of Pharsalus and later murdered in Egypt. Cicero returned to Italy,
where Caesar treated him magnanimously, and for some time he
devoted himself to philosophical and rhetorical writing. In 46 B.C.
he divorced his wife Terentia, to whom he had been married for
thirty years and married the young and wealthy Publilia in order to
relieve himself from financial difficulties; but her also he shortly
divorced. Caesar, who had now become supreme in Rome, was
assassinated in 44 B.C., and though Cicero was not a sharer in the
conspiracy, he seems to have approved the deed. In the confusion
which followed he supported the cause of the conspirators against
Antony; and when finally the triumvirate of Antony, Octavius, and
Lepidus was established, Cicero was included among the
proscribed, and on December 7, 43 B.C., he was killed by agents
of Antony. His head and hand were cut off and exhibited at Rome.

The most important orations of the last months of his life were the
fourteen "Philippics" delivered against Antony, and the price of
this enmity he paid with his life.

To his contemporaries Cicero was primarily the great forensic and
political orator of his time, and the fifty-eight speeches which have
come down to us bear testimony to the skill, wit, eloquence, and
Passion which gave him his pre-eminence. But these speeches of
necessity deal with the minute details of the occasions which
called them forth, and so require for their appreciation a full
knowledge of the history, political and personal, of the time. The
letters, on the other hand, are less elaborate both in style and in the
handling of current events, while they serve to reveal his
personality, and to throw light upon Roman life in the last days of
the Republic in an extremely vivid fashion. Cicero as a man, in