MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO, the greatest of Roman orators and the chief
master of Latin prose style, was born at Arpinum, Jan. 3, 106 B.C.
His father, who was a man of property and belonged to the class of
the "Knights," moved to Rome when Cicero was a child; and the future
statesman received an elaborate education in rhetoric, law, and
philosophy, studying and practising under some of the most noted
teachers of the time. He began his career as an advocate at the age of
twenty-five, and almost immediately came to be recognized not only as a
man of brilliant talents but also as a courageous upholder of justice in
the face of grave political danger. After two years of practice he left
Rome to travel in Greece and Asia, taking all the opportunities that
offered to study his art under distinguished masters. He returned to
Rome greatly improved in health and in professional skill, and in 76
B. C. was elected to the office of quaestor. He was assigned to the
province of Lilybaeum in Sicily, and the vigor and justice of his
administration earned him the gratitude of the inhabitants. It was at
their request that he undertook in 70 B. C. the Prosecution of Verres,
who as Praetor had subjected the Sicilians to incredible extortion and
oppression; and his successful conduct of this case, which ended in the
conviction and banishment of Verres, may be said to have launched him
on his political career. He became aedile in the same year, in 67 B.C.
praetor, and in 64 B. C. was elected consul by a large majority. The
most important event of the year of his consulship was the conspiracy of
Catiline. This notorious criminal of patrician rank had conspired with
a number of others, many of them young men of high birth but dissipated
character, to seize the chief offices of the state, and to extricate
themselves from the pecuniary and other difficulties that had resulted
from their excesses, by the wholesale plunder of the city. The plot was
unmasked by the vigilance of Cicero, five of the traitors were summarily
executed, and in the overthrow of the army that had been gathered in
their support Catiline himself perished. Cicero regarded himself as the
savior of his country, and his country for the moment seemed to give
grateful assent.
But reverses were at hand. During the existence of the political
combination of Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus, known as the first
triumvirate, P. Clodius, an enemy of Cicero's, proposed a law banishing
"any one who had put Roman citizens to death without trial." This was
aimed at Cicero on account of his share in the Catiline affair, and in
March, 58 B. C., he left Rome. The same day a law was passed by which
he was banished by name, and his property was plundered and destroyed,
a temple to Liberty being erected on the site of his house in the city.
During his exile Cicero's manliness to some extent deserted him. He
drifted from place to place, seeking the protection of officials against
assassination, writing letters urging his supporters to agitate for
his recall, sometimes accusing them of lukewarmness and even treachery,
bemoaning the ingratitude of his country or regretting the course
of action that had led to his outlawry, and suffering from extreme
depression over his separation from his wife and children and the wreck
of his political ambitions. Finally in August, 57 B. C., the decree
for his restoration was passed, and he returned to Rome the next month,
being received with immense popular enthusiasm. During the next few
years the renewal of the understanding among the triumvirs shut Cicero
out from any leading part in politics, and he resumed his activity in
the law-courts, his most important case being, perhaps, the defence of
Milo for the murder of Clodius, Cicero's most troublesome enemy. This
oration, in the revised form in which it has come down to us, is ranked
as among the finest specimens of the art of the orator, though in its
original form it failed to secure Milo's acquittal. Meantime, Cicero was
also devoting much time to literary composition, and his letters show
great dejection over the political situation, and a somewhat wavering
attitude towards the various parties in the state. In 55 B. C. he went
to Cilicia in Asia Minor as proconsul, an office which he administered
with efficiency and integrity in civil affairs and with success in
military. He returned to Italy in the end of the following year, and he
was publicly thanked by the senate for his services, but disappointed in
his hopes for a triumph. The war for supremacy between Caesar and Pompey
which had for some time been gradually growing more certain, broke out
in 49 B.C., when Caesar led his army across the Rubicon, and Cicero
after much irresolution threw in his lot with Pompey, who was overthrown
the next year in the battle of Pharsalus and later murdered in Egypt.
Cicero returned to Italy, where Caesar treated him magnanimously,
and for some time he devoted himself to philosophical and rhetorical
writing. In 46 B.C. he divorced his wife Terentia, to whom he had been
married for thirty years and married the young and wealthy Publilia in
order to relieve himself from financial difficulties; but her also
he shortly divorced. Caesar, who had now become supreme in Rome, was
assassinated in 44 B.C., and though Cicero was not a sharer in the
conspiracy, he seems to have approved the deed. In the confusion which
followed he supported the cause of the conspirators against Antony;
and when finally the triumvirate of Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus was
established, Cicero was included among the proscribed, and on December
7, 43 B.C., he was killed by agents of Antony. His head and hand were
cut off and exhibited at Rome.
The most important orations of the last months of his life were the
fourteen "Philippics" delivered against Antony, and the price of this
enmity he paid with his life.
To his contemporaries Cicero was primarily the great forensic and
political orator of his time, and the fifty-eight speeches which have
come down to us bear testimony to the skill, wit, eloquence, and passion
which gave him his pre-eminence. But these speeches of necessity deal
with the minute details of the occasions which called them forth, and
so require for their appreciation a full knowledge of the history,
political and personal, of the time. The letters, on the other hand,
are less elaborate both in style and in the handling of current events,
while they serve to reveal his personality, and to throw light upon
Roman life in the last days of the Republic in an extremely vivid
fashion. Cicero as a man, in spite of his self-importance, the
vacillation of his political conduct in desperate crises, and the
whining despondency of his times of adversity, stands out as at bottom
a patriotic Roman of substantial honesty, who gave his life to check the
inevitable fall of the commonwealth to which he was devoted. The evils
which were undermining the Republic bear so many striking resemblances
to those which threaten the civic and national life of America to-day
that the interest of the period is by no means merely historical.
As a philosopher, Cicero's most important function was to make his
countrymen familiar with the main schools of Greek thought. Much of
this writing is thus of secondary interest to us in comparison with his
originals, but in the fields of religious theory and of the application
of philosophy to life he made important first-hand contributions. From
these works have been selected the two treatises, on Old Age and on
Friendship, which have proved of most permanent and widespread interest
to posterity, and which give a clear impression of the way in which
a high-minded Roman thought about some of the main problems of human
life.