8
THE IDEAL CONSTITUTION
Writing about Politics: 55–43 BC
Now that he was no longer able to play an active role in the conduct of affairs, Cicero decided to find time for another kind of political intervention. It took the form of extended critiques of the crisis facing the Republic, in which he offered his own proposals for reform. By writing books, he believed he could still influence the course of events. If he could no longer promote his cure-all for the Republic’s ills, the “harmony of the classes,” in the Senate House and the Forum, then he would do so from the study.
Nothing like the modern publishing industry existed in ancient Rome, of course, nor were there public libraries, until Caesar founded the first one in the 40s. Books were written out by hand on papyrus rolls (sometimes as long as thirty feet), which were then passed around to friends and acquaintances and stored on shelves. The task of copying was usually given to highly trained slaves. Atticus employed a large number and seems to have acted as a prototypical publisher, probably selling books for a profit. He had many of Cicero’s speeches and books copied and distributed.
Readers had to work hard. Characters took one form only, without differentiation into capital and lowercase letters. There were no spaces between words or punctuation, and texts were unparagraphed.
Like many Romans, Cicero was a great collector of books. He was proud to acquire rare editions and enjoyed visiting other people’s libraries. Despite the technical production difficulties, upper-class Romans were eager to buy the latest works of contemporary writers, which were carefully studied and much discussed. Political pamphlets were an accepted part of public life. Although copying runs must have been small, books appear to have been in plentiful supply. (According to Catullus, they could end up wrapping mackerel in fish shops.)
Cicero’s literary career was checkered. The precocious teenage poet had grown into an overprolific windbag with his endless autobiographical epic. It was as an orator that he really made his reputation as a writer. He understood that a speech was a one-time, live event like an actor’s performance and that, in the public eye, he would be only as good as his latest appearance. So, like other successful public speakers of his day, he took great pains to work up his speeches on paper and publish them as books. In this way, past rhetorical triumphs became permanent records of achievement.
But he had long been acknowledged as a leader, if not the leader, in this field and he sought a new, more demanding challenge. His first step was to set out his views on political education. This he did in The Ideal Orator (De oratore), a substantial work which he first mentioned to Atticus in November 55. What Cicero had in mind was a justification of rhetoric not as a technique but as an approach to the morally good life, a means of expressing and enforcing morality. Ever since his student days when he toured Greece and Asia Minor and studied both philosophy and rhetoric, he had been convinced that the two disciplines were intertwined. This was the proposition he now sought to demonstrate.
The book was written as a dialogue (following the Greeks, this was a common convention for philosophical writing) and was imagined as an actual event taking place some years earlier, in 91. The leading figures were two of the great political and legal personalities of his adolescence, Lucius Licinius Crassus and Marcus Antonius. Cicero argued for a broadly based and well-integrated liberal education in which the discidium linguae atque cordis, the split between word and heart, would be healed.
Modeling himself largely on Plato’s Republic, from which there is a substantial direct quotation, he then composed another dialogue. On the State (De re publica), which he followed in due course with On Law (De legibus). Both books have only partially survived; On the State was discovered as late as 1820, when fragments amounting to about one third of the original were found in a palimpsest also containing St. Augustine’s commentary on the Psalms. Even in truncated form, while purporting to give an account of states in general, these works provide a comprehensive analysis of the weaknesses of the Roman constitution and proposals for its reform.
AS we have already seen, Cicero did not fully appreciate the gravity of the political situation. In his judgment no more was required than a return to tried and tested traditions. “When we inherited the Republic from our forebears,” he wrote, “it was like a beautiful painting whose colors were fading with age. We have failed to restore its original colors and have not taken the trouble to preserve its overall composition or even its general features.” Cicero probably started On the State in May 54 and it was published about 51. Its subject, he told Quintus, was “the ideal constitution and the ideal citizen.” He found the work hard going, for it entailed a good deal of research both in the Greek authorities and in the history of Rome’s political development.
He chose to set the dialogue safely in a more glorious and perhaps more authoritative past, making his main speaker Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus, the adopted grandson of the great Africanus, who had defeated Hannibal at Zama outside Carthage in 202. He was a generous patron of the arts and letters and a Hellenophile. The action opens one morning during a public holiday in 129, not long before Scipio’s death at the end of a long life. This timing was not accidental, for the stormy career of Tiberius Gracchus was recent history. Cicero believed that his Tribuneship, which “divided one people into two factions,” had introduced the long constitutional crisis which now was coming to a head.
The scene is Scipio’s country estate, where the old man is found in his bedroom receiving callers. The conversation touches on the reported sighting of two suns in the sky. More visitors arrive, including his lifelong friend Laelius, whose cognomen, Sapiens, is a tribute to his scholarship and philosophical attainments. Scipio rises from his couch, dresses and puts on his shoes. The company moves to a portico of the house, where the talk turns away from the physical nature of the universe, on the grounds that it is unknowable, to the nature of good governance, about which truths can be ascertained.
Scipio’s thesis, which can be supposed to be Cicero’s, is that there are three basic systems of government: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. Each has its strengths and weaknesses and it is the unique distinction of Rome to have devised a constitution which combines elements of all three. Scipio’s personal preference is for the good king, father to his subjects, but the tendency towards tyranny is hard to eradicate. So “a moderate and well-balanced form of government which is a combination of the three simple good forms is preferable even to monarchy.” A substantial part of the book is devoted to a constitutional history of the early days of Rome and, through Scipio’s words, Cicero nostalgically evokes the Republic in its primitive, pure and thoroughly oligarchical form.
The government was so administered by the Senate that, though the People were free, few political acts were performed by them, practically everything being done by the authority of the Senate and in accordance with its established customs, and the Consuls held a power which, though only of one year’s duration, was truly regal in general character and in legal sanction. Another principle that was most important to the retention of the power by the aristocracy was also strictly maintained—namely, that no act of a popular assembly should be valid unless ordered by the Senate.
This theory of the mixed constitution had a great influence on the development of European political thought during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It retained its appeal until the eighteenth century and the emergence of modern democracy. However, it did not fit the circumstances of the last hundred years of the Republic as neatly as Cicero argued it did. For one thing, it took no account of the political significance of the equites, the business class. His ideas also ignored the unpalatable fact that the last attempt to reestablish the mixed constitution, Sulla’s reforms, had been dismantled soon after his death and had, in fact, been guaranteed by another power which receives little attention in On the State, military force.