What it is
The Life of Cicero is Plutarch's biography of the Roman orator, advocate and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), paired in the Parallel Lives with the Athenian Demosthenes — the two supreme orator-statesmen of Greece and Rome, each the voice of a free constitution in its last generation. The platform reads it as Plutarch's study of eloquence in public life, and of the gap between a man's gifts and his steadiness under pressure.
Its purpose and method
Plutarch's Cicero is drawn with sympathy and without flattery. He honours the eloquence, the wit, the genuine service — above all the suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy that briefly made Cicero the saviour of the Republic — while marking, just as clearly, the vanity, the vacillation, and the want of nerve in the gravest crises. The platform reads the Life under character and power and virtue in public life: Plutarch shows a man of real virtue and real gifts whose besetting weakness — an inordinate love of praise and a tendency to waver when resolve was needed — kept him from the greatness his talents promised.
What it argues about Cicero and the Republic
The Life is inseparable from the Republic's fall. Plutarch traces Cicero's rise through eloquence, his consulship and its glory, his exile and return, his fatal vacillation between the camps of the civil wars, and his final, brave end — proscribed by the Second Triumvirate and killed, his hands and head displayed in the Forum he had ruled with his voice. The platform reads this under decline: Cicero's tragedy is the tragedy of the constitutional statesman in an age when the constitution itself was dying, when eloquence could no longer hold against armies, and it is central to the decline of republics through character.
Influence and citation
The Life of Cicero, with the platform's own Cicero figure entry and his surviving works, is a principal source for the European image of the orator-statesman. The platform reads it with the standard discipline — Plutarch wrote a century and a half after Cicero, weighing character over event, and is notably franker about Cicero's faults than Cicero's own self-presentation. It is paired and contrasted with Demosthenes in the Demosthenes vs Cicero comparison.