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Pro Milone by Cicero (52 BC)

All five speeches in the Oxford University Press selection of Defence Speeches by Cicero are given extremely thorough and wonderfully lucid introductions by the volume’s editor and translator, D.H. Berry. Pro Milone has the longest introduction of the lot, at 12 pages of small font, i.e. a lot of content because there’s a lot to explain.

The trial of Titus Annius Milo, generally referred to as Milo, was held between 4 and 7 April 52 BC. He was charged with the murder of Publius Clodius Pulcher. While he was prosecuted by the usual number of three advocates – Appius Claudius Pulcher, Marcus Antonius and Publius Valerius Nepos – he was defended by just Cicero.

Publius Clodius Pulcher

For a change the background is fairly simple. From the late 60s onwards Clodius had established himself as a rabble-rousing tribune of the people who developed a wide popular following and developed tough street gangs to intimidate and beat up his opponents. He first clashed with Cicero when the latter testified against him at his trial for dressing up as a woman in order to infiltrate the rites of the goddess Bona Dea being held in Julius Caesar’s house (because Caesar held the office of pontifex maximus) in December 62.

From that point onwards Clodius sought revenge and his gangs took to intimidating Cicero on numerous occasions. In 58, Clodius was elected tribune of the plebs and passed a law declaring anyone who had put to death Roman citizens without a trial guilty of treason. This was targeted solely at Cicero who, as consul in 63 BC, had followed the advice of the senate and had five leading members of the Catiline conspiracy put to death. Despite the support of the senate, the letter of the law defined Cicero as a criminal liable to the death penalty and so he was forced to flee into exile in Greece. 18 months later, in 57, the political atmosphere in Rome changed and he was allowed to return.

During his absence Clodius’s street gangs for the first time met their match in equal and opposing groups of fighters organised by ex-gladiator Titus Annius Milo, who held the post of tribune. Milo arrested some of Clodius’s men, was attacked by his gangs, attempted to prosecute Clodius for violence and, when that failed, recruited gangs of his own to meet violence with violence.

In 56 Clodius brought Milo to court but the trial was broken up by brawling and not reconvened. When Cicero defended another tribune he used the opportunity to issue a rallying cry to patriots to gather round patriots such as Milo and against traitors such as Clodius. The two became close allies. Milo provided bodyguards to protect the builders who were rebuilding Cicero’s house (after Clodius had it demolished during his exile) from Clodius’s gangs who were attacking them.

In April 56 Cicero delivered a blistering attack on Clodius and especially his sister, the notorious Clodia, as part of his defence of Marcus Caelius Rufus (referred to as as Caelius) in the speech known as Pro Caelio. Clodius’s hatred grew even deeper and resulted in several violent incidents, but Clodius’s main enemy was Milo.

In late 53 both Milo and Clodius stood for office, Milo for consul, Clodius for praetor. Cicero strongly backed Milo’s campaign since, as consul, he would be able to control Clodius. But every attempt to hold elections was foiled by outbreaks of violence and 52 opened with no magistrates elected.

The murder of Clodius

It was only a few weeks into the year, on 18 January 52, that Milo and his entourage encountered Clodius and his followers on the Appian Way outside Rome heading in opposite directions. They passed in surly silence but the rearguard of both gangs provoked each other and started fighting. It spread and became a general melee. Clodius was wounded with a spear and taken to a nearby inn at which point Milo was faced with the choice between leaving a wounded and infuriated enemy alive or doing away with him for good. So he had his men drag Clodius into the road and finish him off, leaving the body.

Milo’s trial

Having been done various favours by Milo over the years Cicero felt duty bound to speak in his defence. His presentation was seriously hampered by booing and catcalls from Clodius’s followers and it is said that Cicero didn’t manage to finish. In any case the facts were generally agreed and Milo was convicted. He hurriedly went into exile in Massilia, modern Marseilles. Subsequently Cicero polished his text and had it published. It was his last surviving court speech and is widely considered his masterpiece.

What makes it twice as interesting is that it is the only speech by Cicero for which we have an independent and separate account, by a first century AD scholar named Quintus Asconius Pedianus (3 to 88 AD) and that Asconius’s account drastically differs from Cicero’s. Its existence suggests the extent to which Cicero manipulated the facts and distorted the narrative (lied) in his speeches.

Some people thought the best line of defending Milo would have been to claim that eliminating Clodius was in the interests of public peace and order. Marcus Junius Brutus wrote and circulated the speech he thought should have been given along these lines. But instead Cicero decided to base his entire long speech on the premise that Clodius knowingly set a trap for Milo, who was therefore justified in defending himself. However, according to Asconius the encounter on the Appian Way was an accident and the outbreak of violence was an accident.

Asconius’s version

Berry includes in this edition a translation of Asconius’s version, his summary of the events surrounding Clodius’s murder and of the trial itself (and of the trials of Clodius and Milo’s associates which followed). In fact he recommends that the reader read it first, before reading Cicero’s account. It is a trim ten pages long.

Berry points out the key substantive difference between Cicero and Asconius, namely Cicero says Clodius planned an ambush which Milo heroically defended himself from, while Asconius (and, in the event, the jury) believed it was sheer luck that led to a purely accidental meeting on the Appian Way.

But there’s another way in which Asconius’s account sheds light on Cicero’s –it is brief and to the point. It is arranged in a simple chronological order, dealing with the background, the events on the day, and the complex arrangements regarding Roman law which led up to the trial itself. In many places it reads like a Wikipedia article. Asconius doesn’t mention himself once.

All this is, of course, in striking contrast to what I’ve learned to think of as Cicero’s style, which is:

wordy, very wordy, gabby and verbose
rarely if ever addresses the facts, and if it does you barely notice because they are drowned in:
a never-ending stream of self-glorifying self-promoting references to himself, to his great achievement in saving the state during the Cataline crisis, to his importance as a mentor and role model for the young, to his tastes in literature, to the hard work he’s put in to becoming Rome’s leading advocate, and so on and so on
barrages of references to Great Romans From The Past: to Scipio Aemilianus and Gaius Laelius and Quintus Metellus and Cato the Elder, and so on and on, great names yoked into his discourse in order to boost it, make it sound more patriotic and weighty
cluttered and repetitive: his defence of Archias is short by his standards but still manages to repeat certain claims 3 or 4 times; arguments and related sub-arguments pop up unexpectedly, with no apparent logic and then, a few pages later, pop up again
melodrama: in every trial Cicero makes out that the entire future of Rome, and all its citizens and women and children and their great heritage is at stake! and that only acquitting the noble defendant – a man ‘who has done more for his country than any other man in history’ (76) – can save the nation from ‘national calamity’! This unrelenting hyperbole must have gotten pretty tiring.

In contrast to all this, Asconius’s style and presentation is a wonderful breath of fresh air and makes you realise that not all ancient writing needs to be as verbose, overwrought, self-indulgent and confusing as Cicero’s.

Here’s Cicero:

So give me your attention, gentlemen, and lay aside any fear you might have. For if you have ever had the power of judging loyal and valiant men, if you have ever had the power of judging meritorious citizens, and if specially selected men from the most distinguished orders have ever been given the opportunity of demonstrating, by their actions and their votes, that approval of valiant and loyal citizens which they have so often expressed in the past by looks and words; if that is how it is, then you have at this moment complete power to decide whether we who have always upheld your authority should linger on in adversity for all time, or whether, after being persecuted for years by the most degraded citizens, we are at long last to be revived by your good selves, and by your honour, your courage and your wisdom. (4)

Here’s Asconius:

Milo was travelling in a coach with his wife Fausta, the daughter of Lucius Sulla the dictator, and his friend Marcus Fufius. Following them was a large column of slaves and also some gladiators, including two well-known ones, Eudamus and Birria. These were moving slowly at the rear of the column, and started an altercation with Publius Clodius’s slaves. As Clodius looked back menacingly at the disturbance, Birria pierced his shoulder with a spear. Then a fight began, and more of Milo’s men ran up. The wounded Clodius, meanwhile, was carried into a nearby inn in the territory of Bovilla. (32C)

I appreciate that Cicero was working within a specific genre – the advocate’s speech – that oratory had a host of rules, that the audience expected a show of rhetorical fireworks and that, in this respect, Cicero’s over-ripe performances were following convention and pleasing the crowd. And that, by contrast, Asconius’s commentary is just that, a scholarly text conforming to a completely different set of conventions and required to be precise and factual. But my God, what a relief it is to turn from Cicero’s gluttonous grandiloquence to Asconius’s spartan diet of bread and water.

Two versions of Cicero’s speech

Berry devotes several pages of his introduction to making a key point about the text. The version we have is a document Cicero heavily revised and reworked after the trial. Evidence for this comes from two sources. Firstly Asconius and the noted 1st century orator Quintilian both refer to the original version Cicero actually delivered at the trial – they’d both read it – and distinguish it from the text we have.

Secondly, Berry is the latest in a long line of scholars to detect a noticeable change in the text: the first two-thirds of the speech are favourable to the then-most powerful man in Rome, former general Gnaeus Pompeius, generally known as Pompey the Great:

‘the wise and fair-minded Gnaeus Pompeius’ (2)
‘a man of lofty and almost divine mind’ (21)
‘a man of the highest principles’ (21)
‘the exceptional carefulness of Gnaeus Pompeius’ (65)
‘so very brave a man as Gnaeus Pompeius’ (66)

But around section 70, Pompey becomes more the focus of the speech and for the final third the references to him become notably hostile. Berry thinks this is because the first two-thirds are close to what Cicero delivered on the day, when the outcome of the trial still hung in the balance and it made sense to suck up to Pompey. The final third of the second version of the text was composed after it had become clear that Pompey in fact supported the prosecution and (tacitly, in the background) helped Milo be convicted. Hence the switch in tone from sucking up to critical.

