Perhaps it is no surprise that the Romans should have had the same word, ‘actor’, for both a prosecutor and a performer on a stage. Socially, the gulf between the two of them was vast, but in terms of technique there was often little to choose. Rome’s leading orator in the decade following Sulla’s death, Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, was notorious for apeing the gestures of a mime-artist. Like Caesar, he was a celebrated fop, who ‘would arrange the folds of his toga with great care and exactness’,19 then use his hands and the sweep of his arms as extensions of his voice. He did this with such grace that the stars of the Roman stage would stand in the audience whenever he spoke, studying and copying his every gesture. Like actors, orators were celebrities, gawped at and gossiped about. Hortensius himself was nicknamed ‘Dionysia’, after a famous dancing girl, but he could afford to brush all such insults aside. The prestige he won as Rome’s leading orator was worth any number of jeers.
Naturally, there were always opponents looking to snatch his crown. It was not in the Romans’ nature to tolerate any king – or queen – for very long. Hortensius’ own pre-eminence had been established during the years of Sulla’s dictatorship, when the law courts had been muzzled. Committed to upholding the Senate’s authority, he was strongly identified with the new regime. Such was his friendship with the dictator that it was Hortensius who had delivered Sulla’s funeral speech.* In the following decade his authority as a dominant member of the Senate inevitably served to buttress his legal reputation. But as the seventies BC wore on Hortensius’ pre-eminence came increasingly under threat, not from a fellow member of the senatorial establishment, not even from a member of the nobility, but from a man who was an upstart in every way.
Like Marius, Marcus Tullius Cicero was a native of the small hill town of Arpinum – and, like Marius, he was filled with ambition. There the resemblance ended. Gawky and skinny, with a long, thin neck, Cicero was never going to make a great soldier. Instead, even from his childhood, he planned to become the greatest orator in Rome. Sent to the capital as a boy in the nineties, Cicero’s precocious aptitude for rhetoric was such that the fathers of his fellow students would come to his school just to hear him declaim. The anecdote can only have derived from the infant prodigy himself, and even to the Romans – who never regarded modesty as a virtue – Cicero’s conceit was something monstrous. Not unjustified, however. His vanity was as much prickliness as self-promotion. A deeply sensitive man, Cicero was torn between a consciousness of his own great talents and a paranoia that snobbery might prevent others from giving them their due. In fact, his potential was so evident that it had been spotted early by some of the most influential figures in Rome. One of these, Marcus Antonius, provided the young Cicero with a particularly encouraging role-model. Despite coming from an undistinguished family himself, Antonius’ powers of oratory had succeeded in elevating him to both the consulship and the censorship, and a status as a leading spokesman of the senatorial elite. He was one of a clique of orators who dominated both the law courts and the Senate throughout the nineties, the spokesmen for an aggressive conservatism, strongly opposed to Marius and to anyone who threatened the traditional status quo. Cicero, who was always prone to hero-worship, never forgot him. Antonius and his colleagues were to prove a formative influence on what was already a passion for the Republic’s ancient order. Despite the fact that it was this same order that placed so many obstacles on the path of his advancement, Cicero never wavered in his belief that it embodied the acme of constitutional perfection. During the eighties, as the Republic began its collapse into civil war, this conviction was only reinforced.
Antonius himself was murdered following Marius’ putsch in 87 BC. His head was displayed in the Forum and his body fed to birds and dogs. The finest orators of their generation were culled along with him. The stage had now been swept clear of competition, but Cicero, unnerved by the murder of his patrons, elected to keep his head down. He spent the years of civil war studying and honing his rhetorical skills, and not until 81, when he was already in his mid-twenties, did he finally plead in his first trial. Sulla had just resigned the dictatorship, but Cicero still had to move warily. A year after his debut in the law courts he agreed to defend the son of an Umbrian landowner charged with parricide. The case was politically highly sensitive. As Cicero was to demonstrate, the murdered man’s name had been illegally slipped on to a proscription list by one of Sulla’s favourite freedmen, who had then trumped up the charge of parricide to cover his tracks. The defendant was duly acquitted. Sulla did nothing to indicate that he was in any way displeased. Cicero’s reputation was made.
But not yet to his own satisfaction. Aiming for the political heights as he was, he knew that he first had to seize Hortensius’ oratorical crown. Accordingly, he threw himself into defence work, taking on other prominent cases and using the courts to test himself to the emotional and physical limits, ‘drawing on all the strength of my voice and the effort of my whole body’.20 After barely two years of public life he found himself near breakdown. Warned by his doctors that he was putting a terminal strain on his throat, Cicero took leave of absence and headed for Greece. For six months he stayed in Athens, sight-seeing and indulging in a spot of recreational philosophy. The city still bore the scars left by Sulla’s legions, but for the Romans, Athens remained inviolably the home of beauty and culture. Tourists had begun returning there even as blood was drying in the streets. Among them had been an old schoolfriend of Cicero, Titus Pomponius, a prudent refugee from the judicial murders back in Rome. Recognising the bottom of a market when he saw it, Pomponius had invested his inheritance in provincial real estate, then used the profits to fund a life of cultured leisure in the shadow of the Parthenon. Eight years later he still had not the slightest intention of returning to Rome. His friends called him ‘Atticus’, a nickname that suggests how distinctive his expatriate lifestyle was perceived to be. Even so, he was a straw in the wind. ‘Atticus’ was not the only wealthy citizen to have witnessed a decade of violence and political collapse, and decided that there might be no shame in embracing a life of secluded ease.