Letters

Overview

About three hundred and fifty pages in the standard selected editions, drawn from a surviving corpus of nearly nine hundred letters written by Marcus Tullius Cicero between 68 and 43 BCE, addressed chiefly to his closest friend Titus Pomponius Atticus, but also to his brother Quintus, to Brutus, and to a wide circle of political and personal correspondents. The letters were preserved and eventually published after Cicero’s death, evidently from copies Cicero or his secretary Tiro kept, and they survive in a form their author never intended for public circulation: unrevised, often visibly hasty, written in the genuine grip of whatever crisis or mood prompted them, in sharp contrast to the carefully constructed speeches and philosophical treatises on which Cicero’s public reputation chiefly rested.

This unrevised quality is precisely what makes the letters historically invaluable. They cover, from the perspective of a genuinely well-informed participant rather than a later historian working from incomplete records, essentially the entire collapse of the Roman republic: Cicero’s consulship and the Catiline conspiracy, his exile, the breakdown of the First Triumvirate, the outbreak of civil war between Caesar and Pompey, Caesar’s dictatorship and assassination, and the chaotic year and a half of Cicero’s own final political struggle against Mark Antony that ended with his death.

The argument

Early career and political anxiety. The earliest letters, from the 60s and 50s BCE, show Cicero already deeply engaged in the calculations of Roman political life, weighing alliances, reporting on Senate debates, and displaying, even at the height of his public success following his consulship, a recurring private anxiety about his own security and standing that his public oratory rarely admits.

Exile. The letters written during Cicero’s exile in 58 BCE, forced from Rome after his execution of the Catiline conspirators without trial was used against him by political enemies, are among the bleakest in the entire collection, showing a man stripped of the confidence and control that characterize his public writing, dwelling repeatedly on the damage his exile has done to his family and asking Atticus for candid assessment of his situation rather than comforting reassurance he does not entirely trust.

The road to civil war. The letters from 49 BCE, as the uneasy political arrangement among Caesar, Pompey and the Senate finally broke down into open civil war, capture Cicero at his most exposed as a political thinker, genuinely uncertain which side to support, able to see real faults and real dangers in both Caesar’s and Pompey’s positions, and describing the indecision itself, the inability to find any position he could defend with a clear conscience, as one of the most painful aspects of the entire crisis. He eventually joined Pompey’s camp, reluctantly, and was later pardoned by Caesar after Pompey’s defeat.

Tullia’s death. The letters following the death of Cicero’s daughter Tullia in childbirth in February 45 BCE mark a sustained shift in register, arguably the collection’s most purely personal material, largely free of the political calculation that dominates elsewhere. Cicero, who had written extensively and influentially on the philosophical consolations available for grief, admits in these letters that his own grief has overwhelmed every resource that philosophy gave him, and withdrew from public life for a period, unable to compose himself sufficiently to resume his ordinary political and social obligations.

After Caesar’s assassination. The final phase of the correspondence, from Caesar’s assassination in March 44 BCE through Cicero’s own death in December 43 BCE, shows him attempting one last, ultimately failed political campaign, urging the Senate in increasingly urgent letters to move decisively against Mark Antony before Antony could consolidate the same kind of dominant, unchecked power the conspirators had killed Caesar specifically to prevent. Cicero’s fourteen surviving Philippic speeches against Antony, delivered during this same period, are the public face of the campaign these final letters document from the inside; his failure to rally sufficient opposition led directly to his proscription and execution.

How to read it

Read the letters chronologically and alongside a basic timeline of the late republic’s collapse; their power depends heavily on knowing, as Cicero himself often did not fully know at the time of writing, what was actually about to happen next, which lets a reader see the gap between his contemporaneous assessment and subsequent events.

Pay attention to the difference in register between the letters to Atticus, generally the most candid and unguarded, and letters to more distant or politically sensitive correspondents, where Cicero writes with considerably more calculation about how his words might be read or repeated.

Notice how frequently Cicero’s private letters contradict or complicate the more confident, settled positions of his public oratory and philosophical writing. The letters are not simply a supplement to his public work but frequently a genuine correction to it, showing the uncertainty and improvisation behind positions his finished prose presents as settled conclusions.

Read the letters following Tullia’s death with attention to how starkly they depart from Cicero’s own earlier philosophical writing on grief and consolation, a gap between theory and lived experience that the letters make visible in a way almost no other ancient source does for any comparable figure.

Read the final letters from 44 and 43 BCE alongside Cicero’s Philippic speeches from the same months to see the private political calculation and the public rhetorical performance of the same campaign against Antony running side by side.

Questions it raises

• What is gained, and what is potentially distorted, by reading a historical figure’s private, unrevised correspondence as more truthful or more reliable than their carefully composed public writing?
• Cicero repeatedly asks Atticus for candid assessment rather than reassurance. What does this recurring request suggest about how much Cicero trusted his own judgment during the periods of greatest political uncertainty?
• Does the gap between Cicero’s confident public philosophy of consolation and his own admitted inability to master his grief after Tullia’s death undermine the philosophy, or does it simply show the ordinary difficulty of living up to one’s own stated principles?
• How does Cicero’s genuine indecision at the outbreak of civil war in 49 BCE compare to the more confident, retrospective judgments later historians have made about which side, Caesar’s or Pompey’s, represented the better choice for the republic?
• What responsibility, if any, does Cicero bear for the republic’s collapse, given his own account, across hundreds of letters, of trying and repeatedly failing to find an effective position from which to defend it?
• Cicero’s final letters show him trying to rally opposition to Antony using essentially the same rhetorical and political skills that had made him successful throughout his career. Why do these skills fail him in this final campaign when they had succeeded so often before?