Cicero In and On Political Crises - Melissa Lane

This lecture was recorded by Melissa Lane on the 11th of June 2026

Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics, Princeton University and is also Associated Faculty in the Department of Classics and Department of Philosophy. Previously she was Senior University Lecturer at Cambridge University in the Faculty of History and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.

She studied for her first degree in Social Studies (awarded summa cum laude) at Harvard University, and then took an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where she was a student at King’s College, supported by appointments as a Marshall Scholar, Truman Scholar, and Mary Isabel Sibley Fellow of Phi Beta Kappa.

Professor Lane is an author, lecturer and broadcaster who has received major awards including being named a Guggenheim Fellow, and the Lucy Shoe Meritt Resident in Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome. She has published widely in journals and authored or introduced nine major books including Greek and Roman Political Ideas; Eco-Republic; and most recently, Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political, which was awarded the 2024 Book Prize of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and was published in a paperback edition with modifications in 2025.

Professor Lane is the only person ever to have delivered both the Carlyle Lectures and the Isaiah Berlin Lectures at the University of Oxford.

The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/cicero

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

I give you Professor Melissa Lay. Ought a man to remain in his country while it is tyrannized? Ought he to strive for the overthrow of a tyranny by every means, even if the existence of the state is going to be endangered thereby? Ought a statesman to live quietly in retirement while his country is under a tyranny? Or ought he to take every risk for freedom's sake? Ought a man who has rendered his country great service and has on that account brought himself irreparable suffering and hostility to incur danger on his country's behalf? Or may he be allowed to begin to think of himself and his family giving up political opposition to those in power? Cicero asked himself these questions in a letter to his close friend Atticus, written on the 12th of March 49 BCE. In fact, he asked himself these questions in Greek. He switched to Greek for this paragraph of his letter, switching from his everyday Latin, perhaps to highlight, as scholars have suggested, how alien were the circumstances in which he found himself. The fear of tyranny was alien to Romans, who had long prided themselves on their freedom from tyranny, their equal liberty, won when the last in a long line of kings had been expelled. Indeed, we might think the Romans were the original exponents of the chant No Kings. Yet when Cicero was writing that letter in 49, he and his fellows were confronting the rise of Julius Caesar, whom Cicero saw in that moment precisely as a looming tyrant. Now, the relationship between Cicero and Caesar was in fact complex. They shared literary interests and at times a wary mutual admiration. But Cicero was conscious that even such cultured men could be corrupted by ambition. And he wrote in his work on duties, Deafies: men are led most of all to being overwhelmed by forgetfulness of justice when they slip into desiring positions of command or honor or glory. And the example he gave in that paragraph was Julius Caesar. So who was Cicero? Well, he was known in Roman politics as a new man. He came from a city outside Rome, and a city that had only recently, well, fairly recently, been granted full voting citizenship, about a century before his birth. And Cicero was somewhat socially disadvantaged. He was born to a father who was an equis, a knight, the second rank of Roman society, below the highest rank aristocratic patricians. Nevertheless, as an ambitious student of philosophy and rhetoric, who had made what was becoming a standard educational pilgrimage to Athens as a young man, somewhat akin to my first journey to the UK, perhaps, some to study at Cambridge in 1989, Cicero impressed the public as a legal advocate, and he started to climb the political ranks, the cursus honorum, the ladder of political offices. As Walter Nigorsky has commented, evidence that Cicero really knew the ropes is found in his remarkable success at attaining the necessary offices of the cursus honorum. One had to succeed in winning election to each office sequentially. And he did so each at the earliest possible age, and thus positioning himself to stand for Rome's highest office, consul, at his initial, his earliest age of eligibility. Moreover, more than anyone else, Cicero was responsible for adapting and transforming the philosophical and political frameworks of ancient Greek thought to make them bear on Roman life and in writing in Latin, while also, as I mentioned, sometimes himself continuing to engage to write and think in Greek. He translated in his writings technical Greek terms for the first time, and he produced expanded metaphors and conceptual innovations drawing on Roman law and experience. So his work as a philosopher is of an importance that scholars have only in recent decades fully come to appreciate. Yet in his own mind, Cicero was first and foremost a servant of the public realm, the commonwealth, the