rank of capitan-pasha. In the next Persian war, after conducting successfully one campaign, he was signally defeated by Shah-Abbas the Great, and died of chagrin in 1605.—J. S., G.
CICCARELLI, Alfonso, an Italian physician, was born at Bevagna, and died in 1580. In 1564 he published at Padua a work "On Truffles." He made himself notorious for literary forgeries, and fabricated genealogies and family histories. He was arrested by Gregory XIII. for these falsifications, and was executed, after having his hand cut off.—J. H. B.
CICERO, Marcus Tullius, the greatest of the Roman orators, was born on the 3rd January, 106 b.c., at Arpinum, where the family, who were of equestrian rank, had been long settled, and where the grandfather of the orator, who was living at the birth of his grandson, was a man of considerable influence, Cicero records an observation of this busy and energetic ancestor, which might have been pronounced by the orator himself in the wider arena which he eventually occupied—that the men of his day were like Syrian slaves; "the more Greek they knew, the greater knaves they were." And we know on the same authority that when the old man had one of the municipal disputes in which he delighted referred to the consul at Rome, he received from the first magistrate of the republic a reply somewhat to the effect, that it was a pity a man of old Cicero's energy should have preferred to be the first man of a village, rather than a considerable personage at Rome. Marcus Tullius Cicero, the father of the orator, though prevented by infirm health from occupying that distinguished position in public life which his talents and literary culture would otherwise have secured for him, was not unknown to several of the leading statesmen of Rome; and when, with a view to the proper education of his two sons, Marcus and Quintus, he removed to the capital, his society was courted by such men as the orators M. Antonius and L. Crassus, and the jurists Q. Scævola and C. Aculeo. The sons of this Aculeo, whose sister Helvia was the mother of the orator, and their cousins, the young Ciceros, pursued their studies together under masters carefully selected for them by Crassus, whose accomplishments as an orator, and experience as a statesman, peculiarly fitted him for the task of directing their education. With but one exception, Cicero's masters at Rome were Greeks. One of them, Archias of Antioch, though of great celebrity in his day as a poet, would now be forgotten but for his connection with the orator, who more than discharged the obligations he was under to his master, by defending in one of the most splendid of his orations the poet's right to be a citizen of Rome. The character and pursuits of this master, no less than his instructions, were influential in forming the character and developing the tastes of Cicero. While under the care of Archias, the pupil imitated the master in the abundance and in the indifferent quality of his verses, When a mere boy he had composed a poem in tetrameters, called "Pontius Glaucus," which was extant in Plutarch's time. He produced before his twenty-fifth year one entitled "Marius," and another "Limon;" and translated into Latin verse the Phænomena of Aratus. These efforts of the young poetaster, although hardly rising to mediocrity, served to exhibit the diversity, and no doubt contributed to the improvement of his taste. In his sixteenth year Cicero, having exchanged his boy's dress for the manly gown, was placed under the tutelage of his father's friend, Scævola the augur; and upon his death was committed to the care of the pontifex of the same name, by whom he was initiated into an acquaintance with the constitution of the republic, and the principles of jurisprudence, which, together with the lessons of practical wisdom that he received from the same admirable instructor, gave a distinct direction to his talents and ambition from which they never swerved.
