Cicero In and On Political Crises

Cicero in and on Political Crises

Melissa Lane, Gresham Professor of Rhetoric

11 June 2026

Abstract

An enthusiast of the Roman mixed constitution, Cicero was elected consul and in that role dramatically curbed the tyrannical ambitions of Catiline. He would later become fatally embroiled in the shifting politics of later generations of ambitious strongmen, while also writing his own theories of constitutional change. This lecture explores Cicero’s life and death as a way to articulate the crises of the late republic. 

Introduction

‘Ought a man to remain in his country while it is tyrannized? Ought he to strive for the overthrow of a tyranny by every means, even if the existence of the state is going to be endangered thereby?... Ought a statesman to live quietly in retirement while his country is under a tyranny or ought he to take every risk for freedom’s sake?... Ought a man who has rendered his country great service and has on that account brought himself irreparable suffering and hostility voluntarily to incur danger on his country’s behalf, or may he be allowed to begin to think of himself and his family, giving up political opposition to those in power?’[1]

Cicero asked himself these questions in a letter to his close friend Atticus written on 12 March 49. In fact, he asked himself these questions in Greek, switching from his everyday Latin, perhaps to highlight – as scholars have suggested – ‘just how alien are the circumstances in which he finds himself’:[2] insofar as ‘“being subject to a tyrant [was] a typically Greek rather than Roman situation”’.[3] Romans had long prided themselves on their freedom from tyranny, having won aequa libertas (‘equal liberty’) in 509 BCE when the last in a line of kings was expelled. Yet when Cicero was writing in the year 49 BCE, he and his fellows were confronting the rise of Julius Caesar, whom Cicero saw in this moment precisely as a looming tyrant. 

To be sure, the relationship between the two men was complex: they shared literary interests, and at times, a wary mutual admiration. But Cicero would diagnose Caesar as having been fatally corrupted by his ambition: ‘men are led most of all to being overwhelmed by forgetfulness of justice when they slip into desiring positions of command or honour or glory’ (Off. 1.26, giving Gaius Iulius [usually transliterated into English as Julius] Caesar as a specific example). 

Who was Cicero? Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) was known in Roman politics as a novus homo (a “new man”) from Arpinum, a city outside Rome. The people of Arpinum had only been granted full voting citizenship in Rome about a century before his birth (in 188 BCE, having been granted citizenship sine suffragio in 304 BCE). And Cicero was somewhat socially disadvantaged by being born to a father who was an eques or ‘knight’, as opposed to the highest-rank aristocratic ‘patricians’. Nevertheless, as an ambitious and assiduous student of philosophy and rhetoric, who had made what was becoming a standard educational pilgrimage to Athens as a young man, Cicero impressed the public as a legal advocate and climbed the ranks of political office as an elected magistrate: 

‘Evidence that Cicero really knew the ropes is found in his remarkable success at attaining the necessary offices of the cursus honorum [the ladder of Roman political offices], each at the earliest possible age, and thus positioning himself to run for Rome’s highest office, consul, at his initial age of eligibility’.[4]

Moreover, more than anyone else, Cicero was responsible for adapting and transforming the philosophical and political frameworks of ancient Greek thought to make them bear on Roman life and in writing in Latin (while also, as we have already seen, sometimes continuing to engage them in Greek). He translated technical Greek terms for the first time, and produced expanded metaphors and conceptual innovations drawing on Roman law and experience. Such translation of Greek ideas into Roman vocabularies and contexts transformed them in the process.[5]

Yet in his own mind, Cicero was first and foremost a servant of the public realm or commonwealth, the republic, the res publica (literally, the thing or affair of the people, their common possession). He insisted that ‘virtue is not some kind of knowledge to be possessed without using it…[It] consists entirely in its employment…[its] most important employment is the governance of states… accomplishment in deeds rather than words of…[what] philosophers talk about in their corners’ (Rep. 1.2).[6] Thus, while writing philosophy throughout his life, Cicero did so most intensively, and distinctively, in periods when his full participation in political life was circumscribed by exile or military and political turmoil. In those periods, ‘[w]riting, and the writing of philosophy in particular, became not a facet of his political life [as in the 50s], but rather an alternate way of being in politics, a substitution that he struggled to construct as viable’.[7] Cicero wrote in a letter to the scholar Varro in 46 B.C. that ‘we must serve the state in our libraries, if we cannot in Senate House and Forum’ (Fam. 9.2.5).[8] But even then, he asserted that ‘only so much time can be given to philosophy as will not be needed in the discharge of my duty to the commonwealth’ (Div. 2.7).[9] 

