The street violence​ endemic to the city of Rome had been growing steadily worse for years and because of it, early in 52 BC, the great orator Marcus Tullius Cicero was facing a nasty challenge in a career that had been full of them: how to defend a murderer who openly admitted to the killing and, worse, how to do it when the victim was Cicero’s worst enemy, Publius Clodius Pulcher. A decade before, Clodius, a louche aristocrat, had scandalised the city by infiltrating – perhaps to pursue a tryst – the rites sacred to Bona Dea, which were confined to women. After this damaging affair, he settled on rabble-rousing as the surest path to power. Born into the patrician aristocracy as a member of the venerable gens Claudia, he had himself formally adopted into a plebeian family (by a considerably younger man) so that he could stand for election to the tribunate, the only magistracy open solely to plebeians and a relic of a much older phase in the republic’s history. As tribune of the plebs, in 58, he had enacted various populist measures, vastly expanding the grain dole and harassing hardline aristocrats opposed to such policies, as well as passing legislation that forced Cicero into exile. He retained his popularity, and his ability to call up a violent mob, long after his year in office ended and Cicero returned to Rome. Clodius ran for one of the eight praetorships – the second most senior level of magistrate after the two consuls – of 52 BC, his victory a foregone conclusion, although the elections were declared void on account of procedural irregularities of the sort that were almost inevitable amid the chaos. The new year opened with an interregnum – that is, without legally elected magistrates – and with an interrex appointed to conduct new elections, in which Clodius would certainly have been victorious. But on 18 January he was murdered; the next morning, a mob of his supporters cremated his body in front of the Senate House, which was burned down.

The killer was Titus Annius Milo, a serving praetor who was running for the consulship. He was a bitter enemy of Clodius, and like him a brutal thug: his nickname was a reference to Milo of Croton, the ancient Olympian wrestler famed for his astounding strength. Once a client of the general and three-time consul Pompey, on whose behalf while tribune he had engineered Cicero’s recall from exile, Milo had recently married Fausta Sulla, daughter of the steely dictator who had normalised the proscription and mass murder of political opponents. The marriage signalled Milo’s allegiance to the part of the aristocracy that regretted the dismantling of Sulla’s measures to curb the rights and silence the voice of the masses. These men are still known out of long habit as optimates, though they were not a coherent faction, still less a political party. Clodius was as hateful to them as Milo was useful, and when the two agitators met on the Via Appia, perhaps not by chance, a pitched battle ensued. Clodius fled, wounded, only to be discovered by Milo and killed on the spot. Cicero argued that Clodius had laid a trap for Milo, who had been conducting official praetorian business, and that the murder was self-defence. The trial was marked by violence and intimidation: the mob wanted Milo’s head. It’s possible that Cicero lost his nerve and never finished his defence speech; certainly he lost the case, by a decisive vote of the jury, and Milo was exiled to Massilia.

The loss wasn’t the nadir of Cicero’s career – that had been his exile – but it made clear he no longer possessed the authority he had enjoyed in the 60s. This new Rome was a different world, in which the aristocracy could no longer maintain the political equilibrium that allowed the oligarchy to endure, though names and faces might change. The alliance of Pompey and Julius Caesar had begun to fray, but it cast a shadow over everything else. Cicero still won trials far more often than he lost them, but he lacked the will and the ability to trim his sails to each passing breeze. He still wanted to steer a middle course, to pursue the concordia ordinum – a harmony of the social orders – and not the extremism now embraced on every side. He had reached the pinnacle of a Roman career a decade earlier, with the consulship of 63, but the events of the late 50s, culminating in his exile, had shown that he was still an outsider in the metropolitan political classes, still constrained by his origins in Arpinum, sixty miles south-east of Rome.

Andrew Dyck’s giant volume begins there, with Cicero’s birth in 106 BC, and sticks relentlessly to biographical chronology. It is very much a life – the best in English since Elizabeth Rawson’s fifty years ago – not a life and times. The context of that life will be unintelligible without some prior knowledge of Roman republican history, and all but the most expert will at times struggle to remember what role one character or another played beyond their walk-on appearance in Cicero’s story. But it is very much worth persevering. If the general reader skims a short history of the late republic, and the historian has a copy of the Magistrates of the Roman Republic to hand, both will be rewarded with an expert guide to the way Cicero’s numerous works fitted in to the course of his life. Cicero’s writings, especially his rhetorical studies and philosophical treatises, are frequently studied in a disembodied realm of ideas. Dyck manages to locate the works within the public life of an era in which Cicero played an outsized role.

