Marcus Tullius Cicero

'Indeed, Cato,' said I, 'you use words illustrious and declaring what you wish!

'The things which you have said so far, Cato,' said I, 'you could say the same, if you followed Pyrrho or Aristo.

And so, although in that discussion which was held with Torquatus we were not slack, yet this struggle prepared with the Stoics is keener.

[Cicero argued] that to the Academic wise man the second place is given by all those of the other sects who think themselves wise, since each must necessarily claim the first place for himself;

[Cicero held] that nothing can be perceived by man, and that nothing is left to the wise man but the most diligent inquiry into truth;

Not long ago, when our friend Atticus was with me at my place near Cumae, word came to us from Marcus Varro that he had arrived from Rome the evening before, and that, had he not been worn out by the journey, he would have come on to us at once.

for I, as consul, all but conducted that most illustrious man's chariot into the city.

'In the first place, you seem to me' (he was addressing me by name) 'when you name the ancient natural philosophers, to do the very thing that seditious citizens are wont to do, when they bring forward certain illustrious men of old whom they declare to have been champions of the people, that they themselves may seem to be like them.

We had come the earlier, indeed, because it had been arranged that, if there were a wind, Lucullus should sail to his estate near Neapolis and I to mine near Pompeii.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, the greatest of Roman orators and the chief master of Latin prose style, was born at Arpinum, Jan.

To his contemporaries Cicero was primarily the great forensic and political orator of his time, and the fifty-eight speeches which have come down to us bear testimony to the skill, wit, eloquence, and passion which gave him his pre-eminence.

As a philosopher, Cicero’s most important function was to make his countrymen familiar with the main schools of Greek thought.

And so Marcus Cicero, in the book which he wrote on fate, when he said that this question was most obscure and most entangled, declares that the philosopher Chrysippus too did not extricate himself in it, in these words:

Those verses of Homer also lend support to this opinion, which Cicero rendered into Latin:

And, that a poet may not be too cheap a witness, take Cicero as your authority for the honor in which this fish was held in the eyes of Publius Scipio Africanus, the famous conqueror of Numantia.

But now, to free myself from all reproach, I shall set out in full the opinions of the philosophers concerning the nature of the gods.

and it was precisely when I seemed least engaged in it that I was most a philosopher — as is shown both by my speeches, which are full of the maxims of philosophers, and by my intimacy with the most learned men, in whom my house has always abounded, and by my having been trained by those eminent teachers, Diodotus, Philo, Antiochus, and Posidonius.

While there are many matters in philosophy that even now have by no means been adequately explained, the inquiry into the nature of the gods is one of peculiar difficulty and obscurity, as you, Brutus, are very well aware — an inquiry which is at once the noblest of all for the understanding of the mind and indispensable for the regulation of religion.

You will receive, then, this little work, composed by lamplight during these now shorter nights — since that earlier gift of my longer vigils has already appeared under your name — and you will taste the kind of exercises which I have been accustomed to practise, when I transfer to this oratorical manner of ours the matters that are discussed in the schools as abstract theses.

whereas I have, by way of amusement, cast into the form of commonplaces those very propositions which the Stoics scarcely uphold even in their lecture-halls and at their leisure.

And because these propositions are astonishing and run counter to everyone's opinion — they are even called by the Stoics themselves *paradoxa* — I wished to test whether they could be brought out into the light, that is, into the forum, and stated in such a way as to win assent, or whether learned discourse is one thing and popular discourse another;

Marcus Cicero, if at that time, when he escaped the daggers of Catiline—by which he was attacked together with his country—he had fallen;

Marcus Cicero, tossed about among the likes of Catiline and Clodius, among the Pompeys and the Crassuses—some open enemies, some doubtful friends—while he is buffeted along with the state and holds it back as it founders, only to be swept away at last, neither at rest in prosperity nor able to endure adversity—how often does he curse that very consulship of his, praised by himself not without cause, but without end!

Cicero called himself half a free man.

I drive the cautery into the ambition by which Marcus Tullius bought an orb of citron-wood for five hundred thousand sesterces, by which Asinius Gallus pays twice as much for a table of the same Mauritanian wood.