ce."

MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO

By REV. W. J. BRODRIBB

(106-43 B.C.)

[Illustration: Cicero. [TN]]

Marcus Tullius Cicero, the foremost orator of ancient Rome, one of her
leading statesmen, and the most brilliant and accomplished of her men of
letters, lived in those stirring later days of the Roman republic, that
age of revolution and civil wars, in which an old and decaying order of
things was passing away. It was the age of great and daring spirits, of
Catiline, Caesar, Pompey, Antony, with whose history Cicero's life is so
closely intertwined.

Born 106 B.C., at an old Italian town, Arpinum in Latium, of a good
family, and inheriting from his father, who was a man of considerable
culture, a moderate estate, he went as a boy to Rome, and there, under
the best teachers and professors, he learned law and oratory, Greek
philosophy, and Greek literature, acquiring in fact the universal
knowledge which he himself says in his essay "On the Orator" (De
Oratore), an orator ought to possess. An orator in the ancient world, we
should bear in mind, was first and chiefly a pleader of causes, causes
both legal and political--speaker alike, as we should say, at the bar
and in parliament. Hence the necessity for knowledge and information of
every kind. Cicero's first important speech, in his twenty-sixth year,
was the successful defence in a criminal trial of a client against one
of the favorites of the all-powerful Sulla, then dictator. After a visit
to Athens, and a tour in Asia Minor, where he profited by the society of
eminent professors of rhetoric and men of letters, he returned to Rome,
and at thirty years of age he was in the highest repute at the Roman
bar.

In 76 B.C., having been elected quaestor (a financial secretary, as we
may say) by a unanimous popular vote, he held an appointment in Sicily,
where he won the good opinion of two highly important interests, apt at
times to conflict, the traders and the revenue collectors. To this he
owed the glory of his successful impeachment of the infamous Verres, in
70 B.C., which he undertook at the request of the Sicilian provincials.
The bad man who had so hideously misgoverned them, felt himself crushed
by Cicero's opening speech, and went into voluntary exile. Cicero was
now a power in the state, and his rise up the official ladder was sure
and rapid; in 66 B.C. he was praetor, and supported in a great political
speech (Pro Lege Manilia) the appointment of Pomp