Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero was born on 3 January 106 BCE at Arpinum (modern Arpino), a hill town about seventy miles southeast of Rome ^[1]. His family belonged to the local equestrian order: wealthy, respectable, but without a single ancestor who had held high office in Rome. In Roman terms this made Cicero a novus homo, a new man, and the label followed him for his entire career ^[2].

His father, a man of weak health but scholarly tastes, moved the family to Rome so that Marcus and his younger brother Quintus could receive the best education available. The boys studied rhetoric, law, and philosophy under prominent teachers, and Cicero later recalled attending the lectures of the Epicurean Phaedrus and the Academic philosopher Philo of Larissa ^[3]. He also observed the great orators of the day, Lucius Licinius Crassus and Marcus Antonius, whose techniques he would analyze decades later in his dialogue De Oratore ^[1].

As a young man he served briefly in the Social War under Pompeius Strabo, the father of Pompey the Great, in 89 BCE. Military life never suited him. His talents lay in words, and he returned to Rome to complete his training in law and oratory during the violent years of the civil wars between Marius and Sulla ^[2].

Cicero argued his first major case in 81 BCE, defending Publius Quinctius in a property dispute. The following year he took a far riskier brief: the defense of Sextus Roscius of Ameria on a charge of parricide. The prosecution was backed by Chrysogonus, a powerful freedman of the dictator Sulla, and challenging it took real nerve. Cicero won, and the acquittal made his name in the Roman courts ^[1].

Shortly afterward he left for Greece and Asia Minor, partly for his health and partly to refine his speaking style. He studied under the rhetorician Apollonius Molon at Rhodes, who taught him to restrain the florid delivery that had strained his voice ^[3]. He returned in 77 BCE a more disciplined advocate.

His political ascent then followed the standard ladder of Roman offices, the cursus honorum, and he reached each rung at the earliest legal age, a rare achievement for a new man. He served as quaestor in western Sicily in 75 BCE, an experience that paid off in 70 BCE when the Sicilians asked him to prosecute their corrupt former governor, Gaius Verres. Cicero gathered evidence so overwhelming that Verres fled into exile after the first hearing, and the published Verrine orations demolished the reputation of Hortensius, then Rome's leading advocate ^[2]. Cicero became praetor in 66 BCE, and in 63 BCE he was elected consul, the first new man to hold Rome's highest office in more than thirty years ^[1].

The defining crisis of Cicero's consulship arrived in the autumn of 63 BCE. Lucius Sergius Catilina, an aristocrat twice defeated for the consulship, organized a conspiracy to seize power by force, drawing on indebted nobles and discontented veterans. Informers brought word of the plot to Cicero, who denounced Catiline in the Senate on 8 November in the first of four speeches now known as the Catilinarian orations ^[1].

Catiline fled Rome to join an army gathering in Etruria, but several of his associates remained in the city. When written evidence of their treason was intercepted, the Senate debated their fate. Julius Caesar argued for life imprisonment; Cato the Younger demanded death. The Senate voted for execution, and Cicero, as consul, had five conspirators strangled in the Tullianum prison without trial on 5 December 63 BCE ^[2]. Catiline himself died in battle the following January.

The Senate hailed Cicero as pater patriae, father of his country, and he regarded the suppression of the conspiracy as the summit of his life. Yet the executions carried out without formal trial violated a Roman citizen's right of appeal, and the decision would return to haunt him ^[3]. Cicero facts often begin with this episode because it displays both his courage and the vulnerability that his enemies later exploited.

In 60 BCE, Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus formed the informal alliance historians call the First Triumvirate. Caesar invited Cicero to join them. He refused, unwilling to undermine the constitution he had sworn to defend, and the refusal left him exposed ^[2].

His enemy Publius Clodius Pulcher, elected tribune for 58 BCE, passed a law retroactively outlawing anyone who had executed Roman citizens without trial. The measure was aimed squarely at Cicero. Rather than face prosecution he withdrew from Italy, and his house on the Palatine was burned while Clodius consecrated part of the site to the goddess Liberty ^[1]. The exile lasted about sixteen months and left deep marks on him; his letters from this period, addressed to his friend Atticus, are among the most anguished documents to survive from antiquity ^[4].

