Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "To understand Cicero's life, which spanned the first two thirds of the first century BC, it is necessary to picture the world in which he..." (more)
Key Phrases: ooo sesterces, strange madness, proscription lists, Julius Caesar, Asia Minor, First Triumvirate (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Using Cicero's letters to his good friend Atticus, among other sources, Everitt recreates the fascinating world of political intrigue, sexual decadence and civil unrest of Republican Rome. Against this backdrop, he offers a lively chronicle of Cicero's life. Best known as Rome's finest orator and rhetorician, Cicero (103 -43 B.C.) situated himself at the center of Roman politics. By the time he was 30, Cicero became a Roman senator, and 10 years later he was consul. Opposing Julius Caesar and his attempt to form a new Roman government, Cicero remained a thorn in Caesar's side until the emperor's assassination. Cicero supported Pompey's attempts during Caesar's reign to bring Rome back to republicanism. Along the way, Cicero put down conspiracies, won acquittal for a man convicted of parricide, challenged the dictator Sulla with powerful rhetoric about the decadence of Sulla's regime and wrote philosophical treatises. Everitt deftly shows how Cicero used his oratorical skills to argue circles around his opponents. More important, Everitt portrays Cicero as a man born at the wrong time. While Cicero vainly tried to find better men to run government and better laws to keep them in order, Republican Rome was falling down around him, never to return to the glory of Cicero's youth. A first-rate complement to Elizabeth Rawson's Cicero or T.N. Mitchell's monumental two-volume biography, Everitt's first book is a brilliant study that captures Cicero's internal struggles and insecurities as well as his external political successes. Maps. (On sale June 11)
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Everitt's first book is a good read that anyone interested in ancient Rome will enjoy. It is also the first one-volume life of the Roman leader in 25 years. To create a work that flowed and was therefore more colorful for the lay reader, Everitt, the former secretary-general of the Arts Council for Great Britain, has taken liberties when describing a person or a place that may annoy scholars. Yet reading this book is an excellent way to understand the players of the period and the culture that produced them. Bloody, articulate, erudite, sexist, slave-owning-Cicero and his circle were all that, but Everitt is careful to recognize that the orator was a product of his age. This is not strictly a political history; Everitt scrutinizes Roman society in discussing events of the orator's life and, when describing Cicero's marriage, acquaints the reader with various aspects of that institution and the home of the era. Throughout, he is willing to admit when the evidence for a theory is weak and when he is extrapolating from the assumptions of scholars. Recommended for public and undergraduate collections.
Clay Williams, Hunter Coll. Lib., New York
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (June 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375507469
• ISBN-13: 978-0375507465
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (88 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #187,296 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

72 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everitt v. Rawson, September 3, 2004

By	Timothy J. Graczewski "tgraczewski" (Burlingame, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician (Paperback)

There are many able and thoughtful reviews of this bestseller below. Rather than rehash the common themes -- namely that "Cicero" is well-written but a bit shallow (I happen to agree) -- I've decided to use this review to assess Everitt's work against the last popular biography on the great Roman statesman and philosopher, Elizabeth Rawson's "Cicero: A Portrait," which is regarded by many Roman scholars as the finest ever written. With diligence and a little bit of luck I was able to obtain a copy of Rawson on the Internet. I decided to read the two books concurrently to discover why many learned readers hold her book in so much higher regard than Everitt's.

Keeping with the spirit of a head-to-head competition, first let us consider the "tale of the tape." The paperback versions of both books are remarkably similar is structure, organization and length. That is, both are chronological narratives organized into seventeen chapters and just over 300 pages in length (it should be noted that the font and margins in Rawson are smaller, so "Portrait" is roughly 20% longer in terms of wordcount). Clearly, then, Everitt's relative weakness isn't excessive brevity or an unorthodox and ineffective approach to Cicero's life.

Much to my surprise, these books turned out to be just as similar in content as they were in size. Rawson certainly does a more thorough job of analyzing Cicero's philosophical works and her book ends with an excellent but brief review of Cicero's legacy, but overall Everitt's prose is more lucid and he excels Rawson in his ability to capture the pulse of life in Republican Rome (his descriptions of the traditional Roman marriage ceremony and assembly voting procedures are especially noteworthy). Rawson doesn't quote from Cicero's writings or letters to Atticus any more extensively than Everitt -- indeed, Everitt's choice of quotes are so precisely similar to Rawson's that it almost raises some suspicions. In sum, because these books are so close in every way I feel that Everitt's is superior simply because it is more readable (not to mention far easier to find and purchase).

