Book Description

CICEREO (Marcus Tullius, 3rd Jan. 106-7th Dec. 43 B.C.), Roman lawyer, orator and politician (and even philosopher), of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era which saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 Speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, 58 survive (a few of them incompletely). In A.D. 1345 Petrarch discovered copies of a collection of more than 900 Letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man and all the more striking because they were not written for publication. Six Rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.