#  Cicero ("Tully") 

 



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*Thyng that I speke, it moot be bare and pleyn.*  
*I sleep nevere on the Mount of Pernaso,*  
*Ne lerned Marcus Tullius Scithero*.  
(FranPro V.720-22)  
   
  
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC - 46 BC) is cited by Chaucer as an expert on rhetoric (mainly because of the *Rhetorica ad Herennium*, which he may not have written) and (in the Melibee) as a source of wise *sententiae*, drawn from such essays as *De senectute*. His major works are:

*De officiis*, tr. Walter Miller, Loeb, Cambridge, MA. 1913 \[PA 6296.D5\].  
*De senectute, De amicitia, De divinatione*, tr. William Armistead Falconer, Loeb, New York. 1938 \[PA 6295.A3\].  
*Tusculan disputations*, tr. J.E. King. Loeb, New York. 1927 \[PA 6304.T6 1971x\].  
*The Letters to his Friends*, tr. W. Glynn Williams, Loeb, Cambridge, MA. 1972-79 (4 vols.) \[Widener Lc 37.519.86\].  
*Rhetorica ad Herennium*, tr. Harry Caplan. Loeb, Cambridge, MA. 1954 \[PA6156.R4\].

His "Dream of Scipio" was known to Chaucer with the commentary by Macrobius:

Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius Macrobius, *Commentary on the Dream of Scipio*, tr. William Harris Stahl. New York. 1972 \[PA6498.E6 S8\].

For further references, see the [Cicero Home Page](http://sites.la.utexas.edu/cicero/) maintained at the University of Texas at Austin. Many of his works, in the original and in translation, are available on the [Internet Classics Archive](http://classics.mit.edu/index.html) maintained at MIT. (Unfortunately, the Archive does not have the *Rhetorica ad Herennium*, which is not available on the web).  
  
For a biography of Cicero, see [Plutarch's](http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/cicero.html)*[ *Life of Cicero*](http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/cicero.html)*, translated by John Dryden.