Who was Cicero?

A new man from Arpinum

Cicero was born on January 3, 106 BC, at Arpinum, a hill town southeast of Rome that had also produced the general Marius. His family had money but had never sat in the Senate. Even his name was a joke: cicer means chickpea, and Plutarch says an ancestor had a cleft on the tip of his nose like one. Cicero promised to make it more famous than the proudest names in Rome.

He rose in the courts. In 70 BC he prosecuted Verres, a governor who had stripped Sicily bare, so crushingly that Verres fled into exile before the trial ended. Cicero published the speeches he never had to give. In 63 BC, at the youngest age the law allowed, he became consul, a novus homo, a new man, the first of his family to reach the top.

The consul and Catiline

That year a ruined nobleman, Lucius Sergius Catilina, plotted to seize power. Cicero denounced him to his face in the Senate, opening with a line Latin students still learn: Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?, how long, Catiline, will you abuse our patience? The same speech gave us O tempora, o mores!, oh the times, oh the morals. Catiline fled to a rebel army. Five plotters who stayed in Rome were arrested, and on December 5 Cicero had them strangled without trial. He announced it in one word: vixerunt, they have lived.

Rome hailed him as father of his country, and never let him forget the executions. In 58 BC his enemy Clodius carried a law against anyone who had put citizens to death untried, and Cicero went into exile. He was back within eighteen months, but Pompey, Crassus and Caesar now ran Rome without him.

The Philippics

In the civil war he sided with Pompey, lost, and was pardoned by Caesar. Shut out of power and grieving for his daughter Tullia, who died in 45 BC, he wrote philosophy, such as On Duties and On the Nature of the Gods. He had no part in the Ides of March, though he later told one of the killers he wished he had been invited to that banquet (Letters to Friends 10.28).

With Caesar dead, Cicero saw one last chance for the Republic, and one man in its way: Mark Antony. From September 44 to April 43 BC he attacked him in speech after speech, fourteen of which survive. He called them Philippics, after Demosthenes’ speeches against Philip of Macedon, and a philippic still means a furious verbal attack. The most savage, the Second, was never delivered; it circulated as a pamphlet. To beat Antony he backed Caesar’s teenage heir, Octavian, joking that the young man should be praised, honored and raised up. In Latin the last word also meant removed.

How he died

Octavian had other plans. In November 43 BC he made peace with Antony and Lepidus, and the three posted lists of men to be killed. Antony demanded Cicero. Plutarch says Octavian held out for two days and gave him up on the third. Cicero tried to escape by sea, turned back, and was overtaken near his villa at Formiae on December 7. He had his slaves set down his litter and stretched his neck out to the centurion’s sword. His head and hands, the hands that wrote the Philippics, were nailed to the Rostra in the Forum. Cassius Dio adds that Antony’s wife, Fulvia, pierced the dead man’s tongue with her hairpins.

What he left

More of Cicero survives than of almost any other Roman: dozens of speeches, books on rhetoric and philosophy, and over nine hundred letters, the richest record of private life in the late Republic. When Petrarch found his letters to Atticus at Verona in 1345, the discovery fed the Renaissance passion for Latin. Plutarch ends with a story. Years later Augustus caught a grandson reading Cicero, read for a long while himself, and handed the book back, calling him a learned man, and a lover of his country.