The speech itself

It takes up 40 pages in the OUP edition and is divided into 105 sections. The central point is that Cicero chose to frame the events as Clodius having set a trap for Milo and so the response of Milo and his entourage was justified self-defence. He says:

it was Clodius who set a trap for Milo (6) and repeatedly tries to narrow the entirety of the case down to this one point, that either Clodius or Milo set a trap, and it was Clodius (31)
if it is agreed that Clodius set a trap, then it is no crime for a Roman to kill a criminal if his house is being burgled, or he is being assaulted or sexually attacked – a bandit may be lawfully killed (11) – and gives a roll call of Eminent Romans who have killed enemies but still been honoured (8, 9, 10)
it is a natural law which needs no encoding, that a man may use violence to defend himself if attacked (10)
he states and then repeats the claim that, by killing Clodius, Milo did the state and the people a favour, to ‘the benefit to our country, the benefit to you, and the benefit to all loyal citizens’ (30)
it was just the latest in a long line of services Milo has performed ‘for our country’
the senate has repeatedly spoken in favour of Milo (12)

Cicero asks who had the most motive for setting a trap? The obvious answer is Clodius, for Clodius was running for the office of praetor whereas Milo was running for consul and showed every sign of being elected. Now if they’d both been elected, Milo would have cramped Clodius’s (no doubt treasonous plans) at every turn – so Clodius had a clear and obvious reason for eliminating Milo. Whereas, now that he has been brought to trial for Clodius’s murder, Milo’s position is in deep jeopardy: in other words Milo had no motive for killing Clodius, quite the contrary, his murder has jeopardised his career and even his life (34).

Having established, to his own satisfaction, that the case boils down to which of the 2 men planned to ambush the other, Cicero compiles a dozen or more ways in which the time and location and make-up of the two entourages all favoured Clodius, so he was the obvious planner and trapper.

Cicero’s speech is laced with the usual references to Great Romans in order to big up his speech, to make it seem more weighty and prestigious by associating his case with Famous Men, something which really counted in this super-patriotic society.

In a related way, he continually makes the case sound as if it’s not about the guilt of just one man, but that the entire fate of the state – and therefore of the entire world (19) – is at stake. This is a familiar Cicero strategy, to make it sound as if the entire world will collapse if his man isn’t acquitted.

And both lines of argument are also connected with Cicero’s relentless flattery of the jury:

‘specially selected men from the most distinguished orders’ (4)
‘the most distinguished men from all the orders’ (5)
‘the brightest luminaries from the most distinguished orders’ (21)

Indeed the final phrase of the entire over-ripe performance is unfettered sucking up to the jury of ‘those who are the best, the wisest and the most brave.’ (105)

Above all else, Cicero’s speech is full of endless references to himself, to his tangled history with Clodius – with an extended description of how it was Clodius’s intimidation which (unfairly) drove him into exile in 58 – and all after he had saved the state, single handed, by his own quick thinking (36 and 73 and yet again at 82).

There is something more than ludicrous about Cicero’s endless self glorification and self justification, his references to the way ‘the entire people of Italy was united by concern for his welfare’ (38), and the later passages which repeatedly refer to his exile and then ‘my restoration’ (39, 68 and 87 and 88).

The reader learns to shiver at the familiar words ‘And as for me, gentlemen…’ which introduce yet another variation on what a hero he was single-handedly saving the state during the Cataline crisis, how unjustly he was terrorised into exile by Clodius, and how ‘all of Italy’ and ‘the entire Roman people’ celebrated his return. One of the most frequent words in a speech by Cicero is ‘me’.

And so it comes as no real surprise, but is still vaguely ludicrous that the final passage in the entire speech is an extraordinarily long eulogy not to Milo, but to himself!

But as things are, Titus Annius, there is one consolation that sustains me – the thought that there is no duty of love, support, or devotion in which I have failed you. I have incurred the hostility of the powers that be for your sake; I have exposed my body and my life many times to the weapons of your enemies; I have abased myself as a suppliant before many people for your sake; I have risked my own property and possessions, and those of my children, by throwing in my lot with yours; and today, if any violence has been arranged, of if there is to be any life and death struggle, then I claim it as my own. What, then, does that leave? What more can I do for you, to repay your services to me, except to consider your own fortune, whatever it may be, my own? I shall not refuse it. I shall not say ‘No’. (100)

Several times Cicero refers to the tears in his eyes as he speaks (‘I can no longer speak for tears’, 105). This is a histrionic performance. He was on a stage. He was playing a tragic death scene, playing to the crowd, tugging the heartstrings of the jury, using every rhetorical and psychological and dramatic trick to align his own auctoritas and his noble self-sacrificing actions with those of Milo, trying to make them both out to be ‘saviours of their country.’

But wait! Cicero has more to say about himself! He always does:

How unhappy I am! What appalling luck I have had! You succeeded, Milo, in obtaining the help of these men in recalling me to my country; shall I be unsuccessful in obtaining their help to keep you in yours? What shall I say to my children, who count you as their second father? What shall I say to you, brother Quintus, who are now far away, but who shared those difficult times with me? That, in attempting to protect Milo’s welfare, I was unable to obtain the help of the very men who had helped Milo to secure my own welfare? Unable in what sort of cause? One that was approved by all the nations of the world. Unable to protect Milo’s welfare from whom? From those who had felt the greatest relief at the death of Publius Clodius. And on whose advocacy? My own. (102)

What terrible crime did I devise or what awful deed did I commit, gentlemen, when I tracked down, uncovered, exposed and expunged those indications of our impending destruction? All my troubles, and those of those close to me, derive from that source. Why did you want me to return to Rome? Was it so that I could watch the expulsion of those by whom my restoration was secured? I beseech you, do not let my return be more painful to me than my departure was! For how can I consider myself restored if I am to be separated from those who were responsible for securing my restoration? (103)

Subsequent trials

One last important thing: because it is so widely considered Cicero’s ‘masterpiece’ and is often read or studied by itself, a false impression is created of Pro Milone as sitting in splendid isolation like a statue on a plinth. It is salutary, then, to learn from the introduction (and from Asconius’s account, which devotes its last 2 pages to the fact) that the Milo trial was immediately followed by a succession of further trials, all related to the events of that day, and that Cicero was just as involved in these trials as in the Milo one.

Far from his world falling apart when Milo was convicted – as his histrionic performance stated – Cicero merely went back to his study and knocked out another defence speech. And another. And another.

Thus, although Milo was found guilty in the trial we’ve been following, and packed his bags and went into exile overnight, he was, in his absence, the subject of three further trials:

Milo prosecuted for electoral malpractice (bribery) – convicted in his absence
Milo prosecuted under the law on illegal association – convicted in his absence
Miilo prosecuted under a different law about illegal violence – convicted in his absence

But the battle between Milo and Clodius’s followers raged on in the courts:

Milo’s gang leader, Marcus Saufeius – the man who actually supervised the attack on the inn where Clodius had taken refuge and his actual murder – was tried and acquitted by just one vote – and he was defended by Cicero and Caelius.
Saufeius was then immediately retried, under an alternative law about illegal violence, was again defended by Cicero, and again acquitted, this time by a larger majority.
Meanwhile, Clodius’s gang leader, Sextus Cloelius, was prosecuted for taking Clodius’s body into the senate building on the day of his funeral, which resulted in the building being set on fire, and was convicted by a near unanimous verdict.
A number of other Clodians were tried and convicted.
A Clodian ex-tribune, Quintus Pompeius Rufus, was prosecuted by Caelius for the burning of the senate house, convicted and went into exile – Cicero was delighted because Pompeius had been spreading the lie that Cicero had organised Clodius’s murder.
Then another Clodian ex-tribune, Titus Munatius Plancus Bursa, was prosecuted by Cicero, also for responsibility in the burning of the senate house, convicted and went into exile.

Plancus’s conviction, in particular, pleased Cicero. We have a letter to a friend in which he says the conviction of Plancus gave him more pleasure than the death of Clodius a) because he preferred justice to be done in a court of law than at swordpoint b) because it reflected well on his friend Milo but – and this is what is so characteristically Ciceronian about the letter and his reasons – because c):

I was especially pleased at the display of good-will towards me on the part of honest men in the face of an astonishing amount of pressure from a very grand and powerful personage [he’s referring to Pompey, who tried to defend Plancus]

As so often in his legal speeches, the whole thing ends up being about him. He goes on to say:

It is a great victory. No braver Roman ever lived than those jurymen who dared to find him guilty in spite of all the power of the very personage who had empanelled them [Pompey]. They would never have done that if they had not felt my grievance as their own.

There is something winningly boyish in Cicero’s complete inability to conceive of justice as an objective factual thing, and persistently see it in solely personal terms, of whether the great figures in the land, judges and juries are for him or against him.

Slavery

Few editors comment on it but I am continually appalled at the casual references to slavery in every one of these old Roman texts. I know slavery was universal and universally accepted, and the editors of all the books I’ve read generally take it for granted – but it never ceases to shock and upset me.

