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Title: Cicero: A Portrait by Elizabeth Rawson ISBN: 0-86292-051-5 Publisher: Focus Publishing/R. Pullins Company Pub. Date: 01 December, 1975 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: The one indispensable modern portrait that we have
Comment: Rawson's biography of Cicero is probably the ONE indispensable modern portrait that we have. Readers are advised to start here and avoid Anthonmy Everitt's better publicised and more lavishly produced volume, "Cicero, A Turbulent Life". Cicero has, of course, been the subject of innumerable books. His importance to any understanding of his age (or indeed our own) simply can not be underestimated. So prolific was he that during the middle ages he was actually thought to be two people. Tullius and Cicero.

With each succeeding generation, new biographers shoulder forward to offer their own interpretations. Cicero's reputation has suffered somewhat of late. A fantastic example of this is the crudely distorted and utterly unhistorical (though admittedly novelistic) treatment he receives in one of Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series (which series seems to steadily deteriorate in quality and coherence from volume to volume). Here Cicero (a tub in the mind of McCollough to Caesar's whale) squeaks and grovels his way through some of the most momentous moments in Roman history. McCollough (who comically purports in one of her "After Words" to have her "nose glued to the historical record") is not alone -- but her purportedly "historical" portrait surely remains the most distempered and dyspeptic view of Cicero in recent memory.

To my view Rawson offers a readable, erudite, accessible biography that canvasses all of the important aspects of his life and thought. She is sympathetic and an admirer, but she is not blind to his many foibles.

As a young man I had a perhaps unreasoning admiration for Cicero. I held him in a somewhat old-fashioned esteem. Rather like the English aristocracy of the 1500s - they loved their Tully so much that it became a fashion to name their daughters Tully. I confess I named a succession of dogs after him!

But it was Rawson who provided me with the necessary perspective on him. You really need no other. I think that what is important about this volume is the careful attention devoted to Cicero's political and philosophical works. As you can see from my review of Everitt's book, Mary Beard has best described what we are waiting for: "a biographical account that tried to explore the way his life-story has been constructed and reconstructed over the last two thousand years; how we have learned to read Cicero through Jonson, Voltaire, Ibsen and the rest; what kind of investment we still have, and why, in a thundering conservative of the first century BC and his catchy oratorical slogans. Why, in short, is Cicero still around in the 21st century? And on whose terms? Quo usque tandem?"

Cicero's reputation gets a much needed shot in the arm IN Rawson's volume. She writes, "whatever the shortcomings of Cicero's political works, there is no evidence that any of his contemporaries understood the problems of the time as clearly or indeed produced nearly so positive a contribution towards solving them as he did."

Her penultimate chapter on his final year in Rome also offers a closely argued reassessment of his place in the "final conflict". In Rawson's view it was in 43 that he became the "true ruler of Rome" -- for however brief a period.

The book is filled with little gems. It is often remarked that one of Cicero's principal contributions to Rome was his elevation of the language itself. But it was unknown to me that words such as "quality", "essence" and "moral" were first found in Cicero (though derived from Greek roots).

Also reproduced here are some of the marvelous witticisms for which he was so justly famous. Upon hearing that Brutus deemed Caesar to have "joined the boni", Cicero remarked that he did not know "where Caesar would find them, unless he first hanged himself." Cicero is also famous for the oft quoted expression "o tempore, o mores" which comes from his famous attack on Cataline that began, " How far, then Cataline, will you go on abusing our patience. How long, you madman, will you mock at our vengeance? Will there be no end to your unbridled audacity".

Perhaps the most poignant assessment of Cicero was Plutarch's, though he puts the words in, of all people, Augustus' mouth. The story is extremely famous. August discovers a young grandson reading a volume of Cicero. The terrified boy trembles while his grandfather leafs through the book at length. At last he hands it back with the famous words: "an eloquent man, my boy, an eloquent man....and a patriot."

Cicero is one of the most important personages in all history. Indeed it is almost impossible for us to understand the roots of our culture unless we understand him. If you read nothing else of him, read this wonderful book.