republic, the res publica, literally the thing or affair of the people, their common possession. He insisted that virtue is not some kind of knowledge to be possessed without using it. It consists entirely in its employment. Most important is the governance of states, accomplishment in deeds, rather than words, of what philosophers talk about in their corners. And I think that's a reference to Plato's Gorgias, which derides in the voice of one character, philosophers skulking in their corners. So while he did write philosophy throughout his life, Cicero did so most intensively and distinctively in periods when his full participation in political life was circumscribed during a period of exile in the 50s and during the military and political turmoil of the 40s, especially in what would prove the last two years of his life. In these periods, as Yelena Baraz has remarked, writing and the writing of philosophy in particular became an alternate way of being in politics. We see this expressed in a letter that Cicero wrote in 46, in which he wrote, We must serve the state in our libraries, if we cannot, in Senate House, and Forum. Yet even then he asserted that only so much time can be given to philosophy as will not be needed in the discharge of my duty to the Republic. So, back to Cicero's bout of self-questioning in Greek in 49, my opening questions about what a statesman should do when facing a looming tyranny, indeed, what anyone should do in those circumstances. As Malcolm Schofield has pointed out, soon afterward, when Caesar had fully consolidated his power in the Battle of Pharsalus in 48, and there you see the flight of Pompey, the loser of that battle, Cicero, in Schofield's words, concluded that attempting to fight on would be pointless and needlessly destructive. Staying in his own country, even though it was now under tyrannical rule, was the right course. Now you might think that that decision would be rewarded by the course of events, because of course Caesar would be murdered by Brutus and Cassius just four years later and a group of other Romans on the Ides of March in 44. But that did not leave Cicero safe. Far from it, he too would eventually be murdered for reasons that we'll see later on. So these were just a few of the political crises that Cicero navigated in the course of his tumultuous life that was lived out almost entirely in the first century before the Common Era, in the shadow of profound changes in Roman politics that had begun in the previous century. And in my previous lecture, I spoke about the remarkable consolidation of Roman power in 146 BCE, when Rome sacked Carthage, defeated Corinth, and suppressed the Greek Achaean League. And so Cicero is looking back at that period and is born about 50 years later. So in tonight's lecture, I'm going to highlight five crises that Cicero thought about and in most cases lived through in the course of that tumultuous life. As you can see, the first crisis is one before his birth that he reflected on, and then the last would end in his death. So I'm going to say just a little bit more about each of these to fix them in your mind, and then we'll go through them sequentially. So the first crisis is the shadow of crisis in the previous generation. It's Cicero's retrospective commentary on the lives of Tiberius Gracchus and his brother, collectively known as the Gracchi. So that was in the generation before his birth. Then we'll see the crisis of Cicero's early life, civil war in the 80s, and the rise of Sulla as a dictator, the crisis of Cicero's own holding of the consulate when he suppressed a conspiracy by Catiline, the crisis of Caesar's rise to power, in Cicero's terms, to tyranny, and then the crisis after Caesar's assassination, in which we'll emphasize the battle between Cicero and Mark Antony. And throughout, we'll see that each one of these episodes raises a fundamental question about how to protect a political order from being undermined. And the question is whether a flexible response is best or whether an uncompromising commitment to past norms is better. Like Demosthenes, to whom Cicero has been compared since antiquity, Plutarch wrote a comparison of the lives and careers of Demosthenes and Cicero. Cicero, too, was conscious of threats to the very basis of the political order that he served. But as I'll conclude tonight, he too, perhaps like Demosthenes, was arguably complicit in the burgeoning of some of those very threats himself. And indeed, such threats would never cease. They remain with us, indeed, today. Just a generation later, in Rome, the elder Seneca, tutor of the Emperor Nero, on whose orders he would eventually commit suicide, would take up the topos, the rhetorical figure that he described in the words, Cicero considers whether he should beg Antony for mercy. And this for Seneca was a way of reflecting for himself on the ethics of negotiating with a tyrant in order to save one's life. So let's begin with the first crisis, the crisis before Cicero's birth, the long shadow of history, Cicero on the Gracchi. So in 133 BCE, the tribune Tiberius Gracchus was murdered by a group of patrician senators for having pushed for land reform to benefit the poor by redistributing public lands that had been effectively appropriated, we could say privatized by the wealthy. Tiberius took drastic measures to win this land reform. They included securing an unprecedented vote to remove a consul from