A moment in Asconius’s text is even more upsetting than usual, where he claims that, immediately after the fight on the Appian Way, Milo had travelled to Clodius’s country villa to find his son (presumably to kill him) but, finding the son had been taken away, interrogated the head slave, Halicor, by cutting off his limbs one by one, before going on to murder Clodius’s bailiff and two other slaves.

This incident is contained in the Asconius text that Berry includes in this edition and translates, but he nowhere mentions it and it doesn’t, of course, crop up in Cicero’s speech, which makes Milo out to be a noble and patriotic man, the saviour of his nation, a man who had ‘freed his country at his own personal risk’ (72).

But it’s moments like this, the steady trickle of throwaway references to how despicably slaves were treated in ancient Rome without free men blinking an eye, which make me feel physically sick and make all reference to the ‘civilisation’ of the ancient world seem like a mockery.

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Pro Caelio by Cicero (56 BC)

Background

Marcus Tullius Cicero gave the speech known as Pro Caelio on 4 April 56 BC in defence of his young protegé and one-time friend, Marcus Caelius Rufus, generally known as Caelius.

The full background to the trial is staggeringly complicated. It is explained in great detail and with admirable clarity by D.H. Berry, editor and translator of the excellent Oxford University Press edition of (five) Defence Speeches by Cicero (2000).

The Cataline conspiracy

In 63 BC Cicero was consul during the crisis of the Cataline Conspiracy i.e. the attempt of the disgruntled aristocrat to lead an armed overthrow of the Roman state. He was in north Italy raising an insurrectionary army when five leading conspirators, including some senators, were caught in Rome and implicated by letters and then confessed. Cicero led a debate in the senate about what to do with them which concluded by voting to execute them and Cicero led them straightaway to the state execution or carnifex who did the deed.

In the years that followed various of Cicero’s enemies developed the accusation that, because the five had never been granted a full (long and probably delayed) trial, they had been illegally killed – and that Cicero was therefore guilty of murder and treason (killing senators).

One of the lead proponents of this view was the nasty piece of work known as Publius Clodius Pulcher, an eccentric scion of the distinguished Claudius clan, who had arranged to be adopted by a plebeian family in order to stand for office as tribune of the plebs. He used this office to pass measures designed to appeal to the people and made rabble-rousing speeches. He developed a following of thugs who terrorised the streets of Rome and even beat up senators and other magistrates.

Cicero sent into exile

In 58 BC, while serving as tribune, Clodius got a law passed declaring it treason to have any Roman citizen put to death without a trial. Everyone knew this was directed at Cicero and his precipitate action in having the five high-ranking Catiline conspirators executed – so he swiftly packed up his things and went into exile, in Greece.

He was gone for a long, miserable 18 months during which Clodius had his house in Rome torn down and had a temple to Liberty build over the ruins, as well as having Cicero’s other properties around Italy looted and sacked.

But the mood in Rome changed. Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, known in English as Pompey, had acquiesced in Cicero’s exile but then Clodius got above himself and started attacking Pompey verbally and attacking some of his lieutenants in the street. Pompey and the other members of the triumvirate realised they’d let Clodius get out of control. Pompey signalled to his followers that he would support Cicero’s exile being ended and so a law was raised and passed declaring Cicero innocent of any wrongdoing.

So Cicero made a triumphant return to Brundisium and the a triumphant progress across south Italy feted in every town as the Father of the Nation. In his absence Clodius had not only destroyed his homes but sponsored mistreatment of his wife, Terentia. So the two men were at daggers drawn.

Marcus Caelius Rufus

Now to Marcus Caelius Rufus. Born in 82 BC, and so 24 years younger than Cicero, Caelius had been Cicero’s pupil and protégé, learning the arts of politics and oratory at first hand. In 63, however, he was intoxicated, like many others, by the revolutionary rhetoric of the half-mad Cataline and supported his bid to become consul (the same election which was won by Lucius Licinius Murena, who Cicero had defended in another famous speech).

He appears to have abandoned the Cataline cause when the latter when postal and decided to launch an all-out insurrection. Instead Caelius went off to serve as assistant to the governor of Africa from 62 to 60. Back in Rome he began to make a name for himself as a lawyer by launching a prosecution against Gaius Antonius Hybrida, the man who had been co-consul with Cicero in 63, and who had ‘led’ the army which finally defeated Catalina in the field.

Cicero didn’t much like Antonius but figured the state owed him a debt of gratitude and so defended him – but Caelius won the case, defeating his old master. Inspired by his success, Caelius moved to the smart set on the Palatine Hill and rented a room from Clodius, close to the residence of his sister, Clodia. Clodia’s husband had recently died (59 BC) and it was widely rumoured that Caelius became her lover.

As described above, in 58 Clodius held office as tribune and got Cicero exiled; 18 months later in 57 Cicero was triumphantly recalled. Then at the end of 57 or beginning of 56 Caelius broke with the Clodiuses. Did she dump him, did the men fallout? We don’t know, but Berry thinks the most likely reason is that Caelius had switched his political allegiance from the Clodii to Pompey, who was increasingly antagonistic to them. Whatever the exact reason, in their venomous way the brother and sister decided to take revenge.

Lucius Calpurnius Bestia

The proximate cause of the trouble was the trial of Lucius Calpurnius Bestia. Caelius was prosecuting Bestia for malpractice in the elections for the praetorship of 57, in which Bestia stood unsuccessfully. Now this Bestia had been on trial no fewer than four times previously, and Cicero had defended and got him acquitted on each occasion. So now he defended Bestia against his old protégé, Caelius, and won again. However, Caelius was not daunted. Bestia was planning to stand for the praetorship this year as well and so Caelius launched yet another prosecution against him.

But at this point Bestia’s son, Lucius Sempronius Atratinus, got involved. He realised the best form of defence is attack and so launched a pre-emptive prosecution against Caelius. If Caelius was convicted he would be unable to take forward his prosecution of Bestia. Atratinus needed to move fast to protect his dad and so launched the prosecution in the violence court (quaestio de vi) which, unlike other courts, sat during public holidays. (This fact would be central to Cicero’s speech.) And, crucially, Atratinus’s attack on Caelius attracted the support of Clodius and his sister. They agreed to be witnesses against Caelius and suggested some additional charges against him (see below for the charges).

Caelius was an experienced orator and so elected to defend himself – but he also managed to persuade the richest man in Rome, Marcus Licinius Crassus to join him. Improbably, he also persuaded Cicero to join his defence. You’d have thought there was no love lost between Cicero and his protégé who had betrayed him twice over, once joining the diabolical Catalina, and then allying with his nemesis, Clodius. But it seems that Cicero invoked that timeless equation, my enemy’s enemy is my friend: anyone who Clodius hated must be worth defending.

Ptolemy XII of Egypt

There’s more? Yes, involving – bizarrely enough – the king of Egypt. In 80 BC Alexander of Egypt died and bequesthed his nation to Rome. The throne was usurped, however, by Ptolemy XII ‘Auletes’ who proceeded to rule with the nervous knowledge that at any moment Rome might step in to claim its prize. Thus he sucked up to the Romans at every turn, much to the dislike of his people. When the triumvirate of Caesar, Crassus and Pompey took power in 60 BC Ptolemy offered to pay them the huge sum of 6,000 talents in exchange for formal recognition of his title. But when he tried to collect it from h is people they rebelled and expelled him from the kingdom.

Ptolemy took refuge in Rome where he borrowed and got into debt lobbying and bribing Roman politicians to raise an army to restore him to power. But the Egyptians didn’t want him back and so in 57 sent a deputation of their best men, led by the Academic philosopher Dio, to put their case before the senate. Ptolemy’s response was to try and get the leading men assassinated, to organise an uprising against them when they stopped in Naples and to bribe slaves in the noble houses where they stayed in Rome to kill them.

At the end of 57 the senate finally found in Ptolemy’s favour but then someone found a reference in the Sibylline books which allegedly forbade it, so the senate rescinded its gesture. Pompey was lobbying to be appointed general in charge of restoring Ptolemy against his rebellious population when, early in 56, Dio was murdered.

Everybody suspected everybody else – the killing obviously suited Ptolemy who wanted the delegation to fail and Pompey who wanted the generalship of imposing Ptolemy on his reluctant people – and a number of prosecutions swiftly followed.

First an agent of Pompey’s, Asicius, was tried for the murder of Dio; Cicero defended him and he was acquitted.

Next we come to the case brought against Caelius by Atratinus. As we have seen this was predominantly motivated by Atratinus’s wish to have Caelius convicted so he wouldn’t be able to prosecute his (Atratinus’s) father, Bestia, for the sixth time. The Clodii were persuaded to join the prosecution against Caelius because a) they had a personal grudge against him, mixed up with the way he had ceased to be Clodia’s lover, nobody knows the details but it obviously left them both furious; and b) it was a way of getting at Pompey, who Clodius now hated.

The charges

The prosecution brought five charges against Caelius, all relating to the disturbances surrounding Dio’s embassy to Rome, namely:

the civil disturbances which affected the Egyptian delegation in Naples
assaults on the delegation at Puteoli
damage to the property of Palla (nobody knows who Palla is but presumably something connected with the above)
taking gold for the attempted murder of Dio and then the attempted poisoning of Clodia: in more detail the charge was that Caelius borrowed gold from Clodia under false pretences, with the intention of using it to bribe servants at the house where Dio was staying to murder him; then, when Clodia discovered what Caelius was planning, Caelius attempted to bribe some of her slaves to poison her in order to shut her up
the murder of Dio – Caelius was accused of being in league with Asicius to have Dio murdered (despite the illogic of the fact that Asicius had, by the time of the trial, been qcuitted – and by Cicero, who therefore had intimate knowledge of all the circumstances surrounding the murder

The preceding speeches

Prosecution

Atratinus spoke first and made an extended attack on Caelius’s character, calling him a ‘pretty boy Jason’, a loose-living, immoral lover of luxury, corrupt and used to committing bribery and violence.

