Lawless Republic

 

"Lawless Republic

By Josiah Osgood

Basic, 384 pages, $32

Cicero composed one of the epigrams by which he is known today as part of his legal defense, in 52 B.C., of a man named Milo: Silent enim leges inter arma, or "The laws are silent amid weaponry." Milo was accused of killing a political rival, Clodius, after the two men, both attended by ruffian gangs, crossed paths on the roads south of Rome. Cicero's ringing words have been taken to mean that legal systems break down when violence holds sway -- seemingly a critique of his troubled, turbulent era, the late Roman Republic. In context, though, they are more complex and cast a disquieting light on their author.

It seems that Cicero's strategy in this high-profile trial was to argue that Milo had every right to kill, even when his victim, Clodius, had been wounded and no longer posed a threat. Clodius, according to Cicero's reconstruction, had ambushed Milo and set his toughs upon him, creating, in effect, a state of war. The "laws" in such a circumstance were "silent": Milo had no legal recourse, Cicero maintained, so homicide was a legitimate option.

In "Lawless Republic," Josiah Osgood argues that, rather than lamenting the decline of the rule of law in Rome, Cicero was in fact hastening it. Amid increasing disorder, Cicero had "appealed to the state of nature to absolve Milo," thereby granting legitimacy to vigilante attacks. As Mr. Osgood observes: "No good was going to come from defending Milo for roaming the streets with gangs of gladiators." With such shrewd assessments, Mr. Osgood allows us to see how Cicero, who first appears in this book as a man of honor and probity, gradually lost his highest ideals amid the larger decay of the social order.

Mr. Osgood has structured most of this book not as a biography but, ingeniously, as a series of criminal trials that Cicero took part in, beginning with a murder case in 80 B.C. Each trial involves us in new intrigues and legal maneuvers while also revealing the problems that the Roman judicial system was trying, and failing, to solve. The riveting chapter on Cicero's case against Verres (70 B.C.), a rapacious governor who had stripped the Sicilian Greeks of much of their art, illustrates how the rich were buying off jurors and soliciting perjury, despite antibribery statutes. A poisoning case shows how a Roman court created to deal with killings by poison actually invited false accusations; in an era that lacked toxicological tests, any death from illness could be brought to that court as a murder.

Not only the judiciary was in crisis during the period Mr. Osgood covers. Between the dictatorship of Sulla, a strongman who seized control of Rome in 82 B.C., and the stabbing of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., the breakdown of civil society was widespread. As the backdrop to Mr. Osgood's trials, we witness steady aggregations of force by rivalrous faction leaders and violent displays by their fanatical supporters. Once Sulla had broken all rules and gotten away unpunished, the enforcement of any rules became a challenge. Ultimately, beyond the point reached by "Lawless Republic," order returned only after autocracy -- the reign of Augustus -- took hold.

Cicero's success in the courts spurred his ambition to run for Rome's highest offices. Mr. Osgood makes clear that the two career tracks, the legal and the political, created conflicts of interest and that Cicero subordinated the former to the latter. "Anyone running for the consulship knew that the votes of wealthy Italians counted most," he writes. "This was one reason Cicero took on so many legal defenses for powerful men from outside Rome." Cicero was elected consul, the highest rung on Rome's political ladder, in 63 B.C. by defeating a desperate, debt-ridden man named Lucius Catilina.

Catiline, as we know him today, was not about to accept the outcome. He conspired to take over the state, prompting Cicero to deliver his most famous speeches, the "Catilinarians," to a paralyzed senate. The speeches are, as many Latin students have learned, models of rhetorical force and artful invective ("O tempora, O mores!"). By exposing the plot, Cicero set in motion a chain of events that led to Catiline's defeat and death in battle; then, as consul, Cicero oversaw the execution, without trial, of five of the principal plotters. He later regarded his consulship as Rome's salvation, but Mr. Osgood's verdict is harsher: "He fanned hysteria rather than try to calm it."

As even its title seems to suggest, "Lawless Republic" evokes parallels and suggests lessons for our own politics, though Mr. Osgood, a Georgetown professor of classics, leaves these implicit. He sticks to general terms when his narrative touches on a question that he raises in his introduction: "How, after an outbreak of violence, do you restore the rule of law?" His vagueness befits the dispassionate stance of a scholar, but some parallels practically leap off the page and demand a closer engagement, as when Mr. Osgood decries Catiline and his followers for "striking at a key principle of the Republic: the peaceful transfer of power."

Mr. Osgood writes with such a sure hand, and has such a deft command of historical facts, as to make each stage of Rome's growing disorder seem plausible, lamentable and disturbingly familiar. He reckons up the cost of the slide through his focus on Cicero, who ended up the victim of forces he himself, in this book's view, had abetted. In 43 B.C., two decades after he'd sanctioned the extrajudicial killing of Catiline's men, Cicero suffered a similar fate, assassinated on the order of Mark Antony.

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Mr. Romm is the author of "Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece's Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece," to be published in May." [1]

1. A Society In Decay. Romm, James.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 Feb 2025: A15.