Back to Cicero’s bout of self-questioning in Greek in 49 BCE. As Malcolm Schofield has pointed out, soon afterward, when Caesar had fully consolidated his power in the battle of Pharsalus in 48, Cicero ‘concluded…that attempting to fight on would be pointless and needlessly destructive’, and so ‘effectively replied…in the affirmative, at any rate for himself. Staying in his own country, even though it was now under tyrannical rule, was the right course’.[10] That decision might have seemed to be rewarded by the course of events: as Caesar would be murdered by Brutus and Cassius and a group of other Roman on 15 March 44 BCE. Yet that did not leave Cicero safe. Far from it. He himself would eventually be murdered on the orders of a triumvirate that included Mark Antony (Marcus Antonius), who had quickly turned the tide of popular opinion against Caesar’s ‘tyrannicides’ and those, like Cicero, who celebrated their act. 

These were only two of the political crises that Cicero navigated in the course of a tumultuous life, lived out almost entirely in the first century BCE, in the shadow of the profound changes in Roman politics that had happened in the previous century, beginning just over a decade after the remarkable consolidation of Roman power in sacking Carthage, defeating Corinth, and dissolving the Greek Achaean League in 146 BCE.[11] This lecture will highlight five crises: 

1. The shadow of crisis in the previous generation: Cicero’s retrospective commentary on the crisis of Tiberius Gracchus (followed by his brother) in the generation before his own birth
2. The political crisis of Cicero’s early life: Sulla
3. The political crisis of Cicero’s consulate: Catiline
4. The political crisis of Julius Caesar’s rise to power: in Cicero’s terms, ‘tyranny’
5. The political crisis after Caesar’s assassination: Cicero vs Antony. 

Each one of these episodes raises a fundamental question about how to protect a political order that is vulnerable to being undermined: whether a flexible response is best, or whether an uncompromising commitment to past norms is better. Like Demosthenes, to whom Cicero has been compared since antiquity,[12] Cicero was at once conscious of threats to the very basis of the political order that he served, while also arguably having been complicit in the burgeoning of some of those very threats himself. Such threats would never cease. A generation later, Seneca, tutor of the emperor Nero on whose orders he would eventually commit suicide,  would take up the topos of ‘“Cicero considers whether he should beg Antony for mercy”’, as a means of reflecting on ‘the ethics of negotiating with a tyrant in order to save one's life’.[13] 

1. The Long Shadow of History: Cicero on the Gracchi 

The long shadow of history: in 133 BCE, the tribune Tiberius Gracchus was murdered by a group of patrician Senators, for having pushed for land reform to benefit the poor, by redistributing public lands that had been effectively appropriated and privatised by the wealthy. Tiberius took drastic measures to push it through, including securing an unprecedented vote to remove a consul from office, and seeking a second term for himself. These were seen by many as violating legal and political norms, while the land reform itself was widely felt as an attack on the prerogatives of the elite. 

All that said, Tiberius’ assassination, at an electoral assembly, was profoundly shocking in its turn: not least because the chief assassin, Scipio Nasica, was both his cousin and the pontifex maximus, meaning that the act was a religious breach and as such, a source of civic pollution.[14] Yet his legacy would be profound in reshaping the terms of Roman politics. 

The land reform itself had been successful for a time. Harriet Flower has observed that ‘the agrarian reform passed by Tiberius [Gracchus] did go into effect shortly after it was passed’ and that there were effective Gracchan land commissioners for a few years.[15] Nevertheless, the cause of land reform would remain a flashpoint for decades afterward. Moreover, other political reforms favourable to the common people (the ‘plebeians’) had been introduced in that decade and afterward, including the gradual introduction of secret ballots across the various Roman voting assemblies. Harriet Flower has called this a ‘political revolution’, observing that  ‘[t]he very concept of a secret ballot recalibrated the balance of power in Roman politics as envisioned by Polybius’;[16] another scholar has argued that this was a ‘radical’ and ‘democratic’ ‘innovation’, ‘lessening the control of the upper classes over the electorate, and enhancing the voters' effective freedom of choice’.[17] Thus the Gracchi were part of a wider effort to challenge elite prerogatives in this epoch. 

