Marcus Tullius Cicero
106–43 BCE · Ancient Rome
“O tempora, o mores!”
#52of 111Best Authors
Influence79th pct
Popularity11th pct
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
Influence
The lineage through Marcus Tullius Cicero
Drew From(2)
who shaped Marcus Tullius Cicero
PlatoAncient Greece
via The Republic
- Cicero's De Re Publica is built on the Republic by design — he borrowed its title, its six books, and its dialogue form to write Rome's answer to Plato
- The Dream of Scipio that crowns it is a direct remaking of the Republic's Myth of Er, Plato's afterlife vision recast for a Roman statesman
- Read Plato first and Cicero's frame snaps into focus — you can see exactly what he's adapting and what he changes to make it Roman
AristotleAncient Greece
- Cicero is in direct conversation with the Nicomachean Ethics — he names it, argues over its authorship, and engages its Peripatetic doctrine head-on
- The Ethics is clearly reflected in De Finibus, especially Book II's treatment of virtue and the good
- Read Aristotle first and you'll see Cicero translating Greek ethical theory into a Roman key — right down to framing De Officiis as advice to his own son
Inspired(7)
who Marcus Tullius Cicero shaped
Dante AlighieriMedieval
- Dante's whole map of Hell rests on one Ciceronian distinction
- De Officiis splits injustice into force and fraud — "fraud the more hateful" — and Dante builds the lower circles of the Inferno on exactly that hierarchy (Canto 11)
- Cicero is the moral philosopher behind the architecture: Dante read him alongside Boethius after Beatrice's death and quotes him at length in the Convivio
Niccolò MachiavelliRenaissance
via The Prince
- The Prince is Cicero's De Officiis with the moral signs reversed — Cicero is the shadow text Machiavelli writes against
- Cicero used the fox and the lion to forbid the very deceit Machiavelli would later prescribe; the famous "be a fox and a lion" is a point-blank reply to De Officiis
- Machiavelli's chapters on liberality and mercy engage Cicero's directly, then invert them — virtue that gets a prince killed isn't virtue
Michel de MontaigneRenaissance
- Montaigne's chief philosophical quarry — he quotes and reworks Cicero throughout the Essays
- His essay "That to study philosophy is to learn to die" lifts its title and whole argument straight from the Tusculan Disputations: that the philosopher's life is a rehearsal for death
- Read Cicero here and you meet the voice Montaigne is forever turning over in his hands a millennium and a half later
David HumeEnlightenment
- The model for the kind of philosophy Hume set out to write — elegant, addressed to common life, built to last
- Hume devoured Cicero at Edinburgh and openly claimed his ancestry: in the Enquiry's closing section he identifies his own mitigated skepticism with Cicero's Academic skepticism
- The skeptical tradition that runs through the Enquiry has its Roman headwaters here
BoethiusAncient Rome
- Boethius knew his Cicero cold — he wrote a full commentary on him, the In Ciceronis Topica
- That intimacy feeds the Consolation: the turning wheel of Fortune and its parade of historical examples descend from Cicero's De Officiis and the Dream of Scipio
- Cicero's On Fate is the partner Boethius is arguing with when the Consolation takes up divine foreknowledge against free will
SenecaAncient Rome
- Seneca names Cicero directly, citing the letters to Atticus in his own Letters from a Stoic
- Cicero built the Latin vocabulary for Greek philosophy — and Seneca leans on it, borrowing his terms even where he disagrees
- The philosophical letter as a form of moral instruction starts here, a century before Seneca
Publius Cornelius TacitusAncient Rome
- Cicero is the rhetorical bedrock Tacitus was trained on — his Quintilian-led education was avowedly Ciceronian, and his Dialogus de Oratoribus is openly modeled on De Oratore, Brutus, and Orator
- But the Annals is also a swerve away: its clipped, jagged prose defines itself against Cicero's balanced period, reaching instead toward Sallust
In their words
Famous Quotes
“How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?”
“How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours?”
“The safety of the people shall be the highest law.”
“Let the welfare of the people be the ultimate law.”
Biography
About Marcus Tullius Cicero
Roman statesman, orator, lawyer, and philosopher, considered one of Rome's greatest prose stylists. His speeches, letters, and philosophical works established the model for Latin rhetorical prose and transmitted Greek philosophy to the Roman world. He was executed during the political purges following Caesar's assassination.
1 work