How are you judging the supposed intelligence of these politicians? Sure there were more successful politicians than Cicero, but he was starting from a less than advantageous position. He was an outsider from Arpinum without the wealth of a Crassus of the August lineage of a Cicero. Sure, clodius “outsmarted” Cicero, but the Claudii were one of the greatest families in Rome stretching back to the early days of the republic—something Cicero plays on in the Pro Caelio when he adopts a prosopopia of Appius Claudius Caecus to remonstrate Claudia for her, um, “loose” ways.

But I don’t really want to defend Cicero’s political decisions or the invective he hurled at people. His speeches are the gold standard of Latin. Sulla sought to remove military success as a mode of gaining power and opened up the courts as a field of aristocratic competition, and Cicero was acknowledged to be the best. And this was coming in the era of the Late Republic when Romans were self-consciously crafting Latin into a literary language worthy of their imperial ambitions. The speeches of Cicero were preserved and read as the gold standard of a sort of late republican latin style. Now, modern scholars have been known to eschew Cicero as someone placed on a pedestal by “traditional” scholars for centuries—centuries—as the model for “good” Latin writing, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Catilinarian is a speech most students of Latin encounter. This importance was enshrined by Quintilian, the great teacher of Rhetoric in the imperial period and the authority of Rhetoric in the Renaissance.

Now, if you are not thrilled by sentences that go on for line after line (this is good latin style), slowly building momentum until you reach the main verb or subject at the end that drives the knife in, the speeches themselves are brilliant pieces of political speechwriting. Cicero has a knack for using a court speech to attack a political rival in a way that doesn’t rhetorically traps them in a box.

Take the pro roscio as an example. Here he is defending a man accused of patricide. He is hired to do this by his then patron, Caecilia Matella and the Matelli. If you read between the lines, the guy might have done it, but Cicero uses the speech to turn the accusation around on Chrysogonus (golden mouth), the former slave of the dictator Sulla of greedily gobbling up estates of Romans during the proscriptions, thereby accusing Sulla, without accusing Sulla, of wrongdoing. This is a strategy he would employ in many of his trials, using his court speeches as brilliant attacks on political rivals.

And this is all without discussing his philosophical writings. His “On Duty”, “On the Republic”, and the “Tusculan Disputations” are both absolutely foundational works in western philosophy. The dream of Scipio and bits of on the republic and these other works were read throughout the Middle Ages and were fundamental to university education in that period.

And then the rediscovery of his letters in the late Middle Ages opened up yet another door onto Cicero. Here emerged the personal Cicero, and the style of these letters was seen as exemplars of the literary letter (a form of literature now lost). This is where the catty, Whiny Cicero emerges for catty, whiny Petrarch to idolize. Regardless of what one thinks of the tone of these letters, they’re wonderful windows onto the political life of the late republic.