I know, I know, this is a whole lunar month late. Life got exciting (which is French for "I forgot").
February's book of the month is Anthony Everitt's Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician. It's a newer book (2011) so it's quite accessible, but it has other virtues: it is also thorough, detailed, and sympathetic.
We probably know more personal details about Marcus Tullius Cicero than any other man (or woman) of the ancient world. That is because over nine hundred of his letters, official and personal, have survived to the present in one of those preservational flukes historians love to argue about. "In Cicero's correspondence," writes Everitt, "noble Romans are flesh and blood, not marble. Here is someone who dined with Julius Caesar,
detected the incorruptible Marcus Brutus in a financial scam and helped put a stop to a sexual escapade of the teenage Mark Antony." And this man of flesh and blood did many things: he was an orator and lawyer without rival (a career, in that pre-mass-media society, that made superstars as surely as Hollywood does today), a savvy politician when he had to be, and the man who popularized Stoic philosophy--not just in his own day but for the medievals as well. To top it all off, he was apparently such an incurable wit and jokester that it literally made him enemies! One trembles to think what he would have been like in the age of Twitter. As a small sample of his historical impact, one of his philosophical dialogues (the Hortensius, which sadly has been lost) inspired the teenaged Augustine of Hippo to begin the studies that would eventually lead him to the Christian faith.This biography shows that the author thoroughly read Cicero's own words, as well as other sources on the period. The style is fresh, easy, and almost colloquial. Everitt readily summarizes an enormously complicated and chronologically-distant political situation with a deft touch; the book would serve almost as well as a simple introduction to late-Republican (c. 150-42 B.C.) Rome. Many key figures, like Clodius, Mark Antony, Pompey, Caesar, and Atticus, are given plenty of time to share the spotlight. But it's never overdone: Cicero's entire life, from his political career to his family scenes to his final execution by Antony's goons by the seaside, is laid out for us succinctly in just over 300 pages.
For the novice who wants to learn about the man or the period, I cannot recommend this book enough. And there's enough detail in it that even the veteran academic might find a few reasons to add it to his list.
