Short answers, pulled from the story.
Cicero, full name Marcus Tullius Cicero, was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, orator, and writer who lived from the 3rd of January 106 BC to the 7th of December 43 BC. He tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises of the late Roman Republic and served as consul in 63 BC.
Cicero was proscribed by the Second Triumvirate and executed on the 7th of December 43 BC while fleeing his villa in Formiae toward the coast. A centurion named Herennius cut off his head, and on Mark Antony's instructions his hands were severed too, then nailed to the Rostra in the Forum Romanum.
The Catilinarian conspiracy was a plot led by Lucius Sergius Catilina to overthrow the Roman Republic during Cicero's consulship in 63 BC. Cicero drove Catiline from Rome with four speeches, seized letters incriminating five conspirators, and had them strangled in the Tullianum prison, earning the honorific pater patriae.
Cicero was exiled in 58 BC because he had executed five Catilinarian conspirators, all Roman citizens, without a trial. The tribune Publius Clodius Pulcher passed a law banning anyone who had done so from coming within four hundred miles of Rome, and Cicero went into exile, arriving at Thessalonica on the 23rd of May 58 BC.
Cicero is traditionally considered the master of Latin prose, credited with transforming Latin into a literary medium and coining nearly a hundred and fifty philosophical terms. Petrarch's rediscovery of his letters helped initiate the Renaissance, and the historian Tadeusz Zielinski called the Renaissance above all a revival of Cicero.
The Philippics were a series of speeches Cicero delivered attacking Mark Antony after the assassination of Caesar in 44 BC, named after Demosthenes' denunciations of Philip II of Macedon. They marked the height of Cicero's popularity and were the reason Antony later had his hands displayed on the Rostra.