Cicero

Rome's greatest orator, who died defending the Republic

Marcus Tullius Cicero was Rome's greatest orator and the writer who fixed the shape of Latin prose. A new man from Arpinum with no senators among his ancestors, he rose by his voice alone to the consulship of 63 BC, where he crushed the conspiracy of Catiline and had its leaders executed without trial, the act that later sent him into exile. Sidelined by Caesar and Pompey, he wrote the works of rhetoric and philosophy that carried Greek thought into Latin. After Caesar's murder he attacked Mark Antony in the Philippics and was killed in the proscriptions of 43 BC. His letters are the most intimate record of any ancient life.

Timeline

3 Jan 106 BC

Born — At Arpinum, into a family of knights

80 BC

First great case — Defends Sextus Roscius against a favourite of Sulla, and wins

70 BC

Against Verres — Prosecutes the governor who plundered Sicily; Verres flees after the first speech

63 BC

Consul — Exposes Catiline's conspiracy, has its leaders executed and is hailed pater patriae

58 BC

Exile — Clodius's law drives him to Greece and his house is razed; recalled in 57

49 BC

Civil war — Follows Pompey to Greece; pardoned by Caesar in 47

45 BC

Tullia dies — Grief turns him to philosophy: the Tusculans, On Duties

44 BC

The Philippics — Fourteen speeches against Antony, from September 44

7 Dec 43 BC

Killed — Antony's soldiers behead him near Formiae; head and hands displayed on the Rostra

Family

photo Marcus Tullius Cicero a knight of Arpinum

photo Helvia of a good Roman family

photo Cicero 106 BC–43 BC

photo Terentia married c. 79, divorced 46 BC · said to have lived to 103

photo Tullia c. 79–45 BC

photo Marcus consul 30 BC · born 65 BC

Tullia's death in February 45 BC, after childbirth, undid him; the letters of that spring are among the most personal to survive from antiquity. His son Marcus was consul in 30 BC when the Senate pulled down Antony's statues.

The new man from Arpinum

Marcus Tullius Cicero was born on 3 January 106 BC at Arpinum, a hill town south-east of Rome, into a wealthy equestrian family that had never held office in the capital. His father moved the family to Rome for the boys' schooling; Cicero studied law under the two Scaevolas, philosophy under Greeks, and rhetoric in Athens and Rhodes. In 80 BC, aged twenty-six, he took the defence of Sextus Roscius against a favourite of the dictator Sulla and won. In 70 he prosecuted Verres, the governor who had plundered Sicily, so thoroughly that Verres fled into exile after the first speech.

Every office came to him in the first year he was eligible: quaestor, aedile, praetor, and in 63 BC the consulship — the first novus homo, a man without consular ancestors, to reach it in more than thirty years.

Consul and exile

His consulship was dominated by Catiline, a ruined aristocrat who lost the election and turned to armed revolt. Cicero exposed the plot in four speeches to the Senate and the people.

“Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?” — How long, Catiline, will you go on abusing our patience?

— Cicero, *First Catilinarian*, delivered in the Senate in November 63 BC with Catiline present

On 5 December 63 he had five of the conspirators executed without trial, on the Senate's advice, and was hailed pater patriae, father of his country. He never stopped reminding people of it. The executions were also his undoing: in 58 BC the tribune Clodius passed a law against anyone who had put citizens to death untried, and Cicero went into exile in Greece while his house on the Palatine was demolished. Recalled by a vote in 57, he found that Pompey, Crassus and Caesar now ran the state between them.

Philosopher in a civil war

Shut out of politics, he wrote: On the Orator in 55, On the Republic by 51. He governed Cilicia honestly in 51–50, came home to civil war, and after long hesitation followed Pompey to Greece. Caesar pardoned him in 47. The death of his daughter Tullia in February 45 broke him, and he answered grief with the most productive two years of any Latin writer: the Tusculan Disputations, On the Nature of the Gods, On Old Age, On Friendship, On Duties — and with them the Latin words for Greek ideas, qualitas and moralis among them.

The Philippics

He was not in the plot against Caesar, but he wished he had been. From September 44 he delivered the fourteen Philippics against Mark Antony, named after Demosthenes's speeches against Philip of Macedon, and threw the Senate's weight behind the young Octavian, the future Augustus, who he thought could be “praised, promoted and pushed aside”. Octavian heard about that remark. When he, Antony and Lepidus formed the triumvirate in November 43, Cicero's name went on the proscription list. Soldiers caught him near Formiae on 7 December 43 BC as his litter made for the coast; he stretched his neck out of the litter for them. His head and hands were nailed to the Rostra where he had spoken.

He mattered less for what he did than for what he wrote: some 900 letters that are our closest view of any ancient life, speeches that fixed Latin prose for two thousand years, and the philosophical vocabulary of the Latin west. Petrarch's discovery of the letters to Atticus in 1345 is often called the start of the Renaissance.