Pompey engineered his recall in 57 BCE, and crowds welcomed him home. But the political ground had shifted. During the 50s Cicero was obliged to defend allies of the triumvirs in court and found his independence curtailed. He turned increasingly to writing, producing De Oratore in 55 BCE and De Republica, his dialogue on the ideal state, around 51 BCE ^[3]. In 51 to 50 BCE he served, reluctantly but honestly, as governor of Cilicia in Asia Minor ^[2].

Cicero married Terentia, a woman of substantial property, around 79 BCE. The marriage lasted some thirty years and produced two children: a daughter, Tullia, whom he adored, and a son, Marcus. Terentia managed the family finances through his exile and the civil war, but the relationship soured, and the couple divorced in 46 BCE. A brief second marriage to his young ward Publilia ended quickly ^[1].

The heaviest blow of his private life came in February 45 BCE, when Tullia died shortly after giving birth. Cicero was inconsolable. He withdrew to his villa at Astura, read every treatise on grief he could find, and wrote a Consolatio addressed to himself, a work now lost ^[3]. Friends including Servius Sulpicius Rufus sent letters of condolence that still survive in his correspondence ^[4].

That correspondence is itself a monument. More than nine hundred of Cicero's letters survive, addressed to Atticus, to his brother Quintus, and to a wide circle of friends and rivals. Never intended for publication, they show a man by turns vain, witty, indecisive, affectionate, and shrewd, and they give historians a day-by-day record of the Republic's collapse that exists for no other period of ancient history ^[4].

When civil war broke out between Caesar and Pompey in 49 BCE, Cicero hesitated for months before joining Pompey's side, which he judged the more constitutional cause. After Pompey's defeat at Pharsalus in 48 BCE, Caesar pardoned Cicero and allowed him to return to Italy ^[2]. Sidelined from politics under the dictatorship, he threw himself into philosophy, and the burst of writing that followed is astonishing: between 46 and 44 BCE he completed works including the Academica, De Finibus, the Tusculan Disputations, De Natura Deorum, and De Officiis, effectively creating a Latin vocabulary for Greek philosophy ^[3].

Cicero was not among the conspirators who killed Caesar on the Ides of March 44 BCE, though Brutus reportedly raised his bloodied dagger and called out Cicero's name. In the power struggle that followed, Cicero re-entered politics as the leading voice of the Senate against Mark Antony. Between September 44 and April 43 BCE he delivered and circulated fourteen speeches against Antony, which he called the Philippics after Demosthenes' attacks on Philip of Macedon ^[1].

The gamble failed. In November 43 BCE Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus formed the Second Triumvirate and drew up proscription lists of enemies to be killed. Antony insisted on Cicero's name. Soldiers caught the orator near his villa at Formiae on 7 December 43 BCE as he was carried toward the coast in a litter. He ordered his bearers to set him down and offered his neck to the executioner. On Antony's orders his head and hands were cut off and nailed to the Rostra in the Forum, the platform from which he had so often spoken ^[2].

Any Cicero biography must reckon with the scale of what survives: fifty-eight speeches in whole or in part, more than nine hundred letters, and a shelf of treatises on rhetoric, politics, ethics, and religion. No other figure of the ancient world can be known in such detail ^[4]. His prose style became the standard against which Latin was measured. Quintilian, writing in the first century CE, treated the very name Cicero as a synonym for eloquence ^[3].

His afterlife shaped whole eras of European thought. Early Christian writers, including Jerome and Augustine, wrestled with his influence; Augustine credited Cicero's lost dialogue Hortensius with turning him toward philosophy ^[3]. In 1345 Petrarch rediscovered the letters to Atticus in the cathedral library at Verona, an event often cited as a spark of Renaissance humanism ^[5]. Enlightenment readers valued him no less: John Adams admired him deeply, and Cicero's arguments about natural law, mixed constitutions, and the duties of public life informed eighteenth-century political thinking on both sides of the Atlantic ^[6].

Among Cicero achievements, the political record is genuinely mixed. He saved the Republic in 63 BCE and failed to save it in 43 BCE, and critics from antiquity onward have noted his vanity and his wavering. Yet the verdict of his enemy's heir is telling: the emperor Augustus, finding a grandson reading Cicero, is said by Plutarch to have remarked that the man was eloquent and a lover of his country ^[2]. The books, speeches, and letters remain in print in every major language, still read for pleasure and still argued over, twenty centuries after the hands that wrote them were nailed to the Rostra.