In 43 BC the severed head and hands of Marcus Tullius Cicero were nailed to the Rostra in the Roman Forum on Mark Antony’s orders, punishment for what he had spoken and written. This episode traces how a new man from Arpinum with a name meaning chickpea used only his voice and intellect to reach the consulship. We cover his coining of roughly 150 Latin terms to translate Greek philosophy, his dangerous defense of Sextus Roscius against the dictator Sulla’s ally, his study abroad in Greece and Rhodes, and the evidence-driven prosecution of Gaius Verres that routed the champion advocate Hortensius.

We then examine the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BC, the Senate debate between Caesar and Cato, and the execution of citizens without trial that earned Cicero the title father of the fatherland but handed his enemies a weapon. From there: his refusal to join the First Triumvirate, exile and despair, humiliating compromises, the Philippics against Antony, his miscalculated alliance with the teenage Octavian, and his stoic last words on a dirt road. We close with his legacy through Petrarch, the Enlightenment, and the American founders.

• Why Cicero refused to change a name that sounded like a legume
• How the Verres trial replaced theatrical rhetoric with an avalanche of financial evidence
• The constitutional paradox of a great lawyer strangling conspirators in the Tullianum without trial
• The retroactive law that drove him into exile and the burning of his house
• How Octavian outplayed his mentor and put Cicero at the top of the proscription list