Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) was born in Arpinium, around 60 miles south of Rome, into a wealthy equestrian family. His cognomen, or personal surname, derives from the Latin for ‘chickpea’ [cicer], by which his ancestors may have prospered. He lived through a time of great civil unrest, famously decrying, O tempora, O mores [‘Oh the times, oh the customs’]. Despite his frail and sickly constitution, he served in the army in 89-88, notably under Pompey’s father, Pompeius Strabo. But what he lacked for in virility and nobility he more than made up in study and oratory. In 87, Philo of Larissa, the last undisputed scholarch of the Academy, arrived in Rome, and Cicero came to sit at his feet—later opining that, if Zeus were to speak, it would be in none other than the language of Plato. He studied law under Quintus Mucius Scævola, who founded the study of law as a systematic discipline.

Cicero began practising the law in around 83-81, and, in 80, made his reputation on the back of his brilliant defence of Sextus Roscius against a fabricated charge of patricide. In 79, he made a marriage of convenience to Terentia, who came with property and a dowry of 400,000 sesterces, and who bore him a daughter, Tullia, and a son, Cicero Minor (later, Cicero the Younger). In the same year, partly on account of his health, he travelled to Greece, Asia, and Rhodes, and met with several leading philosophers including, in Athens, Antiochus of Ascalon. Antiochus had studied under Philo of Larissa but had come to reject Academic Skepticism. By seeking to fold the doctrines of the other schools into Platonism, he inaugurated the stage of Platonic philosophy known as Middle Platonism. While in Greece, Cicero asked the oracle at Delphi how he might attain the greatest glory. The pythoness [high priestess] replied, ‘By making your own genius and not the opinion of the people the guide of your life.’

Ladder of Offices

In the next period, Cicero climbed the cursus honorum, or ‘ladder of offices’, holding each office at or near the youngest possible age: quæstor in 75, ædile in 69, prætor in 66, and consul in 63. He became consul at the age of just 42, making him the youngest non-patrician to serve as consul in the five-hundred-year history of the Republic. As quæstor in Western Sicily, he seemed so formidable that the locals asked him to prosecute Gaius Verres, who, as governor, had plundered the province. He fought the case with such aplomb that he came to be regarded as the greatest orator in Rome. In Sicily, he took it upon himself to rediscover the tomb of Archimedes, which he described as surmounted by a sphere and cylinder. He then chided the Syracusans for leaving it to a man from Arpinium to remember their most illustrious citizen. As prætor, he made his first big speech, in favour of conferring upon Pompey the command of the campaign against Mithradates VI, King of Pontus. But the crowning glory of his career came during his consulship, when, by the force of his four Catiline Orations, he put down the Catiline conspiracy to overthrow the Republic. He had five of the conspirators executed and announced their deaths to a cheering crowd with the single word, Vixerunt [‘They lived’]. For ‘saving the Republic’ (as he liked to boast), he received the honorific Pater Patriæ [‘Father of the Fatherland’] from his ally Cato, but lived forever after in fear of reprisal for having put Roman citizens to death without trial.

In 62, Cicero added a large townhouse on the Palatine Hill to his portfolio of properties. The house, which he described as ‘in sight of nearly the whole city’ [inconspectu prope totius urbis], had belonged to Rome’s richest citizen, Crassus, and cost him 3.5 million sesterces. In 60, Cæsar pressed Cicero to join his alliance with Pompey and Crassus (later called the First Triumvirate), but he rejected the offer on the grounds that their arrangement undermined the Republic. He also refused Cæsar’s offer of a place on his staff in Gaul, leaving him exposed and vulnerable to the many enemies that his sharp tongue had left in its train.

Exile

When Publius Clodius Pulcher became tribune in 58, he passed a law, with retroactive effect, to exile any official who executed a citizen without trial. The law was squarely aimed at Cicero, who fled to Greece while Clodius’ supporters ransacked his house on the Palatine and his villas at Formiæ and Tusculum.

Cicero now fell into a deep depression, and wrote to his friend Atticus:

I say this deliberately—that no one was ever afflicted with so heavy a calamity, that no one had ever greater cause to wish for death; while I have let slip the time when I might have sought it most creditably. Henceforth death can never heal, it can only end my sorrow.

In the wise words of Plutarch,

He was become so poor-spirited, so humiliated and dejected by his misfortunes, as none could have expected in a man who had devoted so much of his life to study and learning… But the desire for glory has great power in washing the tinctures of philosophy out of the souls of men.

Cicero returned in 57 after being recalled by the Senate, with Clodius casting the single vote against the motion. He was met by a cheering crowd all the way from Brundisium [modern-day Brindisi] to the Capitol, and his properties, which had been destroyed, were rebuilt at public cost.

