Cicero (106 BCE - 43 BCE) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, orator and philosopher of the late Republic. He rose from outside the traditional aristocracy to the consulship in 63 BCE, and his speeches, letters and philosophical treatises became the foundation of classical Latin prose. [1] A defender of republican government against the rise of one-man rule, he was proscribed and killed in 43 BCE after opposing Mark Antony. [2]
Early life and education
Marcus Tullius Cicero was born on 3 January 106 BCE at Arpino, a hill town southeast of Rome, into a prosperous family of the equestrian order. As a novus homo, a man without consular ancestors, he had no inherited claim on the highest offices of the Roman state and advanced instead through legal and rhetorical skill. [1]
He studied rhetoric, law and philosophy at Rome and later in Greece and Asia Minor, where he heard leading teachers of the Academic, Stoic and Epicurean schools. This training gave him both the technique of his courtroom practice and the philosophical material he would later adapt into Latin. [2]
Political career
Cicero built his reputation as an advocate, notably in the prosecution of Gaius Verres, the corrupt governor of Sicily. He held the standard sequence of Roman magistracies and reached the consulship in 63 BCE, the highest office of the Republic and one rarely attained by a man of his background. [1]
During his consulship he exposed and suppressed the conspiracy of Catiline, delivering the four Catilinarian orations before the Senate and people. The execution of the conspirators without trial won him the honorific title Pater Patriae, father of the fatherland, but also left him politically exposed, and he was driven into exile in 58 BCE before being recalled the following year. [2]
As the Republic fractured between Pompey and Julius Caesar, Cicero attempted to mediate and was repeatedly marginalised. After Caesar's assassination in 44 BCE he returned to the centre of politics with the Philippics, a series of speeches attacking Mark Antony. [1]
Philosophy and writings
Forced periods of political inactivity produced much of Cicero's writing. In works such as De Republica, De Legibus, De Officiis, De Natura Deorum and the Tusculan Disputations he set out Greek philosophical debate in Latin for a Roman readership, creating much of the philosophical vocabulary later European languages inherited. [3]
His rhetorical treatises, among them De Oratore and Brutus, analysed the training and duties of the public speaker. Alongside these survive more than eight hundred letters, chiefly to his friend Atticus, which give an unusually direct record of political life in the last decades of the Republic. [2]
Death and legacy
When Antony, Octavian and Lepidus formed the Second Triumvirate in 43 BCE, Cicero was placed on the proscription lists. He was hunted down and killed near Formia on 7 December 43 BCE, and his head and hands were displayed on the Rostra in the Roman Forum. [1]
Cicero's prose became the model for Latin style in late antiquity, the Renaissance and beyond, and the rediscovery of his letters by Petrarch helped initiate humanist scholarship. His arguments about natural law, duty, and the responsibilities of citizens to the commonwealth influenced Enlightenment political thought and the framers of modern republican constitutions. [4]
