Cicero's name means chickpea, and he refused to change it
Marcus Tullius Cicero inherited a family nickname from an ancestor whose nose had a chickpea-like cleft. Urged to drop it on entering politics, he vowed to make it glorious instead. He did: his letters, rediscovered by Petrarch, helped spark the Renaissance, and his coinages still shape the language of philosophy.
Arpinum, perched in the hills roughly 100 kilometres southeast of Rome, was where Cicero was born on 3 January 106 BC, into a wealthy equestrian family. His father, too sickly for public life, poured himself into study; his mother Helvia was remembered by his brother Quintus as a careful housekeeper. Educated in Rome and Greece, Cicero became a leading lawyer and orator, though he considered politics his real achievement. Plutarch records his joke that he would outshine men named Swollen-ankled and Puppy.
As consul in 63 BC he crushed the Catilinarian conspiracy, but executing five conspirators without trial cost him exile in 58, with recall the following year. Disillusioned through the 50s, he governed Cilicia from 51 and sided with Pompey in Caesar's civil war, receiving Caesar's pardon afterwards. When Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, Cicero rallied the Senate against Mark Antony in the speeches known as the Philippics and promoted the young Octavian as a counterweight. Once Octavian, Antony and Lepidus formed the Second Triumvirate, Cicero was proscribed and killed in late 43 BC while trying to flee Italy, on Antony's orders.
His linguistic legacy is enormous. Translating Hellenistic philosophy into Latin, he invented a large share of its philosophical vocabulary, nearly 150 terms rendered from Greek, including words such as qualitas, quantitas and humanitas. A large portion of his writing survives, on rhetoric, philosophy and politics, and it remains one of the richest primary sources for the last years of the Republic.
His afterlife was just as striking. The Polish historian Tadeusz Zieliński argued that the Renaissance was above all a revival of Cicero, reached through Petrarch's discovery of his letters in the fourteenth century. His prestige peaked in the Enlightenment, when John Locke, David Hume, Montesquieu and Edmund Burke all drew heavily on him.
Source: Cicero
