Conclusion

Extract

It is rash to attempt any summary of so large a field, particularly as there could easily be produced, and no doubt by anyone else there would have been produced, a quite different perspective, with a quite different set of footnotes. But it may be helpful to pull a few threads together.

As a politician, Cicero continues to fascinate, and to exasperate. I have argued that what is needed is neither vitriol nor whitewash, but a realistic approach to the problems and methods of a practising politician in his context, and that the latest scholarship is perhaps moving towards this happy issue. Granted this, we can then see if there is any respect in which Cicero is remarkable either for virtue or vice. To the historians in particular we owe it that he need no longer be treated in a vacuum. We should be able at last to get away from the two Ciceros, which with enough accuracy for a broad generalization, were described by Marrou as one for the historians and one ‘des littéraires’. Two points are essential. The speeches are of great historical importance, but they were preserved as literature. The neglect of this fact and its implications in favour of concentration on the speeches as historical documents has not always produced even very good history. Secondly, the letters, equally if not more important to the historian, are (mainly) a private correspondence. This has been said so often as to be a platitude: yet it is easy to forget as one actually reads the letters.