Clodius Confusingly, Berry thinks the ‘Clodius’ who spoke at the trial was not the Clodius but someone who shared the name or a freed slave. We don’t have a transcript but it is likely he deplored the treatment of the Egyptian delegation, criticised Pompey for his support for the corrupt and unpopular Ptolemy, and referred to the evidence Clodia would give at the end of the trial to the effect that a friend of Caelius’s was caught handing poison to some of her, Clodia’s, slaves, having bribed them to poison her with it.

Lucius Herrenius Balbus closing the case for the prosecution, Balbus repeated the accusations of immorality against Caelius, and therefore his unfitness to be continuing the prosecution of Bestia (i.e. fulfilling the core aim of Atratinus who brought the prosecution in the first place.)

Defence

Caelius spoke in his own defence, wittily referring to Clodia as a ‘one-penny Clytemnestra’ i.e. a loose women who murdered her husband (she was suspected of poisoning him). We don’t have his speech either, but it is logical to imagine that he defended himself against all five of the charges.

Crassus ditto, presumably addressed the charges.

Cicero’s speech pro Caelio

Cicero was (as he preferred to be) the third and final of the three defence speakers.

Cicero takes advantage of the fact that the trial was taking place on the first day of the Megalensian games. While everyone else was watching the games in the circus the jury of 75 was stuck all day in the forum listening to this legal case. Therefore Cicero sets out to entertain them, by adopting a jocular tone throughout, telling jokes, impersonating famous people.

Above all it is a relentlessly ad hominem attack on the plaintiffs. In this respect it is a classic example of misdirection. Instead of answering any of the prosecution’s arguments, Cicero turns his speech into a) a defence of Caelius’s character but above all b) a devastating attack on one of the chief movers of the case, Clodia.

In this trial, members of the jury, everything has to do with Clodia, a woman who is not only of aristocratic birth, but notorious. (31)

an impetuous, capricious and angry woman (55)

With a woman like that anything is possible (69)

He is witheringly insulting. The prosecution had painted Rufus as a pretty-boy Jason, but in the ancient story Jason was seduced by the monster of anger and revenge, Medea, and so Cicero is not slow to compare Clodia to Medea, calling her the ‘Medea of the Palatine’ (18). He compares her to a prostitute (1, 37, 48, 49, 50, 57) and a sex-starved matron. He accuses her of incest (32, 34). He says the entire case only exists because of her ‘insupportable passion and bitter hatred’ (2), ‘to gratify the whim of a licentious woman’ (70), that it originates from:

a malevolent, disreputable, vindictive, crime-ridden, lust-ridden house (55)

and:

a household like this in which the lady of the house behaves like a prostitute, in which nothing that goes on is fit to be made public, in which perverted lusts, extravagant living, and all kinds of outlandish vices and outrages are rife (57)

The prosecution had calculated that Caelius would not reveal that he was actually Clodia’s lover and he apparently didn’t – but Cicero did, and depicted Clodia as a nymphomaniac who, if she was spurned, lied, bribed and cheater her way to revenge. Cicero admits their liaison but in such a way as to make Clodia seem the main mover of it, an immoral seducer and then, once spurned, a vengeful harpy. By sleight of hand, or deft presentation, Cicero manages to reveal the affair but have Caelius emerge unblemished. Thus Cicero didn’t address any of the charges, but dismissed them all as the pretexts of a deranged nymphomaniac.

He associates Clodia with Baiae, the southern resort which had become associated with decadence and immorality:

Baiae talks all right, and not only that, it resounds with this report – that the lusts of a single woman have sunk to such depths that she does not merely decline to seek seclusion and darkness with which to veil her immoralities, but openly revels in the most disgusting practices amid crowds of onlookers and in the broadest light of day! (47)

Cicero does address the two specific charges that Caelius took gold from Clodia under false pretences to pay for the murder of Dio, and that, when she found out, he tried to poison her. But he very effectively destroys the plausibility of both charges. Why on earth did she give him such a large amount of gold, unless he was her lover? And as to the entire story about Caelius attempting to poison Clodia when she discovered what he was really using the gold for, Cicero subjects this to a long forensic deconstruction, which demolishes every step of the supposed narrative as wildly improbable until the whole story collapses (56 onwards).

But he goes one further. He pounces on the entire notion of poison and makes the prosecution realise they made a terrible mistake raising it: because Clodia herself was suspected of poisoning her husband, and Cicero describes the death bed scene of this husband, Quintus Metellus, in harrowing detail and in a subtle way so as to implicate Clodia in his death – all in such a way as to completely distract attention away from Caelius.

But far longer is the passage where he ridicules the entire notion of Clodia recruiting men friends to wait concealed in the public baths till they say Lucinius hand over the famous box of poison to one of her slaves. Where are these brave hiders, Cicero asks. What are their names, why have they not been produced by the prosecution, where did they hide, in an actual bath or was there a wooden horse nearby, like at Troy? You can imagine the jury rocking with laughter. Over 2,000 years later it’s still funny and funnier because Cicero keeps piling on the comic exaggeration and ridiculous variations on the prosecution’s narrative, reducing it to smoking wreckage.

This itself is a triumph of the barrister’s manipulating art. But the OUP editor Berry makes a further point. The entire case had a very fraught political significance. The Roman public had been outraged by the shameless murder of an emissary from a foreign country who had come to live, unprotected, among them. It breached very profound codes of hospitality and civilisation. Everyone knew that Pompey supported Dio’s enemy, Ptolemy, and so the case had the serious potential to badly unravel and make Pompey very unpopular.

By focusing on Clodia alone, Cicero managed to contain this: he eclipsed the genuine outrage felt by many over the murder with a pantomime act. Personalising it depoliticised it. It also meant Cicero didn’t have to take a view either way, doing which would have risked alienating either the people or Pompey. Instead he ignored the charges and produced a Carry On entertainment which gave everyone a good laugh.

Each of the Cicero speeches in this volume has a moment when the argument ends, and the conclusion begins. Having read two of them I can begin to see how each speech ends with a description of the distressed family of the accused, and a sentimental appeal to the jury not to condemn the wife, children, mother or father of the accused to misery and shame, in Caelius’s case, Cicero paints a heart-breaking portrait of Caelius’s father as an old man with no-one else to look after him.

The result

Caelius was acquitted which allowed him, against Atratinus’s plans, to proceed with his prosecution of Bestia. Once again Cicero defended Bestia but lost. Bestia went into exile.

The next year, 55, Ptolemy was restored to the Egyptian throne by bribing the governor of Syria, Aulus Gabinius with the eye-watering sum of 10,000 talents. On his return to Rome Gabinius was prosecuted for this, Cicero defended him but lost and Gabinius also was sent into exile.

Ptolemy ruled until his death in 51 when he divided the throne between his son, Ptolemy XIII and daughter Cleopatra VII. It was his deep involvement in the cause of their father, which led Pompey, after his disastrous defeat at the Battle of Pharsalus in 48, to decide to make his way to Egypt to seek sanctuary with Auletes son. This was a fateful decision because Ptolemy XIII’s advisers told him Julius Caesar would like it if he eliminated his rival – and so Pompey was brutally murdered as he set foot ashore in Egypt (Plutarch’s Life of Pompey, chapter 79).

Caelius was elected tribune in 52. This was the year when Clodius was finally murdered, by his longstanding rival Titus Annius Milo, and Caelius helped Cicero defend his killers (see another of Cicero’s best-known speeches, Pro Milone).

In 51 Cicero reluctantly acquiesced in being sent by the senate to be governor of Cilicia, now south-west Turkey. Caelius was elected aedile, in Rome, while he was away and any reader of Cicero’s letters is familiar with the way Cicero had him promise to send him all the news and gossip he could gather. Caelius memorably keeps needling Cicero to send him some panthers so he can make a splash at the public games which he, as aedile, was charged with organising.

When the civil war broke out Caelius made the right call and supported Caesar and was appointed one of the praetors. However, he put forward radical plans for debt relief against the wishes of his fellow praetors, which caused a riot and he was suspended from office. He fled Rome and, along with Milo, who he had helped defend 4 years earlier, tried to foment a revolt against Caesar, but they were both killed by Caesar’s troops. Few, if any, happy endings in ancient Rome.

Credit

Defence Speeches by Cicero, translated and edited by D.H. Berry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2000.

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Pro Murena by Cicero (63 BC)

‘Hardly anyone dances when he is sober, unless he is insane…’
(Cicero defending his client against charges of loose living in Pro Murena)

It is late November 63 BC and Marcus Tullius Cicero is drawing towards the end of his year serving as one of Rome’s two consuls. The last few months have been marked by the increasingly scandalous behaviour of the Roman senator Lucius Sergius Catilina, who, frustrated in his plans to get elected consul for the following year (62 BC), is planning to overthrow the Roman state, to set Rome itself on fire, murder its leading politicians and lead an army of liberated slaves on the capital.

