Beskrivning
Beskrivning
Three postconsular speeches.Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician, and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in hiscorrespondencewe see the excitement, tensionandintrigue of politicsand the part heplayed in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106speeches, deliveredbefore the Roman people ortheSenate if they werepolitical, beforejurors if judicial,fifty-eightsurvive (a few ofthem incompletely). Inthe fourteenthcenturyPetrarch and otherItalian humanists discoveredmanuscriptscontainingmore than 900letters of which more than 800 werewrittenby Cicero andnearly 100by others to him. These afford arevelationof the man allthe morestriking because most were notwritten forpublication. Sixrhetoricalworks survive and another infragments.Philosophical worksincludeseven extant major compositionsand anumber of others; andsome lost.There is also poetry, someoriginal,some as translationsfrom theGreek. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.