All this would be opposed by Cicero, who saw the era of the Gracchi as the crucial moment from which a divide between two groups of political actors in Rome ensued. The Gracchi represented the populares, literally the ‘supporters of the people’, who were generally elite actors (of some kind) but who spoke for concerns that less elite people generally shared. Their opponents were self-anointed as the optimates, the self-anointed ‘best men’, mainly a conservative elite. And that was the group with whom Cicero broadly identified himself. He would challenge the secret ballot in On the Laws (3.33-39). He would attack land reform when it was proposed again by a tribune in his own day (in 64 BCE), vehemently criticizing it in a set of speeches ‘on the agrarian laws’. And speaking in his own voice as a character in his dialogue Brutus, Cicero would celebrate the assassination of Tiberius Gracchus for having ‘freed the res publica from the domination of Tiberius Gracchus’.[18]

In fact, Cicero’s speeches ‘on the agrarian laws’ hinged on a further fateful trope both for him and for Rome. Cicero accused the populist tribune Rullus who was proposing land reform of claiming to be a champion of the people, while insisting that it is Cicero himself who is the single true champion of the people, against the mere pretenders to that role: ‘What is so welcome to the people as peace...What is so welcome to the people as liberty... How then can I help being on the side of the people, Romans, when I see that all these things…were entrusted to my keeping and…to the protection of my consulship?’.[19] Bear this manoeuvre in mind; we will meet it again. 

2. The Political Crisis of Cicero’s Early Life: Sulla 

About four decades after the Gracchi, Cicero as a young man lived through a subsequent crisis of great significance in the political history of Rome: a civil war between two generals, Marius and Sulla, roughly representing the populares and the optimates respectively. Having marched on Rome itself, Sulla won appointment as ‘dictator’ without time limit (something unprecedented in Roman history, in which a dictatorship had long been possible as a strictly emergency measure). 

Sulla’s victory involved bloody revenge. At one moment, as Plutarch later wrote:

‘He summoned the Senate to meet in the Temple of Bellona. Just as he began to speak, by arrangement his men began to execute the six thousand [sc. prisoners]. The noise of so many men being slaughtered in a small area was audible and the senators were terrified; but Sulla continued to speak with an unchanged and immoveable expression and instructed them to pay attention to what he was saying and not to worry about what was taking place outside; some wrong-doers were receiving correction, on his orders’.[20] 

Sulla saw himself as a ‘lawgiver’ who was self-consciously establishing a new constitution.[21] Among his most consequential measures was requiring Senate approval of all legislative proposals made by the popular tribunes. Whereas previously the tribunes had had the power to propose new laws directly to the popular assemblies for ratification, from that point onward those assemblies could only ‘ratify laws that had already been approved by the senate and that were proposed by the highest magistrates’.[22]

Sulla voluntarily stepped down as dictator in 79 BCE, and his reforms would be overturned within a decade. But he had proven that one could seize political power at the heart of Rome by force, and use that power to rewrite the basic legal and constitutional compact. And his use of force set a further chilling precedent. After indulging in straight-out massacres, he pioneered the use of ‘proscription’: the publication of a list of enemies of the state, with drastic consequences for those named. As Catherine Steel has written: 

‘The property of the proscribed became the state’s; they themselves lost the state’s promise of protection in case of violence; and the citizen rights of their male descendants, for two generations, were curtailed’.[23]

Steel adds that Sulla ‘attempted to revoke the citizen status of some of the communities which had opposed him’.[24] It is sobering in this light that Elon Musk mused on X on 13 June 2023, ‘Perhaps we just need a modern day Sulla’.[25] 

As a relatively young legal advocate, Cicero defended some of those caught up in the consequences of the proscriptions and in the toils of Sulla’s influence more generally (e.g. Sextus Roscius of America in Rosc. Am.). And while he himself came through personally unscathed, this first civil war would cast a long shadow.  While Sulla’s formal legal changes would be rolled back, the possibility of changing fundamental aspects of the constitution through violence had been proven real. Thus in subsequent decades, as Plutarch would suggest, there would be others who ‘sought to agitate and change the existing status for the sake of their own gain, and not for the best interests of the state’.[26]

3. The Political Crisis of Cicero’s Consulate: Catiline 

Less than a quarter-century after Sulla’s dictatorship, Cicero would be elected consul on his first try, having been (in Plutarch’s words) ‘advanced to the consulship no less by the aristocrats than by the common people, and in the interests of the city’.[27] Cicero owed his nomination to widespread concern about an aristocratic senator Lucius Sergius Catilina (commonly referred to in English as Catiline), an erstwhile partisan of Sulla who was already known for vice and ambition. And while Cicero outflanked Catiline in that election,[28] that did not end the matter. On the contrary: Catiline launched an attempted coup in the midst of Cicero’s year in office (in 63 BCE), radicalizing the optimates platform while also attempting to recruit the masses by promising debt relief. 