Born to a valetudinarian father and a mother, Helvia, about whom little is known, the young Cicero received the education in Greek and Latin normal for a well-off child of the equestrian order. (Roman citizens who met a certain threshold of wealth were equestrians, able to pursue either the sort of political career in Rome that might win them entry to the senatorial order, or to confine their political lives to their home towns and take part in the life of the capital through commerce or in the courts.) Cicero’s father’s ill-health may have masked a disinclination to enter politics, but Cicero intended to make it in the metropolis. He moved to Rome as a teenager, just before the upheavals of the Social War between Rome and its Italian allies, who had been repeatedly promised, and repeatedly disappointed of, enfranchisement as full citizens. After a short spell of military service, which put him off it for a lifetime, Cicero resumed his education. He hung on the orations of the great public speakers, frequented the salons of visiting Greek sages, wrote a first book on rhetoric, which was indebted to Greek models, and practised translating Greek philosophical treatises, which meant inventing a whole new Latin vocabulary to express ideas that Romans had previously only talked about in Greek. He also studied the law alongside another young equestrian, Titus Pomponius, later nicknamed Atticus, a lifelong friend and the recipient of Cicero’s least mannered correspondence.

It was under Sulla’s dictatorship that Cicero made his debut in the courts and began to publish his more successful defences. Republican Rome was a litigious place, but lacked a state apparatus of justice: both civil and criminal cases were brought before standing juries by private individuals, often politicians seeking advantage, and lawyering for the defence was a way onto the public stage as well as the fastest means of developing the network of mutual obligations that characterised the political classes. In around 80 BC, Cicero married the wealthy heiress Terentia, whose dowry would finance the next stages of his career. The following year, he left on an eastern tour with his younger brother, Quintus, visiting Pomponius Atticus in Athens as well as the Greek cities of Asia Minor and Rhodes. Returning to Rome aged thirty and thus eligible to stand in the elections of 76, he secured one of the twenty annual quaestorships, the most junior magistracy, serving his term at Lilybaeum in Sicily. The quaestorship meant entry to the Senate and eligibility for higher office. It was a good start, although for a novus homo like Cicero, a new man with no ancestral claims on advancement, the quaestorship was often also the end of a political career.

His year in Sicily brought him useful, if not terribly powerful, connections with Sicilian provincials and among equestrians with business interests there, and it was on behalf of these groups that he made a somewhat unorthodox bid for renown: rather than confine himself to legal defence, he launched a prosecution, correctly reckoning that it would set him apart from other new men on the make. His target was Gaius Verres, a former governor of Sicily, whom he charged with extortion. It was a risk: a failed prosecution rebounded on the prosecutor and could easily bankrupt him, and Verres was defended by Quintus Hortensius, the most admired speaker in Rome. Cicero’s Verrines have few equals as a piece of forensic invective, balancing seriousness of purpose with the bravado of a young man with something to prove. As prosecutor, Cicero did everything right. He had done the legwork in his Sicilian investigations; his witnesses and his evidence were impossible to refute; and he skilfully parried every procedural manoeuvre the defence used to try to draw the case out into the festival season, when lawsuits had to pause. Hortensius realised that a conviction was all but inevitable and urged his client to go into voluntary exile. Verres’ retirement to Massilia deprived his prosecutor of more hours in the limelight, so Cicero published the material he had been keeping in reserve as a second oration In Verrem. He carried on an amicable rivalry with Hortensius till the latter’s death and honoured his memory with a treatise, Hortensius, on Philosophy, now lost, but a favourite text of late antiquity and a great inspiration to St Augustine.

