Bust of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Musei Capitolini
The best-known ancient portrait of Cicero, in the Capitoline Museums. It is the face of a man who reached the consulship without a consular ancestor — a novus homo in a republic where the office normally passed within a few dozen families, and who got there by speaking.
Cicero's consulship of 63 BC is remembered for the Catilinarian conspiracy and for the four speeches that ended it. Both the crisis and its handling rested on oratory: he had no army, no faction of his own worth the name and no inherited standing, and he governed for a year by persuading the senate and the crowd. The executions he authorised without trial were legal under a senatorial emergency decree and were the charge on which he was exiled five years later. See Cicero's consular year and the triumph of oratory.
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