Cicero Biography Quotes 130 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in 106 BCE at Arpinum, a hill town south of Rome, into an equestrian family that was prosperous but not patrician. That outsider status mattered in a republic where ancestry was political currency. He grew up amid the aftershocks of Rome's Italian expansion and the Social War, when questions of citizenship, law, and violence were no longer abstract. From early on, he absorbed the double consciousness of a provincial who revered Rome's traditions yet saw how contingent and fragile they were.

His family positioned him for a public career by moving within Rome's orbit while keeping ties to Arpinum. Cicero's talent for language and argument was evident young, but so were the anxieties of a "new man" (novus homo) who would have to earn authority by performance rather than lineage. The generation that shaped him had watched Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla turn armies into political instruments; Cicero's lifelong fear was that civic life could be dissolved into force, and that eloquence and law would be left as ornaments.

Education and Formative Influences
In Rome he trained under leading teachers of rhetoric and jurisprudence, studying with the jurist Quintus Mucius Scaevola and absorbing the practical craft of Roman law alongside Greek philosophy. He was formed by Academic skepticism and Stoic ethics, and he later traveled to Greece and Asia Minor (notably Athens and Rhodes) to refine his oratory under Apollonius Molon. That education gave him a distinctive synthesis: philosophical breadth married to courtroom precision, and a belief that the statesman-orator could translate ideas into workable civic norms.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points
Cicero rose through the cursus honorum by brilliance at the bar, winning fame in cases such as Pro Roscio Amerino (80 BCE) and reaching the consulship in 63 BCE, the apex possible for a novus homo. As consul he confronted Catiline's conspiracy and defended emergency measures in speeches later published as the Catilinarians - a triumph that also planted a moral time bomb, because the execution of conspirators without trial made him vulnerable to political retaliation. He was exiled in 58 BCE under Publius Clodius Pulcher, recalled in 57, and thereafter navigated the collapse of republican equilibrium as Pompey, Caesar, and later Antony and Octavian contended for power. In the 40s BCE, withdrawing from active politics after personal losses and the civil war, he produced his major philosophical dialogues in Latin - De Republica, De Legibus, Tusculan Disputations, De Officiis, De Natura Deorum - attempting to preserve a usable moral and constitutional tradition as institutions failed. After Caesar's assassination in 44 BCE, he returned to the Senate as Antony's fiercest critic, delivering the Philippics; the Second Triumvirate proscribed him, and he was killed in 43 BCE, his head and hands displayed as a warning against republican speech.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes
Cicero's inner life was a tug-of-war between the ideal of concordia and a temperament made for combat: he wanted harmony under law, yet he came alive in conflict, measuring himself by the stakes of public argument. His philosophical project was less about inventing systems than about moral rescue - translating Greek ethical and political reasoning into Roman terms so that duty (officium) could outlast faction. He insisted that public life required character as much as talent, a conviction distilled in "Ability without honor is useless". The line is not piety; it is self-indictment and self-defense at once, a standard he used to judge rivals and to steady his own ambition.

His style - periodic sentences, carefully staged climaxes, and a dramatist's sense of audience - served a theme he never relinquished: liberty as a legal and psychological condition. When he defined civic calm as freedom itself, he was naming the republic's emotional core: "Peace is liberty in tranquillity". Yet he also understood the dark arts of politics and the ease with which reason is replaced by attack; his mordant observation, "When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff". , reads like both satire and trauma recollection from the courts and Senate, where he saw reputations murdered to avoid questions of justice. Across speeches and dialogues, he returned to the same preoccupations - the fragility of norms, the seductions of power, and the need for rhetorical craft to be tethered to a moral compass - because he believed words could still restrain swords, even when history suggested otherwise.

Legacy and Influence
Cicero became Rome's model of the statesman-writer: his speeches set the standard for Latin prose, his letters (especially to Atticus) created an unmatched documentary record of a dying republic, and his philosophical works carried Greek thought into Western political and ethical vocabulary. Medieval and Renaissance readers treated him as a master of rhetoric and civic virtue; early modern republicans mined him for arguments about mixed government and natural law; modern legal and political theory still echoes his insistence that legitimacy depends on justice, not mere command. If his life ended as a cautionary tale about the costs of speaking against armed power, his corpus ensured that the republic he could not save would remain thinkable - and that persuasion, not coercion, would remain the benchmark by which public reason judges itself.

Our collection contains 130 quotes who is written by Cicero, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Justice.

Other people realated to Cicero: Publilius Syrus (Poet), Niccolo Machiavelli (Writer), Saint Augustine (Saint), Terence (Playwright), Plutarch (Philosopher), Julius Caesar (Leader), Lucretius (Poet), Marcus Terentius Varro (Author), Ryan White (Celebrity), Junius (Writer)

• Cicero pronunciation: English: SIS-uh-roh; Classical Latin: KIH-keh-roh.
• Cicero philosophy: Eclectic Academic skeptic; popularized Greek thought in Latin; ethics, natural law, rhetoric.
• Cicero books: De Officiis; De Oratore; De Re Publica; Tusculan Disputations; De Natura Deorum; Philippics.
• Cicero meaning: Latin cognomen from cicer = chickpea.
• Cicero Skyrim: The jester/assassin NPC of the Dark Brotherhood in Skyrim; not the Roman Cicero.

• -45 On the Nature of the Gods (Book)
• -45 Tusculan Disputations (Book)
• -46 Brutus (Book)
• -52 On the Laws (Book)
• -54 The Republic (Book)
• -55 On the Orator (Book)

• Wikipedia