by MARY BEARD
Cicero (106 BCE – 43 BCE) was a Roman politician & philosopher
It has been a bit of a disturbed week (on which more later, when the dust has died down a bit). But really I have been trying to get on with the book. Caesar has, you will be pleased to hear, been killed off and we are about to move on the next round of Civil Wars, followed by the principate (and the home straight).
To be honest, this isn’t really a book about battles. But I did think that moving straight from the run up to the death of Caesar, to the Philippi campaign, the triumviral proscriptions, and then to the Actium campaign was really a bit much for the reader — in the sense that however much one varies the style and the focus etc, there is a kind of “more of the same” feel to it all. So I decided to take a bit of an intermezzo at this point and do a chapter that I was going to call “A Day in the Life”, but which is now called “The Home Front”.
The point is to look at what else is going on in the lives of these big characters, that we dont get told in most of the main ancient narratives. So what I have decided to do is to work out from Cicero‘s Letters of the period between 49 and 44 BC (crossing of the Rubicon to assassination of Julius Caesar) — the period when Cicero’s family collapses, when he divorces Terentia (his wife of thirty years) and marries a ?15 year old heiress, when his daughter Tullia is also divorced and then dies in childbirth. The idea is not simply to tell a private story, but to use the private story to broach issues about women, marriage, life expectancy, children etc etc (the things that most Romans worried a lot more about than exactly what Julius Caesar was up to).
As it happens I have worked on Cicero’s Letters most of my adult life on and off.
For those of you not familiar with them, they are the single most important collection of private letters to survive from the ancient world, about 900 in all, including very many written to Cicero’s “best friend”,by the name of Atticus, but also others to his wife and family, various of the big wheelers and dealers of the Late Republic, and even to his slave (later ex-slave) Tiro. And they cover every topic under the sun, from upset stomachs to the elections for the next consuls. (You can find plenty of selections, and the complete text in Latin and translation on plenty of places on the web.)
The Times Literary Supplement fro more