With all its domestic and external conflicts, with its multitude of ideas, man power, and personal ambitions, the final years of the Roman Republic exposed the Romans to many opportunities and challenges. These required tough choices and made it inescapable to show where one’s loyalty lay: with family or friends, the Senate or the middle-class citizens, or with more abstract values such as freedom, honor, or glory, unless the driving force was just the immediate advantage or mere desire of survival.

Most famous among the sources for the 50s and 40s BCE are the commentaries of Caesar (100-44 BCE): they give us his spin on the factionalism that made him cross the Rubico with the 13th legion (49 BCE), while also explaining his strategy when defeating Gnaeus Pompey at Pharsalus (48 BCE).

An even more precious witness for us is Cicero (106-43 BCE): although he was no longer at the steering wheel of the state ship after his consulate (63 BCE), he stayed close to the leaders of his time, supported, criticized, or fought them with his spoken or written word. Over a thousand of his letters from the last two decades of his life are extant. They convey most intimate insights into the last generation of the Roman Republic.

The flow of letters is particularly dense after the murder of Caesar on the Ides of March (15 March) 44 BCE, after which Cicero sided openly with the conspirators. This group was led by Marcus Iunius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, who promised to re-establish the old Republic. Such hopes, however, were quickly dashed, when Caesar’s co-consul Mark Antony gained the upper hand in the Rome. The cards were reshuffled again with the arrival of Caesar’s great-nephew and adoptive son Gaius Octavius, or simply Caesar, as he called himself henceforth (before he became Augustus in 27 BCE). The Romans soon ushered into a new round of bloody confrontations, culminating in the siege of Mutina in Northern Italy early in 43 BCE. Though a seeming success for the Senate, a new alliance among the Caesarians was forged only a few months later, whence the last prominent Republicans were either expelled from Italy or killed, including Cicero.

New exciting sources for those watershed years have come to light. While researching the reception of the Book of Daniel in a monastery in the Swiss Alps, the Rabbi witnessed a monk working on a neglected manuscript of Cicero’s Epistulae ad familiares (‘Letters to His Friends’). As you all know, whatever is new intrigues Ben more than anything else. So, he poked his nose into the Latin text and quickly noticed a tone that was markedly different from the letters he remembered. Since these words struck a chord with him, he dug a little deeper.

Some hours later, Ben concluded that these letters had been preserved locally before they were appended to the posthumous collection of Ciceronian epistulae. So far, Ben has identified three new letters from the time after Caesar’s murder. They are presented here for the first time ever in English translation.

I send my regards to you, Marcus Cicero.

I thank you for this last letter and the others and I welcome your friendly feeling towards myself. I should like to write you now about my own feelings toward myself. I am not in the manner of thinking or speaking like this, but this is its own time in our lives. And I think that you, of anyone I have ever known, will understand.

In a word, I am not you, Cicero. I do not have a great mind. I could not give one of your great speeches. I am a soldier. That is too modest: I am a great commander on land and on sea, in the open field and besieging a city. I have waged war against the most warlike peoples, captured many strongholds and destroyed many places. My soldiers have experienced my generosity and my courage. I thought that I did all that to serve the public. But mostly, I did every single thing to advance my popularity and reputation.

When you feel the thrill of commanding a victory that followed your plans and was based on the way you led your men, you want to feel that glorious feeling, again and again. You start thinking about the next battlefield.

I admit that Caesar was an even greater strategist, but I am great in my own right. He knew this and promoted me, even giving me governance over Gaul in his stead. When he returned in triumph, I was by his side.

There was not just one thing that made me turn against him. It was how he became Dictator for Life. It was Cleopatra. It was the child they had. It was how he would not let me have my triumph, even though he gave that honor to men who had done less than me. Why did he not let me celebrate a triumph for my victory over the tribe of the Bellovaci in Gaul? Was he worried about me? Did he see me as a potential rival? Why did he not trust me?

I was closer to Caesar than the men who have become more famous than me for the assassination, such as Marcus Brutus or Gaius Cassius. After all, they had opposed him during his rise to power in the civil war. When he won that war, that was when they became his supporters. I, on the other hand, had always fought for Caesar, never against him, and so I held a place in his inner circle.

I wonder sometimes: if indeed he had lived with complete power, how much power would I have had? So, no one can blame me for doing it out of ambition. But my ambition wonders if I did the right thing for myself.

I did hope that he would restore the free republic. I did not like the way he flouted republican institutions and took complete control of the government as you pointed out repeatedly in the strongest terms. I did not like the way the Senate flattered him while he insulted Senators. I felt for the men he deprived of office. I did not like the statues of him.

So many things. It was seeing Octavius, who had none of my accomplishments, rise in his eyes. Why would he choose Octavius as his second-in-command in the new war against Parthia? I admit it: this young lad is more cunning than I am. But this was not easy for me to bear. Perhaps it is about honor as much as it is about ambition?

We say that we did it to protect the Republic. But for many years now, Rome has been on the edge of military dictatorship.

