Cicero's Philippics Against Antony — Final Battle for the Republic
Cicero attacked Mark Antony in fourteen speeches between September 44 and April 43 BC and was killed for them. He had spent the years of Caesar's dictatorship out of politics writing philosophy, and Caesar's murder brought him back at sixty-two, arguing that the Republic could be restored if Antony were stopped. The speeches were named after Demosthenes' attacks on Philip of Macedon, a comparison Cicero made himself. They are among the most sustained pieces of invective in Latin: Antony as a drunkard, a bankrupt, a prostitute in his youth, a man who vomited in a public assembly, a forger of Caesar's papers who had sold decrees and citizenships out of a dead man's cash box. The political strategy behind them was to build up Caesar's nineteen-year-old heir Octavian as a counterweight, on the calculation that the young man could be used and then discarded — Cicero was reported to have said that he should be praised, honoured and raised up, in a Latin phrase that also means got rid of. Octavian heard about it. He marched on Rome in August 43, took the consulship at nineteen, and then met Antony and Lepidus on an island near Bononia and formed a triumvirate with proscription lists. Cicero was on Antony's list and was caught near his villa at Formiae in December, leaning out of his litter to offer his neck. His head and hands were nailed to the rostra, and Antony's wife is said to have pierced the tongue with a hairpin. Octavian, who had allowed the name onto the list, is reported years later to have found a grandson reading Cicero, taken the scroll, read a long passage, and handed it back with the remark that he had been a learned man and a lover of his country.
- Year: 44 BCE
- Category: Political
