AThe Annals

Cicero

106 BCE – 43 BCE · Italy · Politics, Philosophy, Law

Republican theory and oratory that still frame constitutional argument.

Index entry

Cicero is currently a short index entry. The research desk can draft the full profile — achievements, works, living legacy and what is documented about the family line.

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Continuity of ideas

Who shaped Cicero, and who they shaped

Inherited from1

  • Zeno of Citium

    334 BCE – 262 BCE · Philosophy

    Cicero transmits Stoic ethics into Latin in De Officiis, the channel by which the Stoa reached Europe.

Passed the work to2

  • Augustine of Hippo

    354 – 430 · Philosophy, Literature

    Cicero's Hortensius turned Augustine to philosophy, as he records in the Confessions.

  • Niccolò Machiavelli

    1469 – 1527 · Politics, Philosophy

    Machiavelli writes The Prince against Cicero's De Officiis, inverting its counsel of honest rule.

Sources and references

Numbered markers in the text above point to the entries below. Each links to a primary document, archival collection or scholarly reference where the claim about Cicero can be checked.

  1. 1.
    Primary texts and first editions by or about Cicero

    Internet Archive · Primary source

  2. 2.

Nearby in the annals

Marcus Aurelius

121 – 180

Emperor whose private Meditations founded modern Stoic self-help.

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Boethius

477 – 524

Wrote Consolation of Philosophy awaiting execution; medieval Europe's bridge to antiquity.

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Thomas Aquinas

1225 – 1274

Fused Aristotle with Christianity; natural-law theory still shapes law and ethics.

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