In the last few weeks Cicero, aware of the growing threat, has made blistering attacks on Catalina in the senate, prompting the latter to outspoken defiance and threats to bring everything down in flames, before he fled the capital. Now news has just arrived in Rome that Catalina has placed himself at the head of a rebel army in Etruria, with the obvious aim of marching on Rome and taking it by force and then implementing his violent social revolution. And it is at this moment of high jeopardy that a case comes to court in which Cicero, in his civilian capacity as Rome’s best advocate, is slated to speak for the defence.

The case has been brought against Lucius Licinius Murena. Murena is a prominent politician and general from a distinguished family and has just been elected to succeed Cicero as one of the two consuls for the following year, 62 BC, elected in the same contest in which Catalina was defeated.

The charge against Murena is of electoral malpractice i.e. bribery, and the prosecutors include some of the leading men of the state, including Servius Sulpicius Rufus, Gaius Posthumius, and Marcus Porcius Cato.

The election and the case and the Cataline rebellion are all intimately linked because Catalina only embarked on his uprising when he was defeated in the election for consul by Murena. It was the third time Catalina had stood for election to consul and failed and it was frustration and bitterness which spurred him to rebel against his city and class.

The speech itself is a classic example of Cicero choosing to ignore the main thrust of the charges in order to shift the point of debate onto a topic where he thinks he stands more chance of winning. Thus the focus of his speech is not whether Murena is guilty or not (there was widespread agreement that he was) but whether Rome could afford to send a distinguished general into exile at just the exact moment when she needed him to save her from Catalina’s uprising. Murena’s conviction and banishment would automatically require a supplementary election to be held to fill the now vacant post of consul. Could Rome afford to be distracted by the holding of a supplementary election at exactly the moment when it needed two consuls, both firing on all cylinders.

D.H. Berry is the translator and editor of the excellent Oxford University Press edition of five of Cicero’s best defence speeches. In his wonderfully lucid introduction to Pro Murena, Berry explains the motivations of the advocates involved on both sides of the trial.

Bear in mind that in ancient Rome there was no police force and no state institutions for the administration of justice, no Crown Prosecution Service. So prosecutions could only be undertaken by individuals against other individuals, and both protagonists then tried to rope in friends, family or colleagues, the more eminent and high social status the better, onto their sides. The whole ‘system’ was riddled with private motives, grievances, opportunities to seize advantage, get rid of rivals, or ally with powerful patrons, and the Murena case was no different.

The prosecutors

Servius Sulpicius Rufus

Sulpicius had stood in the election for consul and been defeated by Murena. He was irked because, as a leading jurist, he had kept within the strict rules governing election behaviour. When Murena was elected, Sulpicius launched the prosecution a) because Murena had undoubtedly breached the law and b) because, if Murena was disqualified (and driven into exile) Sulpicius would stand in the resulting ‘supplementary election’ and stood a good chance of achieving his goal of becoming consul. So pretty crude political motivations, then.

Marcus Porcius Cato

Cato announced before the election that he would prosecute anyone found to breach the new, tougher electoral rules and so, as inflexible as a terminator, joined the prosecution regardless of its political and practical consequences.

The defenders

Quintus Hortensius Hortalus

Hortensius had been the leading advocate in Rome until the young up-and-comer Cicero defeated him in several cases at which point he retired. However, when Cicero was appointed consul in 63 Hortensius returned to the courts and the two now worked together, as on this case. Hortensius was a close ally of Lucius Licinius Lucullus, the general who had won great victories in the East until recalled by the senate and replaced by the boy wonder general, Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey), since when he had been sulking at his vast villa complex near Naples. Murena was related to Lucullus and had served as legate (second in command) for him in Asia, so Lucullus backed him and Hortensius was Lucullus’s agent in the courts.

Marcus Licinius Crassus

It’s surprising to find Rome’s richest man involved in the rough and tumble of a court case but his motivation was similar to Hortensius’s, namely opposition to Pompey. Crassus had resented Pompey ever since he had swept in at the end of Crassus’s prolonged campaign to put down the Spartacus rebellion in 71 BC and claimed all the credit for himself. Pompey had gone on to be given special commands against the pirates, in 67 BC, then sent to relieve Lucullus in the war against King Mithridates in Asia in 66. Now, with that war at an end, Pompey had announced he was soon to return to Rome. So Crassus got involved in the defence of Murena because it would be infinitely better for him to have the consul for 62 (Murena) in big debt to him, than to let Murena be exiled and the leadership of the just-about-to-start campaign against Catalina handed to his enemy, Pompey. (See what I mean about private motivations playing a big role in law cases?)

Cicero

Cicero’s own motivation is more puzzling. He was a good friend of the lead prosecutor, Sulpicius. He was favourably disposed to Pompey i.e. didn’t share the anti-Pompey animus which united Hortensius and Crassus. And Murena was being prosecuted under new, tighter legislation about electoral procedure which he had himself sponsored (the lex Tullia de ambitu). In the absence of any evidence, our best guess is that, as the Cataline conspiracy exploded into open warfare, Cicero wanted to ensure that one of the two consuls due to take over from him in just a few weeks’ time (on 1 January 62) was a seasoned general (as Murena was) who would be the Republic’s strongest possible defender against the rebels.

Also, because nobody’s motive in ancient Rome were pure or simple, it did Cicero no harm that Hortensius and Crassus were leading conservatives. Having risen to the top of the greasy pole by dint of talent and hard work, Cicero promptly espoused the conservative republicanism of the aristocracy and Crassus and Hortensius were leading lights of that faction. So it was a shrewd career and social move to work with them, no matter how temporarily.

Cicero’s speech

Cicero describes the prosecution case as being in three parts. Surprisingly for us, but customary at the time, only one of these parts is concerned with the actual evidence for the charges. Cicero enumerates the three parts as:

an attack on his client’s private life
a comparison of the merits of other candidates who stood against Murena in the consulship election
actual charges of electoral malpractice (11)

As an amateur non-scholar and non-Latinist, for me several things stand out. One is the strongly ad hominem nature of the content throughout, the highly personal nature of both Cicero’s defence and his counter-attacks against the prosecutors. And the way these are entwined with Cicero’s unrelenting self promotion.

The speech is conventionally divided into fairly short (half page) 90 sections and Cicero spends the first 10 of these defending attacks which have obviously been made against him personally by both Sulpicius and Cato regarding his decision to defend Murena at all.

He devotes only four short sections to briskly addressing the accusations of personal immorality the opposition have made, stemming from Murena’s time in Asia, by pointing out that he was there serving as a junior officer under his father and therefore carrying out the kind of filial duty so important to Romans.

Then, somehow, we are back with personalities for a section where Cicero defends Murena against attacks of being a ‘new man’, something which Cicero, the quintessential ‘new man’, takes to heart, prompting him to justify his own attempts to open careers for men like himself.

As you read on, you find that Cicero’s arguments continually rotate back round to himself; they might digress off on this or that topic for a while but they always seem to come back to another way in which Cicero can promote himself, defend himself, extol his virtues and remind everyone of his sterling service to the state.

Sections 18 to 21 compare the careers of Sulpicius (who brought the case against Murena and stood against him and lost in the recent consular election) and Murena; both served as quaestors before Murena went off to work as legate under Lucius Lucullus while Sulpicius stayed in Rome and studied hard to become a leading jurist.

In 21 Cicero adverts to himself again, and the way his constant presence in Rome led to his astounding popularity, swank swank.

22 features a nice use of antithesis with Cicero directly comparing Murena’s daily life in an army in the field with Sulpicius’s cushy civilian existence. This develops, in sections 23 to 29, into Cicero, surprisingly, mocking and scorning Sulpicius’s chosen profession as legal expert (‘filled to the brim with trickery and foolishness’, 26, ‘consisting entirely of fictions and fabrications’, 28), unfavourably comparing the timid life of a scholar to the skills and manliness required by Murena’s of officer in the army. In other words, an extended attack on the prosecutor, completely ignoring the basis of the case.

And throughout, Cicero constantly refers to himself:

It seems to me that many men have started out with a strong preference for my procession, but when in due course they found they were not up to it, they sank to yours. (29)

I was aware of this when I was standing myself… (40)

Having done the same myself when I was a praetor and in my consulship… (42)

I repeatedly told you, Servius, that you had no idea how to campaign for the consulship… (43)

I myself have first-hand experience… (46)

To be a bit more precise, Cicero mocks Sulpicius for being a jurist or expert on the law. By comparison, he says the two qualities most required for a consul are military ability and the ability to speak, to be an orator, to control and sway armies and civilian crowds – both of which, of course, he claims his client has in abundance.

This comparison of Murena and Sulpicius moves on to the flaws in the latter’s campaigning in the recent consular election, which Cicero itemises in devastating detail. His strongest point is that, from an early stage, Sullpicius persuaded the senate to pass a new law against electoral malfeasance stronger than the existing one. Everyone promptly concluded that Sulpicius was throwing in the towel and knew he would lose. Cicero does a witty impersonation of ordinary people on election day, discussing Sulpicius’s giving up and so abandoning him for Murena.

Cicero then lists the people Suplicius’s strict new law alienated, starting with the masses themselves (for, as Berry points out in a droll note, the people liked being bribed; it was one of the perks of being a Roman citizen.)

And this criticism of Sulpicius for threatening to prosecute whoever won the election instead of actively campaigning himself, segues into the reckless behaviour of Catalina during the same campaign which, of course, circles back round to Cicero’s role in the Catalina affair (up to that point) and suddenly the speech is all about Cicero’s actions and motivations in calling Catalina out in the senate (49 ff).

