Cicero

Roman orator, statesman, lawyer and philosopher (106–43 BC), born in Arpinum into a family of equestrian rank with no senatorial ancestors, which made him a homo novus who had to forge his political career solely through his oratorical and legal talent until reaching the consulship, the highest office of the Republic, in 63 BC, the year in which he suppressed the well-known Catiline conspiracy. Regarded as the foremost exponent of classical Latin prose and the stylistic model of reference for centuries for all later European rhetoric, Cicero cultivated with equal mastery political and judicial oratory — his Catilinarian Orations and the Philippics against Mark Antony are famous examples — and a vast corpus of philosophical works written mostly in his later maturity, after temporarily withdrawing from public life. His most enduring philosophical contribution lies not so much in speculative originality — Cicero considered himself, and has often been judged, more an eclectic popular expositor and translator of Greek thought than a creative philosopher — as in his decisive achievement of creating in Latin a technical philosophical vocabulary capable of precisely expressing the concepts of Stoicism, Epicureanism, the sceptical Academy and Peripateticism, without which the later Latin and medieval reception of Greek philosophy would have been practically impossible. Works such as On the Republic and On the Laws develop his political theory, centred on the ideal of a mixed constitution and the existence of a universal natural law accessible to human reason; De Officiis (On Duties), written as an ethical testament for his son, sets out a practical moral outlook of Stoic roots that exerted immense influence on Western ethical thought well into the early modern era. Persecuted and eventually executed by the triumvirs after Caesar's assassination, chiefly on account of his rhetorical attacks on Mark Antony, Cicero became from antiquity onward a model of both republican civic virtue and elegant prose, and his influence, powerfully rediscovered by the early Italian humanism of the Renaissance, remains central to the history of Western rhetoric, law and political philosophy.

What are Cicero's main ideas?What is Cicero's most important work?How would you summarize Cicero's thought?

Cicero

42 works

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