In the moment, though, Cicero had stolen Hortensius’ oratorical crown – everyone agreed. He could therefore afford to avoid such highwire acts for a while and devote himself to defences that expanded his clientele and made him money. Exceptionally for a novus homo, he stood for an aedileship in 69 and won. Aediles were responsible for marketplaces, public works and entertainments; this was a costly burden, if an excellent means of currying favour with the plebs, and the job – an optional post in the magisterial career ladder, the cursus honorum – was most often pursued by the already very rich. A lavish aedileship was one of the soft-power methods used by a scion of a great family to advertise its greatness and guarantee his own place in it. A novus homo had to weigh the debts he would incur, and the risk involved in besting a nobilis and depriving him of his birthright, against the potential return on this investment in the fickle affections of the plebs. Cicero’s gamble paid off. He then stood for one of the eight praetorships of 66. As in the aedilician vote, he was the top-ranked candidate in every voting century, an almost unprecedented feat, let alone for a new man from Arpinum. He had become a genuine superstar, popular with conservative optimates, equestrian business interests and all but the most disaffected plebs. It was in these years of unrivalled success, which his opponents deplored as his ‘reign’, that he became committed to the ideal of the concordia ordinum and started to believe in his own capacity to achieve it. He decided to run for the consulship of 63, the first man from Arpinum to do so since Sulla’s great enemy, Gaius Marius.

It was an odd moment in the history of the late republic. Pompey was at the height of his authority; his rival and erstwhile consular colleague Marcus Licinius Crassus had not yet discovered a means of undermining him; and Julius Caesar’s main claim to fame was the funeral oration for his aunt Julia, the widow of Marius, whose political heir he aspired to be. Pompey’s pre-eminence grated on the conservative nobiles, but no one imagined he would form an alliance with Crassus and Caesar and disrupt the constitutional order for ever. In the elections for 63, Cicero sailed to victory, ahead of his soon to be colleague Gaius Antonius Hybrida, the uncle of Mark Antony. The defeated patrician Lucius Sergius Catilina then plotted revolution. The story is well known: Cicero’s four Catilinarians have been classroom staples since he published them in 60 bc (Dyck edited a good edition with commentary in 2008), and Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae is second only to Caesar’s Gallic Wars as most people’s introduction to Latin historical prose. When the conspiracy was detected, and Cicero pronounced his first, absolutely damning oration, Catiline fled the Senate House to join a rebel army in Etruria, where he was killed in battle. At Rome, Cicero pursued Catiline’s senatorial co-conspirators, exposing five of them, including a former consul, for treasonous correspondence with foreign enemies. The senatorial debate on their punishment has become famous, with Cicero arguing for their death and Caesar offering a spirited argument for life imprisonment and denouncing the execution of citizens without allowing them to exercise their right of appeal to the people. When the hardline optimates Catulus and Cato sided with Cicero, the consul had the conspirators taken to the Tullianum prison, where condemned criminals awaited execution. There they were strangled. Cicero emerged to address the crowd with a one-word sentence: ‘Vixerunt.’ They have lived.

His consulship was the apex of Cicero’s career. He was hailed as pater patriae, father of his country, and granted a supplicatio, a public thanksgiving for having saved Rome. He had, however, executed citizens without trial, and not just any citizens but his social superiors. That would be held against him for the rest of his life. But in 62, he could bask in the glory and flatter himself with having preserved his precious concordia ordinum. The year 60 saw the inception of another conspiracy, and a much more dangerous one, because it unfolded behind a façade of constitutional propriety and was not intended to subvert the state in the way it ultimately did. The informal alliance of Pompey and Caesar, eventually joined by Crassus, gave each of them what they wanted in the moment and allowed them to checkmate their opponents, whom they could play off one against the other. In 58, Caesar went to govern Gaul and unleashed a genocidal war of conquest that took him to the English Channel and the Rhine. Pompey stayed at Rome, administering his provincial command via legates, although the city itself was becoming ungovernable: 58 was the year of Clodius Pulcher’s tribunate, during which, among other populist measures, he proposed a law to exile anyone who executed a Roman citizen without trial. The target, of course, was Cicero, and his failure to mobilise Pompey or the great optimates on his behalf revealed the limits of his authority. He departed for Greece in May. His Roman villa and two of his country estates were razed by Clodius, while Atticus and Terentia scrambled to find the money to support him in his exile and lobbied for his return.

