Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero was Rome's most celebrated orator and one of the most influential writers in Latin, and a leading senator in the final decades of the Roman Republic. Born in 106 BCE to a provincial family outside the old nobility, he rose to the consulship in 63 BCE, defended the traditional republic against the ambitions of Caesar and Antony, and was killed in the purge that followed Caesar's murder. His surviving letters, many written to his friend Atticus, are among the richest sources for the end of the republic.

Cicero was born on 3 January 106 BCE at Arpinum, a hill town about 100 kilometres south-east of Rome, into a wealthy family of the equestrian order. As a teenager he served briefly in the Social War between Rome and its Italian allies, then studied law, rhetoric and Greek philosophy in Rome. From 79 to 77 BCE he travelled in Greece, Asia Minor and Rhodes, refining his speaking style with leading teachers.

His first great criminal case, in 80 BCE, was the defence of Sextus Roscius on a charge of killing his father; Cicero blamed a freedman of the dictator Sulla. Elected quaestor at the minimum age of 30, he served in Sicily in 75 BCE. In 70 BCE the Sicilians asked him to prosecute their corrupt former governor, Gaius Verres. Cicero gathered evidence across the island and beat Rome's leading advocate, Hortensius, establishing himself as the city's foremost speaker.

As a "new man", the first of his family to reach the senate, Cicero climbed each rung of the ladder of offices at or near the youngest legal age, and was elected consul for 63 BCE. That year he exposed a plot by the disgruntled noble Lucius Sergius Catilina to seize power, denouncing him in four famous speeches. After a heated senate debate, in which Julius Caesar argued against execution and Cato the Younger for it, Cicero had five captured conspirators put to death without trial. He was hailed as "father of the fatherland", but the executions left him exposed.

Cicero declined to join the alliance of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. In 58 BCE the tribune Clodius carried a law against anyone who had executed a citizen without trial, and Cicero went into exile in Greece while his house on the Palatine was demolished. Recalled the next year with Pompey's backing, he found his political independence curtailed and turned increasingly to writing. In 51 to 50 BCE he governed the province of Cilicia, where he won praise for honest administration.

When civil war broke out in 49 BCE, Cicero eventually joined Pompey in Greece, though with little faith in his side. After Caesar's victory at Pharsalus he was pardoned and lived quietly, producing many of his philosophical works; the death of his beloved daughter Tullia in 45 BCE devastated him. He was not part of the plot to kill Caesar in March 44 BCE, but welcomed it. He then led the senate against Mark Antony in a series of speeches called the Philippics, and promoted Caesar's young heir Octavian as a counterweight.

The plan collapsed when Octavian joined Antony and Lepidus in the Second Triumvirate in November 43 BCE. Cicero was placed on their list of proscribed enemies; Octavian is said to have resisted for two days. On 7 December 43 BCE soldiers caught him near his villa at Formiae as he tried to reach the sea. On Antony's orders his head and hands were displayed in the Forum.

Cicero's speeches, treatises and letters shaped Latin prose for centuries. He coined much of the Latin vocabulary of philosophy. Petrarch's rediscovery of his letters helped inspire the Renaissance, and Enlightenment thinkers and the American founders admired him, though critics have charged him with vanity, inconsistency and hostility to popular reform.

Our 100 BCE map shows the Roman Republic during his youth. By the 1 BCE map it has become the Roman Empire under Augustus. See also Julius Caesar, Pompey, Mark Antony and the Assassination of Julius Caesar.