Marcus Tullius Cicero was born on the 3rd of January 106 BC in the hill town of Arpinum, a place so far from the center of power that his family name, Cicero, meaning chickpea, seemed like a permanent mark of mediocrity. The name derived from a cleft in the nose of an ancestor that resembled the legume, a detail that Plutarch claimed Cicero refused to change even when urged to adopt a more prestigious cognomen like Fabius or Lentulus. He declared he would make the name Cicero more glorious than the swollen-ankled Scaurus or the puppy-like Catulus, a promise he kept by transforming a humble municipal family into the most influential voice of the Roman Republic. This man, who began his life with a name that mocked his origins, would eventually become the master of Latin prose, creating a vocabulary for philosophy that did not exist before him and shaping the very language of Western civilization. His early years were spent navigating the turbulent waters of the Social War and the civil wars that followed Sulla's rise, where he studied under the greatest Greek minds of the age, absorbing the skepticism of Carneades and the rhetoric of Apollonius Molon to forge a weapon that would change history.
The Orator's Ascent
In 81 BC, at the age of 26, Cicero delivered his first major speech, Pro Quinctio, a defense of commercial transactions that signaled the arrival of a new force in Roman law. His true breakthrough came in 80 BC when he defended Sextus Roscius of Ameria against charges of parricide, a case that required him to accuse a powerful freedman of the dictator Sulla, Chrysogonus, of fabricating the father's proscription to steal the family estate. Cicero tactfully avoided incriminating Sulla directly, instead focusing on the corruption of the freedman, and in doing so, he established a reputation that would carry him to the consulship. He was neither a patrician nor a plebeian noble, yet his brilliance as an orator allowed him to ascend the cursus honorum faster than almost anyone else, holding the post of quaestor at 30, aedile at 36, and praetor at 39. His greatest forensic triumph came in 70 BC when he prosecuted Gaius Verres, the corrupt governor of Sicily, who had been defended by the most prominent lawyer in Rome, Quintus Hortensius. Cicero spent years in Sicily gathering evidence and testimonials, and when he returned to Rome, he dismantled Verres' defense in a series of dramatic court battles that proved his unique style of oratory was superior to the flamboyant Hortensius. This victory made him the greatest orator in Rome, a title that would define his career and his legacy.
The Fire and Water Exile
The year 63 BC marked the zenith of Cicero's political power when he suppressed the Catilinarian conspiracy, a plot led by Lucius Sergius Catilina to overthrow the Roman Republic with the help of foreign armed forces. Cicero procured a senatus consultum ultimum, a recommendation from the Senate to use force, and drove Catiline from the city with four vehement speeches that remain outstanding examples of his rhetorical style. He demanded that Catiline and his followers leave the city, and when they fled, he secured the arrest of five conspirators who had been caught with letters incriminating them. The Senate deliberated on their punishment, and despite Julius Caesar's argument for life imprisonment, Cato the Younger rose in defense of the death penalty. Cicero had the conspirators taken to the Tullianum, the notorious Roman prison, where they were strangled, earning him the honorific pater patriae, or father of the country. However, this act of summary execution without trial would haunt him for the rest of his life. In 58 BC, Publius Clodius Pulcher, a tribune engineered by the First Triumvirate, passed a law making it illegal to offer fire and water to anyone who executed a Roman citizen without a trial. Cicero was the intended target, and when Clodius's gangs dogged him, hurling abuse and stones, he fled Rome. He arrived at Thessalonica on the 23rd of May 58 BC, living in exile while Clodius demolished his house and erected a temple of Liberty on the vacant land. Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus, stating that his afflictions surpassed any he had ever heard of, and that without Atticus's pleas, he would have committed suicide. He returned to Italy on the 5th of August 57 BC, greeted by a cheering crowd and his beloved daughter Tullia, but the political landscape had shifted, and he was forced to recant and support the triumvirate out of fear of being entirely excluded from public life.
