on letting go and moving forward
an introduction feat. cicero
On December 7, 43 BCE, Cicero was beheaded near Formiae on the western coast of Italy. Not even two weeks earlier, the fresh political alliance between Mark Antony and Octavian had resulted in a new round of proscriptions, legally sanctioned executions of so-called “enemies of the state.” The triumvirate1 had a meeting, made their plans, and wrote up an inventory of every person whose murder was allowed, encouraged, and promised a reward. For his dogged defense of the Republic and especially for his bitter, long-standing enmity with Antony (in the span of eight months he had, bravely or foolishly, delivered fourteen anti-Antony speeches2), Cicero landed at the top of the kill list. He was tracked and ambushed not far from his Formiae villa. He told his slaves to put down the litter he was being carried in and not try to defend him; then he leaned forward, offered his neck, and requested that his executioner at least make a clean job of it. It was a composed way to go out—a grim, distorted version of the posture an elite man might assume as he was carried through the streets of Rome. But this wasn’t the Rome that Cicero had known, and that way of life was gone: his head was cut off; his hands were severed at his wrists.
Introductions have always been my least favorite part of writing anything, and writing the introduction to this newsletter feels at once both lower-stakes and higher-stakes than anything I’ve written before. I was calling it a “passion project” when the idea first occurred to me, but now I don’t think that’s quite right. It’s more personal than anything I’ve ever written for public consumption, and I think it would be more appropriate to call it a “therapy project,” or a “commitment project,” or “a project that forces me to sit with my discomfort about both myself and my writing skills.” It’s been five months since I wrote anything beyond the boundaries of my job and my translation work, and four months since I scrubbed all traces of my creative work from the internet—inasmuch as one can do that sort of thing in an age where multiple digital copies can exist. It was not a particularly well-thought-out decision, and I struggled with the fallout for a long time. This was something that had, in many ways, defined the shape of my life and given meaning to it, and abruptly it was gone. The intense regret I felt in July has since dulled, but it’s still been a difficult emotional transition from “I’m a writer” to “I was a writer.” My hands, so to speak, have been severed at the wrists.
Cicero had initially intended to flee Italy for Macedonia, to escape the proscriptions, which is why he had been traveling along the coast. He was supposed to get on a boat and get out of there. But it needed to be a quick, firm decision, and Cicero had never been very good at those. In The Roman Republic of Letters, Katharina Volk writes that he was “a man who was unusually given to probing reflection, if not tortured agonizing, over what ways of behavior and courses of action might be appropriate for him.” But here, at the end, he finally chose to stay, despite knowing that to stay meant to die: the imperial historian Livy wrote that Cicero said, “I will die in the country that I have so often saved.” Roman historiography is sometimes characterized by an interesting muddying of truth, fiction, and hearsay, and we should take this particular story with a grain of salt—but the foundation for it was there.3 Cicero had always hated to be away from home; he still believed in the Republic even though, by that point, it was like a corpse he was stubbornly dragging along behind him. Leaving would have been worse than sawing off a limb, one that held the rest of him together and could never be cut away.
I miss writing, and so I’m here. I still don’t know what here means, exactly, but I imagine it’s somewhere between writing for fandom and writing the original novel that I’ve been thinking about for years but am too afraid to begin. It’s a way for me to return to writing in a creative, intentional way; but also, to be frank, to therapize myself a little bit, because I desperately need it and right now I don’t have anyone else to do it for me. As an adult, I’ve been consistently terrible at journaling, so in a way I’m hoping this pseudo-journaling activity can be a kind of replacement. I’m probably going to overshare, but I’ll try not to overshare too much. There’s me, and there’s the online persona I have curated: the lines will blur, but I don’t want to drop the shroud of anonymity entirely.
Some of Cicero’s writings, like his speeches and philosophical treatises, were intended for public consumption and admiration, but Cicero is unique among Roman sources in that he didn’t just leave his political and philosophical works behind. There is also a huge collection of personal correspondence: more than 800 letters written to friends, family, and other acquaintances,4 many of which were not originally intended to be widely read and shared.5 To get this kind of glimpse into anyone’s life—the triumphs, joys, agonies, and sufferings; the career machinations and the daily mundane—is rare; to get this kind of glimpse into the life of an ancient figure is unparalleled. It’s easy to look back at the Romans through a gilded lens—to view them as solemn, enigmatic, unreachable. It’s more difficult to do this with Cicero. He doesn’t wear the same gleaming, mysterious veil as so many of his contemporaries simply because we do know so much about him.