The discovery of the conspiracy was sensational (if more gradual than one might expect) – it would make a great film, involving leaks, defectors, and visiting tribes. And as consul, Cicero chose to use extraordinary powers to suppress it. He secured a resolution of the Senate (a senatus consultum ultimum, the same meansthat had been used against Tiberius Gracchus), to put some of the conspirators to death immediately without the public trial that was legally required for state crimes (iudicia populi).[29] This decision would be fateful for Cicero himself. He would be ‘accused of tyrannical behaviour’ in this act, especially ironic since as a young advocate he had himself invoked the law protecting against death without trial.[30] The memory of his own actions would complicate the public view of his later opposition to Julius Caesar as a tyrant. 

In the immediate aftermath of the Catilinian conspiracy, however, Cicero was a hero: awarded the honorific title of pater patriae (‘father of his country’) by his fellow senators. Yet within a year, even this celebratory mood would sour. When Sulla’s nephew (Publius Cornelius Sulla) was prosecuted for having supported Catiline, Cicero ended up joining his defence team – leading the prosecutor to charge Cicero himself with effectively ‘establishing a tyranny over Rome’s courts: by his very appearance, for or against a man, Cicero could determine who was acquitted, and who was condemned’.[31] Indeed, Cicero’s role in defending Sulla’s nephew came to seem not only overly ambitious but also overtly corrupt. The scholar Kathryn Tempest observes that Publius Sulla’s acquittal ‘was all too conspicuously followed by Cicero’s purchase of a very expensive house…on the Palatine hill…’ bought, as Cicero said, with the help of a very large ‘loan’ from his grateful client.[32] 

4. The Political Crisis of Julius Caesar’s rise to power: in Cicero’s terms, ‘tyranny’ 

While Catiline’s conspiracy had been nipped in the bud, civil war came again to Rome just decades later. After multiple twists and turns, Julius Caesar was victorious in a struggle with Pompey. According to the ancient historian Appian, Caesar was: 

‘chosen dictator for life and consul for ten years, and his person was declared sacred and inviolable. It was decreed that he should transact business on a throne of ivory and gold; that he should himself sacrifice always in triumphal costume; that each year the city should celebrate the days on which he had won his victories; that every five years priests and Vestal virgins should offer up public prayers for his safety; and that the magistrates immediately upon their inauguration should take an oath not to oppose any of Caesar's decrees’.[33] 

The ceremonial trappings looked a lot like kingship, indeed, like prototypes of the foreign monarchs whom Romans disdained. Moreover, serving as ‘dictator for life’ was effectively to make Caesar into a tyrant, freed of any term limits or legal restraints. 

Many members of the Senate were alarmed by these developments and more. A conspiracy formed, led by Brutus and Cassius. Cicero was not invited to join them in the act (according to Plutarch (Cic. 42.2), they thought him too cowardly and too old). But he was there on the day at the fateful Senate meeting, and dramatic scenes ensued: 

‘Then Brutus walked to the center of the hall. He brandished his dagger, shouted for Cicero by name and congratulated him on the recovery of freedom. The retired statesman, who had apparently made peace with the tyrant, was suddenly pushed to center stage. Hitherto scarcely able to believe his eyes, he could now scarcely believe his ears. It was as if the assassination had been staged especially for him—as a particularly savage benefit performance’.[34]

Cicero quickly took the opportunity to propose a rapprochement, ‘persuad[ing] the senate to imitate the Athenians⁠ [in passing reconciliation with the erstwhile oligarchs after restoring democracy in 403 BCE] and decree an amnesty for the attack upon Caesar, and to assign provinces to Cassius and Brutus’.[35] But, continues Plutarch, ‘none of these things came to pass’: 

‘For when the people, who of themselves were strongly moved to pity, saw Caesar's body carried through the forum, and when Antony showed them the garments drenched with blood and pierced everywhere with the swords, they went mad with rage and sought for the murderers in the forum, and ran to their houses with fire-brands in order to set them ablaze’.[36]

While the conspirators escaped, Antony was now clearly in the ascendance, weaponizing Caesar’s death while giving a different answer from Cicero to the crucial question: ‘whether Caesar's assassins were to be called murderers (homicidae) or liberators (vindices libertatis)’.[37] 

5. The Political Crisis following the death of Julius Caesar

Cicero doubled down in his defence of the tyrannicides – and in his opposition to Antony. In his philosophical writings in the wake of the assassination, Cicero would compare ‘tyrannicide’ to killing a wild beast (On Duties): 

‘...there can be no fellowship between us and tyrants—on the contrary there is a complete estrangement—and it is not contrary to nature to rob a man, if you are able, whom it is honourable to kill.  Indeed, the whole pestilential and irreverent class ought to be expelled from the community of mankind. For just as some limbs are amputated, if they begin to lose their blood and their life, as it were, and are harming the other parts of the body, similarly if the wildness and monstrousness of a beast appears in human form, it must be removed from the common humanity, so to speak, of the body’ (Off. 3.32).[38] 

The tyrant was in Cicero’s portrait someone who had themselves resorted to force, forsaking the tools of speech and persuasion that define human political life (Sest. 92). For Cicero, the dedicated orator, persuasive speech was a ‘gift’ that has ‘united us in the bonds of justice, law and civil order…[and] has separated us from savagery and barbarism’ (De Natura Deorum 2.148).

