Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 3.djvu/101

MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO 63 MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO BY REV. W. J. BRODRIBB (106-43 B.c.) ARCUS TULLIUS CICERO, the foremost ora- tor of ancient Rome, one of her leading statesmen, and the most brilliant and accom- plished of her men of letters, lived in those stir- ring 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 1 06 B.C., at an old Italian town, Ar- pinum in Latium, of a good family, and inherit- ing from his father, who was a man of consider- able 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, acquir- ing 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 re- quest 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 Pompey to the conduct of the