Murena was criticised for having decorated the triumph of his father with military gifts (as well as sharing in the triumph), and that he had lived in luxury while on military campaign. Regarding the triumph, Cicero argued that such actions were legitimate because he had served in the war under his father’s command. He added that the fact that he served in a war made him worthy of praise not criticism.

Incongruously, Murena was also accused of being a dancer, which made him in Roman eyes a person of less dignity. Cicero dismissed this as irrelevant.

Answering Cato

Eventually Cicero reaches the end of addressing issues raised by Sulpicius, takes a pause, and announces he is going to consider the arguments put by the other prosecutors, namely Gaius Postumius and Cato.

He devotes most time to Cato, pointing out that he is a highly moral and distinguished man, but that his adherence to Stoic philosophy has made him hard and inflexible. He asks Cato whether it is wise or practical to deprive the state of the service of an experience general now, at this crucial juncture, just as the Cataline conspiracy is reaching its climax.

Having established this theme in his section criticising Cato, Cicero expands it to bring his speech to a crescendo in the last 5 sections or so, as he turns to the jury and repeats the same idea half a dozen times, that this is no time to be jettisoning a consul and wasting the people’s energies on a supplementary election.

This I understand, but I was puzzled why, in the last few sentences, Cicero dragged in a few extraneous points which he hadn’t mentioned at all in the preceding 90 sections, asking the jury to consider the shock and shame and upset to Murena’s father and wife and extended family if he were to be exiled (87); and also to consider the virtue of his home town, ‘the extremely ancient town’ of Lanuvium (86).

These seem odd distractions to throw in right at the very end, oddly distracting from the pulverising central notion that we can’t afford to lose a consul and a general in this time of crisis.

Plutarch’s account

The order of defence speakers was Hortensius, Crassus and then Cicero, as he preferred speaking last and delivering the killer blow. Plutarch, in his Life of Cato describes the scene:

When the trial was held, Cicero, who was consul at that time and one of Murena’s advocates, took advantage of Cato’s fondness for the Stoics to rail and jest at length about those philosophers and what were called their ‘paradoxes’, thus making the jurors laugh. Cato, accordingly, as we are told, said with a smile to the bystander: ‘My friends, what a droll fellow our consul is!’
(Plutarch, Life of Cato, 21.5)

According to Plutarch, Cicero is said to have spoken below his usual standard because he was up late the night writing the speech, but it didn’t matter – Murena was acquitted, anyway: the jury accepted Cicero’s simple line that the national interest trumped strict adherence to the law or anything Murena might have actually done to breach it.

Subsequently

Murena was acquitted but the Cataline conspiracy was yet to reach its twin climaxes. Only a few weeks after the trial, Cicero was able to present to the senate documentary evidence (letters) and first person testimony from senior conspirators who had been part of the plan to overthrow the state. A famous debate followed about what to do with these five senior figures, which led to the decision to have them executed, which Cicero promptly did – an act which was to haunt the rest of his life as later political enemies would claim it was an illegal and even treasonous act. It would lead to his exile in 58 BC.

Having disposed of the leadership in the city, the struggle against Catalina turned to battle against the army he had raised in the north of Italy and here, ironically, Murena, who had been acquitted chiefly because of his military skills, was to play no part in the military campaign – the loyalist army which confronted and defeated Catalina’s forces in January 62 was led by Cicero’s fellow consul for 63, Gaius Antonius Hybrida, who had his command of the army extended by the senate into the new year solely for this purpose.

Murena, who Cicero had defended so successfully on the premise that the state needed him to defeat Catalina, in the event, played no role whatsoever in the defeat of Catalina. There’s no point studying history if you don’t have a taste for unintended consequences and ironic reversals.

The rule of three

Many rhetorical techniques are on display and there is much balancing of two ideas or parentheses, and some sentences contain four, five or six clauses – but the ancient rule of three is everywhere evident:

But if shunning hard work denotes sloth, rejecting supplicants arrogance, and abandoning one’s friends shamelessness, then this case is one which no one who is hard working or compassionate or loyal to duty could possibly refuse. (10)

For my part, gentleman, I should consider myself wicked had I deserted a friend, cruel had I deserted a man in trouble, arrogant had I deserted a consul. (10)

[Murena’s] father found him an invaluable help in moments of crisis, a comfort in times of strain, and a son to be proud of in moments of victory. (12)

There is nothing more fickle than the masses, nothing more unfathomable than people’s intentions, nothing more misleading than the entire process of an election. (36)

Marcus Crassus, a man of the greatest rank and diligence and oratorical skill… (48)

The rage in his face, the criminality in his eyes, and the insolence in his speech… (49)

He was a man of the greatest eloquence, the greatest devotion to duty, and the greatest integrity… (58)

I venture to predict that in due course experience will influence you, time will soften you, age will mellow you. (65)

Can’t lose with the rule of three. Makes anything sound grander, nobler, more effective.

Credit

Defence Speeches by Cicero, translated and edited by D.H. Berry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2000.

Cicero reviews

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

2 Comments

by Simon on July 13, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Law, Translation

Posted by Simon on July 13, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/pro-murena-cicero/

Introduction to the defence speeches of Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC), without the benefit of coming from a patrician or aristocratic family, rose by hard work to become the leading Roman lawyer and orator of his day. For a generation he dominated the Roman courts, usually appearing for the defence. We know of 88 law speeches he gave and an amazing 58 of them survive in whole or in part. The Oxford University Press publish an excellent paperback containing five of his most famous defence speeches.

(Note that the Latin word pro simply means ‘for’ and takes the ablative case i.e. changes the ending of words and names to ‘o’, so that the speech ‘for Caelius’ is known as ‘Pro Caelio’ and so on – unless the name ends in ‘a’, in which case it stays the same, or already ends in ‘o’ in which case it adds ‘ne’ to the end. These are examples of the kind of rules you have to learn when studying Latin.). The five features speeches are:

Pro Roscio Amerino: his defence of Quintus Roscius Gallus, falsely accused of murdering his father
Pro Murena: defence of the consul-elect Lucius Licinius Murena, accused of electoral bribery (39 pages)
Pro Archia: defence of the poet Archias, on a citizenship charge
Pro Caelio: of Marcus Caelius Rufus , ex-lover of Clodia Metelli, on charges of poisoning and violence
Pro Milone: defence of Titus Annius Milo, accused of murdering Cicero’s hated enemy Clodius

The most obvious thing about the speeches is how long they are. I’ve no idea how long a modern defence address is but Cicero’s speeches occupy 30 to 40 pages of an average paperback and must have taken some time to deliver, especially stopping for all the dramatic pauses, the appeals to the jury and the strategic bursting into tears (he refers to his own tears of grief in several of the speeches). Did he memorise them and deliver them without notes? That, also, is an impressive feat.

The next most obvious thing is how complex the background and context of each case is. If you look them up online, you discover that each of Cicero’s major speeches has an entire Wikipedia article devoted to it because each one requires a meaty explanation of the context of the case: where it stood in Cicero’s career, and then the (generally very complicated) background of the case, including biographies of all the main participants, which themselves only make sense when carefully located within the feverish and tortuously complicated politics of the late Roman Republic.

Many law cases brought in ancient Rome were not objective products of what we think of as ‘justice’ but were entirely motivated by personal rivalries, sparked by the never-ending competition for office, but often just personal feuds or vendettas.

There was no police force in ancient Rome and, crucially, no office of public prosecution, no Crown Prosecution Service such as we have in modern England. In other words, you didn’t take your grievance to the authorities, who then carefully assessed whether there was a case to answer and decided whether to bring a criminal or civil case against a suspect or defendant. None of that framework existed. So people (generally rich and well-connected people) brought cases against individuals off their own initiative, using their own interpretation of the law.

And many of the cases were what I think are, in modern law, called ‘vexatious’, meaning they were not attempts to achieve objective justice but were nakedly biased attempts to game the system in the prosecutor’s favour, often shameless attempts to get political rivals convicted, exiled or maybe even executed. And this was accepted because everyone else was gaming the system, too. Personally motivated accusations and counter-accusations and counter-counter-accusations were the normal procedure.

The courts were one of the principal arenas in which the business of politics in Rome was played out: if you wanted to get rid of a political opponent, you prosecuted him and brought about his exile; if you failed, he might then prosecute you.
(Defence Speeches by Cicero, translated and edited by D.H. Berry, Introduction p.xxvii)

It was also the case that no one could be prosecuted while holding political office. Therefore a lot of the fiercely competitive vying to be elected to ‘magistracies’ or political offices in late Republican Rome was motivated not by keenness to serve, but as a tactic to dodge prosecution.

(This rose to a kind of climax with the political impasse which developed when Caius Julius Caesar refused to give up his command in Gaul and return to Rome unless he could be promised the opportunity to run for consul in his absence [an election he knew he could bribe his way to winning]. His sole reason for doing this being to avoid the prosecutions for corruption and malpractice which he knew he would face if he returned to Rome as a private citizen. Caesar knew this would happen because stentorian Republicans like Cato had made umpteen speeches promising to prosecute him. Therefore he had no choice but to seek election in order to win immunity, and he could only run in his physical absence because he knew that, as soon as he entered Rome as a private citizen, he knew he’d be tried, multiple times until his enemies got the result they wanted. When the senate rejected all his and his supporters’ attempts to negotiate this deal, he was left with no alternative but to enter Italy backed by his legions for security – thus triggering the civil war.)