For a Roman statesman, Cicero’s aversion to provincial command and military glory was almost unseemly; he was only happy when his finger was on the pulse of life at Rome. Away from it, he was desolate, and to Atticus he confessed contemplating suicide. Trying to psychoanalyse historical figures is rarely productive, but Cicero was a type we can all recognise. He had a huge but exceedingly brittle ego which could seesaw from self-regard to self-loathing, and from elation to despondency, with alarming speed. We know this because so much of his correspondence has survived that it is at times possible to watch his mood, and with it his political calculus, change day by day, or even within the same day. (It is of course true that Cicero curated even his most intimate seeming letters, but they were curated for his interlocutor, not for posterity, and they humanise their author in a way that few ancient texts do.) When his recall was engineered in 57, he rebounded from despair, landing at Brindisi to mass adulation and conducting his slow progress back to Rome as if it were a triumphal procession. A vote of the Senate restored his properties and ordered that reparations be made for his losses. The father of his country gloried in the prospect of reclaiming his position at the centre of affairs.

It didn’t happen. Pompey and Crassus were alarmed at Caesar’s Gallic successes, but the three repaired their alliance in 56. Rather than be shut out of public affairs, Cicero dropped his attacks on various legal measures passed by Caesar during his consulship and instead won him a public thanksgiving for his victories in Gaul. Cicero now divided his time between philosophical compositions and the legal defence of Pompey and Caesar’s allies. On the Orator represents this first great burst of theoretical writing. In it, Cicero’s semi-autobiographical thoughts about oratory and politics are disguised as a philosophical dialogue among the great orators of the previous generation. Not long afterwards, he published On the Commonwealth, an immediate success, and a sort of supplement to it, On Laws, set in the present and organised as a dialogue between Cicero, his brother and Pomponius Atticus on the nature of justice and the legal reforms called for by the present political moment.

Meanwhile,​ the violence in the Roman street continued, culminating in the murder of Clodius and the burning of the Curia. It revealed Cicero to be a diminished figure. In the spring of 51, as one of the few ex-consuls then eligible, he reluctantly accepted a provincial command in Cilicia, in what is now south-eastern Turkey. He saw some fighting against brigands and mountain tribes, and against the Parthians who had defeated and killed Crassus at Carrhae two years earlier. He returned to Rome in January 49, after a six-month journey via Rhodes and Athens, but stayed outside the sacred boundary of the city in the hope of being granted a formal triumph. He was, once again, disappointed. By now, Pompey and Caesar had broken with each other: in 50, Pompey, after much vacillation, had sided with senatorial hardliners in demanding that Caesar lay down his command and return to Rome, where he would be open to every sort of prosecution. Caesar cast his die and crossed the Rubicon, precipitating two decades of civil war that would bring down the republic and usher in autocracy.

In his six remaining years of life, Cicero was at both his self-deluding worst and his sublimely determined best. When Pompey and most of the Senate retreated south from Rome and then went to Greece, Cicero temporised before fleeing the city ahead of Caesar’s arrival. Caesar would have welcomed Cicero, as one of the few senior senators still in Italy, and Cicero toyed with the possibility of bringing a moderating influence to bear on the conqueror’s regime. Instead, he sailed to Dyrrachium, the most important Greek city on the Adriatic coast (now Dürres in Albania), and joined the Pompeians, reluctantly accompanying their querulous and self-sabotaging senatorial command to Thessaly, where they were routed by Caesar at Pharsalus.

Demonstrating his usual – if at times inglorious – talent for survival, Cicero abandoned the struggle and returned to Italy. He was never forgiven by the hardliners, and never fully trusted by the Caesarian side. He enjoyed the protection of Caesar’s famous clementia and tested it ostentatiously with a panegyric on the dead Cato, who had already begun his reincarnation as a republican martyr. Caesar, holding all the cards and thus capable of tolerance, replied in a lost Anti-Cato that, one suspects, was a truer assessment of that rancorous fanatic. Normal politics having been suspended, Cicero cultivated his many friendships – the web of amicitia that bound Roman elites together and frequently saved them in moments of danger. The flow of masterly philosophical works, some with politically significant dedications, became a torrent. The Brutus recounted the history of Roman oratory in dialogue form, while the Stoic Paradoxes were imaginary orations on philosophical doctrines. Having divorced Terentia – he blamed her for not working hard enough for his recall during his exile, and they had become estranged during his absences in Cilicia and with the Pompeians – he now lost his beloved daughter, Tullia, in February 45. Among other treatises, he wrote a Consolation, which doesn’t survive, and the Tusculan Disputations, at some level also a consolation, set in formal philosophical terms, as well as On the Nature of the Gods, which pits an Epicurean, a Stoic and a sceptic against one another.

