thanks, Cicero

Today in 43 BCE, Marcus Tullius Cicero's luck ran out, and he was caught fleeing down the Italian coast by Octavian's soldiers, and killed.

Cicero is one of my favourite historical figures. I was trying to decide what I should post in memory of him, and I couldn't choose. There's the hilarious speech for the defence of a guy called Caelius, which totally ignored the actual charge against him and instead committed wholesale character assassination of the sister of the guy bringing the charge, who was alleged to be behind it because she was his jilted mistress, and with whom Cicero had a long-standing feud; the story is that it was a feast day, and none of the jurors wanted to be there, but had been dragged in by the insistence of the prosecutor, so Cicero repeated totally salacious gossip about the sister's beach villa toyboy lifestyle and her alleged sexual relationship with her brother until they could all go home.

There's also the brilliantly cranky letter to a friend of Cicero's who was running for office, who wrote to Cicero while he was a provincial governor out in the godforsaken deserts of Bithynia, asking if he could send him some panthers for some games he was putting on. Cicero, basically, tells him he's got better fucking things to do than find him panthers. Then there's the letter where Cicero writes about how bizarre Latin swear-words are, and how annoying is that everyone giggles when you say 'witnesses' (testes) or 'when we...' ('cum nos', which sounds like 'cunnos', which means, uh, guess), on and on through several paragraphs. It is because of Cicero that we know what a number of swear words mean, and that they are swear words. Thank you, Cicero. Or there are the heartbreaking letters he writes after the death of his daughter, and his obsession, that lasts for several months, with building a huge memorial for her, and getting the right kind of marble; there are the perfectly constructed, scathingly acerbic speeches against Mark Antony while he was off having a civil war, and the fantastically understated letter about having dinner with Julius Caesar when he used Cicero's villa as an overnight stop while marching into Rome with his army.

I love Cicero because he was neurotic, ambitious, brilliant, witty and acutely sensitive; he was too clever, maybe, in the end, to win. He could see both sides of the argument too well, and wanted to keep friends too much. He was very proud, prone to depression when he wasn't working 18 hours a day, he hated getting sick. He loved writing, but he also loved people. He was cranky and impatient and arrogant, sometimes, but he wasn't cruel. He loved his family and his friends and his home, even when they betrayed each other.

I also love him because he was there, right there in the middle of it all as one of the most important political and geographical structures in the world was reforged into an entity that would shape Europe into what it is today, and we know about it in literally day-to-day detail because of his letters.

Spare a moment today to think of Cicero, on the Italian coast, on his cart in the rain. He'd been the most powerful man in the Roman Republic, at one point - arguably one of the most powerful men in the world. He survived one power changeover by the skin of his teeth, but he couldn't get through two. He was in his sixties, divorced, his daughter was dead, and he probably knew he'd left it too late to run. RIP, Cicero.