Plutarch's biography of Rome's greatest orator, from his uncertain birth and rise through the courts to his suppression of the Catiline conspiracy and his brutal murder at Antony's order in the proscriptions of 43 BCE.
This Life traces Marcus Tullius Cicero from an obscure family background — Plutarch admits nothing definite could be learned about his father — through a legal and political career built entirely on eloquence rather than birth or military command. Cicero's early fame comes from prosecuting the corrupt governor Verres, and his central achievement is his consulship, during which he exposes and crushes the conspiracy of Catiline, a plot he treats, and Plutarch narrates, as a near-apocalyptic threat to the Republic complete with omens, a human sacrifice among the conspirators, and forged Sibylline prophecies.
The narrative then follows Cicero's fall from favor: exile engineered by his enemy Clodius, an uneasy recall, and years spent maneuvering among Crassus, Pompey, and Caesar as the Republic slides toward civil war. Plutarch gives real weight to Cicero's oratorical effect on Caesar himself, and to his late, doomed campaign against Antony in the Philippics after Caesar's assassination. The Life closes with an unusually vivid death scene — ill omens from crows, Cicero's calm defiance of his killers, his execution and the display of his head and hands on the Rostra — followed by a coda in which Octavian, once allied with Antony, later honors Cicero's memory and punishes Antony's household.
Historically, the Life matters as one of the fullest ancient portraits of the collapse of the Roman Republic seen through a civilian rather than a general, and as a key source for the Catiline conspiracy, the Second Triumvirate's proscriptions, and the reception of Cicero's own writings within a generation of his death. Plutarch's pairing of Cicero with Demosthenes (in the lost or separate synkrisis tradition) also reflects the ancient habit of reading Greek and Roman political eloquence against each other.
“As for Cicero's mother Helvia, they say she was well-born and lived well, but about his father nothing definite could be learned”
— Cicero
“Taking this man as their champion, the wicked bound themselves to one another by further pledges, and having sacrificed a human being, tasted his flesh”
— Cicero
“How is it, then, that you have become such a man of iron that you have provided your friend with none of all the things he asked for?”
— Cicero
“He himself, as was his custom, touched his chin with his left hand and gazed steadily at his killers, filthy and unkempt and his face wasted away with anxieties, so that most of those present covered their own faces while Herennius cut him down.”
— Cicero
“An eloquent man, my boy — eloquent, and a lover of his country.”
— Cicero
After the Second Triumvirate proscribed him, Cicero fled toward the sea but was overtaken near his villa by soldiers sent by Antony, including a tribune he had once defended in court. He offered no resistance, was killed as he stretched his neck from his litter, and Antony had his head and hands displayed on the Rostra in Rome.
It was a plot, uncovered during Cicero's consulship, in which Catiline and his followers allegedly conspired to seize power in Rome, reportedly binding themselves with oaths and, according to some accounts Plutarch repeats, a human sacrifice. Cicero exposed the plot in the Senate and had the leading conspirators put to death, an act that made his reputation but also generated lasting political enemies.
Plutarch paired Greek and Roman figures by shared character or vocation, and Cicero's Life is paired with Demosthenes as the two great orator-statesmen of the ancient world. The text notes that some self-styled followers of Demosthenes seized on a critical remark Cicero made about him, prompting Plutarch to point out Cicero's genuine and frequent praise of the Greek orator elsewhere.
Caesar was not a close friend but courted Cicero's support even while departing for his Gallic campaign, and Plutarch describes Cicero's oratory visibly moving Caesar's expression during a later speech. After Caesar's assassination, Cicero turned against Antony, and a later anecdote shows Caesar's own grandson caught reading one of Cicero's books, drawing a rare compliment from the family.
A freedman named Philologus, once raised and educated by Cicero, told the pursuing tribune which path Cicero's litter had taken. Antony's associate Pomponia (Quintus's wife) later had Philologus tortured, allegedly forcing him to cut off and eat his own flesh, though Plutarch notes that Cicero's own freedman Tiro records nothing of this betrayal.
Yes. Plutarch notes that once Octavian defeated Antony and became consul, he chose Cicero's son as his fellow consul, and the Senate pulled down Antony's statues and barred any Antonius from bearing the name Marcus again.
A flock of crows flew screeching to Cicero's boat and villa, cawing and gnawing at ropes, and one bird pulled at the cloak covering his face as he lay resting — a scene the household and Plutarch treat as an ill-boding sign of the killing to come.
Yes; Plutarch records several of his courtroom quips, including his retort to a man named Marcus Appius about failing to deliver on promised diligence, eloquence, and good faith — humor that added to his fame but also sharpened his rivalries.
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