Man and Monument.

Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician, by Anthony Everitt (Random House, 359 pp., $25.95)

Marcus Tullius Cicero belongs near the top of the long and lengthening list of writers and statesmen more quoted than read, more revered than pondered. This great republican of Rome, the exemplar of civic virtue and prudent statesmanship, comes to us today wrapped in a mute magnificence. His name rings bells, but rarely are his works mined for the wealth of practical wisdom and elegant style for which untold generations have known him, and in pursuit of which they turned to him with habitual confidence. He's a stained white statue to most of us, nothing more. O tempora, O mores!

How to explain the new ignorance? Not so long ago Cicero's stature in the public mind was high and firm, his academic presence constant-perhaps a little too relentlessly constant, armies of high-school Latin students might well have moaned. Challenged or disgruntled students knew they had reached the apex of Latin prose when, Caesar's Gallic Wars behind them, they were assigned Cicero's famous orations against Catiline, with their haughtiness, dense vocabulary, and elongated sentences. This was Latin for grown-ups.

Cicero came late enough in the curriculum that by the time students got to him, they could smell the printing ink on their diplomas. "Soon as they've passed their last examinations in solid geometry and Cicero's Orations," Thornton Wilder has the Stage Manager tell us in Our Town, "looks like [young people] suddenly feel themselves fit to be married." And for the rest of their lives, his works provided to them proof positive of Cicero's own assurance that we remember our sufferings much more intensely than our pleasures. It is perhaps no surprise that our acquaintance with him should lapse.

Anthony Everitt now steps forth to make reintroductions. A British businessman, journalist, and professor-and also sometime general secretary of the Arts Council for Great Britain-Everitt is the ideal man to do this. He has a passion for all things Roman. (He lives near the first town history has recorded on English soil-Colchester-and is already working on a new biography of Augustus.)

What Everitt shows us in this biography, without the tedium of purposeless, over-researched digression, is that history will always have the last word. Idealized depictions of the past will fade and a more accurate picture emerge. The Roman Republic was a noble experiment-however imperfect-in broader popular rule. But we know what that means: Politics, the practice of finagling results, became serious business. A man of privilege, Cicero was no democrat, yet he abhorred tyranny. He knew when to compromise (too often, according to his critics). When acting the role of the able statesman, he built his fearsome effectiveness from cunning and guile as much as the next guy did; he was just better at it. As the skillful advocate, he could make the weaker case appear the stronger; as a politician, he forged unlikely alliances of expediency to get what he wanted. He targeted Mark Antony and was implicated in a spirited campaign of obfuscation and smear of a kind that would make the U.S. Congress look no more threatening than Romper Room. He even stared down Julius Caesar himself. Of course all these shenanigans would seal his own fate one day.

Everitt's book is principally about Cicero the politician, the man of action and deal-broker, and it's a riveting story. It reads the way the ambitious "Washington novel" of political intrigue, written by the amateur weekend novelist, should but seldom does. Everitt masterfully interlaces the disparate strands of detail from Roman history and culture-and especially Cicero's copious correspondence-to paint a portrait of a man caught up in tumultuous, indeed politically apocalyptic, times. Everitt doesn't temporize. He shows Cicero as he was according to all creditable evidence, not the marble bust. Nonetheless, Cicero's statue can take a little chipping and still stand straight.

Within these pages we are also reintroduced, if briefly, to the man whom some remote generations knew better through their education than Cicero the Orator: Cicero the Philosopher, the author of On Duties and the Conversations at Tusculum, who brought together many of the best strains of the philosophical traditions handed down to his day and made them his own, as well as Cicero the Writer, the tireless author of the rich Letters to Atticus, who perfected a high literary style that influenced spoken and written prose in all Western languages for centuries. "For posterity," Quintilian would one day write, "the name of Cicero has come to be regarded as the name of eloquence itself." This man was also the believer in balanced constitutions whom the American Founders knew best and admired most, and this fact alone should commend him to us now. It was about him that John Adams wrote that "all ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher combined." This is praise not wisely dismissed.

And it is in fact this Cicero, the contemplative man, whose survival in our lives would do us the most good. Here is my only, albeit minor, regret about this fine book: Everitt, in telling the exciting tale of the man who fought in the political arena, sacrifices too much of the other side of his subject-the Cicero who knew those things that the arena cannot provide or be. Politics, in the end, cannot save us-and political maneuvering certainly couldn't save Cicero himself. Nonetheless, the state of education being what it is now, it would be churlish for any of us to dwell on what the book isn't at the expense of what it is. This book is a tour de force of historical and biographical reconstruction that reads like a novel; it's to be welcomed-and read.

The Roman historian Livy, Everitt reminds us, had perhaps the best take on Cicero's legacy. Great and good men are complex, their lives often a tortuous series of contradictions, their records mixed. "During the long flow of success," Livy wrote, "[Cicero] met grave setbacks from time to time-exile, the collapse of his party, his daughter's death and his own tragic and bitter end. However, weighing his virtues against his faults, he was a great and memorable man." Indeed, so great that "one would need a Cicero to sing his praises."