Many people read his letters and find him insufferable. To be totally clear, this isn’t an unfair assessment. He was a product of his time and he often was vain and fickle, pompous and pretentious and cruel; he could also be thoughtful, sentimental, amusing, principled, and capable of great kindness. He went through several periods of extended depression. He was trying to cling to a world, a way of living and existing, that was crumbling at his feet, and he didn’t always know what to do about it. When I read his letters, I feel fond and exasperated in turns. I think I find his indecision and tendency to change his mind endearing because I see myself in that. Isn’t hesitation a part of human nature? Does anyone really know what they’re doing? Aren’t we all hesitating, second-guessing, regretting past choices all the time? That’s always been the draw of Cicero, and his letters, to me: the sense that I am intruding into an intimacy that was never meant for my eyes, like peeking into a window that’s been accidentally cracked open for millennia.
This year has been characterized by my mom’s cancer treatment, even though she was diagnosed in the spring of 2023. This was supposed to be a better year; in truth, it was not. July in particular was an extremely difficult month for me, but the past few months overall have been an emotional experience I would dearly love to never repeat. The silver lining, if there is one, is that being at the bottom of my own personal pit of despair pushed me back into the arms of something that used to give me a lot of joy: Latin translation. If you’ve been following me on social media for any amount of time, you might have seen some of my translations of Catullus’s poems; if you’re going to keep reading this newsletter, I can promise you will learn a lot more about Catullus, and maybe even more than you ever wanted to learn. Latin translation is like a puzzle to me, and the one thing that can reliably take me out of my own head for anywhere between fifteen minutes to an hour. I think it’s not a coincidence that the literature I like to translate is deeply emotional, and the Romans I like to study are the same. Catullus, for all his witticisms, died young and almost certainly depressed (he should have been at the club, but he also should have been at therapy); Cicero was thought to be too sensitive and reactionary, and Livy disparagingly remarked that, except his death, “he bore none of [his] setbacks in a manner befitting a man” (one of the setbacks, it should be said, was the death of his daughter; his friend Brutus—yes, the Brutus you’re thinking of—unhelpfully advised that perhaps Cicero should just get over it). The Romans were not “just like us,” and nor should they be, and nor should it be easy—or possible—to reconcile ourselves with the brutalities and belief systems they existed alongside; at the same time, human emotion is human emotion, and there is some comfort in finding parallels to my own sadness in the sadness of some guy who lived two thousand years before me.
That, and sometimes they just wrote really beautiful prose or made really funny jokes.
I don’t know if I can package this newsletter into a tidy little box. “Essays about Roman history, Latin literature, and personal grief” is the best I could come up with—a buy one, get two free kind of deal. I’m a little afraid that the essays are going to come across as pretentious, no matter the topic, but I don’t think Cicero ever worried about that so maybe I shouldn’t either.6
I often return to Jenny Slate’s essay “The Pits” from her book Little Weirds. “You could argue that the bottom of the pit is where you plant the start of the thing that is made to travel to the light.” I still feel quite stuck in my pit, and every time I feel like maybe I’ve managed to crawl an inch upwards, something pushes me back down: the grief, the anxiety, the fear, the sense that I am sitting on the sidelines of my own life while the world washes on above me. I think I’ve gotten comfortable in the pit, in a way, and so I’m afraid to stay but I’m also afraid to leave—but nothing good will ever happen in the pit, either. I have to claw my way out eventually. The light is still up there.
Thanks to everyone who has already joined me on this newsletter journey! I’m so glad to have you here, and very excited that my long-standing desire to monologue about the Romans has finally found a suitable outlet.
If you noticed the reference to The Terror (2018): you are a real one. I am platonically kissing you on the mouth.
Technically the alliance was between Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus, but everyone always forgets about Lepidus, poor guy.
Another anti-Antony story: the conspirators who assassinated Julius Caesar had considered doing away with Antony at the same time. In the end they decided against it. Cicero, who had not been invited to join the conspirator gang, later wrote to his friend Trebonius, “I wish you’d invited me to that splendid banquet on the Ides of March! I assure you there would have been no leftovers”—the leftovers, of course, being Antony. To continue the food metaphor, he left no crumbs with that one.
Whatever his exact sentiments might have been so close to the end, Cicero was, unfortunately, a documented expert at both the humblebrag and the regular brag, and especially when it came to his “saving of the fatherland.” Tell us about the Catilinarian conspiracy again, why don’t you, Marcus?
A staggering statistic: the collection was originally twice this size. 37 books of letters have survived to the present day; 35 other books have been lost.
Many of which because Cicero did intend to compile, curate, and distribute a collection of his correspondence. He died before this work was completed. One can only assume that such a collection would have been heavily biased, pruning away anything that he found embarrassing, unseemly, or undignified. Luckily this didn’t happen, and now we can still read in excruciating detail about the time he ate some mushrooms and suffered a severe case of food poisoning.
Cicero definitely didn’t worry about it.
This was so wonderfully written, interesting, and sad at the same time. Thank you for sharing with people!