In closing, I'd like to echo the frequent comment that this book isn't a deep and penetrating study of Cicero and his times, such as Meier's biography of Caesar. It wasn't meant to be. It is targeted to a wide audience and succeeds exceptionally well at bringing Rome and one of its most remarkable figures to the average reader. In a world where many of the liberal arts graduates of our leading universities never touch Cicero or Polybius or Livy or Thucydides and probably couldn't tell you whether the Greeks or Romans came first, I can't help but think that books like this are at least a step in the right direction toward stimulating public interest in the classics. Ideally, "Cicero" will inspire young students or the merely intellectually curious to read some of Cicero's writings or pursue more substantial works on the Republican Rome or the ancient world in general. As someone who didn't "discover" the ancients until graduate school and then developed a passion for them, I can only hope that books like this will make a few converts along the way.

43 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Constancy of Political Life, September 2, 2002

By	Paul Frandano (Reston, Va. USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The dust jacket of Everitt's attractive biography quotes a perceptive English reviewer, who observes, "Of all the arts, that of politics has advanced least since the days of Greece and Rome." Upon closing the book, my overwhelming sense was that Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson and, yes, Bill Clinton would have done perfectly well in Julian Rome. The broad contours of the political game have, in the intervening two millennia, acquired several strips of veneer and a few layers of varnish, but they are immediately recognizable in this briskly paced work. Pompey's political ponderousness, Caesar's bright dexterity, and Cicero's conservative deliberateness all find ready parallels in this and every other age. Gain, glory, and fear are here the prime motivators--generalize to politics Thucydides' famous observation that men will go to war for any of these three reasons and you will have neatly summarized all political motive--and Everitt nicely sifts through the ample historical record to relate how the great men of the late Republic clambered for the pinnacle as the challenge of Julius Caesar loomed.

For readers not particularly well versed in Roman history, Everitt does particularly well in quickly situating Cicero's life in the great events of his day, the context of an expanding empire, and the daily life of a Rome that had no city government as we would know it--little public security (private guards for the wealthy, nothing for the rest), sanitation, services, or urban administration. An accretion of checks and balances (so admired by our own founders) caused politic to deadlock, with each of the major protagonists offering solutions that either restored, or to circumvented, the formal primacy of the Senate and Rome's great families. Throughout, Everitt renders intelligible a bewildering tangle of events and human interactions. He shows Cicero standing at the center of these great events--with the exception of the plot to kill Caesar, of which he knew nothing (but you who know your Shakespeare will have known this as well...)--or, less charitably, desperately working the Roman public relations apparatus to "seem to stand," on firm Republican principals. At those times when when his cause fails--perhaps as a result of words or long harbored grudges that return to haunt him--Everitt's statesman retires to one of his well-appointed villas and the life of the mind, turing to his beloved philosophy and the composition of the writings that comprise his greatest legacy.

I dock this commendable biography a star for an insufficiency of documentation and the generally cursory handling of Cicero's ideas. Yes, yes, I recognize this is popular biography, but some particularly quirky looking passages beg for sourcing and don't get it, while other, better known material gets copious sourcing (and with endnotes, by page and passage, rather than with numbered end- or footnotes). As for Cicero's rich store of written ideas, the major works are dutifully listed, their contents for the most part cursorily described. I for one would have appreciated a broader, deeper discussion, but concluded that Everitt viewed his chapters on the works as necessary drudgery required by the life and legacy and as impediments to his narrative design (he does in fact refer to the authoritive scholarly studies in a bibliographic appendix). The author seems too eager to gallop off--perhaps to the cheers of most readers--on his thrilling, often bloody, tale. And so he does.

(And why didn't someone at Random House point out to the design people that the Coliseum, which graces the dustjacket, was erected more than a century after Cicero's death? A particularly shameless attempt to cash in on the Russell Crowe picture.)

This is nevertheless a very worthy book and a solid--and solidly entertaining--introduction to the timeless world of Roman politics. Highly recommended.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars History and Cicero - come alive, October 22, 2002

By A Customer

As a 56 year old physician and non-historian, I would otherwise have remained dimly informed of the complex history of the last days of the Roman Republic ....but for this remarkable book. With clear prose, and finely nuanced style, Everitt brings to life both the times of Rome during the last days of its Republic, and the multifaceted personality of Cicero. Moreover, his index of names is outstanding.

His detailed description of comon elements of Roman life, its overextended and patchwork government (laden with unbelievable corruption), and his fine description of the physical area of the Forum and its multiple functions - are fascinating and gripping.

This is an epic tale brilliantly told - a tragic but unavoidable outcome, enlivened with excellent primary source quotes which bring breath and life to the story.

You will be well versed of this critical period of history, and deeply appreciative of the cultural debt which Western Civiliazation owes Cicero after reading this book.