Seven Hills, But None Called Calvary

In 45 BC Cicero was 60 years old. His beloved daughter Tullia was just 30. She was expecting. In that year Cicero had divorced his wife, as Tullia had divorced her husband. Patrician Roman marriages were political alliances. These divorces brought relief to both parties. Now Cicero and Tullia could spend time together. But the birth was eventually fatal to both mother and child. Cicero was crushed.

Cicero, the greatest Latin stylist and consummate statesman, had survived and helped to guide Roman government through its most bloody century. He was reduced to despair. He wrote his closest friend: "Atticus, everything is over with me, everything, and has been long enough, but now I admit it, having lost the one link that held me." (Cicero, Letters to Atticus, 12.23.) That other great, terse Latin stylist, Caesar, wrote to console Cicero, but Cicero found consolation only in his writing. He withdrew to Astura and composed the Consolatio. Fragments are extant. Few writers in any language have impacted European literature more than Cicero.

In the space of a few years the great Cicero and the mighty Caesar were both dead, both murdered. The vicious game of Roman politics demanded its martyrs. Cicero and Caesar stand as legacies to the grandeur and savagery of Rome. Their lives were lived in homage to themselves and to the Roman enterprise. But death presented itself as the unconquered enemy. Cicero loved nothing as much as his daughter Tullia. Caesar loved nothing as much as power. Both were educated men and found little depth in the Roman gods, divinities stolen from the Greeks and renamed.

Within half a century, though, something happened on the fringes of the Roman enterprise that presented an alternative to despair in the face of death. That something is neither Roman nor Western. Its universality has confounded millennia and today confronts a world awash in economic and political globalization. And Rome and Afghanistan and America melt away before its eternity.

James Clark

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(c) 2001 Millennium Relief & Development Services, vol. 1 no. 15b
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