be resisted. This is a threat to peace because, as Cicero argues later, peace follows liberty. Both Cicero and Demosthenes before him were seeking to persuade a divided and hesitant audience to take action. There is a choice for both between self-government and tyranny, between true peace and illusory peace, between liberty and slavery.
What I am more afraid of is lest, being ignorant of the true path to glory, you should think it glorious for you to have more power by yourself than all the rest of the people put together, and lest you should prefer being feared by your fellow citizens to being loved by them. And if you do think so, you are ignorant of the road to glory. For a citizen to be dear to his fellow citizens, to deserve well of the republic, to be praised, to be respected, to be loved, is glorious; but to be feared and to be an object of hatred, is odious, detestable; and moreover, pregnant with weakness and decay.
This short section is a clear definition of the philosophical tradition of the Roman republic. This is the argument that was passed down from the classical world to the European Renaissance. The esteem in which Cicero is held is satirised by Erasmus in his 1528 treatise Ciceronianus, written in the form of a dialogue, which contains a character who has emptied his library of all books except those by Cicero.
The idea of the Roman republic begins with the fact that the central goal of the city was peace. The greatest danger to peace, says Cicero, is discord. The setting for this speech is the Temple of Concord, but how is concord to be attained? Concord requires justice for all, and that can only be achieved if all the citizens live in liberty. There can be no freedom except in a republic, and the citizen of the free republic is the engaged man, the political man. This is an echo of an argument Cicero uses in De re publica, where he suggests that political participation can overcome the constant dangers of complacency, ‘the blandishments of pleasure and repose’.
The law of the republic is a vital institution, but Cicero argues that the actions of those who will defend the republic, even to the extent of murder, are legitimate all the same because they uphold the honour of the republic. The story goes that when Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March in 44 BC by a group of senators who called themselves the liberatores, one of their number lifted his bloodstained dagger and cried out the name of Cicero, imploring him to ‘restore the republic!’ Cicero’s primary objective in the speech was therefore the restoration of the res publica libera – the free republic.
And, indeed, you have both of you had many judgements delivered respecting you by the Roman people, by which I am greatly concerned that you are not sufficiently influenced. For what was the meaning of the shouts of the innumerable crowd of citizens collected at the gladiatorial games or of the verses made by the people? Or of the extraordinary applause at the sight of the statue of Pompeius? And at that sight of the two tribunes of the people who are opposed to you? Are these things a feeble indication of the incredible unanimity of the entire Roman people? What more? Did the applause at the games of Apollo, or, I should rather say, testimony and judgement there given by the Roman people, appear to you of small importance? Oh! Happy are those men who, though they themselves were unable to be present on account of the violence of arms, still were present in spirit, and had a place in the breasts and hearts of the Roman people.
It is evident from this first Philippic that Cicero is vying to be the leader of the political opposition. Look at how brazenly he enlists the audience in his cause. In mocking Mark Antony’s deafness to popular opinion, Cicero casts himself as the tribune of the people. It is a reminder that the verdict on a public speech in a democracy is settled by the audience. This is an indispensable lesson for every speaker, at every level. It’s not, in the end, you who decides whether a passage works. The audience will decide for you.
Mark Antony reacted with fury to the accusation that he disdained his audience, and seventeen days later delivered a withering attack on Cicero’s career in the Senate. Cicero did not attend because his safety could not be guaranteed. Fearful for his life, he published the Second Philippic as a pamphlet and issued instructions through his friend Atticus for it to be circulated carefully and narrowly. The Second Philippic is written as though it were a speech, with plentiful references to the setting, the occasion, to Antony’s dandy dress sense, and it contains a direct request for a fair hearing. But it was never actually delivered. In his Tenth Satire, Juvenal says that the Second Philippic is Cicero’s masterpiece, the eloquent testament that cost him his life. Antony ordered that Cicero’s right hand, the one which had written the Philippics, be amputated. For good measure the head which had devised and spoken them was cut off. That severed head and hand were nailed to the Rostra on the Forum to discourage imitation. Legend has it that Antony’s wife Fulvia stabbed her hairpins through the dead man’s tongue, which gives chilling meaning to the cliché dangerous rhetoric. Cicero left behind a lament for this and for all times: ‘O tempora, O mores’ – ‘Oh, the times! Oh, the manners!’
Cicero once said that ‘the real quality of an orator can only be deduced from the practical results his speech-making obtains’. By that strict measure the Philippics must count as a failure. Any speaker who ends up with his head and hand nailed to the Rostra is obliged to conclude that the speech might have gone better. Mark Antony went on, with Marcus Lepidus and Caesar’s nephew Octavian, to form a dictatorship known as the Second Triumvirate. The harmony of the group, though, was not helped by Mark Antony, who was married to Octavian’s sister, beginning his affair with Cleopatra. Civil war broke out in 31 BC. Antony and Cleopatra fled to Egypt, where they committed suicide together.
The republic did not end well, but Cicero left a legacy unrivalled in the field. Time and again the speeches of the American republic invoke the spirit of Cicero. It is there in Benjamin Franklin’s defence of the constitution, with all its faults. It is there in Thomas Jefferson’s appeal for exact and equal liberty for all. It is there in Abraham Lincoln’s tribute to popular power and in Barack Obama’s quest for the perfect state of the union. John Quincy Adams said that American democracy had been ‘spoken into existence’. Cicero was one of the scriptwriters.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Equal and Exact Justice to All Men
First Inaugural Address, Washington DC
4 March 1801
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was a Founding Father and the third president of the United States, serving two terms from 1801 to 1809. As the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson stood, against Alexander Hamilton, for a version of the American republic in which the power of the federal government would be limited.
Born and educated in Virginia, where he trained as a lawyer, Thomas Jefferson was asked, in 1776, to draft a statement describing to the world America’s break with Britain. The resulting Declaration of Independence, which ‘affirmed the natural rights of humanity to protect itself from arbitrary and autocratic forms of government’, was adopted by the Second Continental Congress in 1776.
For the rest of the American Revolution, Jefferson served as a governor of Virginia, in which position he remains rightly renowned for his Statute on Religious Freedom. He then succeeded Benjamin Franklin as America’s minister to France and, during five years spent in Paris, witnessed the start of the French Revolution, which he regarded – wrongly as it turned out – as an extension of the example lately offered by America. Upon his return, Jefferson accepted President George Washington’s request that he serve as the nation’s first secretary of state.
Jefferson in Cabinet participated in the most creative tension in democratic history. His own preference for a weak constitution that gave the greater power to the states ran into the objections of Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the Treasury, who wanted a stronger mandate for the federal government. The conflict was managed, rather than resolved, with the formation of the young republic’s first opposition party, Jefferson’s Republicans.
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