In 51 BC, Cicero reluctantly accepted a promagistracy as proconsul of Cilicia, a province threatened by Parthian invasion following the defeat of Marcus Licinius Crassus at the Battle of Carrhae. He restored calm by his mild system of government, discovering that a great amount of public property had been embezzled by corrupt previous governors and doing his utmost to restore it. He retained the civil rights of, and exempted from penalties, the men who gave the property back, and was extremely frugal in his outlays for staff and private expenses, making him highly popular among the natives. Beyond his administrative reforms, Cicero was active in the military sphere, marching with two understrength legions and a large contingent of auxiliary cavalry to relieve Cassius, the interim Roman commander in Syria, who was besieged in Antioch. He defeated a large troop of Parthian horsemen and besieged the fortress of Pindenissum, which took him 47 days to reduce and fell in December. He was hailed as imperator by his troops, a rare honor for a civilian governor, and left the province on the 30th of July 50 BC to return to Rome. His time in Cilicia was a period of relative success and popularity, but it was also a prelude to the storm that would engulf him upon his return. He arrived in Rome on the 4th of January 49 BC, staying outside the pomerium to retain his promagisterial powers, and when the civil war between Pompey and Julius Caesar erupted, he fled Rome, traveling to Dyrrhachium where Pompey's staff was situated. He traveled with the Pompeian forces to Pharsalus in Macedonia in 48 BC, though he was quickly losing faith in the competence and righteousness of the Pompeian side. After Caesar's victory at the Battle of Pharsalus on the 9th of August, Cicero refused to take command of the Pompeian forces and returned to Rome, dismissing his lictors and renouncing his command.
The Ides of March and The Philippics
Cicero was taken by surprise when the Liberatores assassinated Julius Caesar on the ides of March 44 BC, a date that would become synonymous with betrayal and political chaos. He was not included in the conspiracy, even though the conspirators were sure of his sympathy, and Marcus Junius Brutus called out Cicero's name, asking him to restore the republic when he lifted his bloodstained dagger. Cicero became a popular leader during the period of instability, but he had no respect for Mark Antony, who was scheming to take revenge upon Caesar's murderers. In exchange for amnesty for the assassins, he arranged for the Senate to agree not to declare Caesar to have been a tyrant, which allowed the Caesarians to have lawful support and kept Caesar's reforms and policies intact. In April 43 BC, diehard republicans may have revived the ancient position of princeps senatus for Cicero, and he began to play Octavian, Caesar's adopted son and heir, against Antony. He attacked Antony in a series of speeches he called the Philippics, named after Demosthenes's denunciations of Philip II of Macedon, and his popularity as a public figure was unrivalled. He supported Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus as governor of Cisalpine Gaul and urged the Senate to name Antony an enemy of the state, but his plan to drive out Antony failed. Antony and Octavian reconciled and allied with Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate after the successive battles of Forum Gallorum and Mutina. The alliance came into official existence with the lex Titia, passed on the 27th of November 43 BC, which gave each triumvir a consular imperium for five years. The Triumvirate immediately began a proscription of their enemies, modeled after that of Sulla in 82 BC, and Cicero and all of his contacts and supporters were numbered among the enemies of the state, even though Octavian argued for two days against Cicero being added to the list.
