Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106-43 BCE), Roman lawyer, orator, politician
and 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 the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian
humanists discovered manuscripts containing 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 all the more striking because
most 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.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.