Roman Orator Cicero

Although he had a distinguished political career, he is best known as Rome's greatest orator and as a man of letters. Born Marcus Tullius Cicero in Arpinum (now Arpino, Italy), he was also known as Tully. As a youth he studied law, oratory, literature, and philosophy in Rome. After brief military service and three years' experience as a lawyer defending private citizens, he traveled to Greece and Asia, where he continued his studies. He returned to Rome in 77 BC and began his political career and in 74 BC he was elected to the Senate (Sumner, 1973, p. 5).

Although Cicero's family did not belong to the Roman aristocracy, he was supported in the competition for the consulship in 64 BC by most rich and powerful Romans because of their distrust of his aristocratic but less respectable rival, Lucius Sergius Catilina, known as Catiline. Cicero was elected, but during his admin

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simply by the ability to create eloquent sentences but also by his ability to summarize complex philosophical and historical points. Thus his oratory began always in reading and in discussions with other philosophers, with an attempt to locate his main points within a larger body of learning, particularly that of the Greek scholars that had come before him (Bailey, 1986, p. 13). Outstanding among his pieces of oratory are his treatises On the Republic, On the Laws, On Duty, and On the Nature of the Gods. His rhetorical works, written in dialogue form, particularly On the Orator, are of value as the products of an accomplished rhetorician and as a rich source of historical material allowing us a glimpse into the ways in which style and content were balanced to produce great classical oratory (Bailey, 1986, p. 38). The most famous of his orations are the four against Catiline and the fourteen so-called Philippics against Antony, which were among seventeen delivered. In each of these sets of oratorical pleadings, Cicero showed himself to be a master of the Roman art of pleading intellectual and philosophical points as well as a master of the Roman art of politics. In these speeches he presented himself convincingly as a shrew but b
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