In more ways than one. Cicero has been with me since the days of Ronald Reagan and high school Latin, when Cicero’s prose taught me the basics of constructing a worthwhile sentence. Since then, a bust of Cicero looks down from one of my bookcases, and a shelf there contains books by and about him. A profound influence on our Founding Fathers, we owe him a deep debt for our republican form of government.

In 44 B. C., near the end of his life, Cicero wrote three philosophical dialogues, one being De Senectute, “On Old Age.” Its oldest surviving manuscript now resides in a library in Paris and dates from the ninth or tenth century, and it may have come from the Benedictine monastery of Cluny. In 1744, Benjamin Franklin published James Logan’s English translation of Cicero’s treatise; it was one of the few classical texts coming from Franklin’s press. In 1960 Michael Grant translated this dialogue for Penguin Books in a collection called Cicero: Selected Works.

Still, even an admirer of Cicero must admit that his philosophical writings are pretty dull stuff. As one nears the age when Cicero died, dusting off and re-reading what he said about old age has one trying to remember the Latin word for tedium. It may be why C. S. Lewis, writing in September, 1958, to a boy named Martin, said that he found Cicero “the greatest bore . . . of all authors, whether ancient or modern.” So, let each reader track down De Senectute for curing insomnia, and let us instead consider Cicero during his most compelling hours.

At age 17, Marcus Tullius Cicero, a skinny kid from a small town southeast of Rome, served in the Roman army and fought in what historians then and now call the Social War. Nine years later, in 80 B. C., Cicero was a natty young lawyer in Rome and had political ambitions. Landing on his desk was his first big case, and once again we can thank Michael Grant and Penguin Books for bringing Cicero’s courtroom oratory into English.

For while Cicero: Selected Works fascinates only very special readers, Cicero: Murder Trials proves to be a page-turner. As George Orwell wrote in 1946, on a cozy Sunday afternoon, after some roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and with “a cup of mahogany-brown tea,” what more could one want but to read about a murder.

What Orwell despaired of finding in his Sunday newspaper was the kind of murder that filled the London papers in the era of Sherlock Holmes. He longed to read about “the old domestic poisoning dramas, product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy did at least ensure that crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them.” The crime that came Cicero’s way had no poison in it, but it held plenty of intrigue and emotion.

Sextus Roscius was a prominent citizen of Ameria, a small town some fifty miles north of Rome. Much of his wealth came from land: he owned numerous farms, several managed by his son, also named Sextus Roscius. The elder Roscius had a townhouse in Rome, and one night in 80 B. C., as he returned home from dinner with friends in that city, he was attacked and stabbed to death. By the next morning, the news was all over Rome and had made its way to Ameria.

Within a few days, the murdered man’s name appeared inserted into the official list of men facing the death penalty for treason. Men convicted of treason had their property confiscated by the government and sold at auction, and for far less than the actual value, a man named Chrysogonus bought all Roscius’ farms and other property. He put two friends, Magnus and Capito, in charge of it all and evicted the younger Roscius. Moreover, these men accused Roscius of killing his father.

Enter Cicero for the defense. He set forth the facts in the case and reviewed the prosecution’s claim of motive for murder. According to the prosecution, the younger Roscius killed his father because the older man was planning to disinherit him. However, father and son got along well, and the father trusted his son to run the family farms. Furthermore, no one had ever heard the old man gripe about his son or talk about cutting his son out of his will.

Instead, Chrysogonus and his cronies, after deciding to kill the senior Roscius, needed to get the son out of the way. After all, if he could prove that his father had not been accused of treason (he was not), then the property had been illegally sold and the son wrongfully evicted. Moreover, under Roman law, killing a man awaiting execution was not murder.

This case, Cicero argued, was a cynical abuse of the law to frame and kill an innocent man. What the trial really was about, Cicero declared, was Chrysogonus manipulating the judicial system to murder young Roscius. In its final form as we now have it, Cicero filled more than fifty pages exposing and demolishing the conspiracy contrived by Chrysogonus.

As Cicero acknowledged early on in his remarks, older lawyers had declined to take on this case. Too much was at stake, since Chrysogonus was a freed slave employed by Sulla, a general and senator who had just ended his term as dictator but who remained in office as consul, the chief magistrate. Likewise, Roscius had friends in the Senate. If an inexperienced young lawyer like Cicero failed in Roscius’ defense and meanwhile offended Sulla, it would be no great loss.

Needless to say, Cicero won his case, and he went on to defend many more men accused of murder. He also entered Roman politics and eventually served as consul himself. Distinguishing his term in that office was him uncovering and thwarting a plot by another senator, Catiline, to usurp the consulship. Cicero’s first speech against Catiline blistered the paint on the wall.

Twenty years later, Cicero was retired and writing philosophical dialogues. He was centuries too soon to enjoy Orwell’s beef and pudding and tea, but he knew too well the Orwellian menace of a watchful and malevolent state. Sadly, when in his old age Cicero wrote about the quiet pleasures of old age, he somehow overlooked mentioning the armchair fun of reading about his old murder trials.