office, as well as seeking a second term as tribune for himself. And many of his contemporaries saw him, therefore, as violating legal and political norms. That said, Tiberius's assassination, which is pictured here, you can see him being clubbed to death at the meeting of an electoral assembly, was profoundly shocking in its turn. The chief assassin, Scipio Nazica, was his cousin, and the Pontifex Maximus, the high priest. So that meant that the assassination was a religious breach and as such a source of civic pollution. So the whole life and death of Tiberius Gracchus and subsequent to that of his brother, who attempted to carry on his work, was profoundly polarizing. Now, for a time, the land reform was successful. The scholar Harriet Flower has observed that this land reform, the agrarian reform that Tiberius passed, did go into effect shortly afterwards, and there were land commissioners enforcing it, at least for a few years. But the cause of land reform would remain again a flashpoint in the decades to come. And in Cicero's own consulate, it was raised again by another tribune, and Cicero set himself firmly against it. He would attack land reform in a set of speeches on the agrarian laws of his own day. Now, these sorts of reforms were part of a wider effort in the 130s to challenge elite prerogatives. So those reforms included, for example, the introduction of the secret ballot and Roman voting assemblies in the 130s, the same era in which the Gracchi were active. And again, Harriet Flower has said this was a political revolution. It recalibrated the balance of power in Roman politics as envisioned by Polybius. If you're curious about Polybius, you can watch the lecture that I gave here on 28 May on YouTube. So again, however, Cicero was against this kind of reform. Speaking in his own voice, as a character in his dialogue on the laws, he would criticize the secret ballot as having undermined the moral authority of the elite. Prior to the secret ballot, each voter had to give their ballot to a teller who could see for whom they had voted. So for Cicero then, the era of the Gracchi, including their reforms and these other efforts at political reform, was the crucial moment from which a divide between two groups of political actors in Rome had ensued. So the Gracchi represented on the bottom right the popularis, the supporters of the people. Now these were generally elite actors of some kind themselves, but they spoke for concerns that less elite people might have shared. Their opponents on the top right were self-annointed as the optimates, the best men, mainly a conservative elite. And that was the group with whom Cicero would broadly identify himself. One of his characters in his dialogue on the Commonwealth would insist that it was Tiberius Gracchus who had divided one people into two parts, cementing this divide between these two factions. And speaking in his own voice, as a character in his dialogue Brutus, Cicero would celebrate the assassination of Tiberius as having freed the Respublica from domination. So in Cicero's eyes, Tiberius was the tyrant from whom the republic needed to be freed. Now, before leaving this moment, I want to mention one further trope that we find in Cicero's speeches against the agrarian laws that would be proposed in his own day. And this is a trope that we'll find repeated, that became fateful both for him and for Rome. So Cicero accused the populist tribune who was proposing this land reform of claiming to be a champion of the people, which was the mantle that Cicero tried to claim instead for himself. So he wrote in one of these speeches: what is so welcome to the people as liberty, how then can I help being on the side of the people, Romans, when I see that all these things were entrusted to my keeping and to the protection of my consulship? So what we see here is that although he broadly identified with the optimates, Cicero is trying to claim the mantle of the Populares. He's trying to say, I myself am the one true champion of the people, again a trope that we will meet in the future. So let us come to the second crisis then of my five. This is the political crisis of Cicero's early life. So about four decades after the Gracchi, Cicero as a young man, lived through a subsequent crisis of great significance in Roman history, a civil war between two generals, Marius on the right, roughly representing the Popularas, and Sulla on the left, representing the optimates. Sulla marched on Rome, sacking it, and becoming a dictator without time limit, something that was unprecedented again in Roman politics. The Roman constitution included provision for the occasional appointment of a dictator, but that was meant to be an emergency measure for a strictly limited time. So in becoming dictator without time limit, Sulla was again breaching fundamental political norms. And his victory involved bloody revenge. So this is Plutarch and his life of Sulla. He describes one moment. Just as he began to speak, by arrangement, his men began to execute the 6,000 prisoners. The noise of so many men being slaughtered in a small area was audible, and the senators were terrified. But Sulla instructed them not to worry about what was taking place outside. Some wrongdoers were receiving correction. You can see how ominous this epoch of Roman history was. In fact, Sulla saw himself as a lawgiver, a theme resonating with my series of lectures last year at Gresham on lawgivers