D.H. Berry’s introductions

So before the reader gets anywhere near the speeches themselves, you have to mug up on their very complex background. And that’s where the OUP edition of Cicero’s Defence Speeches is outstanding. The editor and translator D.H. Berry not only provides an excellent general introduction to the volume, giving us a thorough and vivid overview of Cicero’s life and how it entwined with the complicated political context of the 70s, 60s and 50s BC, before going on to explain at some length the quirks of the Roman legal system…

But he also precedes each of the speeches with an in-depth summary of the political context and specific events which gave rise to it. This sounds simple but is, in each case, impressively complicated and absolutely vital: without a full understanding of the context you wouldn’t know what Cicero was trying to achieve in each speech. Berry is excellent at not only explaining the factual background but the strategy and tactics Cicero adopts in each speech.

General introduction

There were two main types of oratory: ‘forensic’ (from the Latin forensis meaning ‘of the forum’, which is where the public law courts were sited, also known as judicial) and ‘deliberative’ (the display of public oratory in political assemblies).

The Roman first court or ‘public inquiry’ was only set up in 149 BC and was followed by the establishment of further courts set up to try specific types of cases. Juries were large (sometimes hundreds of citizens) and if no court existed for the type of case, the trial was held in front of the entire people in the forum.

The system grew piecemeal for the next 70 years or so until it was swept away by the dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla in 81 BC. He set up seven courts, designed to try specific types of case, namely murder, forgery, extortion, treason, electoral malpractice, embezzlement and assault.

The make-up of juries was a subject of controversy for decades – as you can imagine, if many cases were politically motivated, then who was allowed to sit on the jury was vitally important to both sides – until a law of 70 BC decreed they should be made up of one third senators, one third equites (or knights) and one third ‘tribunes of the treasury’ (who seem to have been a minor sort of equites).

In the decades that followed, more permanent courts were added, such as one devoted to violence, and other ad hoc types were created as and when required, such as the ‘sacrilege court’ set up to try Publius Clodius Pulcher for his famous dressing-up as a woman to infiltrate the women-only celebration of the Bona Dea being held at Julius Caesar’s house in 61 BC.

There were no public prosecutors. A defendant was prosecuted by the man who brought the case against him and any advocates or eminent men he could persuade to join him. The scope for doing deals and sharing prosecutions with social or political allies who stood to gain from a victory were endless.

Something else surprising: successful prosecutors were awarded their victim’s marks of honour and acceded to their rank in the senatorial hierarchy. So, on the face of it, a very strong motive to bring a prosecution and win.

However, they didn’t gain respect from doing this, often the reverse, and prosecuting was generally seen as an invidious role, unless you were obliged to carry it out by civic or family duty or gross injustice. The role of defender was much more socially respected, which explains why in almost all of Cicero’s cases he appears for the defence. The general idea was to mount one spectacular prosecution to make your name, then seek the safety of defending (a career path Cicero explicitly recommends in Pro Caelio, 73).

Also surprising is that it was forbidden by law to pay a defence attorney. This law had been passed as long ago as 204 BC to prevent bribery, but in a roundabout way led to subtler corruption. Roman society functioned via complex webs of clients and patrons. Patrons gave protection and assistance to clients who in turn waited on their patrons in their houses, in the street, rallied support for them at elections and so on. (These scenes are described by Cicero himself in Pro Murena, 70.)

In a legal setting an advocate (actually called, in Latin, a patronus) was a continuation of this intricate web of allegiances. Cicero might choose to defend a client because he owed them favours (he defended men who had supported him during the Catiline crisis of 63) or to put someone in his debt. It was never done out of charity or public duty. Every relationship, every act in ancient Rome, had undertones of politics and power.

Another surprisingly important factor was personal charisma. Roman trials put less weight on the evidence (they didn’t have the tradition of presenting forensically objective evidence that we do) and much more on the character of the people involved. Often a legal speech spent more time assassinating the character of the accused, or the accuser, than querying any of the supposed facts.

And this extended to the character of the advocate himself. Many of Cicero’s speeches not only defend his client’s character and denigrate the character of the plaintiff, but they also viciously attack the character of the prosecuting attorneys. By the same token, all the speeches in the volume draw heavily on Cicero’s own character and record as part of the defence.

Cicero obsessively invokes the auctoritas he acquired after ‘saving the nation’ during the Catiline crisis, repeatedly describes the risks he ran, the danger he faced, his boldness of action.

In my own consulship I undertook a bold venture for the sake of yourselves and your children. (Pro Milone, 82)

He is not slow to remind everyone that Cato had called him ‘the Father of the Nation’. He does all this in order to bring his (he hoped) huge moral authority to bear on the case.

(For example, when he reminds the jury of his role in saving the nation and then uses this authority to personally vouch for Marcus Caelius Rufus’s good character in Pro Caelio, 77, let alone the half or dozen or more references to it throughout Pro Milone.)

[This emphasis on character and personality is not restricted to Cicero’s speeches. It permeates the histories written at the time. Lacking any theories of society or economics, otherwise intelligent men like Sallust, Plutarch and Suetonius fall back again and again on individual character as the primary engine of history and human affairs, in a manner which we, as heirs to 2,000 years of evermore sophisticated social theory, frequently find naive and simplistic.]

Trials took place in the open air (what happened if it rained?). The presiding magistrate and scribes sat on a raised platform (tribunal) at the front of the court, while the jury (probably) sat on benches slightly raised off the ground. The plaintiff, defendant, their advocates, legal advisers, friends and families sat in two groups to one side. And this diorama was open to the forum and to sometimes huge crowds of the general public who gathered to watch and follow every trial, especially if it was of someone eminent or promised juicy gossip.

Trials were more like theatre than we are used to. The defendant had to wear mourning clothes and not shave or wash for several days in order to present a piteous spectacle. Berry gives examples of defendants who refused to comply with this ridiculous convention and were promptly convicted, regardless of the proceedings, solely because of their affront to tradition.

The prosecution spoke first, laying out the case, then the defence rebutted the prosecution points – only then was any evidence presented. Oddly, to us, in some of Cicero’s speeches he guesses at what the evidence will be.

Slaves could be made to give evidence but only under torture. Nowhere does Cicero refer to the shocking inhumanity of this tradition, which sheds light on the fear of all the slaves in the ‘comedies’ of Plautus and Terence that they might find themselves being tortured if their master gets into any kind of legal difficulty.

The magistrates (praetors) overseeing a case often knew nothing about the law (praetors were elected to hold office for only one year). They simply kept the peace and ensured the rules were complied with. (Cicero is on record as complementing the father of the future Augustus, Gaius Octavius, for his fairness and calm in supervising trials.)

How many jurors were there? Evidence is mixed, but it seems to have been a surprising 75, 25 from each of the three categories mentioned above. Jurors were not allowed to confer and voted immediately after the evidence was presented in a secret ballot. They were each given a wax table with A for absolvo on one side and C for condemno on the other. They rubbed out the letter they didn’t want and popped the table in an urn, then a court official totted up the votes.

If a defendant was found guilty the official penalty was death. But since there were no police and the defendant was never in anyone’s ‘custody’, it was generally pretty easy for them to leave the court, the forum, pack up their things and go into voluntary exile. Before most Italian tribes were given Roman status in 90 BC, this might mean retiring to places like Praeneste (only 23 miles from Rome) but by the time Cicero was a prosecutor it meant having to leave Italy altogether. Massilia, the large thriving port on the south coast of Gaul (modern Marseilles) was a popular destination and was where both Verres, who Cicero successfully prosecuted for corruption, and Milo, who he failed to defend from prosecution for murder, ended up living out their lives in well-heeled exile there.

Rhetorical style

Following his extremely useful and informative summary of Cicero’s career and the apparatus of Roman laws, Berry gives an equally useful explanation of the rhetorical techniques Cicero used in his speeches.

Cicero’s prose style is highly artificial. Sentences are long, sometimes a third of a modern page, sometimes longer. The style is ‘periodic’, meaning the sentences only achieve closure and make their meaning clear right at the end. The result is suspense: the audience hangs on the orator’s words and the succession of subordinate clauses, waiting to find out whether the sentence will end as they expected (with a nice sense of completion) or will deliver a surprise (gasps of delight). You can see how, done well, this could enthral a crowd.

Sometimes clauses are in pairs, to create balance, either/or.

‘For it is not my enemies who will take you away from me but my dearest friends; not those who have on occasion treated me badly, but those who have always been good to me,’ (Pro Milone, 99)

Sometimes they come in threes, to provide a crescendo effect. Pairs and trios create a balanced civilised effect. By contrast, sometimes his sentences pile up 4, 5, 6 7 short clauses to create a machine gun effect, to create something more feverish and frantic.

‘No witness, no accomplice has been named. The entire charge arises out of a malevolent, disreputable, vindictive, crime-ridden, lust-ridden house.’ (Pro Caelio, 55)

Cicero took great care to make sure his clauses ended with certain rhythms. Apparently these cadences were named, categorised and taught by teachers of oratory, although Berry doesn’t list or explain any, and they’re not really detectable in English translation.

The jurors and the public watching the trial knew all about these techniques and assessed speakers on their skill at deploying them. Cicero tells an anecdote about a crowd bursting into applause at an advocate’s particularly elegant turn of phrase.