The Severed Hands and The Head
Cicero has been traditionally considered the master of Latin prose, with Quintilian declaring that Cicero was not the name of a man, but of eloquence itself. He is credited with transforming Latin from a modest utilitarian language into a versatile literary medium capable of expressing abstract and complicated thoughts with clarity. Julius Caesar praised Cicero's achievement by saying it is more important to have greatly extended the frontiers of the Roman spirit than the frontiers of the Roman empire. Cicero was also an energetic writer with an interest in a wide variety of subjects, in keeping with the Hellenistic philosophical and rhetorical traditions in which he was trained. The quality and ready accessibility of Ciceronian texts favored very wide distribution and inclusion in teaching curricula, as suggested by a graffito at Pompeii, admonishing: You will like Cicero, or you will be whipped. Cicero was greatly admired by influential Church Fathers such as Augustine of Hippo, who credited Cicero's lost Hortensius for his eventual conversion to Christianity, and St. Jerome, who had a feverish vision in which he was accused of being follower of Cicero and not of Christ before the judgment seat. This influence further increased after the Early Middle Ages in Europe, where more of his writings survived than any other Latin author's. Medieval philosophers were influenced by Cicero's writings on natural law and innate rights. Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters provided the impetus for searches for ancient Greek and Latin writings scattered throughout European monasteries, and the subsequent rediscovery of classical antiquity led to the Renaissance. Subsequently, Cicero became synonymous with classical Latin to such an extent that a number of humanist scholars began to assert that no Latin word or phrase should be used unless it appeared in Cicero's works, a stance criticized by Erasmus. His voluminous correspondence, much of it addressed to his friend Atticus, has been especially influential, introducing the art of refined letter writing to European culture. Cornelius Nepos, the first century BC biographer of Atticus, remarked that Cicero's letters contained such a wealth of
The Invention of Western Thought
detail concerning the inclinations of leading men, the faults of the generals, and the revolutions in the government that their reader had little need for a history of the period.
Among Cicero's admirers were Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, and John Locke, and following the invention of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press, De Officiis was the second book printed in Europe, after the Gutenberg Bible. Scholars note Cicero's influence on the rebirth of religious toleration in the 17th century. Cicero was especially popular with the Philosophes of the 18th century, including Edward Gibbon, Diderot, David Hume, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. Gibbon wrote of his first experience reading the author's collective works thus: I tasted the beauty of the language; I breathed the spirit of freedom; and I imbibed from his precepts and examples the public and private sense of a man...after finishing the great author, a library of eloquence and reason, I formed a more extensive plan of reviewing the Latin classics. Voltaire called Cicero the greatest as well as the most elegant of Roman philosophers and even staged a play based on Cicero's role in the Catilinarian conspiracy, called Rome Sauvée, ou Catilina, to make young people who go to the theatre acquainted with Cicero. Montesquieu produced his Discourse on Cicero in 1717, in which he heaped praise on the author because he rescued philosophy from the hands of scholars, and freed it from the confusion of a foreign language. Cicero the republican inspired the Founding Fathers of the United States and the revolutionaries of the French Revolution. John Adams said, As all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united than Cicero, his authority should have great weight. Thomas Jefferson names Cicero as one of a handful of major figures who contributed to a tradition of public right that informed his draft of the Declaration of Independence and shaped American understandings of the common sense basis for the right of revolution. Camille Desmoulins said of the French republicans in 1789 that they were mostly young people who, nourished by the reading of Cicero at school, had become passionate enthusiasts for liberty. In the modern era, American libertarian Jim Powell starts his history of liberty with the
The Shadow of the Republic
sentence: Marcus Tullius Cicero expressed principles that became the bedrock of liberty in the modern world. Likewise, no other ancient personality has inspired as much venomous dislike as Cicero, especially in more modern times. His commitment to the values of the Republic accommodated a hatred of the poor and persistent opposition to the advocates and mechanisms of popular representation. Friedrich Engels referred to him as the most contemptible scoundrel in history for upholding republican democracy while at the same time denouncing land and class reforms. Cicero has faced criticism for exaggerating the democratic qualities of republican Rome, and for defending the Roman oligarchy against the popular reforms of Caesar. Michael Parenti admits Cicero's abilities as an orator, but finds him a vain, pompous and hypocritical personality who, when it suited him, could show public support for popular causes that he privately despised. Cicero also had an influence on modern astronomy. Nicolaus Copernicus, searching for ancient views on earth motion, said that he first... found in Cicero that Hicetas supposed the earth to move. Notably, Cicero was the name attributed to size 12 font in typesetting table drawers. For ease of reference, type sizes 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, and 20 were all given different names.