While making his case philosophically, Cicero was also desperately seeking to make it politically: attacking Antony as the newest aspiring tyrant in a series of speeches (some delivered, some merely written) that the orator named his Philippics (so called in homage to Demosthenes’ legendary attacks on Philip of Macedon three centuries before). In these speeches Cicero insisted that (in the words of scholar Henriette van der Blom) any citizen ‘who goes against the interests of the res publica…should be declared a hostis and thereby stripped of his citizenship’. Indeed, as van der Blom observes, at one point he went further, arguing (in his words) that ‘such a person ought to be excluded from membership in the human race, banished beyond the confines of human nature’.[39] 

Such ‘dehumanising’, as van der Blom calls it, is akin to Sulla’s proscriptions (and ironically to the proscription which would be directed against Cicero himself).[40] Dehumanization is a well-known and profound threat to political life, and indeed, to human lives.[41] And so we come to the irony: while casting himself as a defender of the republic, Cicero’s own actions and rhetoric – from at least the suppression of Catiline’s conspiracy onward, and even before, arguably contributed to the very polarization from which he himself would suffer. 

Before I develop those thoughts in conclusion, let us track Cicero to that suffering end. The orator’s uncompromising opposition to Antony would prove his undoing. When Antony joined forces with Lepidus and Octavian, this new ‘Second Triumvirate’ cemented their alliance by agreeing on a new list of proscriptions – following in Sulla’s footsteps. Each of the three insisted on a name that one or other of their partners might otherwise have sought to protect. In Cicero’s case, it was Antony who insisted that he be put on the list, overcoming Octavian’s partial and intermittent fond respect for the philosopher. 

Assassins were duly sent out (just as they were for Demosthenes, as we saw in my third Gresham lecture in this series), and they eventually caught up with Cicero in the countryside. Plutarch writes: 

‘Herennius cut off his head, by Antony's command, and his hands — the hands with which he wrote the Philippics’.[42]

And he continues: 

‘When Cicero's extremities were brought to Rome, it chanced that Antony was conducting an election, but when he heard of their arrival and saw them, he cried out, "Now let our proscriptions have an end." Then he ordered the head and hands to be placed over the ships' beaks on the rostra, a sight that made the Romans shudder; for they thought they saw there, not the face of Cicero, but an image of the soul of Antony’.[43] 

Thus Cicero gave his life for the Republic, as he had long promised that he was willing to do: ‘I defended the Republic when I was young; I shall not desert it now that I am old…I should be happy to offer my body if my death can bring into reality the freedom of our state… ’.[44] 

Conclusion 

How then should we assess Cicero? In his own eyes, and those of some modern scholars, he was the hero of the republic, seeking to protect its political norms against those who traduced and betrayed them. As Cicero himself put it in an immodest poetic paean to his own achievements as consul (de Consulatu Suo, preserved in Div. 1.11-13, trans. C.D. Yonge): ‘you have been by virtue placed, To save your country, in the imminent breach’. He sought to fashion himself as the ideal rector rei publicae of whom he wrote in On the Commonwealth.  

Yet it is clear that he was never entirely above the fray. He was a partisan of the optimates in crucial respects, even as he rejected or refashioned some of their political commitments (in defending the tribunate when writing of an ideally reformed Roman law code, for example). As we have seen, his own action in putting members of the Catilinarian conspiracy to death without trial was illegal on the face of it and a disturbing precedent. And his willingness to benefit from a rich client in the aftermath scandalized his contemporaries at the time. 

