Man and Monument.(Book Review)

Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician, by Anthony Everitt (Random House, 359 pp., $25.95)

Marcus Tullius Cicero belongs near the top of the long and lengthening list of writers and statesmen more quoted than read, more revered than pondered. This great republican of Rome, the exemplar of civic virtue and prudent statesmanship, comes to us today wrapped in a mute magnificence. His name rings bells, but rarely are his works mined for the wealth of practical wisdom and elegant style for which untold generations have known him, and in pursuit of which they turned to him with habitual confidence. He's a stained white statue to most of us, nothing more. O tempora, O mores!

How to explain the new ignorance? Not so long ago Cicero's stature in the public mind was high and firm, his academic presence constant-perhaps a little too relentlessly constant, armies of high-school Latin students might well have moaned. Challenged or disgruntled students knew they had reached the apex of Latin prose when, Caesar's Gallic Wars behind them, they were assigned Cicero's famous orations against Catiline, with their haughtiness, dense vocabulary, and elongated sentences. This was Latin for grown-ups.

Cicero came late enough in the curriculum that by the time students got to him, they could smell the printing ink on their diplomas. "Soon as they've passed their last examinations in solid geometry and Cicero's Orations," Thornton Wilder has the Stage Manager tell us in Our Town, "looks like [young people] suddenly feel themselves fit to be married." And for the rest of their lives, his works provided to them proof positive of Cicero's own assurance that we remember our sufferings much more intensely than our pleasures. It is perhaps no surprise that our acquaintance with him should lapse.

Anthony Everitt now steps forth to make reintroductions. A British businessman, journalist, and professor-and also sometime general secretary of the Arts Council for Great Britain-Everitt is the ideal man to do this. He has a passion for all things Roman. (He lives near the first town history has recorded on English soil-Colchester-and is already working on a new biography of Augustus.)

What Everitt shows us in this biography, without the tedium of purposeless, over-researched digression, is that history will always have the last word. Idealized depictions of the past will fade and a more accurate picture emerge. The Roman Republic was a noble experiment-however imperfect-in broader popular rule. But we know what that means: Politics, the practice of finagling results, became serious business. A man of privilege, Cicero was no democrat, yet he abhorred tyranny. He knew when to compromise (too often, according to his critics). When acting the role of the able statesman, he built his fearsome effectiveness from cunning and guile as much as the next guy did; he was just better at it. As the skillful advocate, he could make the weaker case appear the stronger; as a politician, he forged unlikely alliances of expediency to get what he wanted. He targeted Mark Antony and was implicated in a spirited campaign of obfuscation and smear of a kind that ...