Translator-historian Michael Grant notes in his introduction to the political speeches of the greatest of Roman orators, Cicero (106-43 B.C.), an ancestral atmosphere of violence "casts a lurid light upon the savage chaos and vendetta which signalized these last moribund years of the Republic, and helped to make it inevitable that this once mighty institution should come to an end and be replaced by an autocracy" (Grant 217). Violence permeated the times, and it permeated the minds of that era. Cicero, stoic humanist that he was, was no exception. He accepted violence as such a commonplace part of the human equation that he never considered questioning it. He did, however, set limits to the use of violence. This essay will consider some of those limits and the consistency with which Cicero applied them.
And indeed, gentlemen, there exists a law, not written down anywhere but inborn in our hearts; . . . from nature itself; . . . by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays it down that, if our lives are endangered . . . any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right ("In Defence" iv, 9).
In accord with the tenor of his times, Marcus Tullus Cicero was a man who did not question certain elements of the status quo. While recognizing the inequities of corruption and avarice, he believed in the Roman Republic as a form of meritocracy; he did, after all, rise from the ranks of the knights (equites) to be elected Consul, presiding over the Republican government for a short while (63-62 B.C.). By the same token that he believed in the inherent worthiness of the republican state, Cicero did not question the integral place violence held in the politics of the times, neither on the world stage, nor domestically. If Cicero had qualms about the killing of one's enemies per se, he did not voice them as matters of general principal.
However, as an orator-advocate, Cicero was also grounded in the tenets of l...