I Read a Book!

Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician by Anthony Everitt.

I listen to loads of music and love writing about that, which may be what brought you to this blog/newsletter. But, I also read a lot of books, in a random and impulsive manner, so why not share what I say about them here.

It's always nice to be immersed in Roman political histories, and as I had read the life of Augustus a year or more ago, I enjoyed seeing a good chunk of the story from another point of view.

Cicero was a conservative politician at a time of immense political change. The government of Rome was kind of messy when it came to making things work for an enormous empire. Cicero did what he could to fight off change, but then Julius Caesar became Dictator for Life, and uh-oh. Time to write what is considered to be the greatest compendium of philosophical thought up to that point in history, works which apparently helped keep Greek philosophy in the forefront of the Western world for centuries to come.

You may have heard Caesar was killed, by a number of senators and et tu, Brute. Then Marc Antony came along to praise Caesar. Well, the Civil War that followed was much more complicated than that, and Cicero had to switch off between fear for his life and attempting to manipulate different forces until he devised a plan to save the Republic that - well, it would have worked if it weren't for those meddling armies killing off two Consuls within a matter of days and leaving a power vacuum that Augustus, then known as Octavian, was able to fill. Soon thereafter, it was off with Cicero's head.

Everitt does a great job of telling the story as clearly as possible given the enormous cast of characters flitting in and out of the narrative. Not all of Cicero's writing and oration survived into history, but enough of it did to give us plenty of detail on his life and relation to its times. I know there are many books on the subject, but I'm glad I stumbled on this one.