Some scholars have gone even further in criticizing Cicero. They charge him with having used rhetoric so as to provoke, or at least implicitly legitimate, violence; as Joy Connolly writes, Cicero at times ‘exploits violence for his own ends’.[45] The all-or-nothing tenor of Cicero’s rhetoric in such speeches has been compared to that of the Athenian orator Demosthenes, insofar as both engage in a ‘polarization of the conflict into a dichotomy between good and evil, right and wrong, which is often simplistic in its approach’, resulting in ‘the orator’s intractability, his refusal to compromise or to deal with the enemy’.[46]

Ingo Gildenhard has identified a specific trope that Cicero used to achieve this polarization: namely, redefining political offices and values according to his own philosophical understanding, stripping those who might hold those offices unworthily of the title of holding them at all. For example, the Roman orator argued at one point (returning from exile in 57 BCE) that two consuls were ‘not consuls, but robbers’ (non consules, sed latrones).[47] And in the Philippics, he repeatedly insisted that Antony had forfeited his claim to the consulate as well, urging his fellow citizens that: 

‘you ought not to have regarded Marcus Antonius as consul after the Feast of Lupercal: on that day, when before the eyes of the Roman people he made a public speech naked, oiled, and drunk and tried to place a diadem on his colleague, on that day he not only abdicated the consulship but his personal freedom as well…Am I then to think of him as a consul, as a Roman citizen, as a free man, or even as a human being…? ’[48] 

In Gildenhard’s view, this kind of appeal ‘to a civic ethics, on the basis of which he reconfigures Rome's public sphere by differentiating between “true” and “counterfeit” institutions', in fact ‘resemble[d] autocratic actions’, and gave rise to a ‘rhetoric of holy war, exclusion, and extermination’.[49] Gildenhard continued: 

‘His rhetoric of demonization...jarred with the political culture of the Roman republic. In many ways his ethical fundamentalism...formed the rhetorical equivalent to the suicidal violence of civil conflict. Cicero conceived of himself as standing in the front line of a war against internal enemies; but… he may have been one of the gravediggers of the republic’.[50] 

Amy Russell has recently put a similar challenge to the cult of Cicero: 

‘if we have to point the finger of blame at anyone it must be at the Ciceros: those who created an artificial structure that denied the existence of an alternative and sapped the Republic of its flexibility. Once it could not bend, it broke’.[51] 

Cicero gave his life to protect the Republic as he understood it. But the rhetorical habits he forged to defend the Republic (e.g. claiming unique access to the people's true interests, casting opponents as enemies of the people rather than legitimate political rivals, drawing an ever-tightening circle around who counted as part of the res publica) were themselves destabilizing, dehumanizing and dangerous. In the very act of defending Republican norms, Cicero modelled a style of politics that those norms could not survive.[52] 

©️Professor Melissa Lane, 2026

References, Footnotes and Further Reading 

Ancient Primary Sources: Translations and Commentaries

Appian. Roman History, vol. IV: Civil Wars, Books 1-2, ed. and trans. Brian McGing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.

Cicero. Brutus. Orator, translated by G. L. Hendrickson, H. M. Hubbell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939.

Cicero. On the Commonwealth & On the Laws, trans. J. Zetzel, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Cicero, On Duties, eds. M.T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins; trans. E. M. Atkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Cicero. Letters to Atticus, ed. and trans. D.R. Shackleton Bailey, 4 vols. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999. 

Cicero. Letters to Friends, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Cicero. On Old Age. On Friendship. On Divination, trans. W. A. Falconer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923.

Cicero. Philippics 1-6, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, revised by John T. Ramsey and Gesine Manuwald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)

Cicero. Philippics 7-14, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, revised by John T. Ramsey and Gesine Manuwald. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Cicero. Pro Quinctio. Pro Roscio Amerino. Pro Roscio Comoedo. Pro Tullio. De Lege Agraria, ed. and trans. Andrew R. Dyck. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2025. 

Plutarch. Lives, Volume VII: Demosthenes and Cicero. Alexander and Caesar, trans. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919.

Secondary Sources

Baraz, Yelena. A Written Republic: Cicero's Philosophical Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

van der Blom, Henrietta. ‘Bellum Civile in Cicero: Terminology and Self-fashioning’, in The Historiography of Late Republican Civil War, edited by Carsten Hjort Lange and Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, 110-136. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019. 

Connolly, Joy. The Life of Roman Republicanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Dart, Christopher J., David Rafferty and Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, ‘New Perspectives on Old Problems/Old Perspectives on New Problems’ 4-23, in Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, David Rafferty and Christopher J. Dart (eds), How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond, 4-23. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2025.

Dench, Emma. ‘Cicero and Roman identity’, in Catherine Steel (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Cicero, 122-38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 

Flower, Harriet I. Roman Republics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. 

Gildenhard, Ingo. Creative eloquence: the construction of reality in Cicero's speeches. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Griffin, Miriam T. ‘Latin philosophy and Roman law’, in V. Harte and M. Lane (eds), Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy, 96-115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Lane, Melissa. ‘Plato to Polybius on Constitutional Change’, Gresham Lecture, 28 May 2026: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/plato-polybius. 

