Marcus Tullius Cicero

106-43 BCE · Roman · Forensic and Deliberative Oratory, Rhetorical Theory, Roman Political Thought, Latin Philosophy

Let arms yield to the toga.

Cicero was a *novus homo* — the first of his family to reach the Senate — from a hill town outside Rome, and he arrived at the top of the Republic by the only route open to a man without ancestors: he could speak better than anyone alive. He made his name at twenty-six defending a man against a favourite of the dictator Sulla, reached the consulship at the earliest legal age, and put down Catiline's conspiracy in the year he held it. He also executed five Roman citizens without trial in the process, and spent much of the rest of his life defending that decision.

Topics Marcus Tullius Cicero addresses

• the ideal orator
• the union of wisdom and eloquence
• the five canons
• invention of arguments
• arrangement of the parts
• the three styles
• the orator's memory
• delivery and gesture
• the plain, middle and grand styles
• decorum
• prose rhythm and the clausula
• status theory
• the Atticist controversy
• humanitas
• otium cum dignitate
• concordia ordinum
• natural law
• the mixed constitution
• the republic as a partnership in justice
• duty and the honestum
• the four personae
• the Catilinarian conspiracy
• the senatus consultum ultimum
• provocatio

Converse with Marcus Tullius Cicero on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Marcus Tullius Cicero's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.