Governorship of Cilicia

He took to opposing Cæsar, but this only drove Cæsar closer to Pompey and Crassus. So he swallowed his principles and made a show of supporting them, before quietly withdrawing into his library. In 53, the year that Crassus died, he freed Marcus Tullius Tiro ‘to be our friend instead of our slave’, and it is Tiro who, after his death, collected his letters and speeches for publication. In 51, Tiro, himself a prolific writer, accompanied him to Cilicia (in modern-day Turkey) after he reluctantly accepted the governorship of the province. He restored calm and order to the entire region, repulsing Parthian incursions, suppressing brigands, and stemming corruption. He stopped in Rhodes and Athens on the return to Rome, where the Senate granted him a supplicatio, or period of public thanksgiving—instead of the full-blown triumph that he had been coveting.

Caesar’s demise

Only six days after Cicero’s return to Rome, Cæsar crossed the Rubicon into Italy, thereby declaring war on the Senate. Cicero hesitated in picking a side, reasoning that all outcomes led to a tyrant, but in the end crossed the Adriatic to join Pompey’s camp—where he had words with Cato, who thought that he would have done better to remain in Rome. After Pompey’s defeat to Cæsar at Pharsalus, Cato offered him the command of the Pompeian forces, but he preferred to return to the Eternal City to be pardoned by Cæsar. 

He had divorced Terentia in 51, and in 46 or 45 wedded a wealthy girl called Publilia, who had been his ward, and who jealoused the great love that he bore for his daughter Tullia. The marriage did not withstand Tullia’s sudden death in 45, with Cicero writing to Atticus that he had ‘lost the one thing that bound me to life’. For solace, Cicero went to Atticus, and in his library mined the Greek philosophers, especially Crantor, to write his Consolatio. Sadly, the Consolatio has largely been lost, as has Crantor’s On Grief, which, according to the Stoic Panætius, deserved to be learnt by heart.

Cicero was not a party to Cæsar’s assassination in 44, although Brutus did call out his name upon raising his blood-soaked dagger, beseeching him to ‘restore the Republic’. He later wrote to one of the conspirators, ‘How I wish that you had invited me to that most glorious banquet on the Ides of March.’

Suite et fin

Mark Antony, as consul, leader of the Cæsarian faction, and unofficial executor of Cæsar’s public will, began throwing his weight around. Cicero, who had been hoping to restore the Republic, responded by playing the young Octavian, Cæsar’s grandnephew, adopted son, and heir, against Antony. More than that, he overtly and vehemently attacked Antony in a series of speeches which he referred to as the Philippics, after the speeches delivered by Demosthenes to rouse the Athenians into fighting Philip II of Macedon. But this strategy failed when Octavian and Antony reconciled and joined forces with Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate.

Estimating that Cæsar had been undone by his clemency, the Second Triumvirate brought back the ruthless proscription [the legally sanctioned murder of opponents and rivals], not seen in Rome since the time of Sulla. The proscription also served to fund the Triumvirate’s war, the so-called Liberators’ Civil War, against Brutus and Cassius, who were finally defeated at the Battle of Philippi in 42. When Antony put Cicero at the head of the proscription list, Octavian tried to have him removed, but did not insist or prevail. Also on the list were Cicero’s son, brother, and nephew. The Triumvirate, in the words of Plutarch, ‘let their anger and fury take from them the sense of humanity, and demonstrated that no beast is more savage than man, when possessed with power answerable to his rage.’ 

On 7 December 43, Cicero, betrayed by a freedman of his brother, was intercepted near his villa at Formiæ, travelling down to the coast in a bid to escape to Greece.

He literally bowed to his assassins, extending his neck out of his litter to ease their task.

After killing him, they hacked off his head and hands so that Antony could have them displayed on the Rostra in the fashion of Marius and Sulla. According to the historian Cassius Dio, Antony’s wife Fulvia took up Cicero’s severed head, pulled out his tongue, and jabbed it repeatedly with her hairpin.

Cicero’s brother and nephew were also murdered, but his son, who was then in Greece, escaped unscathed.

Twelve years later, in 31, Cicero the Younger took part in the Battle of Actium, in which Octavian defeated Antony; and in 30, he had the satisfaction, as consul, of announcing Antony’s suicide to the Senate. 

Many years later, Octavian, now Augustus, chanced upon one of his grandsons reading a book by Cicero. The boy tried to hide the book in his gown, but the emperor took it from him and stood a long time leafing through its pages. Finally, he handed it back, saying, “My child, this was a learned man, and a lover of his country.”

Neel Burton is author of How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero