Book 4
appendix.
In the meantime the murderers were coming, under the command of the centurion Herennius and the military tribune Popilius, whom Cicero had once defended when he was prosecuted for killing his own father. Finding the doors closed, they broke them open, but they did not find Cicero, and those who were within said that they did not know where he was. It is said that a young man named Philologus, who had been educated by Cicero in the liberal arts and sciences, a freedman of his brother Quintus, told the tribune that they were carrying the litter through the bushy shaded walks toward the sea. The tribune took a few men and ran around to the exit of these paths. Herennius kept his course along the path, and when Cicero saw him he ordered the servants to put down the litter. Then, leaning his chin on his left hand as was his custom, he looked straight at the murderers. His haggard appearance and his unshaven face, wasted with anxiety, caused most of them to hide their own heads while Herennius murdered him. He was killed while holding his neck out of the litter, being then in the sixty-fourth year of his age. By Antony’s command his head was cut off and also the hands with which he wrote the Philippics, for he styled his orations against Antony the Philippics, and they are so called to this day. (Life of Cicero, 47-48). It thus appears from Plutarch’s account, as well as from Livy’s, that, if Cicero had really desired to escape, he had abundant opportunity. It was perhaps the intention of Octavius and Lepidus that he should do so.
