Lawless Republic by Josiah Osgood

Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome

By Josiah Osgood

Basic Books 2025

Classics professor Josiah Osgood’s previous book, 2022’s Uncommon Wrath: How Caesar and Cato’s Deadly Rivalry Destroyed the Roman Republic, laid out the author’s case for two prime suspects in the fall of the Roman Republic to dictatorship in all but name. His new book, Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome at the very least lays a parallel charge against Marcus Tullius Cicero, an up-and-coming lawyer coming to prominence in the wake of the civil wars that have recently racked the country, and this is less an insinuation of double-dipping on the author’s part and more an acknowledgement that the Rome of the period had an over-supply of prime suspects.

In this case, Osgood focuses on Cicero and his relations with both the established powers of the Roman Republic of his world, including such figures as Hortensius, the famous lawyer whose star Cicero eclipsed, or dictatorial generals like Marius or Sulla or Cinna, or rival gang leaders like Clodius and Milo, and most especially for this book, the senator named Lucius Sergius Catilina, the central leader of an insurrection against the Senate in 63 BC, colloquially known to history as the Catline Conspiracy.

Catiline himself was leading his rebellious troops in the field when he learned that the cause was lost. He and his men were routed and slaughtered by Senatorial forces under the command of Marc Antony. “When Catiline’s body was found, it was said, he was still faintly breathing and had on his face the same fierce expression he had always worn in life,” Osgood writes. “His head was cut off by Antonius and sent to Rome as proof of death.”

But Catiline hadn’t acted alone, of course, and Cicero had several of his co-conspirators arrested, hustled to the dank basement prison next to the Temple of Fortune, and strangled to death without benefit of law or trial, a travesty that Cicero would use as justification to call himself the shield of the Republic. “The streets were lit with lamps and torches set up at the doorways, and from the rooftops women shone lights in his honor, as if he were a victorious general,” Osgood writes. “Cicero would never doubt that it was the most glorious moment of his life.”

It was a dark presentiment of things to come. When the violence between Clodius and Milo finally resulted in the murder of Clodius at a roadside inn by henchmen of Milo, Cicero represented his gangster friend at trial, basically characterizing the murder of Clodius as self-defense. It didn’t work; Milo was convicted and had to flee the City. And it didn’t take Cicero long to change his claim: Clodius hadn’t been killed because he represented a threat to Milo, he’d been killed because he was a bad person, regardless of law or precedence.

Osgood looks unerringly at the new kind of rot this represented:

In their pursuit of their own ambitions, Roman politicians were increasingly ignoring customary and legal restraints on power such as limited commands, regular elections, and a prohibition on reaching for weapons when passions flared. Cicero himself, especially in the published version of his defense of Milo, showed a willingness to disregard laws when he thought them unjust or convenient. Perhaps there are times when one needs to obey a higher law than the laws of men. But as the escalating rancor and violence in Rome shows, there is a grave danger to civil society when that attitude becomes common. Cicero had helped to bring on forces that would ultimately kill him and destroy the Republic.

Lawless Republic forms a perfect companion to Uncommon Wrath, equally well-researched, equally engagingly written, equally gripping not least because some of its characters and rhetoric currently appear virtually unchanged in the news stories of 21st century America. Since Osgood’s obvious next choice of book subject is Julius Caesar’s seizure of absolute power in Rome, those contemporary parallels might become too painful for casual reading.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News