An Open Road sale of A Pillar of Iron (originally $19.99) has the e-book on sale for $3.99.
I've placed the URLs to their sales in the middle of this newsletter.
The times that preceded Augustan Rome were so full of big personalities that history cannot seem ever to get enough of them. Shakespeare concentrated on Julius Caesar, and two triumvirates that included Caesar's assassinators. Cicero appears in "Julius Caesar" only as a Roman Senator known to Shakespeare's audience. Merely as someone to whom a Roman citizen announces astounding portents that bode evil.
Yet, more middle American school children read both Caesar and Cicero than they read almost anyone else. Caesar for his commentaries on the Gallic wars that he pursued to fame. Cicero for his legal and political orations. Read, of course, for the lessons in Latin that many high schools still continued while there were still language teachers that knew Latin.
When Caesar and Cicero were young, the – still – Republic of Rome was beset by massive corruption. Elite opinion saw Senate office as belonging to those with Senate ancestry. Cicero, we find became a Senator on the basis of his talents.
Only the Roman Senate had the power to stop corruption. We struggle to understand the mindset of those times. For example: Why would Caesar, or Alexander the Great almost 300 years before him, think the Senate could confer him as a God? That was not just an honorary title. Ah, but we don't quite fathom the nobility of England's royal family either.
Rome's power and money grew on conquering its provincial lands. Conquering heroes – such as Caesar – exacted mind-boggling tribute. That money then transferred Rome's power to themselves.
By 80 BC Cicero had become a practiced lawyer. He took on the Dictator Sulla and by age 30 he wrote treatises, and then administered successfully at trials, condemning specific powerful people who were corrupting administration of the provinces.
Cicero's orations against Catiline – a man universally regarded as the epitome of evil – had a momentous backdrop. We might not have the patience to understand the personages or issues, except for the salacious parts, which Cicero spared no one.
Catiline's support came from the plebes (poor people; the rabble). When Catiline ran against Cicero for the consulate, the highest position in Rome, he apparently made it public he intended to assassinate Cicero.
The next day in the Senate, with Catiline present, Cicero threw at him a polemic that Latin students know * well. The upshot: after drastic escalation of this confrontation, Cicero – an intellect rather than a commander – had saved Rome from a revolt that would have ended the Republic.
Few have such voluminous writings known to us as did Cicero. He could have been called the king of hyperbole. Their readers regard them as eloquent, rather than sincere expressions of the truth. Caesar himself, as prolific, remarked on how much Cicero had bared his soul in essentially dictated and unrevised oratories.
Then, too, there are his private letters, which lack the relition of his polemics. They don't disguise his vanity, either. All this is available in publications that appeared in school classes in many countries throughout the 20th Century.
Therefore, as in "Great Lion of God," on the life of St. Paul for which "The Acts" in the New Testament gave a profound story, a full actual record of Cicero was available to all.
This, though, started a great competition between Caesar and Cicero. This went silent after Caesar crossed the Rubicon and made himself Rome's dictator. Instead of challenging Caesar at that time, Cicero wrote a voluminous stack of essays on philosophy, as a counter to the dissolution of (pagan) religious belief that those times wrought.
History records that Cicero hoped that philosophy could substitute for religion. He based his thoughts on the wisdom of many of his time's Greek sages, especially Plato.
Cicero circles around many possible stances toward such Roman pagan practices as augury and astrology. Yet, he eventually concludes that religion is essential, a stance that appears also in many Taylor Caldwell novels. He even leaned toward the hope of personal immortality.
Taylor Caldwell wades into this to find a proto-Christian in Cicero, whose sensational oratory is terribly convenient for a grand novel.
Cicero rued (in his own writings) that Julius Caesar eclipsed his life. Following Caesar's assassination, Cicero became an enemy of Mark Antony in the ensuing struggle for Caesar's legacy by the second triumvirate. That taken on by Shakespeare in "Anthony and Cleopatra. Mark Anthony had him murdered; maybe murdered him himself.
These are people writ large. So large that Shakespeare could ride us along their fame to lessons about humanity. Still, they are from another time.
I've often wanted to note the following in public. Antiquity tells us just why Mark Anthony was held in such high regard: He personally resembled statues of the the great half-god, half-mortal hero, Hercules.
Michael Fried, Grandson
For the Descendants of Taylor Caldwell
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