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 Lilybarum 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.
