Cicero

Their life

Rome's greatest orator, a self-made 'new man' who rose to consul without noble birth or an army — on the strength of the spoken word. He exposed the Catiline conspiracy, wrote the handbooks on duty, friendship, and old age that educated Europe for eighteen centuries, and was murdered for refusing to flatter tyranny, his hands and head nailed to the speaker's platform he had commanded.

Known for

• Exposing the Catiline conspiracy
• Prosecution of Verres
• Philosophical works: De Officiis, De Amicitia, De Senectute
• Philippics against Mark Antony
• First 'new man' consul in decades
• Letters to Atticus

The road they walked

Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in 106 BC in Arpinum, a hill town southeast of Rome, to a family of local standing but no Roman nobility — the equestrian class, wealthy but outside the senatorial bloodline that normally supplied consuls. What he had instead was a gift for words and the discipline to sharpen it: he studied law, rhetoric, and philosophy in Rome, then traveled to Athens and Rhodes to train under the era's leading teachers of oratory, including Molon of Rhodes, who reportedly wept when he heard how far his student had already surpassed him.

He came of age in a Republic tearing itself apart. Sulla's proscriptions had shown how far political vengeance could go; Marius and Sulla between them had turned the army into a personal instrument; the Senate's old consensus was fraying under the weight of ambitious men — Pompey, Crassus, and soon Caesar — who commanded legions Cicero never would. His path ran instead through the law courts and the Forum. The prosecution of Gaius Verres in 70 BC, a corrupt governor of Sicily, made his reputation as the sharpest advocate in Rome; the case was so devastating that Verres fled into exile before it finished. Cicero climbed the offices of the Republic in the minimum legal years allowed at each rung, and in 63 BC he was elected consul in his own year, without a war won or a noble name behind him — a feat so rare for a 'new man' that Romans marveled at it for generations after.

His consulship gave him the moment he is best remembered for: uncovering and crushing the conspiracy of Catiline, a plot to overthrow the government by force, which he exposed in four blistering speeches to the Senate. It also planted the seed of his undoing, since the swift execution of the conspirators without trial left him vulnerable to charges of tyranny himself, and cost him a period of exile a few years later. In the decades that followed, as the Republic buckled under civil war and Caesar's dictatorship, Cicero turned periods of enforced political idleness into extraordinary literary output — treatises on duty, friendship, old age, and the nature of the gods that would later carry Roman thought into the medieval and Renaissance world, and a vast personal correspondence, especially to his friend Atticus, that gives history an almost hour-by-hour view of the Republic's final years.

How their story ended

In December 43 BC, Cicero was named on the proscription lists of the Second Triumvirate — Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus — largely at Antony's insistence, in retaliation for the Philippics that had savaged him. He was caught fleeing near Formiae and killed by soldiers sent to hunt him down. On Antony's orders his severed hands and head were nailed to the Rostra in the Forum, the very platform from which he had delivered his greatest speeches. Ancient sources add that Antony's wife Fulvia pierced his tongue with a hairpin in a final act of contempt for his eloquence — a detail some historians treat as later embellishment, though the display of his remains is not disputed.

In their words

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