Cicero - Politics and Persuasion in Ancient Rome

As the greatest Roman orator of his time, Cicero delivered over one hundred speeches in the law courts, in the senate and before the people of Rome. He was also a philosopher, a patriot and a private man. While his published speeches preserve scandalous accounts of the murder, corruption and violence that plagued Rome in the first century BC, his surviving letters give an exceptional glimpse into Cicero-s own personality and his reactions to events as they unravelled around him - events, he thought, which threatened to destabilize the system of government he loved and establish a tyranny over Rome. From his rise to power as a self-made man, Cicero-s career took him through the years of Sulla, and the civil war between Pompey and Caesar, to his own last fight against Mark Antony.Drawing chiefly on Cicero-s speeches and letters, as well as the most recent scholarship, Kathryn Tempest presents a new, highly readable narrative of Cicero-s life and times from his rise to prominence until hi