Surprisingly they have been, and one of the most maligned characters of the late Republic has been Lucius Calpurnius Piso, accused by Cicero of everything from unworthiness to debauchery to outright murder.

I
The real person

Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, born c. 101 BCE and dead after 43 BCE was a nobilis, that is, a scion of a family which had given consuls to the Republic before. He himself rose through the regular cursus honorum to be elected consul in October of 59 for the following year, and to reach the pinnacle of his career with the election for the censorship in 51.
He was the father of Julius Caesar’s last wife Calpurnia; his son Lucius Piso Frugi was active under the principate and early empire and died at the ripe old age of 84.
Piso was the probable owner of the Villa of the Papyri, one of the richest houses found in the excavations of the bay of Naples; the charred papyrus rolls found there have been undergoing restoration and study and have so far hinted at an extensive philosophical library.

II
Cicero’s issues

It was during Piso’s consulship that Cicero was driven to exile by his enemy Publius Clodius Pulcher, and neither Piso nor his colleague Aulus Gabinius supported Cicero; in fact they were probably under instructions from Caesar and Pompey to help send him on his way. Cicero had been a vocal oppositionist to Caesar’s consulship in 59, thereby alienating Pompey whose interests at the time lay with Caesar. So Cicero wrapped Piso with Clodius and Gabinius in the same package of enmity.

An apparently different issue was of a philosophical nature: Piso was a practising epicurean and Cicero despised epicureanism; however, it can be argued that Cicero’s best friend Atticus was an epicurean, and so were C. Trebatius Testa, C. Cassius Longinus and others with whom Cicero had close friendships, and even if Cicero derided their beliefs jokingly in his letters and seriously in his treatises, part of his attacks on the doctrine may actually have been born, or grown, of his dislike of Piso, and not the other way around.

III
Cicero’s speeches against Piso

Besides the main speech directed against Piso, there are also substantial invectives against him in two other speeches, Post reditum in senatu and De provinciis consularibus. The first was addressed by Cicero to the senators in thanks for his recall from exile, and in it he accused both Piso and Gabinius of having sold him to Clodius in exchange for two choice proconsular provinces. Gabinius was effeminate; Piso a debauchee who posed as a philosopher; both were incompetent and relieving them of their provinces Cicero would consider his duty.
This objective was pursued in the second speech, on the allotment of the consular provinces for 55, and was probably delivered in the early summer of 56 after Pompey had put some pressure on Cicero to speak against terminating Caesar’s provincial command. Cicero’s argument was that Caesar had been doing a wonderful job of it, and that if anyone should be recalled it should be Piso and Gabinius. Gabinius, he said, was corrupt and in the process of ruining the Roman traders and publicans in his province. As for Piso, he had lost half his army, alienated friendly peoples and been attacked by hitherto quiet tribes, besides having pillaged and ruined the Greek cities he was supposed to protect.
Piso was in effect recalled and did not finish his three year term as governor; and shortly after taking his place in the Curia he entered a discussion with Cicero from which we retain Cicero’s speech In L. Pisonem.

IV
Facts, arguments and fallacies

Interestingly, I have read descriptions of Piso as having a "dark complexion" and a "hirsute face" ⁽¹⁾, which must come from a misunderstanding of the text. Cicero in fact says that were Piso ugly he would probably not mislead people about his real nature and intentions, while in fact his pale face (the colour of his ancestors’ wax imagines) and noble brow led to a natural belief in his decency.

Yet this man, according to Cicero, had nothing but ancestry in his favour. He himself was nothing, had done nothing to deserve election, was a non-entity as consul and only worse than that as proconsul. Besides, he was a drunkard who visited taverns and excused himself on grounds of ill-health.

Yet we know ⁽²⁾ that epicurean doctors such as Asclepiades of Bithynia, who worked in Rome in the first half of the first century BCE and was very influential, did recommend wine for medicinal purposes, so it is likely that Piso was following a prescription.

Drunkenness and gluttony are accusations recurring in Cicero’s treatises against the followers of Epicurus. In fact, while the pleasures of the table were among those practised by the epicureans, Piso’s own friend the philosopher Philodemus of Gadara whom Cicero defines as "excessively accomplished", wrote:

Artemidorus gave us cabbage,
Aristarchus salted fish,
Spring onions did Athenagoras give us,
Liver Philodemus, Apollophanes two pieces of pork,
Boy, to add to three from yesterday.
Go get a cup, crowns and sandals,
And ointment – at the tenth hour I want to party. ⁽³⁾

This reads nothing like "the reeking orgies of his Greek crew" at which Cicero hints. But while Cicero was prejudiced against the Greeks, Piso was in fact a philhellene.
Piso had substantial properties in Campania and had made his early career there, and Campania was the most hellenised part of Italy, especially the bay of Naples. The very city of Naples had been founded by Greeks, and Baiae, the posh resort nearby, was said to owe its name to Baius, Odysseus’ pilot.
Art, literature and philosophy flourished in Campania while other parts of Italy were still barely civilised, and Piso was used to this atmosphere. Indeed when after his consulship he was made governor of Macedonia he was (unlike Cicero pretends) very much at home in his province, and there is even an inscription ⁽⁴⁾ celebrating him as patron of Samothrace into which mysteries he was initiated.

So did this lover of Greek things rob Greece of its treasures and mistreat its inhabitants as Cicero pretends? While in fact most Roman governors enriched themselves in their provinces, mainly through commissions on contracts for public works and tax collections, and there is no reason to suppose Piso not to have behaved in the usual manner, it is Cicero himself who says that his accounts were perfectly correct. And the poet Catullus complains that his friends who had joined Piso’s retinue came back from Macedonia no richer than before, although he says that Piso’s Greek friends were better treated ⁽⁵⁾.

It seems certain that Piso did not cover himself with military glory and lost many of his men to either tribesmen guerrillas or to disease; yet he was, so Cicero tells us, styled imperator by his army and his lictors wore laurel bound fasces accordingly. This must have been early in his term; as later events turned out worse, Piso never pressed for a triumph and came back without pomp, after having dismissed what remained of the army.

Cicero also finds fault with this; yet it was proper procedure, and Pompey, when returning from his eastern campaigns, also dismissed his army to the relief of the senators, including Cicero, who had feared a Sulla style march on Rome.

That Piso did not crave military glory is easy to believe; Epicurus’ notion that good was to be equated with pleasure did not include politics or warfare. Indeed it was epicurean doctrine that the wise man should lead a private life and that is what made it difficult to accept by most Romans of stature, for whom being active and leading the commonwealth, both in a civilian and a military capacity, was a duty as well as a birthright.
It must have been an interesting man indeed who balanced the Roman attitude with the philosophical doctrine. His children were educated as epicureans, as well as his grandchildren to whom Horace probably addressed his Ars Poetica ⁽⁶⁾ as advice against choosing the undignified path of a bad poet over that fit for a Roman noble.

Cicero ends his speech by wishing upon Piso all possible misfortunes, including an official trial for misconduct as provincial governor. Instead, he pursued his political career and was elected censor in 51 BCE. He took a conciliatory position in the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey and later, after Caesar’s murder, his efforts to moderate Antony and to bring him to terms with the Senate were actually praised by the same Cicero who had so venomously endeavoured to ruin his reputation.

Notes