Letters 281–435
Cicero’s letters to friends span the period from 62 BC, when his political career was at its peak, to 43 BC, when he was put to death by the victorious Triumvirs.
The private correspondence of Rome’s most prolific public figure.
Cicero(Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician, andphilosopher, of whom weknowmore than of any other Roman, livedthrough the stirring erathat sawthe rise, dictatorship, and death ofJulius Caesar in atotteringrepublic. In his political speechesespecially and in hiscorrespondencewe see the excitement, tensionandintrigue ofpoliticsand the part heplayed in the turmoil of thetime. Of about106speeches, deliveredbefore the Roman people ortheSenate ifthey werepolitical, beforejurors if judicial,fifty-eightsurvive(a few ofthem incompletely). Inthe fourteenthcenturyPetrarch andotherItalian humanists discoveredmanuscriptscontainingmore than900letters of which more than 800 werewrittenby Cicero andnearly 100by others to him. These afford arevelationof the man allthe morestriking because most were notwritten forpublication.Sixrhetoricalworks survive and another infragments.Philosophicalworksincludeseven extant major compositionsand anumber ofothers; andsome lost.There is also poetry, someoriginal,some astranslationsfrom theGreek.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.
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