The crude tirades of Cicero the demagogue

It is rare to read a book about Cicero that likens its hero to a demagogue. Rome’s prosecutor of conspiracy and corruption in the last years of the Republic is seen more commonly as a toga-draped crusader for virtue. Was he also a ranter steeped in violence, crude character-assassination, tendentious storytelling and racial stereotypes? Yes, argues Josiah Osgood, an American historian, whose book persuasively analyses a range of Cicero’s murder, fraud and extortion cases. Other men of the time were often no better, he writes, but, echoing Michelle Obama on Donald Trump: ‘Fortunately for Cicero, if his opponents went low, he knew how to go even lower.’

The defender of Rome’s balanced form of government played
a large part in its downfall

Because Cicero wrote so much moral theory, it has been tempting to see him as he wanted to be seen. It has helped his reputation, too, that he died on the orders of the reviled Mark Antony, his hands and tongue nailed up in the forum lest he go on ranting in death. Osgood’s evidence of demagoguery includes texts used in centuries of school examinations and others less studied. The speeches against Catiline, the radical rebel, whose followers Cicero notoriously condemned to strangulation in 63 BC, stand alongside the Pro Cluentio, a case from 69 BC piled high with poisoned bodies in a plot that would take the rest of the space in this magazine to explain. In fragments of the Pro Fonteio we see a Cicero whose inner Trump more than matched his inner Obama, a man ever ready to deploy the rhetorical smear and to call all Gauls greedy, lying drunks in order to undermine a case by some Gauls against his client.