Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in 106 BC at Arpinum into the equestrian class. As a novus homo — a man with no consul among his ancestors — he was an unlikely candidate for Rome's highest office. He told friends he would make the Cicero name (cicer means chickpea) more famous than the Scipios. Brought to Rome at ten, he studied under the leading orators and absorbed Greek philosophy from the Academic Philo of Larissa and the Stoic Diodotus.

He began at the bar in 81 BC. The Pro Roscio Amerino defended a young man framed for parricide by an associate of Sulla, and gave Latin a word that would echo for two thousand years: humanitas, the cultivated humanity proper to a free citizen. The 70 BC prosecution of Verres, who had stripped Sicily of forty million sesterces, exposed late-republican provincial corruption.

In 63 BC he reached the consulship and uncovered Catiline's plot to overthrow the Senate. The Catilinarian Orations — "How long, Catiline, will you abuse our patience?" — remain a peak of Latin rhetoric. Yet his execution of the conspirators without trial was constitutionally questionable, and in 58 BC the tribune Clodius drove him into exile. He returned the next year but was caught between Caesar and Pompey. He sided with Pompey, was pardoned by Caesar after Pharsalus, and retreated into philosophy. Critics from his own time onward have noted his political indecisiveness.

When Caesar was murdered in 44 BC, Cicero saw a last chance to revive the Republic. He attacked Antony in fourteen Philippic orations and tried to use the young Octavian as a republican champion. The boy was no such thing. The Second Triumvirate put Cicero on the proscription list. On 7 December 43 BC, near Formiae, he stretched out his neck for the assassin's sword. Antony ordered the head and writing hand nailed to the speaker's platform in the Forum. His political philosophy — De Officiis, De Re Publica, De Legibus — became the textbook of Latin Europe.