Cicero. A Turbulent Life

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"This is the biography of a brilliant orator and writer, and a politician who twice held the reins of power." "Cicero's speeches and ideas have influenced European civilized values for two thousand years. Personally, he is accessible to us in his hundreds of letters, many of them to his dear friend Atticus. We can follow his busy life as a lawyer and politician, and the historic events in which he took part, from day to day (sometimes from hour to hour) as he nervously prepares a speech to deliver in the Forum or to the Senate, detects the supposedly incorruptible Brutus in a financial scam, puts a stop to a sexual escapade of the young Mark Antony, steadies Rome at a moment of acute vulnerability following Julius Caesar's assassination, vainly tries to prevent civil war ... or at more private moments, as he entertains dinner parties with his wit or irons out a problem with his wayward nephew." "In this account of Cicero's career, from his provincial origins to his tragic end, as the Republican cause he revered crashed round his ears, Anthony Everitt makes full use of Cicero's own words and those of his contemporaries."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved