a single politician of the roman republic was so feared that killing him was not enough. after beheading him, they pierced his tongue with needles. the weapon they feared was not his sword, because he had none: it was his voice. today marks the anniversary of the birth of marcus tullius cicero, in arpinvm, on 3 january 106 bce.
cicero was what the romans called with a certain contempt a homo novus, a “new man”: he came from no senatorial dynasty, had no ancestors who had held magistracies, inherited no military glory or clientage. in a society obsessed with lineage, that left him practically without options. his only tool was the word. and with it alone he climbed to the very top, reaching the consulship in 63 bce, the supreme office of the state, without having won a battle.
that same year he dismantled the catilinarian conspiracy, a plot to take rome by force, and he did it from the rostrum: with four devastating speeches he turned the senate and public opinion against the plotters. he proved something uncomfortable for men of arms: a well-built sentence, launched at the right moment, could bring down a conspirator more effectively than a legion. the senate granted him the title of pater patriae, father of the fatherland — the first in historical times to receive it (centuries earlier tradition had given it only to romulus and to camillus, the “second founder”). his prose fixed cultured latin for the next two thousand years.
he became one of the most feared political voices in rome without any military command, without unsheathing once. that was exactly the threat.
but rome did not forgive dissent, and the oratory that had raised him ended up condemning him. after caesar’s assassination, cicero made the mistake of believing he still lived in a republic and launched against mark antony a series of fierce speeches, the philippics, calling him a tyrant and a public enemy. when antony sealed his alliance with octavian and lepidus in the second triumvirate, in 43 bce, the three drew up proscription lists to eliminate their enemies. the edict that publishes them declares a military purpose — to march against caesar’s assassins beyond the sea — and denies in writing that anyone was hunted for their riches; yet appian himself, writing as narrator, says names were added to the list on account of their wealth, because the three needed money for the war. cicero did not top the list: appian, who copies the whole edict, puts four relatives of the triumvirs themselves at its head — paulus, lepidus’s brother, and lucius caesar, antony’s uncle, the first two. the trade is told by plutarch, and only by him: octavian gave up cicero after holding out two days and yielding on the third; lepidus gave up his brother paulus; antony, his uncle lucius caesar. of the three names in that bargain, the only one who did not survive was cicero.
the revenge was calculatedly humiliating. the hitmen caught up with him fleeing near his villa; according to the sources, he offered his neck without resisting. they cut off his head and his right hand — the one that had written the philippics — and sent them to rome. the single hand is what appian, dio and the livian epitome say, and plutarch too in his life of antony; the plural, «the hands», comes from plutarch’s own life of cicero and from livy’s own text. in rome, according to cassius dio (47.8) — who writes two and a half centuries later, and is the only ancient historian who tells it: the word «tongue» does not appear once in the account of the death given by plutarch, appian, velleius and the livian epitome — fulvia, antony’s wife, took the head, pulled out the tongue and pierced it again and again with the pins of her hair. then they nailed the remains to the rostra, the tribune of the forum from which cicero had spoken a thousand times, so that the whole city would understand the price of opening one’s mouth.
the message was unmistakable: whoever speaks ends up like this. and yet their calculation turned out wrong. of antony there remain mainly the insults cicero dedicated to him; of fulvia, this macabre scene handed down by the tradition hostile to antony — amplified by octavian and his enemies — which modern historiography reads as posthumous propaganda rather than reliable reporting. of cicero there remain the speeches, the treatises of philosophy and rhetoric, the letters still studied in universities. they silenced the man with brutal efficiency. two millennia later, we still read precisely what they wanted silenced.
