened in 44 43 he thought that what they are the new enemy that should be really eliminated was Marc Anthony because he saw they directly which actually was also there between the Caesar a direct link between Caesar and Mark Antony so he thought that Marc Anthony wanted to become the next tyrant and he found in Octavian who then was going to become Augustus Caesars adopted son is 19 at the time yes he found in him is a potential antidote and he thought therefore that he could support by supporting Octavian and pushing the Senate to act against Anthony he might have eliminated created some action to eliminate the new threat did you think we you're gonna take me did you think that great speech of Mark Antony in a sense saying that Caesar was not a tyrant the those who have did for him were tyrants and what Caesar did was honorable and fine and basically he was going to go and do that do you think that he thought that I very much as I said in in a sense throughout this Caesars life you see him as some stage supporting a line of argument which you know in ten years later he might reject completely so you know in the 60s in favor of extraordinary powers is given to you Pompey in 44:43 that is absolutely the the end of the Republic and therefore from this point of view is is he's a good politician in the sense of you know he works on the basis of expediency so in in terms of even in your fork Tavian in the letters he's clearly he has doubts about Octavian he sees things is too young he's naive yes where did you go try to move him he was the least of the two evils and by then he got it wrong and therefore when in 43 the so-called second triumvirate is created by the laxity so what happens is that therefore the first act that Marc Anthony Octavian and Lepidus carry out prescribing Cicero but before lysis had let out a yell of invective against against Mark Antony yes not only back the wrong horse but attacked enemy very much so and even the attack him on ground invective is a word you did you attack him on grounds which were which were consonant his philosophy I yes yes and no yet again so it's invective was an essential part of of rhetoric and a political life and you know so invective and was mainly personal so invective was was also about the way you look to your sexual taste habits yeah desire for food and he was so and Anthony as all the trace of excessiveness of a tyrant so it's all part of the same picture is that slightly out of carriages it's just very going off the scale here medicine well it's interesting I think he realizes that it's his last great act of political life he actually says in one of the philippics I have laid the basis for a new constitution so I think he sees it as the last throw of the dice to try to rid the republic of this new tyrant and thereby refound the Roman Constitution although he knows that it's very unlikely to succeed was it nudee did he know the danger was in or was it did he think that he was going to get away with it me and Octavian we're gonna live happily ever after and start the Republic again well I think until Octavian makes the common cause with Antony and Lepidus he may have that fantasy but at the moment that that happens he knows he's done for one of the interesting things of course is that many of his allies at that point had committed suicide with Cato as a as a stoic had committed suicide when the battle against Caesar was a crucial battle had been lost and it's interesting that Cicero never really seems to have considered that path um he is not a stoic he I think ultimately does recognize that death is a kind of evil although he debates that question with himself and some of his other writings so he's willing to suffer death bravely but he doesn't take that act of suicide but as soon as that comes out Mark Antony's after him and Cicero escapes to one of his houses and they find him and they slaughter him Wow how efficient um how is that done the slaughtering knives no but what what was left of it well the stories are that his his head and his hands were cut off and they were taken to Rome and Fulvia who was Antony's wife but had been previously married to Claudius and pinned them up on the speaker's platform and that the hand mattered because it was the hand that had written the philippic the philippic being the entire tried against and she stuck a happy a hairpin through his tongue I think I think we can move on now to very briefly I'm trying to spring his name what do you think he's legacy was I mean I was reading him at school in the 20th century I'm sure people in the 20 staggering through 21st century so he's gone for a long time yes for sure well perhaps there as a sage there I would say three main areas his language as you said people are still reading Caesar and learning laughing through his text we read Cicero as an historical source if you want to know about the history of the late Republic but we also read the Cicero as a political thinker he has wholly influenced a number of thinker political thinkers throughout the centuries but even nowadays are with aaron a sense of republicanism and their republicanism the idea of Cicero and how a republic should be governed it's very much up front you know we're thinking very Melissa he also translated and Greek philosophy into Latin and left us with a enriched vocabulary for what it is to think philosophically he's a wonderful writer and almost whatever you're interested in about how to be a civilized human in society you can find something interesting him in his essays cover a wide range of only no old age friendship a whole range of more technical philosophical treatises but we haven't even started talking about the letters maybe another time thank you very much thank you much Catherine Catherine Steele miss Elaine Valentina Aaron and next week we'll be discussing the world of kevlar pods the octopus squid cuttlefish and Nautilus and the inner time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests right now you're back on again do you think we got to the heart of what we set out to do I think we did I think we did but when I was thinking about this program and drawing it it seems to me that that it's interesting that when we talk about Cicero's political philosophy one thing we never even touched on is slavery and it does seem to me extraordinary that we can talk about the about political philosophy within a society that's based on slavery and is that because scizor has just never just never talks about it that's my sense it's just not a problem for him well however much he's interested in libertas know what is that because it's not that the Romans have a total blind spot on this look at Seneca you're right it doesn't mention that there is he does however it does consider the Liberty so the freedmen as a political entity because one thing I think we have missed out is actually the process here so what happens just before the de república so they do the great political theory and when he writes this speech in defense of sassages halfway through the speech almost forgets the case of the the legal case and he embarks in a redefinition of the political entities the political players of Rome and in doing so when he claims the optimatus include include not only you know or the members of the elites the senators the equities but also people from the municipal towns of course like him but even the Liberty so what he's talking about even even excess lives so we contrary to to Greece we are talking about a society that allows a slave to become a citizen and actually not only then to be a entitled to vote but even according to this redefinition to be considered an optimal testserver around a political active player around whose consensus it becomes essential from his point of view to rebuilding as public around the Senate yes I think that's right and I think one of the things that we could have looked at in more detail is this question of language to read ascribe the different entities within the state so this this massive broadening of what elite means that he does in process here because he is so keen to create a consensus of everybody who isn't Clodius and his followers and kind of restrict closures and his followers into a into a small gap we didn't talk about hostess the way that that and it's Cicero isn't the first person to do this the way that the Roman elite uses the word hostess and it's external enemy to somehow solve internal crisis by expelling the offending members from the state and thus taking the sidestepping the whole legal problem of how do you how do you exercise how do you deal with execute whatever your own citizens if you call them hostage you kind of solve the problem and and I think there's a there's a link there between the way that you can that Cicero can then they say that the tyrant is not part of the state I think the other point about slavery to go back to that is that in the day lega bus the idea of the multiple layers of law so we have natural law but then we have the the county and the law of all the nations and then we have the youth keep the the civil law of a nation like Rome and so I think he's very willing to accept that the customs on the whole the legal customs and traditions and institutions of Rome have a kind of validity and standing and so he's not going to question something like slavery which is part of those part of those traditions what do you think he could have done to save himself at the end that act he did did he know I mean must have died hard enough so well I think in a sense you know Stalin Tina said already for many years he had thought that the republic that he had lived in was dead all the great figures that of his kind of youth and early career most of them were dead by the stage okay who else was dead well by this time Caesar is dead you know and Brutus was a little bit later after after Cicero but you know the sort of great figures of the age have all have mostly fallen Pompey Crassus obviously and so um and so in a sense I think you know in a sense he has nothing else to play for and he wants to go down fighting and he makes that choice and I think it's Valentina said one of the really striking things is he was a in some ways a good judge of principles but a terrible judge of character and I think because he couldn't he couldn't understand people whose ambition was not just to be first among equals as his was but to really break with equality altogether so men like Caesar and Antony and Octavian that driving ambition that led them to destroy the forms of the Republic that in some way maintained equality he could just never understand that he thought he could control them he thought it wasn't it wasn't real and and then he was wrong every time there's a sense to that I mean if we want to if we want to try and pet if we want to personalize this in terms of what kind of person Cicero was there is that sense that he was always being called back to a sense of a personal ideal I'm that letter at the end of 60 when he's been ask to join Caesar and Pompey in this you know this informal compact that they're gonna run Rome with he's asked to join and he refuses and he quotes Homer at that point and it's a it's a personal line he can't step over it's not consonant with his own self conception and so he he's he's not able to join Caesar in 49 although at some level I think he knows that Prudential II that might be the thing to do because of what Caesar stands for in breaking the Republic rather than trying to operate within it in some way though as Pompey did though I mean the other thing about it is he had no illusions about Pompey either I'm he's quite clearly happy he won there would have been Lauren really sort well I know producers trying banging on the door trying to get in to break up this little Republic but but basically in one way you could say that these Millett the might of these military generals is that what the biggest distorting factor I think so and the failure to find a way of controlling it I mean it had always been a destabilizing factor but the Senators always somehow managed to keep it in check well here's the producer with news for in our time with Melvyn Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson hi I'm Rianna Dillon and I just wanted to let you know about another podcast that I think you might like it's called seriously and twice a week we bring you incredible documentaries from BBC Radio 4 we like to say they're seriously interesting stories told a little sideways from politics to fashion arts to current affairs I'm sure there will be something that takes your fancy so join me there just search for seriously in your 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Channel: BBC Podcasts

Views: 9,382

Rating: 4.9223299 out of 5

Keywords: cicero, history, ancient, timewatch, skyrim secret quests, documentaries, trial, rome, philosophy (field of study), political science (field of study), night mother lore, night mother, oblivion arena, grand champion, oblivion dark brotherhood, cicero secrets, skyrim dark brotherhood, dark brotherhood, dawnstar sanctuary, jesters clothes, cicero lore, elder scrolls lore, skyrim lore, fudgemuppet, elder scrolls, skyrim, skyrim best followers, skyrim quest mods, skyrim follower mods

Id: 7sPTuqfGvVE

Length: 49min 16sec (2956 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 10 2018