GENERAL
By classical standards the sources for the period of Cicero’s life are voluminous, although many histories written within a generation or so of his time are lost. Much has been translated and, for the reader who would like to know more at firsthand about Cicero and the fall of the Roman Republic, some accessible literature is cited below. Titles of classical works are given in translation; see under Abbreviations for original Latin titles.
The most important documentary sources are Cicero’s own writings (all of which are available in Latin alongside translations in the Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press). Many of his speeches, which he revised and issued himself, survive, as do his books on philosophy and oratory. So do about 900 letters; some were designed for publication or for judicious circulation by the recipient, but others, a large proportion of the correspondence with Atticus, were not. They are organized into a number of different collections: the so-called Letters to His Friends and Letters to Brutus and Letters to Quintus are mainly, but not entirely, communications to politicians and public figures; they include letters from Julius Caesar and Pompey and other politicians of the day. They were probably published before the Letters to Atticus, which appeared some time in the first century AD. The complete correspondence was edited and translated in the 1960s by D. R. Shackleton Bailey; he reordered the letters in one continuous sequence, which is cited first in the references below (followed by the traditional numbering).
Cicero’s speeches need to be treated with caution, for he is always arguing a case. On the one major occasion where an alternative version exists to the story he is telling, his defense of Milo, we find that he is almost certainly promoting a tissue of untruths. The letters are an invaluable resource, a reliable guide to day-to-day events even if we do not always agree with their author’s political analyses.
Contemporary or near-contemporary histories include the following: Sallust’s two surviving monographs, The Conspiracy of Catilina and The Jugurthine War, give useful if highly colored and sometimes chronologically haphazard accounts. Caesar’s lapidary, accurate but not always truthful Conquest of Gaul and The Civil War are essential reading. A short life of Atticus was published by a friend of his, Cornelius Nepos. Two sections from a Life of Augustus by Nicolaus of Damascus about his subject’s youth (edited and translated by Jane Bellemore, Bristol Classical Press, 1984) give interesting details about Caesar’s assassination. An Augustan Senator, Quintus Asconius Pedianus, wrote intelligent and well-informed commentaries on some of Cicero’s speeches, in one of which he gives a detailed account of Clodius’s death (Commentaries on Five Speeches by Cicero, ed. and trans. Simon Squires, Bristol University Press and Bochazy-Carducci Publishers, 1990).
Diodorus Siculus, a Sicilian writing in Greek, was a near-contemporary of Cicero. He wrote a history of the Mediterranean world, Library of History, in forty volumes from mythological times up to his own day. He is useful on his native island of Sicily. Unfortunately most of the book survives only as excerpts or paraphrases from Byzantine and medieval times. He was an uncritical compiler and only as good as his sources.
Plutarch, a Greek biographer and essayist of the second half of the first century AD, is one antiquity’s most charming authors. His Parallel Lives include biographies of Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Cato, Crassus, Brutus, Caesar, Mark Antony and Cicero. They are full of fascinating personal detail, but he was interested in character rather than history and was indiscriminate in the use of his sources.
Suetonius was a slightly later contemporary of Plutarch and, as the Emperor Hadrian’s secretary, had access to the imperial archives; this makes his short biographies of Julius Caesar and Augustus, in The Twelve Caesars, of particular interest, although, like Plutarch, he is no historian and concentrates his attention on his subjects’ private lives. Velleius Paterculus lived during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius and wrote a patchy History of Rome from earliest times to 30 AD.
Lines from Catullus, whose poetry movingly expresses the way of life of the younger set who simultaneously attracted and repelled Cicero, are quoted in Peter Whigham’s translation (Penguin Classics, 1966). Further verse quotations have been made from John Davie’s translation of Euripides’ Medea (Penguin Classics, 1996) and Robert Fagles’ version of the Iliad (Viking, 1990).
Although the Greek historian Polybius wrote in the second century BC, his history of Rome’s rise to dominance of the Mediterranean world gives a well-grounded account of the workings of the Roman constitution.
General histories of the period date from later in the Empire. The best of them is by Appian, who flourished in Rome in the middle of the second century AD. He wrote a history of Rome from the arrival in Italy of Aeneas to the battle of Actium in 31 BC. Five books on the civil wars survive, of which the first two give a continuous account of events from the Tribuneship of Tiberius Gracchus to the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination. For the first part of this narrative he depended on a very good source and, although his chronology is sometimes confused and his belief in the role of fate in human affairs unhelpful, Appian is invaluable.
