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Cicero

Latin nameMarcus Tullius Cicero

The Republic’s last defender, who set the pitch of Latin prose

The Light of Latin · Philosophers & Historians

OratoryThe Catiline conspiracyLatin prose

Who they are

Cicero came from the same town as Marius and, like him, was a "new man" with no ancestral shade to shelter under, who rose to the top on his voice alone: elected consul at thirty-nine ahead of his time, he crushed the Catiline conspiracy in his term and was honored as "father of the fatherland." He believed all his life in the Republic and in "harmony among the orders," and balanced painfully between Caesar and Pompey; after Caesar’s death he delivered fourteen Philippics attacking Antony and threw his support behind the young Octavian to check him — until Octavian allied with Antony and wrote his name into the proscription list. The executioners caught up with his litter by the sea, and he leaned out and said, "Come, veteran, if you know your trade, strike true." His head and both hands were nailed to the Rostra of Rome — the hands that had written On the Republic and On Duties. The nearly thousand letters and dozens of speeches he left defined Latin prose, and the Renaissance began when Petrarch rediscovered Cicero’s letters.

Key stories

How long, Catiline, will you go on abusing our patience?

In 63 BC the bankrupt noble Catiline plotted a coup and arson. In the Senate, to his face, Cicero delivered the First Catilinarian, opening with the line for the ages: "Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?" Catiline fled that night and his fellow conspirators were executed. The speech is still a required text in Latin class; and putting citizens to death without a full trial became the handle by which his enemies later exiled Cicero — the height and the stain of his life fell on the same day.

The head and hands on the Rostra

Antony specifically demanded not only the head but the hands — "the hands that wrote the Philippics." His wife Fulvia is said to have taken the head and stabbed the tongue through and through with a hairpin. Octavian permitted all of it; years later, catching his grandson reading Cicero, the boy hid the book in a panic, and Augustus took it, read for a long while, and returned it saying, "A learned man, my child, learned, and a lover of his country." — the man who killed him ended by writing his epitaph for history.