Talk:Cicero

Good Article Status

In my opinion, this article is ready for a GA nomination. Is there any particular reason why it has not yet been nominated? RomanHistorian (talk) 23:57, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Well for one thing it shouldn't contain really bad errors. The opening comments on Arpinum are really seriously wrong. Arpinum entered the full Roman citizenhip under the lex Valeria plebsicite of 188 BC, and in consequence all its citizens then living and born later were full Roman citizens. The fact that Romans citizens could be born and even live elsewhere than Rome is an interesting issue, likewise the various fine gradations of attitudes within the civitas regarding old and new, and place of birth and residence. Nonetheless Roman life was governed by law and custom, and one of the most fundamental distinctions of all was the legal distinction between being a Roman citizen and not. Cicero was, and had the filiation and tribe to prove it. To claim that he was on the other side of this great divide, as this article does, is such a serious misunderstanding of Roman ways and Cicero's life that it's hard to imagine how the responsible author(s) can really understand anything about him or his society at all. Appietas (talk) 07:18, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

You are really polluting a lot of articles. I am going to try to find a moderator, as you are causing a true mess. Oh, and by the way, you are completely wrong about Arpinum. The original entry was right. I have pasted the entry below.

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Cicero was born in 106 BC in Arpinum, a hill town 100 kilometres (60 miles) south of Rome. Arpinum was techincally a subordinate ally of Rome for all of Cicero's life. So, although a great master of Latin rhetoric and composition, Cicero was not "Roman" in the traditional sense, and was quite self-conscious of this for his entire life.

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Nothing in that statement is incorrect, factually or otherwise.

According to Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (which you can see here:[1])

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Arpinum is called both a municipium and a praefectura (Cic. ad Fam. XIII.11; Festus, s.v. Praefectura); and Cicero, a native of this place, obtained the highest honours that Rome could confer.

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A municipium under the republic was a city with citizenship rights, but inferior citizenship rights to a colonia. The municipium was more independent, and could govern itself. Thus, it was not truly "Roman" (but then nothing outside of Rome truly was until the time of the Empire). Even the entry on Arpinum lists it as gaining the status of municipium, although seems to suggest that, at the time of Cicero's birth, its status was even less than a full municipium.

Something else you don't seem to understand is that, under the republic "Roman" was not the same as "Roman Citizen". Only "true" Romans were from the city of Rome. Everyone else, citizen or not, was not a "Roman" in this sense, and thus not regarded as equals by the political (or even plebeian) class in Rome. Until the time of Augustus, the Roman Republic consisted of the city of Rome, with a network of what were technically "allies", but certainly not "Romans". The transformation of Rome from a city-state with a network of dependencies into the capital of a world empire began under Caesar, but was not completed until Augustus. It wasn't even until the time of Diocletian (around 300 AD) that Italy itself was even reduced to the status of an ordinary province. RomanHistorian (talk) 08:27, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

That's utter rubbish. Many Roman families moved to other cities - such as Capua - and were very much STILL Romans as they had children who were Roman citizens the same as they were. Your viewpoint here is borderline lunatic-fringe. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.111.63.192 (talk • contribs) 04:53, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

A confusingly worded sentence

"He wrote more than three-quarters of surviving Latin literature from the period of his adult life"

I find this sentence quite misleading. It's easy (and probably more natural) to misread it as "During his adult life, Cicero wrote more than three-quarters of surviving Latin literature" -- a much stronger claim that's not supported by the reference. In fact, it was only by looking at the reference that I understood what the quoted sentence meant. I'd like to suggest that someone rewrite it, or maybe even delete it (how relevant is this statistic anyway?) but since I'm new to Wikipedia I won't do it myself :) 216.71.110.222 (talk) 14:35, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

Successor in Cilicia

Then Cicero left the province on 30 July to his brother Quintus, who had accompanied him on his governorship as his legate. Is this accurate? When I read Cicero's letters of 50 BC [2], in particular those to Atticus, he did indeed first think of handing the province to his brother but in the end, in particular after the looming threat of another Parthian invasion seemed to have passed, he made up his mind and left the province in the hand of his quaestor Caelius. Though Caelius was rather young and inexperienced it seemed to be more prudent to Cicero to chose him as successor rather than to risk being reproached to install his own brother and thus prolonging his own influence on the province. --Proofreader (talk) 14:48, 27 August 2021 (UTC)

He wrote more than three-quarters of extant Latin literature that is known to have existed in his lifetime

This is quite absurd, whether referring to actual books existing in Cicero's time, or books of his time that have survived to our own time. Any decent Loeb collection will disprove it.2A02:AA1:1029:5099:61C5:D47E:EFD2:2CE0 (talk) 20:49, 30 December 2021 (UTC)