Quotes About Cicero

As praetor, Cicero was expected to take in promising pupils from good families to study law with him, and in May, after the Senate recess, a new young intern of sixteen joined his chambers. This was Marcus Caelius Rufus from Interamnia, the son of a wealthy banker and prominent election official of the Velina tribe. Cicero agreed, largely as a political favor, to supervise the boy's training

Always very pious, these crooked accountants,' observed Cicero.)

Cicero often asked me to perform small services for Milo during that campaign. For example, I went back through our files and prepared lists of our old supporters for him to canvass. I also set up meetings between him and Cicero's clients in the various tribal headquarters. I even took him bags of money that Cicero had raised from wealthy donors.

Cicero's first law of rhetoric, that a speech must always contain at least one surprise.

History of science is a relay race, my painter friend. Copernicus took over his flag from Aristarchus, from Cicero, from Plutarch; and Galileo took that flag over from Copernicus.

Princeton applicants had to know Virgil, Cicero's orations, and Latin grammar and also had to be 'so well acquainted with Greek as to render any part of the four Evangelists in that language into Latin or English.

Annoyed that although outlawed in Rome, astrology was nevertheless alive and well, Cicero noted that at Cannae in 216 B.C., Hannibal, leading about 50,000 Carthaginian and allied troops, crushed the much larger Roman army, slaughtering more than 60,000 of its 80,000 soldiers. "Did all the Romans who fell at Cannae have the same horoscope?" Cicero asked. "Yet all had one and the same end.

As I continued through Cicero's pages, I found much more material celebrating my way of life.

Death is not natural for a state as it is for a human being, for whom death is not only necessary, but frequently even desirable.

the Stoics, from which notably Cicero (Rep., 6, 17) and Pliny the Elder (NH, 2,13) drew their inspiration, made the sun the soul or spirit of the world, 'who governs not only the seasons and the lands, but the very stars and the sky' (ibid.). So the imperial cult appropriated some solar theology.

To be endowed with strength by nature, to be actuated by the powers of the mind, and to have a certain spirit almost divine infused into you.

Cicero had lived through terrible times and his fundamental aim was to make sure that they never returned. He stood for the rule of law and the maintenance of a constitution in which all social groups could play a part, but where the Senate took the lead according to ancestral tradition.

For most people bedtime was early, although Cicero admitted to writing speeches or books and reading papers at night (there was a Latin word for it, lucubrare—to work by lamplight).

Caesar remarked that Cicero had won greater laurels than those worn by a general in his Triumph, for it meant more to have extended the frontiers of Roman genius than of its empire.

As many as three hundred senators were butchered—among them Cicero

As Cicero drily put it: "We must apply to our fellow-countrymen for virtue, but for our culture to the Greeks.

The same may be said for excessive delight, lust and fear. The way forward, Cicero wrote, was to distance oneself from the cares and desires of life.

Cicero asked the Senators if they wished to banish Catilina. This was an ill-judged intervention. Embarrassed by Catilina's presence, the majority said nothing. Cleverly retrieving the situation, Cicero then asked if they would order him to banish Quintus Lutatius Catulus, one of the House's most respected members. They roared back, "No." This allowed the Consul to claim that, by its silence, the Senate had in fact consigned the revolutionary to exile.

Cicero could not boast a long line of noble ancestors, as his colleagues and competitors constantly did

Cicero—were relieved that peace and, above all, certainty had returned

AS a rule Crassus did not bear grudges. This was not because he had a good heart but because other people rarely engaged his emotions. He had little difficulty in dropping friends or making up quarrels as occasion served. Cicero, whose view of friendship was different, had a very low opinion of him.

One of these was Philo of Larisa, head of the Academy in Athens, founded by Plato three hundred years before. He inspired Cicero with a passion for philosophy, and in particular for the theories of Skepticism, which asserted that knowledge of the nature of things is in the nature of things unattainable. Such ideas were well judged to appeal to a student of rhetoric who had learned to argue all sides of a case.

In his early twenties Cicero wrote the first two volumes of a work on "invention"—that is to say, the technique of finding ideas and arguments for a speech; in it he noted that the most important thing was "that we do not recklessly and presumptuously assume something to be true." This resolute uncertainty was to be a permanent feature of his thought.

The last year of Cicero's life, full of glory and eloquence no doubt, was ruinous to the Roman People.