A man for many seasons

I have admired few people as I have admired Cicero. He was what I aspired to be: a man of of action. I grew up in India and the model I could see in the fifties was Nehru, a freedom fighter and politician who took the helm of an old-but-new country but remained a loner, a thinking person, who dreamed skyscraping dreams. I saw few on the world scene who met my measure.

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Then I encountered Cicero, the ultimate dreamer who was also an achiever.

Eighty years before the birth of Christ, the Roman republic was beginning to crumble with the advent of the ambitious Julius Caesar. One man, Rome's foremost politician and orator, Cicero, was speaking and writing tirelessly against letting the republic's democratic values cede to autocrats' power. When Caesar was killed in a plot, Cicero fulminated against the new power grabber Mark Antony and wanted the republic and its values preserved. He failed.

Cicero had had an illustrative career. He was acknowledged as Rome's most brilliant lawyer and orator. Neither a patrician nor a noble, he had achieved key positions: treasurer at 30, magistrate at 36, mayor at 39, consul at 42, and Legate and Pro-Consul of Cecilia and later Greece and Italy. At every stage he had done miracles: multiplied grain collection, detected conspiracies against the state, suppressed violent rebellions, opposed landgrab, stopped corruption, protected civil rights, even led a cavalry to help a besieged garrison. He had courageously declined Caesar's offer to join him in a ruling junta for fear it would undermine the republic.