in the political, in political imaginations. He saw himself as self-consciously establishing a new Roman constitution. Among his proposals, indeed his changes, was to require Senate approval of all legislative proposals that would henceforth be made by the popular tribunes. So before the tribunes could propose new laws and put them forward directly to the people to vote on, but under Sulla's reforms, the Senate could control which of those new laws would go forward, so reinforcing elite control. Now, Sulla stepped down in 79, and most of his reforms would be overturned within a decade. But he had proven that one could seize political power at the heart of Rome by force and use that power to rewrite the constitutional compact. And his use of force set a further chilling precedent. He pioneered the use of proscription, which was the publication of a list of enemies of the state, which had drastic consequences for those put on the list. As the scholar Catherine Steele has written, the property of the proscribed became the states. They themselves lost the The state's promise of protection in case of violence and the citizen rights of their male descendants for two generations were curtailed. So if a vigilante came to kill someone who was proscribed, the state would stand by and let it happen. Steele adds that Sulla also attempted to revoke the citizen status of some of the communities across Italy which had opposed him. In this light, it is sobering that Elon Musk mused in 2023, perhaps we just need a modern day Sulla. Now, as we've seen, the legacy of the real Sola was bloody and painful. As a relatively young legal advocate, Cicero defended some of those caught up in the consequences of the proscriptions. And while he himself came through personally unscathed, this first civil war would cast a long shadow. The possibility of changing fundamental aspects of the Constitution through violence had been proven real. So, the third crisis, Cicero's consulate and the conspiracy of Catiline. Less than a quarter century after Sulla's dictatorship, Cicero would be elected consul on his first try, having been, in Plutarch's words, advanced to the consulship no less by the aristocrats than by the common people and in the interests of the city. Cicero owed his nomination to widespread concern about the patrician senator Catiline, an erstwhile partisan of Sulla, who was already known for his own viciousness and his own ambition. Now, in the consular election, Cicero outflanked Catiline. He was elected along with Catiline's running mate because consular candidates could be elected individually, even if they campaigned as part of a slate. But that did not end the rivalry. Instead, Catiline launched an attempted coup in the midst of Cicero's year in office in 63, radicalizing the optimates platform while also attempting to recruit the masses by promising debt relief. Now, the discovery of the conspiracy, this is Cicero denouncing Catiline in the Senate, was sensational. It would actually make a great film. It involved leaks, defectors, and visiting tribes. And as consul, Cicero chose to use extraordinary powers to suppress the conspiracy. He secured a resolution of the Senate, which was the same means that had been used against Tiberius Gracchus, to put some of the conspirators to death without public trial. And that would later be fateful for Cicero himself, because in his attempts to oppose what he saw as the tyranny of Caesar and Antony, he himself would be accused of having taken a tyrannical action in putting Roman citizens to death without trial. And it was especially ironic because as a young lawyer, he had himself invoked the law that protected against death without proper trial. That said, in the immediate aftermath of the Catalinian conspiracy, Cicero was a hero. He was awarded the honorific title of Pater Patriae, the father of his country by his fellow senators. Yet within a year, this celebratory mood would sour. So we see here he used this resolution of the Senate to execute the conspirators. But what did he do next? Well, within a year, he defended Sulla's nephew on charges of having been part of Cataline's conspiracy. And that led the prosecutor to charge Cicero himself with trying to establish, as Catherine Tempest has said, a tyranny over Rome's courts because he had so much power to sway juries as to who should be acquitted or convicted. And in fact, Sulla's nephew was acquitted, and as Catherine Tempest has observed, this acquittal was all too conspicuously followed by Cicero's purchase of a very expensive house. Bought, as he said, with the help of a very large loan from his grateful client. So now Cicero seemed himself to have embodied not only tyranny, tyrannical action, putting people to death without trial, but also corruption, arguably. And again, both of these charges would dog his memory. So, against that background, then, what happened within the political crisis of Caesar's tyranny? So Catiline's conspiracy had been nipped in the bud, but civil war came again to Rome just decades later. After multiple twists and turns, Julius Caesar was victorious in a struggle with Pompey. And according to the ancient historian Appian, Caesar was chosen dictator for life, again, like Sulla, breaching the norm that the dictatorship should be strictly time-limited, and consul for 10 years, breaching the norm that the consulship was an annual position. His person was declared sacred and