McConnell, Sean. Philosophical Life in Cicero's Letters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Morstein–Marx, Robert. Mass oratory and political power in the late Roman Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 

Nicgorski, Walter. ‘Cicero: In and Above the Republic’s Political Culture’, in Valentina Arena and Jonathan Prag (eds) A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic, 125-35. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2022.

Russell, Amy. ‘Consensus Breakdown: Or, How Cicero Was Wrong About Rome, and We Might Be Wrong About America’, in Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, David Rafferty and Christopher J. Dart (eds), How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond, 39-68. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2025.

Salamanca, Emily. ‘Reimagining Political Legitimacy: Ancestral Imagines in the Contional Speeches of Marius and Cicero’, Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 42 (2025) 305–38. Schofield, Malcolm. Cicero: Political Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 

Tempest, Kathryn. Cicero: politics and persuasion in ancient Rome. London: Continuum, 2011.

Wooten, Cecil W. Cicero's Philippics and their Demosthenic model: the rhetoric of crisis. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

Yakobson, Alexander. ‘Secret Ballot and Its Effects in the Late Roman Republic’, Hermes 123 (1995) 426–42. 

Yu, Liya. Vulnerable Minds: the neuropolitics of divided societies. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.

Foornotes

[1] Cic. Att. 9.4.2, in Cicero, Letters to Atticus, ed. and trans. D.R. Shackleton Bailey [modified, Lane], vol. III (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999). 

[2] Malcolm Schofield, Cicero: Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 205. 

[3] Sean McConnell, Philosophical Life in Cicero's Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014),103; quoted by Schofield, Cicero, 205, n.72. 

[4] Walter Nicgorski, ‘Cicero: In and Above the Republic’s Political Culture’, in Valentina Arena and Jonathan Prag (eds) A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic, 125-35 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2022), at 127-8. 

[5] Miriam T. Griffin, ‘Latin philosophy and Roman law’, in V. Harte and M. Lane (eds.), Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 96–115.

[6] Quotations from Cicero’s On the Commonwealth [Rep.] and On the Laws [Leg.] are from Cicero, On the Commonwealth & On the Laws, trans. J. Zetzel, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 

[7] Yelena Baraz, A Written Republic: Cicero's Philosophical Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 9.

[8] Quotations from Cicero’s letters to friends and family are from the relevant Loeb edition: in this case, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Letters to Friends, vol. II, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 

[9] Cicero. On Old Age. On Friendship. On Divination, trans. W. A. Falconer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923).

[10] Schofield, Cicero, 206. 

[11] As discussed in the preceding Gresham Lecture in this series: Melissa Lane, ‘Plato to Polybius on Constitutional Change’, Gresham Lecture, 28 May 2026: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/plato-polybius. 

[12] Antiquity: e.g. Plutarch, Comp. Dem. et Cic.: translations of Plutarch’s Lives of Cicero and Demosthenes, and his Comparison between them, are as in Plutarch. Lives, Volume VII: Demosthenes and Cicero. Alexander and Caesar, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919); Modernity: e.g. Cecil W. Wooten, Cicero's Philippics and their Demosthenic model: the rhetoric of crisis (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). 

[13] Seneca, Suas. 6, as quoted in Emma Dench, ‘Cicero and Roman identity’, in Catherine Steel (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Cicero (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 122-38, at 122. 

[14] Harriet I. Flower, Roman Republics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 82-3. 

[15] In fact, 'the agrarian reform passed by Tiberius did go into effect shortly after it was passed’ and there were actually effective Gracchan land commissioners for a few years: Flower, Roman Republics, 72.   

[16] Flower, Roman Republics, 73 for both quotations. 

[17] Alexander Yakobson, ‘Secret Ballot and Its Effects in the Late Roman Republic’, Hermes 123 (1995): 426–42, at 426 for each of the words and phrases quoted. 

[18] Cic. Brut. 212, trans. G. L. Hendrickson, in Cicero. Brutus. Orator, translated by G. L. Hendrickson, H. M. Hubbell  (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939).

[19] Cic. Agr. 2.9, in Cicero. Pro Quinctio. Pro Roscio Amerino. Pro Roscio Comoedo. Pro Tullio. De Lege Agraria, ed. and trans. Andrew R. Dyck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2025). See Emily Salamanca, ‘Reimagining Political Legitimacy: Ancestral Imagines in the Contional Speeches of Marius and Cicero’, Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 42 (2025): 305–38, who observes (328) that ‘the entire Lege Agraria II is a highly deceptive speech, meant to present a conservative political program through the guise of populist rhetoric and Cicero’s affected popularis self-representation’ (as referenced by Salamanca, she is on that point following Robert Morstein–Marx, Mass oratory and political power in the late Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 194–203)).

