Marcus Tullius Cicero - Thought and Influence

Greek philosophy and rhetoric moved fully into Latin for the first time in the speeches, letters and dialogues of Cicero (106-43 B.C.), the greatest orator of the late Roman Republic. A brilliant lawyer and the first of his family to achieve Roman office, Cicero was one of the leading political figures of the era of Julius Caesar, Pompey, Marc Antony and Octavian. A string of misjudged alliances saw him exiled and eventually murdered, but Cicero’s writings barely waned in influence over the centuries. It was through him that the thinkers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment discovered the riches of Classical rhetoric and philosophy.

Cicero’s inventive command of Latin prose provided a model for generations of textbooks and grammars. The Church Fathers explored Greek philosophy through Cicero’s translations, and many historians date the start of the Renaissance to Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero’s letters in 1345. Thinkers including John Locke, David Hume, Montesquieu  all borrowed thoughts and turns of phrase from Cicero. The first century critic Quintilian said that Cicero was “the name, not of a man, but of eloquence itself.”