On This Day in History: December 7

The death of Cicero

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Lots of shitty things happened on December 7. Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941. A windstorm killed 9,000 people in Britain in 1703. An earthquake took 50,000 lives in Armenia in 1988. InstaDouche Dan Bilzerian was born . . . and it is also the date that Cicero of Rome was assassinated. A respected statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero tried in vain to uphold Rome as a republic, but imperialists said nope, fuck you, and ghosted him.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: December 7, 43 BCE--

Rome was founded in 753 BCE as a kingdom, but a couple hundred years later the people were all fuck these kings and overthrew them to establish the Roman Republic. It wasn’t a democracy, but an oligarchy, where power rested in the hands of an elite few. Still, it’s usually a better system than a solitary tyrant ruling an empire via whim. And that’s what Cicero was fighting against.

In addition to being a noted politician, Cicero, who was born in 106 BCE, was a celebrated orator and author. Fully three-quarters of surviving Latin literature from the time-period covering Cicero’s adult years were authored by him. His influence on Latin, and European languages as a whole, is immeasurable.

Okay, so Julius Caesar was a dick. All that stabbing, including being stabbed in the dick? Totes deserved it. He basically destroyed the republic and sent it on the path to empire. And Cicero was no fan of Caesar, but he wasn’t involved in his assassination. Nevertheless, the conspirators figured he would have approved of the stab-fest, and afterward Brutus lifted his blood-dripping dagger and called out Cicero’s name, asking that he restore the republic. Afterward, Cicero wrote a letter to one of the conspirators that basically said why the fuck didn’t you invite me to the Caesar stab-o-rama? That must have been fucking awesome!

Anyway, after Caesar was decorated with dagger-shaped holes, Cicero and Mark Antony—another wannabe dictator and leader of the Caesarian faction—were the two leading men in Rome, and Cicero was using his powerful oratory skills to denounce the shit out of Antony. Cicero was all like: Yeah, Antony, fuck that guy. Except, you know, way more eloquent.

But in this case, the sword was more powerful than the pen, or voice, and Antony allied himself with Caesar’s adopted son Octavian and Roman General Lepidus, and went on a killing rampage of the opposition. Soldiers attacked Cicero on December 7, 43 BCE as he left his villa with the intention of fleeing to Greece. It is believed his final words were “There is nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier, but do try to kill me properly.”

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