Cicero's gloria: a tragedy

[ricardienne]

These noble sentiments are often echoed in the letters and speeches he wrote at this time. After Caesar's murder, Cicero felt himself in imminent peril. But he was still more anxious for the State than for himself...Finally, in the Fourteenth Philippic, "after the high Roman fashion, (he) spoke weighty and solemn words on the shortness of life and the eternity of glory. This speech, the last public utterance which we have of Cicero's is in his highest strain, and is in every respect worthy of the orator who delivered it, of the language he spoke, and of the Roman name." It was the twenty-first of April, 43 B.C. In December of that same year he was done to death by the agents of Antony.
. . .
"Rome's least mortal mind" remained to the end very mortal still. But all who know Cicero intimately must admit that the glory he hungered after was no mean or vulgar thing. It inspired him to live nobly and to die bravely, like one of his old Roman heroes.

--Francis A. Sullvan: "Cicero and Gloria." TAPA 72 (1941).