Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome, Josiah Osgood, Basic Books, £25

The collapse of the Roman Republic has long fascinated historians. From the populist land reforms of the Gracchi and Sulla’s bloody dictatorship, to the Catiline conspiracy and Caesar’s assassination, the Republic’s death was neither sudden nor singular. It came in convulsions, civil wars, opportunistic alliances and triumvirates, broken norms (and promises), and the steady erosion of institutions, until Octavian’s victory at Actium in 31 BC marked the triumph of empire over liberty. Amid this political turbulence, one figure stood out: Marcus Tullius Cicero.

A central player in this Roman drama, Cicero, arguably the most successful orator of his day, was a towering intellectual influence in early modern Europe and beloved by 18th-century Britons, to the point that he was affectionately referred to as ‘Tully’. Many biographies of Cicero have been written since then – some condemning him as a social snob, an elitist, a reactionary, and an opportunist; others elevating him to the status of philosopher, principled moderate, and statesman, seeking to preserve his beloved Republic.

Josiah Osgood, in his new book, offers a different portrait, focusing on Cicero’s legal career: his victories in the courts of Rome and his rise and fall from power. Osgood demonstrates how Cicero’s courtroom successes underpinned his ascent through the cursus honorum, and how they ‘bolstered his prestige and helped maintain alliances with powerful politicians’. Born in 106 BC to an equestrian family – just below the senatorial order – Cicero was elected quaestor in Sicily in 75 BC; in 69 BC, aedile, in charge of the games and grain supply in Rome; and three years later, praetor, presiding over the important extortion court. His zenith came in 64 BC, when he was elected one of the two consuls of the Republic.

His first major case came in 80 BC, when he successfully defended Sextus Roscius against a charge of parricide. In 70 BC he secured the conviction of the corrupt governor of Sicily, Verres. Edmund Burke, during the impeachment of Warren Hastings in the 1790s, would model his own forensic approach on Cicero’s speeches. A year after Verres, Cicero successfully defended Marcus Fonteius, governor of Transalpine Gaul, against charges of extortion.

‘After years of prosecuting and defending criminal cases’, Cicero ‘was confronted with a crime in the making: a conspiracy to topple the elected government of the Republic’ – the infamous plot led by Catiline, a proto-populist who promised debt cancellation. Cicero’s turbulent consulship provides telling insight into his political thinking. Osgood rightly emphasises Cicero’s deep, almost sacred, respect for property and his commitment to the existing social and political order. He fiercely opposed land redistribution proposals and resisted a law in 63 BC, which, he feared, would grant tyrannical powers to a commission tasked with redistributing land. The ghost of the Gracchi turbulences and monarchy still haunted the Roman imagination, just as, centuries later, William Pitt the Younger and his supporters raised classical anxieties when Lord North and Charles James Fox sought to reform the East India Company by placing its finances under their government’s control.

Cicero upheld the patrician standard and opposed most reform measures put forward during his consulship. His moment of greatest acclaim came when the Senate named him pater patriae for foiling the conspiracy. Osgood credits Cicero ‘for taking steps to prevent unrest in the city of Rome’, safeguarding ‘the peaceful transfer of power’, while also accusing him of opportunism, defending entrenched inequality, and condemning the conspirators to death without trial.

Inequality in the ancient world demands careful handling. To Aristotle and many Greeks, inequality was either natural or inevitable. In Rome, little formal consideration was given to the condition of the urban poor. Cicero was not exceptional in this respect. Nor did he resist reform solely out of self-interest; he was a principled conservative defending the status quo against coup d’état. Sallust, in his Bellum Catilinae, presents both Caesar’s call for clemency and Cato’s demand for severity, but refrains from judging Cicero directly. The executions may have preserved order, but they also weakened the Republic’s commitment to due process at a critical moment.

Cicero’s downfall began with the scandal surrounding the trial of the Good Goddess and his feud with Clodius, a powerful populist who haunted him for three years. Clodius’ revenge culminated in the burning of Cicero’s villa on the Palatine Hill and his 16-month exile. The feud with Clodius eventually turned deadly when his ally Milo killed Clodius on the Appian Way, an event Cicero sought to defend in court. He was neither innocent in the Republic’s descent into violence, nor immune to the moral corrosion he decried. Though a fierce critic of corruption, he amassed a collection of villas and country houses, ‘the darlings of Italy’, and at times displayed an arrogance and cruelty that alienated even his allies.

In the final chapters of Osgood’s narrative, Cicero appears only as a supporting character. He is portrayed as indecisive and weak – both fair assessments. For most of his later career, he remained loyal to the aristocratic camp of Pompey, Cato, and Brutus, only switching allegiance to Octavian after Caesar’s assassination, when his own life was in danger and his old friends dead. Siding with Pompey over Caesar, though arguably principled, left him increasingly isolated from power. Proscribed alongside his family and friends by Mark Anthony, Cicero met his brutal end in 43 BC.

The book spans just over 300 pages and does not attempt to offer a comprehensive biography of Cicero. Inevitably, much is left out. While Osgood ably traces Cicero’s legal journey, the omission of his philosophical corpus is striking. Cicero’s ethical reflections on duty, the state, and divine order were not ancillary but central to his conception of Roman life. Cicero the statesman, also, receives relatively little attention. For instance, his attempts to reconcile Pompey and Caesar in 50 BC are summarised in a single sentence: ‘as soon as he was back in Rome, he tried to avert war’. Nevertheless, one of the reasons Cicero remains perhaps the most familiar character from this turbulent era is his vast correspondence. Although Osgood acknowledges this, he rarely draws on the letters directly, leaving Cicero’s distinctive voice curiously absent from key moments in his career.

The book’s central concern is the relationship between law and political violence. For Osgood, the principal reason for the Republic’s fall was the dissolution of legal order: ‘Like other citizens in democratic societies, Romans struggled to balance a desire for security with respect for civil liberties.’ While this is true, a further dimension, particularly relevant to Cicero’s own lifetime, might have been explored: the knock-on effects of imperial expansion. As Machiavelli would later observe, libertas and imperium seldom co-exist. Eighteenth-century historians, too, recognised that the Senate’s authority had been weakened by the corruption stemming from conquest and colonial wealth. Maintaining a standing army to defend a far-flung empire required strongmen, and with Sulla and Caesar came a new kind of politics, one driven not by law but by loyalty, patronage, and power.

Lawless Republic is a brisk, intelligent study of how law became both weapon and casualty in the dying days of the Republic. As our own societies grapple with the tension between civil liberty and state authority, the Roman lesson endures – and in Cicero’s rise and ruin, it still speaks with unsettling clarity.