Conventional take on Cicero, nothing new
Review of Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician by Anthony Everitt
This is a good undergraduate-level panoramic view, but it does not make the man or his era come to life or add anything new. You get very solid overviews of how the government functioned, what people believed in, and how a major politician (and far better writer) tried to mold things in his own way. It’s essentially the version that Cicero and a few of his contemporaries present of themselves, which is bound to be wrapped up in propaganda. As a classics major, I knew all of this already. There are the details of Caesar's life, Cato's, Crassus', and Pompey's, but not intimately or in any sense living. It is too dryly scholarly for that.
Cicero was a conservative "new man", who wanted to preserve the Republic (and the institution that allowed him to rise from a local Oscan, i.e. non-Roman, aristocrat to the pinnacle of the Roman State). His entire career was shaped by this, though he made many compromises and was Caesar's client for quite a long time. He made one major early career move, squashing a conspiracy (Cataline's) that allowed executions and impeachments in certain circumstances, which would ultimately help to undermine the Republic. Then, very late in his career, he opposed Marc Antony in the name of restoring the Republic and paradoxically supported the future dictator Octavian, only to lose his life to Antony's revenge once Octavian cut a deal. About all of this, Cicero wrote with unequalled elegance in Latin, much of which is quoted to very good effect in translation here. This is a great pleasure to read in Everitt's prose renderings.
So much of this is well known – in this standard interpretation – and Everitt presents it well, indeed comprehensively. However, there are other ways to see it. Perhaps Cicero was not really a good politician, but a rhetorician and naive amateur whose actions were ultimately destructive to his cause, the Republic. His words survive to spin his motives as "good and just". Perhaps he was a fussy man with unrealistic ideas – the Roman state had become too big to govern by the gridlocked Senate, which had been decimated repeatedly for 60-some years of civil war. Perhaps ultimately he was a fool under the thumb of other, shrewder politicians like Octavian. Unfortunately, Everitt does not develop these lines of argument at all or even question the conventional line. Instead, he accepts Cicero's portrayal of events almost verbatim, at least in my reading, without the slightest skepticism of the slippery political agenda beneath the eloquence. This is superficial and lazy.
I do not regret having read this. However, if you want the era to really live, I would suggest reading Colleen McCullogh's series, starting with the First Man of Rome. You will learn as much as any textbook can offer, but with much more flavor and daring.