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’s Caesar 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.