We know more about Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.E.) than about any other person in the classical world: over 900 of his letters are extant, some to family, some to friends, and some to Cicero from his aquaintances; 58 of his speeches survive and we have fragments of others; there are 5 works on rhetorical theory which may be added to the 13 essays on philosophical topics (many in several books); and several fragments of his poetry have come down to us. The variety of the material and the superabundance of detail presents us with an image of Cicero that displays all his faults along with his virtues.

Plutarch (ca. 48-121 C.E.) was a prolific writer of rhetoric, philosophy, history, and biography. He wrote a series of parallel lives of famous Greeks and Romans with explicit comparisons after each pair. The Life of Cicero was paired with a Life of Demosthenes , who was the greatest orator among the Greeks. Both the Life of Demosthenes and the comparison are extant. Plutarch realized the difference between biography and history, and his biographies are, thus, not intended to be full historical accounts of a person's life. Instead, the biography emphasizes the person's moral virtues, public and private life, and well-known sayings. In addition, Plutarch is given to moralizing on his own part. In many of the Roman lives (including the Cicero ) Plutarch may have known of and looked at sources written in Latin, including the subject's own writings, but probably relied more heavily on Greek sources. He is often unreliable about the details of events. Nevertheless, his biographies make interesting reading and were enormously popular in the Renaissance. Many of Shakespeare's history plays, including Julius Caesar and Cariolanus are based on translations of the Lives .

Go to the Text of Plutarch's Life of Cicero.