In 89 b.c. Cicero, who was then of age to bear arms, fulfilled the duty imposed upon every citizen of the republic of serving at least one campaign, by following Pompeius Strabo, father of the great Pompey, to the Marsic war. On its termination in the following year he returned to Rome, and resumed his forensic and philosophical studies under the most famous of the numerous Greek teachers who then resided in Rome. For upwards of six years from the date of his short term of soldiering, although haunted by no common ambition of "burning in the forum," he kept himself sedulously aloof from public life—the arena of which, indeed, offered little temptation to a youth of his diposition and talents, at a period when the furious rivalry of Marius and Sulla had annihilated order and government, and committed the lives and fortunes of the community into the hands of a brutal soldiery. During this period—one of the most calamitous in the history of Rome—Cicero attended first the lectures of Phædrus the Epicurean; then those of Philo, the chief of the new academy, whom the invasion of Greece by Mithridates had driven from Athens to Rome. These were his masters in philosophy; to the first he was chiefly indebted for a spirit of enthusiasm in the pursuit of philosophical subjects; to the second he owed many of the opinions which he put forth in his philosophical works. Diodotus, the Stoic, who lived and died in his house, was his master in logic; and in rhetoric he enjoyed the advantage of being instructed by one of the most famous masters of the art, Apollonius Molo of Rhodes, who, like Philo, had been driven from Greece by the Mithridatic invasion. About this period, simply, it would appear, for the sake of practice in composition, he drew up the treatise "De Inventione Rhetorica," translated the Œconomics of Xenophon, and added a poem or two to the catalogue of his early failures. With an industry and perseverance which were prophetic of his future eminence, he daily exercised himself in declamation—haranguing his friends and companions sometimes in Latin and sometimes in Greek, upon the subjects and according to the rules prescribed by his various masters. When Sulla became master of Rome, and with the establishment of his power a decent although ghastly tranquillity began to reign in the capital, it was thought time that the youth upon whom had been lavished so many advantages of culture, and whose assiduity, no less than his abilities, had answered all the expectations of friends and patrons, should at last enter upon the exercise of his profession; and accordingly Cicero, then in his twenty-fifth year, came forward as a pleader in 81 b.c. The earliest of his extant speeches, although not the first he delivered, is that in favour of P. Quinctius. The first time he appeared in the forum—his former pleadings being in civil suits—was in defence of Sex. Roscius of Ameria, who, at the instance of Chrysogonus, a freedman of Sulla, was accused of parricide. The defence of Roscius, which was undertaken not without danger from the partisans of Sulla, was successful; Cicero, in the course of his pleading, boldly execrating the malice and cruelty of Chrysogonus, and indirectly reprehending the tyranny and injustice of the dictator. So decided was the impression that the fervour and eloquence of his address made upon his auditory, that as he himself says, the public voice at once placed him among the first orators of Rome. If there was any danger to be apprehended from Sulla, when his proceedings during the struggle with Marius were thus publicly called in question, Cicero, either ignorant of it or encouraged to contemn it by the success of his defence of Roscius, within the two following years once more bearded the dictator in the forum: for having undertaken the defence of a woman of Arretium, against whose title to appear in court the preliminary objection was urged that she belonged to a town which in the recent troubles had been deprived of the rights of citizenship, Cicero declaimed with all his power of invective against the measure of deprivation, pronouncing it unconstitutional, and therefore null and void. In this defence he was again fortunate enough to carry his judges with him, and nothing could be more auspicious for his professional career than the character of defender of the oppressed, in which this and the Roscian success established him with the populace. But after two years of assiduous professional labour the state of his health, which had never been robust, began to create serious alarm among his friends, and by the advice of his physicians, which was seconded by his own desire to improve his style of oratory under Greek masters, he departed for Athens. There he found his old schoolfellow, Atticus, who had quitted Rome in 85 b.c., and had during a long residence in the capital of Greece acquired those elegant tastes in all matters of art and literature, which with Cicero, who after this visit to Athens was bound to him by the strongest ties of personal affection, and with many other illustrious contemporaries, were the subject of unbounded panegyric. In the company of this accomplished and amiable person Cicero spent six months at Athens, extending his acquaintance with philosophy in the school of Antiochus of Ascalon, occasionally listening to the lectures of Zeno, the Epicurean, and assiduously studying rhetoric under Demetrius Syrus. When he left Athens it was to pursue, in an extensive tour through Asia Minor, the same objects which had engaged his attention in the city. He cultivated everywhere the society of men of letters, and besought their advice; if they were rhetoricians, obtained from them examples of their art;