Despite his assiduity, Cicero could not regain his standing in politics. The conspirators against Caesar did not include him in plotting the assassination they carried out on the Ides of March 44 BC. They assumed they had his sympathies but distrusted his constancy, and they had the measure of their man. As Mark Antony performed his inheritance of the Caesarian faction and incited the mob against the assassins, Cicero tried to broker a truce. Cowardice was and is imputed to him here, but we should instead find evidence of a sincere devotion to the ideals of concord and compromise as well as a habit of overestimating his own talents for charting the middle path. Mark Antony was in no mood for generosity, but he allowed the conspirators, or self-styled Liberators, to flee unmolested so that all Caesar’s measures could stand – and so that he could promulgate, or manufacture, others that the dictator had intended to issue before his death.

But then Antony, Cicero and everyone else were wrong-footed by the appearance of Gaius Octavius, Caesar’s great-nephew and heir, soon to style himself Caesar’s adoptive son. Some have argued otherwise, discerning a faint but steely realism in Cicero’s assessment of the future Augustus, but really it is hard to deny how thoroughly he underestimated Octavius, divi filius, son of the deified Caesar. Cicero saw in him a useful tool, an implement with which to short-circuit faction and rid the republic of Antony, whom Cicero had wished murdered alongside Caesar. The triumphant Caesar had been a prodigy, but Antony was just a man, the very type of the Roman nobilis. Cicero’s Philippics against him – a reference to the broadsides written by the Athenian Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon – are a tour de force, more so even than the Catilinarians, from whose invective they borrow liberally. The undelivered though widely circulated second Philippic is the Cicero one remembers and returns to. Hyperbolic to the point of absurdity, not quite pornographic in its catalogue of Antonian depravity, it exemplifies the Roman mastery of invective. Cicero believed he was fighting for the life of the republic, and this spirit of existential struggle imbues common rhetorical tropes with a power they would not otherwise have. Whether Cicero knew he was putting his life on the line is much less clear. He had self-dramatised his own mortal peril too many times for us to know whether he realised that this was the war of words that would get him killed.

Following Caesar’s murder, friendships and enmities shifted, and battlefields produced surprising alliances. When Caesar’s heir formed an alliance with Antony and the noble Aemilius Lepidus, other eminent Caesarians having perished, Cicero may still have reckoned himself safe. Had he not nurtured and counselled and smoothed the path to power for the teenage Gaius Octavius? He was not safe. Few men in history have been as willing as the divi filius to discard those no longer useful to them, however dear they might have been – something that must be admitted, no matter how highly one rates the foresight with which Augustus brought the peaceful order of autocracy to the chaos of aristocratic freedom.

Antony, Lepidus and the young Caesar created themselves triumviri rei publicae constituendae, triple magistrates for state restoration. Their only shared goal was revenge on the Liberators. Caesar’s murder had taught them that failing to proscribe one’s enemies was the sheerest folly. In the semi-legal massacres that followed, there was plenty of space for denunciation, opportunism and the prosecution of private grudges. (Cicero’s old enemy Verres was among the hundreds killed.) The triumvirs traded death sentences without regard to former loyalties and as their own advantage demanded. Whatever Octavian might have owed the pater patriae, it counted for less than Antony’s implacable desire for vengeance.

Cicero faced his end with the gravity and self-possession that often eluded him in less mortal crises, baring his neck for the executioner’s blade. It is the locus classicus for a type of statesman martyr, from the late Roman general Stilicho to Thomas Becket and Charles I: with whatever ambivalence they attended its prelude, they faced their end with composure, for the good of the state and the glory of posterity. The barbarity of Antony’s vengeance – the hand that wrote and the tongue that pronounced the Philippics were nailed to the rostra in the Roman Forum – did less to guarantee Cicero’s immortality than his extraordinary writings, which are here given their due. The roll call of eminent Ciceronians is longer even than the book with which Dyck has cemented his place in it.