The attitudes Cicero acquired as a serious-minded, bookish boy lasted him all his life. He always loathed and feared physical aggression. He recalled, a little priggishly: “The time which others spend in advancing their own personal affairs, taking holidays and attending games, indulging in pleasures of various kinds or even enjoying mental relaxation and bodily recreation, the time they spend on protracted parties and gambling and playing ball, proves in my case to have been taken up with returning over and over again to … literary pursuits.”
Cicero wrote poetry in his adolescence and as early as the age of fourteen completed a work in tetrameters called Pontius Glaucus. Although it has not survived, we know that it told the story of a Boeotian fisherman who eats a magic herb and is turned into a fabulous sea divinity with a gift of prophecy. It was an apt subject for someone who had dreams of making his way in the world by means of his chief talent, a strikingly persuasive way with words.
AS a young man Cicero was as well known for his verse as for his oratory. His style was fluent and technically accomplished. He wrote quickly and easily, as many as 500 lines a night, and could turn his hand to unpromising subjects such as a translation of a Greek work on astronomy by Aratus. However, he did not really have a poetic imagination and readers found that verbal virtuosity was not enough. His reputation as a poet declined sharply and permanently with the arrival a generation later of a new, more personal and lyrical style of verse writing, pioneered by Catullus and his circle. Tacitus, the imperial historian of the following century, noted: “Caesar and Brutus also wrote poetry—no better than Cicero, but with better luck, for fewer people know that they did.”
AS his education proceeded, Cicero met the full force of an inherent schizophrenia in Roman culture. There was a widespread belief that traditional values were being undermined by foreign immigrants. The decadence that was perceived to permeate the Republic was attributed largely to slippery and corrupt Greeks and Asiatics who had come to Rome from the hellenized Orient. Cicero’s paternal grandfather, for one, would have nothing to do with them and deplored falling standards of Roman morality. “Our people are like Syrian slaves: the better they speak Greek, the more shiftless they are.” When speaking in public, senior Philhellenes such as Crassus and Antonius sometimes felt obliged to conceal their true beliefs.
But the fact is that while the ferocious city-state on the Tiber was able to defeat them in war, it had nothing to rival the Greeks culturally. Greek literature, philosophy and science were a revelation to people who had little more than ballads and primitive annals as their literary heritage. They immediately started borrowing what they found and the history of Roman literature in the third and second centuries BC is essentially one of plagiarism. Even in Cicero’s day there was a good deal of catching up to be done.
Cicero’s father seems to have reacted against his own father’s anti-Greek views. Like many other bien-pensants of the time, he believed that the future for his sons lay in a grounding of Greek literature, philosophy and rhetoric. So it is no wonder that the young Cicero was given access to a well-known Greek poet of the day, Archias, from whom he gained much of his knowledge of the theory and practice of rhetoric. Archias was a fashionable figure in leading circles and mixed with many of the best families in Rome. Cicero recognized the debt: “For as far as I can cast my mind back into times gone by, as far as I can recollect the earliest years of my boyhood, the picture of the past that takes shape reveals that it was [Archias] who first inspired my determination to embark on these studies, and who started me on their methodical pursuit.”
Cicero became so addicted to all things Greek that he was nicknamed “the little Greek boy.” However, he also made sure that he learned about Rome and its history. To this end he cultivated the acquaintance of Lucius Aelius Stilo. Rome’s first native-born grammarian and antiquarian, Aelius was a fund of knowledge about the history of the Republic, which he made available to his friends for use in their political speeches. His patriotism rubbed off on the precocious adolescent from Arpinum, who developed a lifelong fascination with the details of Rome’s inadequately recorded past.
It was while studying with Scaevola at the house of Crassus that Cicero met other contemporaries in the little world of upper-class Roman society. Two boys in particular stood out from the crowd. Caius Julius Caesar was six years younger than Cicero, but both he and Quintus knew him personally. Through Marius’s marriage to Caesar’s aunt Julia they were, after all, distant relatives. Cicero also struck up a friendship that would last a lifetime with a boy named Titus Pomponius, who came from an old but not strictly noble family. They met at the Scaevolas’ and found that they shared a passion for literature and Roman history. Cicero’s friendship with Atticus, as he later called himself, was to be central to his life. Years later when he was adult, he wrote: “I love Pomponius … as a second brother.”
The three youngsters were not allowed to pursue their education without interruption. The few years of relative calm that had followed the assassination of the radical Tribune Saturninus came to end when Cicero was fifteen. The Republic was now battered by a succession of crises that set the scene for the politics of the boys’ adult lives. Cicero, Caesar and Pomponius watched events in the Forum and on the streets.
While most of the Senate was unwilling to countenance any constitutional change, a few of its more farsighted members realized that the status quo could not last and that it was wiser to anticipate events than react to them. It fell to yet another aristocrat to pick up the battered baton of reform. Marcus Livius Drusus was a wealthy and ambitious nobleman who became Tribune in 91. He was a friend of Cicero’s mentors, Scaurus and Crassus, and we can presume that the young student witnessed some of the events that followed at firsthand. Drusus’s main project was a renewal of the plan to extend Roman citizenship to the Italians, but the Senate, with typical shortsightedness, threw out his legislation. They were profoundly suspicious of him from the most self-interested of motives: if the Italians were enfranchised, they would join Drusus’s clientela in huge numbers and that would make him far too powerful.
The outcome was predictable. The Allied communities lost all hope that the Republic would ever share the profits of empire with them. The mood in the countryside became tense and feverish. Drusus was known to have entertained one of the Allied leaders at his house in Rome and public opinion suspected him of disloyalty. There were reports that the Italians had vowed allegiance to Drusus.
It was about this time that Crassus made his last contribution to a Senatorial debate. Cicero left a detailed account of what took place. Furious with one of the Consuls, Lucius Marcius Philippus, for criticizing the Senate, Crassus launched a tirade against him. The Consul lost his temper and threatened to fine him. The old man refused to back down: “Do you imagine that I can be deterred by the forfeit of any of my property?” The Senate unanimously passed a motion in his support. Crassus had made a fine speech, but the effort had weakened his strength and he was taken ill while delivering it; he contracted pneumonia and died a few days later. Cicero and the other boys were probably at Crassus’s house when the great orator was brought home. They were deeply upset, and Cicero describes them as going later to the Senate House to look at the spot where that last “swan song” (a phrase he popularized) had been heard.