Quintus Tullius Cicero - Personality and Relationship With Brother Marcus

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 Ciceronem pro eius merito legionemque collaudat (He praised Cicero and his men very highly, as they deserved) (Bello Gallico 5.52). Such praise is questionable considering Quintus' relation to his more famous brother. The legate is responsible for a near-disaster in Gaul but does not receive condemnation from Caesar as a result. (Bello Gallico 6.36)

Quintus had an impulsive temperament and had fits of cruelty during military operations, a behavior 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 parricide into a sack and throwing him out in the sea,(the felon was severely scourged then sewn into a stout leather bag with a dog, a snake, a rooster, and a monkey, and the bag was thrown into the river Tiber). This punishment he meted out during his propraetorship of Asia. (For the Romans, both parricide and matricide were one of the worst crimes.) His brother confesses 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, reading Greek tragedies - and writing 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" lecturing to his brother what was the right thing to do. Quintus might also feel at times, that the self-centered Marcus thought only how his brother might hinder or help Marcus’ own career on the Cursus honorum.