Cicero

Biography

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer and writer, the greatest orator of ancient Rome. Born in 106 BC in Arpinum, a small town south-east of Rome, into a family that had never held high office, he rose through his brilliance in the law courts to become consul in 63 BC. That year he uncovered the conspiracy of Catiline to seize power, and the first of his four speeches against Catiline, with its cry “O tempora, o mores!”, is still read in schools. A few years later his enemies drove him into exile, but he was recalled to Rome the following year.

In times when he was kept out of politics he wrote on philosophy, bringing the thought of the Greeks into Latin in works such as On Duties, On the Republic and the Tusculan Disputations, and more than eight hundred of his letters have survived. After the murder of Julius Caesar he attacked Mark Antony in a series of speeches, the Philippics, and when Antony came to power together with Octavian, Cicero was put on the list of the proscribed. He was killed in December 43 BC near Formiae. His Latin prose was a model for centuries, and Petrarch’s rediscovery of his letters is often counted among the beginnings of the Renaissance.