>>>>The death of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC marks the beginning of a period of crisis
in the late Republic, a period that will see a series of outright civil wars. And the fact
that Tiberius was killed, that that his career ended in an act of violence, somehow almost
opened new possibilities for the use of brute force instead of the rule of law to settle
political accounts. The assassination of Tiberius also saw the beginnings of a new factionalism
in Roman society, in Roman politics. The rise of two factions: one, the optimates. The elites,
the best people, those who represented the interests of the Senate, those who represented
the aristocratic element in Roman society and who wished to see the society, the Republic,
dominated by the authority of the Senate. Those who believed that differences in wealth,
especially differences in the distribution of land, were just, were part of the order
of society in which some deserved more than others. A second faction: the populares, the
populist faction. Those who favored the power of the army, the power of the common man,
the power of the assemblies, the democratic elements in the Roman Constitution, and those
who believed that the distribution of land, that the distribution of wealth was so unequal
that it was in fact unjust, and that the Roman state might in various ways take actions to
equalize the distribution of property and to harmonize society. We'll look at the crisis
of the late Republic, especially through the eyes of one towering intellectual figure -- Cicero.
Cicero, who lives from 106 BC, who grows up against the backdrop of this age of crisis,
and who becomes one of the central political figures in the late Republic until his death
in 43 BC, when he's assassinated by the henchmen of Marc Antony: one of the lieutenants of
Caesar, of Julius Caesar who was vying for control of the Roman state and who resented
the opposition of Cicero, the stubborn and open opposition to the power of Marc Antony
and his colleagues. So Cicero is a man of politics, but he's also a man of intellect.
He's a philosophical figure and, in fact, few are so responsible as Cicero for integrating
Greek philosophy, Greek thought, and the tradition of Greek political thought, into not just
the Roman world, but specifically into the Latin language. Cicero inherits the tradition
of Plato and above all Aristotle. And Cicero's political thought is often considered eclectic
and derivative, that is that it's eclectic, it's formed of different sources and is in
some ways perhaps inconsistent, and derivative, that is that Cicero's political thought is
simply a translation derived from the Greek originals like Aristotle. And it's true that
Cicero doesn't stand as one of the most innovative political thinkers in the history of the ancient
world. But it's easy to underestimate the significance of Cicero, even the originality
of Cicero as a political synthesizer, as someone who synthesizes the various strands of constitutional
thought that come out of Aristotle, of natural law and natural justice that derive at least
in part from the philosophy of stoicism, that we'll consider. And Cicero harmonizes these
in a way that have direct application to the politics of the late Republic. Cicero is a
moderate conservative. That is, Cicero is someone who favors the traditions and the
powers especially of the Senate, but in a moderate way, and resents the deep discord
that has infected Roman society. Cicero is a conservative who seeks a politics of consensus,
a politics of concord. And in fact, his rise to power is based upon his advocacy of concordia,
of political concord, of a kind that would restore the Republic to its balance and its
glory. We'll see Cicero, who is one of the greatest Latin authors simply in terms of
his command of the language and who has always been the gold standard for Latin prose, so
that to learn Latin is and always has been in some sense, to learn to read Cicero. We'll
see Cicero as a political figure and as a philosophical figure. And so we'll see Cicero,
whose extensive surviving writings, his letters, and his political tracks, make him one of
the best-known figures in the history of political thought, certainly in the ancient world. He's
someone whose career, whose thoughts, whose family life we know, in some ways intimately.
And he's left behind a record of his letters, of his legal cases, and of his political thoughts,
above all in three fundamental works: his book "The Republic," his book "The Laws,"
and his book, which has important political content, called "On Duties" -- De Officiis.
A book whose importance would be hard to overestimate historically, a book that was read across
the Middle Ages and throughout the early modern period, even across the Enlightenment--one
of the most printed and one of the most widely read books after the Bible in all of human
history. And so we'll look at the ideas that are in these books as an expression of Roman
republicanism. Cicero is one of the most important theorists of Roman republicanism, and he does
so in a way that synthesizes Greek philosophy, translates it into the concrete terms of Roman
institutions, and does so in a way that was highly politically relevant
within the context of the late Republic.