Dio Cassius was a Greek historian, born about the middle of the second century AD, who wrote a Roman History from Aeneas to his own second Consulship in 229 AD. The books that survive cover the period between the second war against Mithridates and the reign of Claudius. Although he had no way of evaluating his sources, he offers a useful complement to other earlier texts.
Our knowledge of the late Republic has been enhanced by twentieth-century archaeology, especially through coins and inscriptions.
Modern literature on Cicero and the Roman Republic is multitudinous. (See Further Reading for full details of works mentioned in this and the next paragraph.) Information on further reading in English can be found in two excellent surveys, H. H. Scullard’s standard textbook From the Gracchi to Nero, and Michael Crawford’s analytical study The Roman Republic. Matthias Gelzer’s masterpiece Caesar, Politician and Statesman, with full annotations, is perhaps the classic account of Caesar’s life. Christian Meier’sCaesar is authoritative and readable and, as well as giving a lively narrative of the life, offers a profound insight into the nature of Rome’s constitutional crisis. Ronald Syme’s great The Roman Revolution is forthright and challenging about Cicero’s behavior. F. R. Cowell’s Cicero and the Roman Republic is a thorough and readable account of the politics and economic and social development of ancient Rome.
Among previous books on Cicero to which the present work is indebted are the following: Gaston Boissier’s delightful Cicero and His Friends, applying to its subject the perceptions of a nineteenth-century French man of the world, skeptical, witty and without illusions; scholarship has moved on, but this remains a convincing evocation of a vanished society. Elizabeth Rawson’s Cicero is the last full-length biography to have been published in Britain by an English author and is both scholarly and attractively written. T. N. Mitchell’s two-volume Cicero: The Ascending Years and Cicero: The Senior Statesman constitutes an authoritative and monumentally comprehensive study.
FURTHER READING
The major classical authors cited above are available in the original with English translations, in Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Principal classical sources
Appian, The Civil Wars, trans. John Carter, Penguin Classics, 1996.
Caesar, The Civil War, trans. Jane F. Gardner, Penguin Classics, 1967.
———, The Conquest of Gaul, trans. S. A. Handford, Penguin Classics, 1951.
Catullus, Odes, trans. Peter Whigham, Penguin Classics, 1966.
Cicero, Letters to Atticus and to His Friends, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Penguin Classics, 1978.
———, Selected Political Speeches, trans. Michael Grant, Penguin Books, 1969.
———, Works, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Plutarch, The Fall of the Roman Republic, trans. Rex Warner, Penguin Classics, 1958.
———, The Makers of Rome, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert, Penguin Classics, 1964.
———, Parallel Lives, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert, Penguin Classics, 1979.
Sallust, The Jugurthine War; Conspiracy of Catiline, trans. S. A. Handford, Penguin Classics, 1963.
Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, revised Michael Grant, Penguin Classics, 1979.
Principal modern sources
Gaston Boissier, Cicero and His Friends, Ward, Lock, 1897, first published in France, 1865.
F. R. Cowell, Cicero and the Roman Republic, Penguin Books, 1948.
Michael Crawford, The Roman Republic, Fontana Collins, 1978.
Florence Dupont, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, Basil Blackwell, 1992.
Matthias Gelzer, Caesar, Politician and Statesman, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, with corrections 1969; first published in Germany, 1921.
Christian Meier, Caesar, HarperCollins, 1995, first published by Severin & Siedler, Germany, 1982.
T. N. Mitchell, Cicero: The Ascending Years and Cicero: The Senior Statesman, Yale University Press, 1979 and 1991.
Elizabeth Rawson, Cicero, Allen Lane, 1975.
H. H. Scullard, From the Gracchi to Nero, Routledge, 5th ed., 1982.
Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution, Oxford University Press, 1939.