inviolable. It was decreed that he should transact business on a throne of ivory and gold, sacrifice always in triumphal costume, that each year the city should celebrate the days on which he had won his victories, that every five years priests and vestal virgins should offer up public prayers for his safety, and that the magistrates, immediately upon their inauguration, should take an oath not to oppose any of Caesar's decrees. Now these ceremonial trappings, the ivory and gold, looked a lot to Roman eyes like kingship, indeed like prototypes of the foreign monarchs whom Romans disdained. As I said, serving as dictator for life effectively made Caesar into a tyrant, freeing him of term limits and legal restraints. Now many members of the Senate were alarmed by these developments. A conspiracy formed, of course, famously led by Brutus and Cassius. They did not invite Cicero to join them in the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar. Plutarch says they thought he was too cowardly and too old. But he was there on the day at the fateful Senate meeting when some 60 conspirators stabbed Caesar 23 times. And in the words of author Anthony Everett, a further dramatic scene ensued involving Cicero himself. So this is Antony Everett. Brutus walked to the center of the hall after stabbing Caesar. He brandished his dagger, shouted for Cicero by name, and congratulated him on the recovery of freedom. The retired statesman, Cicero, who had apparently made peace with the tyrant, was suddenly pushed to center stage. Hitherto scarcely able to believe his eyes, the sight of the stabbing, he could now scarcely believe his ears, the calling to him and the congratulating him on freedom. Everett concludes, it was as if the assassination had been staged especially for him. Now Cicero took the opportunity to propose a rapprochement. He tried to persuade the Senate to pass a reconciliation, decree an amnesty, and reward Cassius and Brutus with the governorship of provinces that would take them outside Rome, so perhaps damping down the polarization. But Plutarch comments that none of these things came to pass. Instead, there was a dramatic set of scenes that led up to Caesar's funeral five days later. Just after the assassination, when the people, this is Plutarch again, saw Caesar's body carried through the Forum. And when Antony showed them the garments drenched with blood and pierced everywhere with the swords, they went mad with rage and sought for the murderers in the Forum. So from having been liberators in their own eyes and in Cicero's eyes, the Tyrannicides, as they were known, those who assassinated Caesar, were swiftly cast by Antony as murderers. So that leads us then to the fifth and final crisis that I'm going to discuss this evening, the political crisis after Caesar. Cicero doubled down in defending the tyrannicides and so in opposing Antony. In his philosophical writings, in the wake of the assassination, in this work, Deophices on Duties, Cicero would compare tyrannicide to killing a wild beast. So he wrote, there can be no fellowship between us and tyrants. This is in the immediate aftermath of Caesar's assassination. On the contrary, there is a complete estrangement. It is honorable to kill them. Indeed, the whole pestilential and irreverent class ought to be expelled from the community of mankind. For just as some limbs are amputated, if they begin to lose their blood and their life, as it were, and are harming the other parts of the body, similarly, if the wildness and monstrousness of a beast appears in human form, it must be removed from the common humanity, so to speak, of the body. So what Cicero is doing here is saying the tyrant is a limb that needs to be amputated for the good of the commonwealth of human society. And in other writings, he emphasized that this was because the tyrant had resorted to force, forsaking the tools of speech and persuasion that define human political life. For Cicero, the orator, persuasive speech was the gift that separates us from savagery and barbarism, and that was the tool that he thought the tyrant had forsworn. Now, in making his case philosophically, Cicero was also desperately seeking to prosecute it politically. He was attacking Antony as the newest aspiring tyrant in a series of speeches, some delivered, some merely written, that Cicero named his Philippics, and he named them that in homage to Demosthenes' legendary attacks in speeches on Philip of Macedon three centuries before. And in these speeches, Cicero insisted, in the words of the scholar Henrietta van der Bloom, that any citizen who goes against the interests of the Respublica should be declared a hostess, a public enemy, and stripped of his citizenship. We might think proscribed. Cicero is adopting the very tactics that Sulla had pioneered. We see in Cicero's own words, in the second quotation on the slide, in the 13th Philippic, Cicero writes of tyrants, such a person ought to be excluded from membership in the human race, banished beyond the confines of human nature. So here we see his philosophy and his political life coming together. So this dehumanizing, as van der Blum also calls it, is akin to Sulla's prescriptions. Dehumanization is a well-known and profound threat to political life and indeed to human lives, as the scholar Leah Yu has shown, for example, in her book Vulnerable Minds, The Neuropolitics of Divided Societies. And so we come to this irony. While