#Imperator rome cicero pro#
#Imperator rome cicero free#

The lex proposed by the tribune Manilius transferred supreme command of the war between Rome and Mithridates VI, the king of Pontus, to Gnaeus Pompeius (or ‘Pompey’), already then known as ‘the Great’( Magnus) – but also, less flatteringly, as adulescens carnifex (‘youthful butcher’), a sobriquet he acquired for his role in the civil wars on Sulla’s side.

#Imperator rome cicero pro#

(This is no exaggeration: after Brutus had sunk his dagger into Caesar on the Ides of March 44, he lifted his bloodied weapon in the air and called out: ‘Cicero!’) Yet in 66 BC, Cicero gave a speech, the pro lege Manilia or de imperio Gnaei Pompei, in support of a bill designed to give extraordinary powers to one of Sulla’s most notorious lieutenants, whom many suspected of desiring to pick up the mantle of the former dictator.

#Imperator rome cicero free#

For a literary description of a sparagmos see your verse set text, (.)ģCicero, then, went down in history as the incarnation of the free republic. 3 For a biography that pays due attention to the lurid and the sensational see (2009).His speeches and treatises (and there are lots of them!) are filled with outbursts against ‘the tyrants’ of the late republic, who abused power, allegedly aimed at kingship, and sought to bring down the state: Verres, Catiline, Clodius, Caesar, Mark Antony – with Sulla figuring as the archetype of them all. These constituted his last-ditch effort of a lifetime dedicated to the fight against the political ‘monsters’(his idiom) that he perceived as threats to his beloved res publica, which he identified with the senatorial tradition of republican government. Ironically, Cicero lost his head at the hands of a clique he himself had helped to bring to power via his initial support of the young Octavian and his uncompromising stance towards Mark Antony in his last set of speeches, the Philippics. Octavian, the future princeps Augustus), Mark Antony, and Lepidus again opted to ‘proscribe’ enemies: and their most famous victim was none other than Cicero. Arguably, his entire political career and intellectual efforts unfolded under the banner: ‘History Must Not Repeat Itself! Proscriptions? Never Again!’ 2 History, of course, did repeat itself: in 43 BC, the second triumvirate of Caesar Octavianus (a.k.a.

As Plutarch puts it in his Life of Sulla (31.1): ‘Sulla now busied himself with slaughter and filled the city with deaths without number or limit.’ĢCicero seems to have found Sulla’s civic bloodshed deeply disturbing. ( Mutatis mutandis, such ‘hit lists’ seem to have remained in fashion ever since.) He used this procedure to purge the Roman elite of his personal enemies: several thousands lost their lives, slaughtered in cold blood. Once Sulla had crushed armed resistance in the first full-blown civil war that Rome experienced (it proved trend-setting.), he proceeded to ‘proscriptions’ – the drafting of lists that contained the names of alleged enemies of the res publica, who then could be killed on sight. 1 The dictator introduced a new practice into Roman politics: the mass-slaughter of Roman citizens by Roman citizens – and not just on the battlefield. 1 His earliest surviving speech, in defence of Publius Quinctius in a civil law suit, dates to 81.ġBorn in 106 BC, Cicero reached his political maturity during a nasty period in Roman history: the reign of Sulla (82-79 BC).