LAWLESS REPUBLIC

The life of the Roman orator, lawyer, and politician Cicero.

If you can read the history of the late Roman republic without being confused by all the players and their contending agendas, then you’re a rarity. In Cicero’s case, considerable confusion lies in constantly shifting alliances and some very well-placed enemies. In one episode that Georgetown University historian Osgood examines at considerable length, a freed slave named Chrysogonus, operating under the aegis of the tyrannical ruler Sulla, engineered the murder of a wealthy provincial landowner and took over his estates, having declared his victim an enemy of the republic. (If this sounds more like organized crime and less like the governance of a growing world power, then you’re on the right track.) In the long trial that followed, Cicero delighted his audience with a snippy putdown of the prosecutor that would never pass in court today: “Even if fortune hasn’t allowed you to know who your father is and so to learn how a father feels toward his children, nature at least has endowed you with some human feeling.” Indeed, as Osgood recounts, the Roman legal system, though with some vestiges in our own, was less concerned with evidence than with good storytelling and smart rhetorical tricks, at which Cicero excelled. But those sorts of skills can also earn a fellow enemies: going up against both Sulla and, later, a powerful, rule-bending politician named Clodius, Cicero marked himself for retribution. Osgood’s account of one particularly complex episode in Roman history, known as the Catiline conspiracy, is as clear as circumstances will allow—which is to say, one still needs a score card. It will be up to the reader to gauge whether Cicero had it coming, whether Julius Caesar was a good guy or a bad guy, and so on.

Richly detailed, if sometimes a slog. Still, the best life of Cicero to have come along in a long while.