[20] Plut. Sull. 31.1-2, as quoted in Catherine Steel, ‘Rethinking Sulla: the case of the Roman Senate’, The Classical Quarterly 64 (2014) 657-668, at 662. 

[21] Flower, Roman Republics, 133, adding, 134, that ‘the Romans did not accept Sulla, partly because the figure of the lawgiver was simply not a part of their political tradition’. 

[22] Flower, Roman Republics, 125. 

[23] Steel, ‘Rethinking Sulla’, 662. 

[24] Steel, ‘Rethinking Sulla’, 662. 

[25] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1668673066115711011?lang=en, linking to an Encyclopedia Britannica article (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sulla), last checked on 8 June 2026; see Christopher J. Dart, David Rafferty and Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, ‘New Perspectives on Old Problems/Old Perspectives on New Problems’ in Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, David Rafferty and Christopher J. Dart (eds), How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond, 4-23 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2025), at 5.

[26] Plut. Cic. 10.2. 

[27] Plut. Cic. 10.1.

[28] Cicero was elected alongside Catiline’s erstwhile running mate; consular candidates were elected to the twin posts individually even though they could campaign as part of a kind of slate. 

[29] Those put to death on Cicero’s orders did not include Catiline himself, who had fled the city and been killed in subsequent fighting outside it. 

[30] Verr. 2.5.163 as discussed in Schofield, Cicero, 5 with n.16. 

[31] Kathryn Tempest, Cicero: politics and persuasion in ancient Rome (London: Continuum, 2011), 105.

[32] Tempest, Cicero, 105, citing Gell. NA 12.12.2.

[33] App. B. Civ. 2.106, in Appian, Roman History, vol. IV: Civil Wars, Books 1-2, ed. and trans. Brian McGing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

[34] Anthony Everitt, Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician, paperback edn (New York: Random House, 2003), 6; also quoted in Baraz, Written Republic, 187.

[35] Plut. Cic. 42.2.

[36] Plut. Cic. 42.3-4.

[37] Ingo Gildenhard, Creative eloquence: the construction of reality in Cicero's speeches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 156, n.39, referring to Cic. Phil. 2.30. 

[38] Translations of Cicero, On Duties (De Officiis) are as in Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Duties, eds. M.T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins; trans. E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

[39] Cic. Phil. 13.1. Translations of Philippics 7-14 are as in Cicero. Philippics 7-14, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, revised by John T. Ramsey and Gesine Manuwald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

[40] Henriette van der Blom, ‘Bellum Civile in Cicero: Terminology and Self-fashioning’, in The Historiography of Late Republican Civil War, edited by Carsten Hjort Lange and Frederik Juliaan Vervaet (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019), 110-136, adding on 117 that  ‘Sulla’s usage of hostis declarations during the civil wars had influenced Cicero’s own language, as shown by Lange and Cornwell’, citing various works by Carsten Hjort Lange and Hannah Cornwell.

[41] See for example Liya Yu, Vulnerable minds: the neuropolitics of divided societies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). 

[42] Plut. Cic. 48.6.

[43] Plut. Cic. 49.1-2. 

[44] Cic. Phil. 2.118, discussed in Tempest, Cicero, 18 with n.9. 

[45] Joy Connolly, The Life of Roman Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 59.

[46] Wooten, Cicero’s Philippics, 169. 

[47] Red. Sen. 10, trans. Lane; discussed in Gildenhard, Creative Eloquence, 9 n.26. 

[48] Cic. Phil. 3.12. Translations of Philippics 1-6 are as in Cicero. Philippics 1-6, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, revised by John T. Ramsey and Gesine Manuwald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); discussed by Gildenhard, Creative Eloquence, 156. 

[49] Gildenhard, Creative Eloquence, 163, 389, 390 respectively. 

[50] Gildenhard, Creative Eloquence, 390. 

[51] Amy Russell ‘Consensus Breakdown: Or, How Cicero Was Wrong About Rome, and We Might Be Wrong About America’, in Vervaet, F., Rafferty, D. and Dart, C. ed. How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond, 39-68 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2025) at 63.

[52] I am grateful to Emily (‘Sal’) Salamanca for suggesting the formulation of this conclusion and for other valuable assistance with the preparation of this lecture. 

Further Reading

Arena, Valentina. Libertas and the practice of politics in the late Roman Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 

Beard, Mary. SPQR: a history of ancient Rome. New York: Liveright, 2015.

Connolly, Joy. The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Connolly, Joy. The Life of Roman Republicanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Everitt, Anthony. Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician, paperback edn (New York: Random House, 2003). 

Tempest, Kathryn. Cicero: politics and persuasion in ancient Rome. London: Continuum, 2011.