Calle de Cicerón
Honours Marcus Tullius Cicero, the orator and philosopher of republican Rome whose prose set the standard of literary Latin for centuries.
The name recalls Marcus Tullius Cicero, lawyer, politician and writer born in Arpinum in 106 BC. He reached the consulship as a new man, with no illustrious ancestors, and earned every step with his voice: he broke the Catiline conspiracy from the rostrum and left treatises on friendship, old age and duty that modern Europe read as a manual of good Latin and good government.
His gift for speaking cost him his life. After Caesar’s murder he attacked Mark Antony in the Philippics, and Antony did not forget. When the second triumvirate drew up its lists of the proscribed, his name headed the killing. He was caught while fleeing; they cut off his head and also his hands, the ones that had written against Antony, and nailed them to the very rostrum in the Forum from which he had electrified Rome.
The calle de Cicerón is a short pedestrian stretch of the old Cuatro Caminos district, where the street map mixes Spanish provinces with figures from classical culture.