casting himself as a defender of the Republic, Cicero's own actions and his own rhetoric arguably contributed to the very polarization that he decried. Now, before I develop that thought in conclusion, let us briefly track Cicero to the bitter end. So his uncompromising opposition to Antony would prove his undoing. When Antony joined forces with Lepidus and Octavian in the second triumvirate, they cemented their alliance by agreeing a new list of proscriptions. And each one of them insisted on a name that one of the others might have otherwise wanted to protect. So they were sort of making a blood pact that they would each give up someone for the sake of their new alliance. So in Cicero's case, it was Antony who insisted that he be put on the list, overcoming Octavian's partial and intermittent fond respect for the philosopher. So once Cicero had been proscribed, again the state would not protect him. He was a public enemy. And assassins were duly sent out, as indeed they had been for Demosthenes back in ancient Greece, as we saw in my third Gresham in this series on March 12th. In Cicero's case, they eventually caught up with him in the countryside as he was attempting to flee to the sea. And Plutarch writes, Herenius, the assassin, cut off Cicero's head by Antony's command, and his hands, the hands with which he wrote the Philippics. And Plutarch goes on: when Cicero's extremities were brought to Rome, Antony ordered the head and hands to be placed over the ship's peaks on the rostra, a sight that made the Romans shudder, for they thought they saw there not the face of Cicero, but an image of the soul of Antony, Antony revealing himself in this act, truly to be the tyrant that Cicero had called him. So Cicero gave his life for the Republic as he had promised that he was willing to do. He had said in the second Philippic, I defended the Republic when I was young, I shall not desert it now that I am old. I should be happy to offer my body if my death can bring into reality the freedom of our state. So, in conclusion, how should we assess Cicero? Well, in his own eyes, he was a hero of the Republic, and in the eyes of many scholars of past generations and many today, he was seeking to protect its political norms against those who traced and betrayed them. Cicero himself wrote in a poetic peon to his own achievements as consul, for which he was much mocked already in antiquity. He wrote in this poem, You have been by virtue placed to save your country in the imminent breach. He sought to fashion himself as the ideal guide of the republic, of whom he wrote in his work on the Commonwealth. Yet he was never entirely above the fray. As we've seen, he was a partisan of the optimates in crucial respects, not wholesale. At times he rejected or refashioned some of their political commitments. So, for example, in his work on the laws, he defended the institution of the tribunate, which some of his colleagues might have wished to dispense with. But nevertheless, overall, as we saw on the question of land reform, of the secret ballot, he was very much aligned with one side. We also saw that his own actions in putting members of Cataline's conspiracy to death without trial was illegal on the face of it and a disturbing precedent. And a number of scholars have gone on to emphasize that he used rhetoric at times to provoke or at least implicitly legitimate violence. The scholar Joy Connolly has written: Cicero at times, as she says, exploits violence for his own ends. Indeed, Ingo Gildenhard has emphasized one specific rhetorical trope that Cicero used in this kind of polarization. He redefined political offices according to his own standards. So, for example, at one point he wrote that two consuls were not consuls, but robbers. And in the Philippics, he writes of Mark Antony that Antony had forfeited his claim to the consulate. So he says to his fellows, you ought not to have regarded Marcus Antonius, Mark Antony, as consul after the feast of Lupercal. Am I then to think of him as a consul, as a Roman citizen, as a free man, or even as a human being? So again, we see Cicero claiming that someone who is acting as a tyrant forfeits his claim to his office, to his citizenship, to his freedom, even to his humanity. Now again, in Ingo Gildenhard's view, this is the quotation from the third Philippic, in Ingo Gildenhard's view in the top paragraph here, Cicero's rhetoric of demonization jarred with the political culture of the Roman Republic. It formed the rhetorical equivalent to the suicidal violence of civil conflict. Cicero conceived of himself, he says, as standing in the front line of a war against internal enemies, but he may have been one of the gravediggers of the Republic. And Amy Russell has recently put a similar challenge. She writes, if we have to point the finger of blame at anyone for the fall of the republic, it must be at the Ciceros. Those who created an artificial structure that denied the existence of an alternative and sapped the republic of its flexibility. Once it could not bend, it broke. So Cicero gave his life to protect the Republic as he understood it. But the rhetorical habits that he forged were themselves at times destabilizing, dehumanizing, and dangerous. In the very act of defending republican norms, Cicero modeled a style of politics that those norms could not survive. And so we'll ask in my next lecture about the death of the Roman Republic. Thank you very much.