Quintus Tullius Cicero

Quintus Tullius Cicero ( , ; 102 – 43 BC) was a Roman statesman and military leader, the younger brother of Marcus Tullius Cicero. He was born into a family of the equestrian order, as the son of a wealthy landowner in Arpinum, some south-east of Rome.

Biography

Cicero's well-to-do father arranged for him to be educated with his brother in Rome, Athens and probably Rhodes in 79–77 BC. Around 70 BC he married Pomponia (sister of his brother's friend Atticus), a dominant woman of strong personality. He divorced her after a long disharmonious marriage with much bickering between the spouses in late 45 BC. His brother, Marcus, tried several times to reconcile the spouses, but to no avail. The couple had a son born in 66 BC and named Quintus Tullius Cicero after his father.

Quintus was aedile in 66 BC, praetor in 62 BC, and propraetor of the Province of Asia for three years 61-59 BC. Under Caesar, during the Gallic Wars, he was legatus (accompanying Caesar on his second expedition to Britain in 54 BC and surviving a Nervian siege of his camp during Ambiorix's revolt), and was under his brother when the latter was governor in Cilicia in 51 BC. During the civil wars, he supported the Pompeian faction, obtaining the pardon of Caesar later.

During the Second Triumvirate, when the Roman Republic was again in civil war, Quintus, his son, and his brother were all proscribed. He fled from Tusculum with his brother. Later, Quintus went home to bring back money for travelling expenses. His son hid his father and did not reveal the hiding place even under torture. When Quintus heard this, he gave himself up to try to save his son, but father, son, and famous brother, were killed in 43 BC as proscribed persons.

Personality and relationship with brother Marcus

Quintus is depicted by Caesar as a brave soldier and an inspiring military leader. At a critical moment in the Gallic Wars he rallied his legion and retrieved an apparently hopeless position. Caesar commended him for this with the words "He praised Cicero and his men very highly, as they deserved". However, later the legate was purportedly responsible for a near-disaster in Gaul but does not receive condemnation from Caesar as a result.

Quintus had an impulsive temperament and had fits of cruelty during military operations, a behaviour frowned on by Romans of that time. The Roman (and stoic) ideal was to control one's emotions even in battle. Quintus Cicero also liked old-fashioned and harsh punishments, like putting a person convicted of patricide into a sack and throwing him into the sea. Such convicts were traditionally "stripped, scourged, sewn up in a sack together with dog, a cock, a viper, and a monkey, and thrown into a river or the sea to drown". This punishment he meted out during his propraetorship of Asia.

His brother confessed in one of his letters to his friend Titus Pomponius Atticus (written in 51 BC while he was Proconsul of Cilicia and had taken Quintus as legatus with him) that he dares not leave Quintus alone as he is afraid of what kind of sudden ideas he might have. On the positive side, Quintus was utterly honest, even as a governor of a province, in which situation many Romans shamelessly amassed private property for themselves. He was also a well-educated man who enjoyed reading Greek tragedies, and even wrote some tragedies himself.

The relationship between the brothers was mostly affectionate, except for a period of serious disagreement during Caesar's dictatorship 49-44 BC. The many letters from Marcus ''ad Quintum fratrem'' show how deep and affectionate the brothers' relationship was, though Marcus Cicero often played the role of the "older and more experienced" sibling, lecturing to his brother on what the right thing to do was. Quintus might also have felt at times that the self-centred Marcus thought only about how his brother might hinder or help Marcus' own career on the ''cursus honorum''.

Authorship

As an author, during the Gallic wars, he wrote four tragedies in the Greek style. Three of them were titled ''Troas'', ''Erigones'', and ''Electra'', but all are lost. He also wrote several poems on the second expedition of Caesar to Britannia, three epistles to Tiro (extant) and a fourth one to his brother. The long letter '' Commentariolum Petitionis'' (''Handbook on electioneering'') has also survived. Although its authenticity has been much questioned, recently the scholar Andrew Lintott has argued that Quintus was the true author. It is in any case a guide to political behavior in Cicero's time.

References

Citations

Modern sources

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Ancient sources

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Tullius Cicero, Quintus
102 BC births
43 BC deaths
1st-century BC executions
1st-century BC Romans
1st-century BC writers
Ancient Roman generals
Ancient Romans in Britain
Ancient Romans involved in Julius Caesar's invasions of Britain
Correspondents of Cicero
Executed ancient Roman people
People executed by the Roman Republic
Plebeian aediles
Roman-era students in Athens
Roman people of the Gallic Wars
Roman Republican praetors
Cicero, Quintus