In addition to rhythm a trained orator could deploy:

Anaphora

The repetition of words or phrases in a group of sentences, clauses, or poetic lines.

If you restore Caelius to me, to his family, and to the country, you will have a man who is dedicated, devoted and bound to you. (Pro Caelio 80)

Asyndeton

The omission of the conjunctions that ordinarily join coordinate words or clauses, as in ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’.

Apostrophe

A speech or address to a person who is not present or to a personified object. Cicero frequently addresses the spirit of dead, venerable Romans, or addresses the spirit of murdered Clodius, or addresses figures not physically present in the court (such as Pompey, directly addressed in Pro Milone).

Exclamation

For example, ‘O gods!’ the speaker pretending to give way to moments of emotion.

Alliteration, assonance and wordplay

Berry assures us these are everywhere present in Cicero but it is, of course, impossible to judge in translation.

Metaphor

One consul handing over to another informs him of the current challenges and issues in much the same way that the captain of a ship putting into port tells the captains of ships just setting out about the weather and pirates (Pro Murena, 4). A metaphor which is revived later in the speech, in the extended comparison of elections to unpredictable ocean currents or storms in (35 to 36).

Rhetorical strategies

At a higher level than specific tricks of rhetoric are larger-scale rhetorical tactics.

Appropriating the prosecution

Often he repeats the points the prosecution has made in order to rebut them. He does this by quoting them but often twisting the points in such a way as to suit himself, to tee up the kind of rebuttal he wants to make – as when he repeats a series of points allegedly made by Cato in Pro Murena, 67 onwards).

Inventing opposition points

One step beyond twisting prosecution points is inventing possible objections to what he’s saying in order to easily counter them. There are hundreds of instances along the lines of:

‘You will no doubt ask me, Grattius…’ (Pro Archia, 12)
‘Someone will surely ask…’ (Pro Archia, 15)

In which he attributes to the opposition lines of attack which he then easily refutes.

Rhetorical questions

Why do I mention his mother and his home when the penalty of the law deprives him of his home, his parent, and the company and sight of his friends? Shall the poor man go into exile, then? Where? To the east, where for many years he serves as a legate, led armies and performed heroic deeds? (Pro Murena, 89)

If Caelius had really given himself up to the kind of life that is alleged, would he, when still a young man, have brought a prosecution against an ex-consul? If he shied away from hard work, if he were enslaved to pleasure, would he do battle here every day, go in search of personal enmities, bring prosecutions, and run the risk of being prosecuted himself? And would he also maintain for so many months now and in full view of the entire Roman people a struggle for one of two things – his own political survival or glory? (Pro Caelio, 47)

Mimicry

As when Cicero imagines the feelings of soldiers called on to vote for Murena and remembering his many achievements in the army of the East (Pro Murena, 36) or mimics the voices of sceptical voters on election day (Pro Murena, 45).

Or the great sequence in Pro Caelio where he pretends to be one of Clodia’s ancestors brought back from the dead to thunder against her immoral behaviour.

There’s another type of mimicry. Surprisingly, the defendant was not allowed to speak at their own trial and so Cicero sometimes speaks for them, in the sense of putting words into their mouths and telling the jury, this is what X said to me, these are his very words.

This is notable at the climax of Pro Milone where sections 94 , 95 and 98 purport to be the sad but stoic speech of Milo himself.

If you combine this technique with ‘apostrophe’, addresses to people either absent or dead, you can see why the speeches are highly dramatic in the sense that there are a surprising number of characters in them, not as in a play, obviously, but being named, addressed, invoked and even attributed whole speeches which are then performed in another voice.

Changing the subject

In Pro Milone Cicero doesn’t bother denying that Milo was responsible for the murder of Clodius, but tries to shift the ground of argument to the issue of whether Milo was acting in justifiable self defence. Specifically, he argues that the incident wasn’t a random accident but a carefully contrived ambush by Clodius and so his client was only responding as Great and Eminent Romans Throughout History had responded i.e. by defending himself. This strategy failed and Milo was convicted.

Invoking famous men

In all the speeches Cicero invokes the memory of Great and Noble Romans from history who he says behaved like his client. It is a variation on invoking his own auctoritas.

Closely related is the Appeal To Patriotism. All of the speeches invoke the idea that jury must acquit his client because The Very Existence of the State is at stake!

‘In this trial you hold the whole country in your hands!!’ (Pro Murena, 83)

Invoking the sad family

At the end of Pro Murena and Pro Caelio Cicero invokes the tragic spectacle of the defendant’s family, his aged father, his weeping mother or wife, on their knees, begging for their son or husband or father to be freed and their family happily reunited.

The Appeal to the Romans’ very strong sense of Family Values seems to have been a tried and trusted, standard strategy (Pro Caelio, 79 and 80).

Crying

In several of the speeches Cicero refers to the fact that he himself is weeping, crying at the spectacle of such a valiant, heroic, brave, virtuous, patriotic, dutiful and wonderful person having been brought low by his fiendish enemies and so utterly deserving of vindication and acquittal that he, Cicero, cannot help bursting into floods of tears, he cannot see the jury, he cannot see the court, he can barely speak for grief!

‘But I must stop now. I can no longer speak for tears…’ (Pro Milone, 105)

Repetition

Obviously the rule of three, or using multiple clauses to say the same thing, or asking a series of rhetorical questions are all types of repetition. But a big feature of all the speeches which Berry doesn’t really address is their repetitiveness. Cicero often says he’s going to address a point, addresses it, tells us he’s finished with it, and yet several pages (a few minutes) later, brings it up again.

I can’t find the precise references now but in the three longest speeches, he has a tendency to make a point, wander off to something completely different, then revert to the same point later. This was the single factor which made reading them difficult for me, the sense that they didn’t have a clear logical flow – a beginning, middle and end – but on the contrary, I found all the speeches rambling and digressive and often hard to follow, with no higher level logic.

Conclusion

The cumulative effect of all these techniques is that the speeches, especially when written down and published (as Cicero took care to have done) are emphatically not the language of ordinary speech. The orator has done a lot of work preparing them and he expects the audience to do some work to appreciate them. It is intended to sound ‘theatrical and high flown’ in Berry’s phrase. The fact that I found them long-winded and often quite confusing maybe says more about my taste, shaped as it is by the 20th century taste for laconic brevity, than Cicero’s verbose and long-winded achievement.

P.S. Adrian Goldsworthy’s comments

Dr Adrian Goldsworthy’s big biography of Augustus contains lots of factual asides about aspects of late Republican Rome. Some of these concern the law and provide context to these speeches:

Legal attacks could easily end a career and so were far more high-stakes than in our society (p.94).

Goldsworthy gives an example of the rhythm of Cicero’s sayings in Latin. This was a throwaway remark he made about young Octavius, laudanum adulescentum, ornandum, tollendum – which means ‘we will praise the young man, reward and discard him’ – and, apparently, caused a serious breach in their relations (p.122) – but it’s one of the few examples I have of the rhythm of Cicero’s language in Latin.

He reinforces the notion that a) since there was no equivalent of the Crown or State, legal cases could only be brought by individuals and b) prosecuting was seen as invidious, unless one was defending family pride or there was a really gross example of wrongdoing – and so accusers tended to be young men out to make a name for themselves with one or two eye-catching prosecutions, before settling into the more congenial and socially accepted role of defence counsel, exactly the career Cicero followed (Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor by Adrian Goldsworthy p.43). He repeats the point on page 281:

Prosecution was generally left to the young, and had long provided an opportunity for youthful aristocrats to catch the public eye at an early stage in their careers.

Goldsworthy refers to ‘the aggressive and abusive tone common in Roman trials’ which we’ve seen plenty of evidence of (p.280).

Above all, Goldsworthy makes the most devastating single point about Cicero’s speeches with striking simplicity:

A glance at Cicero’s speeches is enough to show the readiness with which Roman advocates distorted the truth. (p.278)

For all his pontifications about Justice, for all his exhaustive descriptions of Law epitomising Reason In Action – Cicero was a highly professional and convincing liar.

Credit

Defence Speeches by Cicero, translated and edited by D.H. Berry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2000.

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Pro Milone by Cicero (52 BC)

Publius Clodius Pulcher

The murder of Clodius

Milo’s trial

Asconius’s version

Two versions of Cicero’s speech

The speech itself

Subsequent trials

Slavery

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Pro Caelio by Cicero (56 BC)

Background

The Cataline conspiracy

Cicero sent into exile

Marcus Caelius Rufus

Lucius Calpurnius Bestia

Ptolemy XII of Egypt

The charges

The preceding speeches

Prosecution

Defence

Cicero’s speech pro Caelio

The result

Credit

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Pro Murena by Cicero (63 BC)

The prosecutors

Servius Sulpicius Rufus

Marcus Porcius Cato

The defenders

Quintus Hortensius Hortalus

Marcus Licinius Crassus

Cicero

Cicero’s speech

Answering Cato

Plutarch’s account

Subsequently

The rule of three

Credit

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Introduction to the defence speeches of Cicero

D.H. Berry’s introductions

General introduction

Rhetorical style

Anaphora

Asyndeton

Apostrophe

Exclamation

Alliteration, assonance and wordplay

Metaphor

Rhetorical strategies

Appropriating the prosecution

Inventing opposition points

Rhetorical questions

Mimicry

Changing the subject

Invoking famous men

Invoking the sad family

Crying

Repetition

Conclusion

P.S. Adrian Goldsworthy’s comments

Credit

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Roman reviews

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