Cicero

Cicero a Roman statesman, orator and writer (106–43 BC) whose speeches, letters and philosophical works made him the most influential prose stylist of antiquity. As consul he suppressed the Catilinarian conspiracy, as a theorist he transmitted Greek philosophy to the Latin world, and as a defender of the republic he died a victim of the political violence he had spent his life trying to restrain.

Rise and Political Career

Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in 106 BC at Arpinum, a town of the Volscian hills, into a wealthy equestrian family without senatorial ancestry. He was educated in Rome in law, rhetoric and philosophy, studying under Greek teachers and the great orator Crassus. His talent was such that he soon became the leading advocate of his generation, and he undertook the dangerous prosecution of Verres, a corrupt governor of Sicily, in 70 BC.

He rose through the cursus honorum to the consulship in 63 BC, the first man in his family to reach the highest office. During his year as consul he uncovered and suppressed the conspiracy of Catiline, a patrician who had planned to seize power by force. The four speeches he delivered against Catiline, known as the Catilinarian Orations, are among the most famous in the history of rhetoric.

His decision to execute the conspirators without trial, though justified by a decree of the senate, exposed him to lasting hostility. In 58 BC his enemy Clodius secured his exile, and he was forced to leave Italy for over a year. He was recalled with honour and resumed his career, but the republic was already sliding into the civil wars that would destroy it.

Oratory and Prose Style

Cicero's reputation rests above all on his speeches, of which fifty-eight survive. They range from the early defence of Sextus Roscius to the Philippics against Mark Antony, and they display every resource of ancient forensic and political eloquence: logical argument, vivid narrative, emotional appeal, irony and invective. His defence of Archias and his essays on old age and friendship are equally admired.

He wrote extensively on the theory of oratory, notably in On the Orator and the Orator, in which he set out the ideal of the speaker who combines wide knowledge, moral character and technical mastery. For Cicero the orator must be a good man skilled in speaking, and eloquence without wisdom is a dangerous weapon. These ideas shaped rhetorical education for centuries.

As a stylist he established the periodic sentence and the balanced, harmonious prose that became the model for Latin literature and for later European writing. His vocabulary and syntax were studied in schools from antiquity to the nineteenth century, and his influence can be traced in the prose of Augustine, Erasmus, Montaigne and the writers of the English Augustan age.

Philosophical Works

In the last years of his life, barred from politics, Cicero turned to philosophy and produced a series of works that gave Latin readers access to Greek thought. On the Nature of the Gods, On Divination, On Fate, the Tusculan Disputations and On Duties treat theology, epistemology, ethics and political morality. Without him, much of Greek philosophy would have reached the Middle Ages only indirectly.

He was an eclectic rather than an original thinker, drawing on Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Academics. His preferred stance was that of the Academic sceptic, who argues both sides of a question and suspends judgement where certainty is unattainable. His dialogues present opposing views with fairness and leave the reader to weigh them, a method that suited his temperament and his rhetorical training.

His ethical writings, especially On Duties, had an immense influence on later European thought. They combine Stoic principles with Roman practical wisdom and insist that what is honourable and what is useful cannot really conflict. This synthesis of Greek theory and Roman experience gave Renaissance humanists and the founders of modern political thought a vocabulary for discussing duty, justice and the public good.

Political Thought and the Republic

Cicero's political ideal was the mixed constitution of the Roman republic, in which the consuls, the senate and the popular assemblies balanced one another. In On the Commonwealth he set out this theory, drawing on Polybius and on his own experience, and in On the Laws he sketched a code grounded in natural law, the universal reason that binds all human beings and all nations.

He held that the state exists for the sake of justice and the common good, and that a government which violates these ends ceases to be a true commonwealth. This idea, that political authority is legitimate only when it serves justice, became a foundation of Western constitutional thought. He also insisted on the equality of all citizens before the law and on the dignity of the individual.

His practical politics were less consistent than his theory. He opposed the triumvirs, then cooperated with them when expedient, and his final struggle against Antony cost him his life. Yet his defence of republican liberty against the rising power of military dynasts gave later ages a language for resisting tyranny, and his name became a byword for the honest statesman in a corrupt age.

Death and Reputation

After the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, Cicero returned to public life and attacked Mark Antony in a series of speeches known as the Philippics, modelled on the orations of Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon. When the second triumvirate was formed, Antony demanded his death, and Cicero was proscribed. He was killed by soldiers near his villa at Formiae in December 43 BC, and his head and hands were displayed in the forum.

His death marked the end of the Roman republic and of the political world he had championed. Yet his writings survived, and they exercised a continuous influence on European culture. The Church Fathers admired him, the medieval schools taught him, and the humanists of the Renaissance made his prose the model of good Latin and his moral philosophy the basis of civic education.

He is remembered as Rome's greatest orator, as the creator of a philosophical vocabulary in Latin, and as a defender of constitutional government. Historians criticise his vanity and his political vacillation, but few deny the depth of his learning or the courage of his last struggle. His letters, discovered in the fourteenth century, revealed him as a man of ordinary anxieties and extraordinary gifts, and they remain one of the most vivid self-portraits of the ancient world.

See also

• Catilinarian conspiracy
• Roman Republic
• Mark Antony
• Stoicism