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A review by lkedzie
Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome by Josiah Osgood
4.0
A specter is haunting Lawless Republic - the specter of President Trump.
This book is a biography of the Roman politician Cicero, mostly. Unlike some ancients, Cicero left a copious paper trail that is somewhat intact. Cicero rose to prominence on his oratory, specifically in the Roman courts. Courts in Rome were less about questions of law and fact and more like...analog Twitter. Clowning on your enemies knows no season, and the jabs are pretty damn funny, mostly.
Cicero is a great writer, making it a lot of fun to write about him, and that inherent joy bursts through each page. The writing here is worthy of Cicero in being lively and engaging, a book it took me a long time to read because I wanted for it to take a long time. This is sometimes the wrong way to write a history, but it is the right way to write this history.
There is something of a Columbo-like structure, since the end-point of most chapters is Cicero giving a speech. A speech which contains all the facts that the chapter has been leading up to, and sometimes is acting as the primary source for everyone. This deconstruction is weird to contemplate, but works.
The problem with this structure is the problem of any history about the Roman Republic, early or late, which is that it can get confusing. Other than similar names and repeated instances of concepts that feel familiar, but are not (cf. trials) it has all the personal grudge of dynastic politics with six times the people. Therefore, the book periodically must step back to explain the deep lore, which can be taxing as it requires reading backwards and forwards. It is good enough, but it is a tension between the book as biography and the book as history.
The letdown here is that the book makes an argument about civility, about respect for the rule of law, and the degrading quality of politicized violence to the political process that just does not bear out with the facts. Cicero was a jerk. He was an eloquent jerk, less jerkish than some of his contemporaries, but an jerk nevertheless. High minded ideals are not in deeds, only in words, and only occasionally that. He was out for self-aggrandizement, same as all the others, playing to his strengths, which was being clever. What is unique, and to the author's credit this is noted, is his legacy and its creation of a sort of political character to emulate that fossilizes into a high-minded ideal.
Of course, since it is Rome, we have to make it into an analogy. Don't make me tap the sign. Look, for my money, the Roman Empire fell in 1922 (your homework is figuring out what I am referring to) so all this talk is so much Spenglerian bunkum. Oh, you rejoin, we are talking about the fall of the Roman Republic, not the Empire. First off, are you? Are you drawing a distinction? The Romans did not always themselves. But let us say for the sake of argument you can, and you do, and we are agreed on it. Okay, then this is still the wrong setting. The contemporary United States is not coming out of a civil war complete with government-sanctioned murk lists, not without some generous foot-lopping.
But great Caesar's ghost, is this book full of the pregnant comment. And maybe it is unintentional. It is not coherently pointing at something, but that feels as good evidence for it being intentional. I, myself, would not call it paraleipsis. I might call it a sound marketing strategy.
My thanks to the author, Josiah Osgood, for writing the book and to the publisher, Basic Books, for making the ARC available to me.
This book is a biography of the Roman politician Cicero, mostly. Unlike some ancients, Cicero left a copious paper trail that is somewhat intact. Cicero rose to prominence on his oratory, specifically in the Roman courts. Courts in Rome were less about questions of law and fact and more like...analog Twitter. Clowning on your enemies knows no season, and the jabs are pretty damn funny, mostly.
Cicero is a great writer, making it a lot of fun to write about him, and that inherent joy bursts through each page. The writing here is worthy of Cicero in being lively and engaging, a book it took me a long time to read because I wanted for it to take a long time. This is sometimes the wrong way to write a history, but it is the right way to write this history.
There is something of a Columbo-like structure, since the end-point of most chapters is Cicero giving a speech. A speech which contains all the facts that the chapter has been leading up to, and sometimes is acting as the primary source for everyone. This deconstruction is weird to contemplate, but works.
The problem with this structure is the problem of any history about the Roman Republic, early or late, which is that it can get confusing. Other than similar names and repeated instances of concepts that feel familiar, but are not (cf. trials) it has all the personal grudge of dynastic politics with six times the people. Therefore, the book periodically must step back to explain the deep lore, which can be taxing as it requires reading backwards and forwards. It is good enough, but it is a tension between the book as biography and the book as history.
The letdown here is that the book makes an argument about civility, about respect for the rule of law, and the degrading quality of politicized violence to the political process that just does not bear out with the facts. Cicero was a jerk. He was an eloquent jerk, less jerkish than some of his contemporaries, but an jerk nevertheless. High minded ideals are not in deeds, only in words, and only occasionally that. He was out for self-aggrandizement, same as all the others, playing to his strengths, which was being clever. What is unique, and to the author's credit this is noted, is his legacy and its creation of a sort of political character to emulate that fossilizes into a high-minded ideal.
Of course, since it is Rome, we have to make it into an analogy. Don't make me tap the sign. Look, for my money, the Roman Empire fell in 1922 (your homework is figuring out what I am referring to) so all this talk is so much Spenglerian bunkum. Oh, you rejoin, we are talking about the fall of the Roman Republic, not the Empire. First off, are you? Are you drawing a distinction? The Romans did not always themselves. But let us say for the sake of argument you can, and you do, and we are agreed on it. Okay, then this is still the wrong setting. The contemporary United States is not coming out of a civil war complete with government-sanctioned murk lists, not without some generous foot-lopping.
But great Caesar's ghost, is this book full of the pregnant comment. And maybe it is unintentional. It is not coherently pointing at something, but that feels as good evidence for it being intentional. I, myself, would not call it paraleipsis. I might call it a sound marketing strategy.
My thanks to the author, Josiah Osgood, for writing the book and to the publisher, Basic Books, for making the ARC available to me.