Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
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from Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, 1906
106-43 B.C., the foremost orator of ancient Rome, one of her leading statemen, and the most brilliant and accomplished of her men of letters, lived in those stirring later day of the Roman republic, the age of revolution and civil war, in which an old and decaying order of things was passing away. It was the age of great and daring spirits, of Catiline, Caesar, Pompey, Antony, with whose history Cicero’s life is closely intertwined….
…In 63 BC., at the age of forty-four, he was consul, the highest dignity attainable to a Roman; in that memorable year he foiled, by bold promptitude, the revolutionary plot of Catiline, in which many distinquished Romans—-Caesar, it was even said, among them—-were implicated. He was now at the height of his fame; ‘father of his country’ he was actually called; for a brief space he was with all classes the great man of the day….
here it be in latin and google for saxon
http://gracie.smsu.edu/~cicero/Orationes/pro_murena.htm
On Cicero, see also:
Biography of “Cicero” by Plutarch
http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/cicero.html
A somewhat special introduction to Cicero’s “On Friendship and Old Age” —- I particularly like the “The Six Mistakes of Man” at the bottom…
http://www.btinternet.com/~glynhughes/squashed/cicero.htm