We say that we killed him because he was so ambitious. We say we killed him because of all the power he had amassed. But were we not ambitious ourselves? Do we not each seek power, and then more power?

Still, there must be something more than ambition. As I decide on my strategy from this moment, hoping to preserve the Republic, I wonder: Is that really my goal? Or do I, like every person who conspired against him, really want to be Caesar?

(Did the letter end so abruptly, or have the last lines been lost? Who may this Roman general be? Ben told me that the next letter he is currently working on even reveals his name …)

Marcus Cicero to Decimus Brutus, imperator, consul designate, greetings.

I received your letter and I want to respond immediately.

You say that your group killed the tyrant because he was so ambitious and because of all the power he had amassed. But then you go on, with great honesty and courage, to ask difficult questions about the ambitions of those who killed him, wondering if all of you were not seeking power as well. You examine yourself, again, with brutal honesty, listing what motivated you to do what you did.

I will now respond: You were part of creating a moment, the execution of a great deed, surely the greatest known to history.

You should stop examining your motivations. We do not have the luxury of time. We are not historians who can reflect across the centuries. We are actors in one of the greatest dramas that will ever play out on the stage of reality. And the drama is unfolding this instant.

Here is my emphasis: That great deed will not accomplish its goal if we do not understand and control the moment that we are now in. It is incumbent on your supporters, and I am leading them, to do everything they can to help you achieve our goals. I have spoken on your behalf in the Senate with great zeal.

You killed a tyrant, and rightly so, but you did not destroy tyranny. A tyrant is a manifestation of a phenomenon, and there are many people who believe that tyranny is in their best, selfish interests. They want kings to glorify, as if the rays of the leader’s glory will warm them and sustain them.

Do not group yourself with tyrants and dictators. Ambition is not a crime.

It is ambition that deprives others of their free will that is the crime.

It is you, Decimus Brutus, that the Roman people look to at this time. The people hope to regain their liberty. But they will lose their liberty if you do not master the winds that are blowing in all directions.

Why you? Precisely because of the letter that you wrote me questioning your ambition. That letter, which I cannot share with anyone, is your greatest qualification for the highest office. The fact that you examine your motivations, exactly what I ask you to stop doing for now, demonstrates your sincerity and your nobility. Your ambition is in the service of the state, and there is nothing wrong with being motivated and to seek renown.

If this is the stage of the world, you must act. This is your task, this the part you must play. This moment demands you.

Given in Rome, twelve days before the Kalends of December <44 BCE>

Decimus Brutus to Marcus Cicero, Greetings!

I will not tell you where I am. Let us be honest, my dear Marcus. I can trust no one. By the time you receive this, I may be dead. As you know, I allied with Octavius and withstood Mark Antony’s attack during the siege of Mutina in the winter. Antony was forced to flee and regroup. I boldly followed him over the Alps into Gaul. But now something has happened. I feel betrayed by Octavius. He seems to have allied with Antony.

I should have known that he would do this. Now, dressed like a Gaul, speaking Gaulish, as I do, like a Gaul, I am in hiding, and I do not know if I will survive at all, much less gain power again.

In hiding, I have had a great deal of time to think. Where has the real power in Rome been for a long time now? It has not been in the hands of the Senate, but with the victorious generals who have commanded armies more loyal to their general than to the Republic: men like Gaius Marius, Lucius Sulla, Pompey Strabo, Pompey Magnus, and, of course, Caesar.

I ask myself: Did killing one of them really change the picture at all? Now it will be one of us, Antony, Octavius…. I had thought … perhaps me. I had thought that I was out there with my army, preparing to bring the power back to the Senate. But would I have done so if I had won? All anyone can see is armies supporting the cult of personality. Is there a chance of armies or the populace supporting the Senate of Best Men and rich aristocrats over the great generals? How can the Republic and its laws and institutions compete with mighty individuals cloaked in glory? Who will make a wager on that result?

On most days, I have no regrets. I thought I was doing the right thing for the right reason. There was popular support, and historical precedent, and an immediate need, a true crisis. But I know that my fellows and I went outside of the Law of the Republic to save the Republic.

If I had truly believed in the Republic, should I not have lived by the institutions and processes of the Republic? Does it save the Republic to go outside its institutions and laws? If I did not want Caesar to rise above the law, did I not go above the law in leading him to his death? If one does not do things through the processes of the law, if the law is not powerful enough to prevent tyranny, then an assassination will not be enough to stop tyranny, either.

I now understand how a Republic must have such strong protections that it cannot be subverted by the ambitions or popularity of a man. There should be such protections that there would be no need for an assassination. Both the Athenians and our Republic feared military heroes, and they were right. I can plainly see that certain figures have gone outside the institutions of government, to move towards dictatorship, the very thing we were trying to prevent.

I believe that laws and institutions are the best system. The Republic was a great and noble thing. The Republic, like myself, may be doomed. But I hope that someday, there will be another Republic, and it will create strong safeguards again both the mob and those who can manipulate it. This new Republic will understand that people love kings and want to worship them. This new Republic will be able to protect itself against the leaders who worship themselves.