Marcus Tullius Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) was a Roman statesman, orator and philosopher, born at Arpinum into a family that had never held high office. He rose through the courts to the consulship in 63 BC, when he suppressed the conspiracy of Catiline, and spent the rest of his career trying to preserve the republic against Caesar, Pompey and finally Mark Antony, whose soldiers killed him. In the enforced leisure of his last years he wrote the philosophical works, including On the Republic, On Duties, the Tusculan Disputations and the essays on friendship and old age, that carried Greek thought into Latin and into the Middle Ages.