ABBREVIATIONS
ACI—Cicero, Ad Caesarem iuniorem (frag.) [To the younger Caesar]
App—Appian, The Civil Wars
Arch—Cicero, For Archias (Pro Archia)
Asc—Asconius, Commentaries on Five Speeches by Cicero (Bristol University Press)
Att—Cicero, Letters to Atticus (ed. Shackleton Bailey)
Bell civ—Caesar, The Civil War (Commentarii de bello civili)
Bell gall—Caesar, The Conquest of Gaul (Commentarii de bello gallico)
Boiss—Gaston Boissier, Cicero and His Friends
Brut—Cicero, Brutus
Brutus—Cicero, Letters to Brutus (ed. Shackleton Bailey)
Cael—Cicero, In Defense of Caelius (Pro Caelio)
Castle—E. B. Castle, Ancient Education and Today (Pelican, 1961)
Cat I—Cicero, First Speech Against Catilina (In Catilinam I)
Cat II—Cicero, Second Speech Against Catilina
Cat IV—Cicero, Fourth Speech Against Catilina (In Catilinam IV)
Catull—Catullus, Odes (Carmina)
Clu—Cicero, In Defense of Cluentius (Pro Cluentio)
Comm—Quintus Tullius Cicero, A Short Guide to Electioneering (Commentariolum petitionis)
Corn Nep—Cornelius Nepos, Life of Atticus (from De viris illustribus)
De inv—Cicero, On Invention (De inventione)
De or—Cicero, The Ideal Orator (De oratore)
Dio—Dio Cassius, Roman History
Div—Cicero, Foretelling the Future (De divinatione)
Dom—Cicero, About His House (De domo sua)
Fam—Cicero, Letters to His Friends (Ad familiares) (ed. Shackleton Bailey)
Harusp—Cicero, Concerning the Response of the Soothsayers (De haruspicum responsis)
Homer Il—Homer, Iliad (trans. R. Fagles, Viking, 1990)
Hor Sat—Horace, Satires (Sermones)
Imp Pomp—Cicero, On Pompey’s Commission (De imperio Gn. Pompeii)
Lact—Lactantius, Divine Institutes (Institutiones divinae)
Leg—Cicero, On Law (De legibus)
Leg ag—Cicero, On the Land Act (De lege agraria)
Luc—Lucan, Pharsalia (trans. Robert Graves, Penguin Classics, 1956)
Marc—Cicero, In Defense of Marcellus (Pro Marcello)
Mod Dig—Modestinus, Digest (Digesta)
Mur—Cicero, In Defense of Murena (Pro Murena)
Nic—Nicolaus, Life of Augustus
Odf—Orationum deperditarum fragmenta [Fragments of Lost Speeches] (ed. I. Puccioni, Milan)
Off—Cicero, Duties (De officiis)
Para Stoic—Cicero, Stoic Paradoxes (Paradoxa Stoicorum)
Phil—Cicero, Philippics (Orationes Philippicae)
Planc—Cicero, In Defense of Plancius (Pro Plancio)
Pliny—Pliny the Elder, Natural History (Naturalis historia) (trans. John F. Healy, Penguin Classics)
Plut Brut—Plutarch, Life of Brutus
Plut Caes—Plutarch, Life of Caesar
Plut Cat—Plutarch, Life of Cato
Plut Cic—Plutarch, Life of Cicero
Plut Crass—Plutarch, Life of Crassus
Plut Pomp—Plutarch, Life of Pompey
Plut Sull—Plutarch, Life of Sulla
Post red—Cicero, Speech to the People after His Return (Post reditum ad quirites)
Quint—Cicero, Letters to Quintus
Quintil—Quintilianus, The Education of an Orator (Institutio oratoria)
Rab—Cicero, In Defense of Caius Rabirius on a Charge of Treason (Pro C. Rabirio perduellionis)
Rep—Cicero, On the State (De republica)
Rosc—Cicero, In Defense of S. Roscius Amerinus (Pro S. Roscio Amerinó)
Sall Caes—Letter to Caesar (Epistula ad Caesarem)
Sall Cat—Sallust, The Conspiracy of Catilina (Bellum Catilinae)
Sall Inv—Sallust, Invective Against Cicero (In M. Tullium Ciceronem oratio)
Sen—Seneca the Elder, Suasoriae
Sest—Cicero, In Defence of Sestius (Pro Sestio)
SIG—Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecorum [Collection of Greek Inscriptions] (ed. W. Dittenberger)
Suet—Suetonius, Life of Caesar, in The Twelve Caesars (De vita Caesarum)
Tac—Tacitus, Dialogue on Orators (Dialogus de oratoribus)
Tusc—Cicero, Conversations at Tusculum (Tusculanae disputationes)
Val Max—Valerius Maximus, Memorabilia
Vell—Velleius Paterculus, History of Rome (Historia romana)
Verr—Cicero, First Speech Against Verres (In Verrem I)