Arve, and welcome to Emperors of Rome, a Roman history podcast from Latrobe University.

I'm your host Matt Smith, and with me today is Dr. Catherine Tempest, reader in classics

and ancient history at the University of Roe Hampton.

This is episode C-L-X-X-X-I-I, Philippics.

As the power struggle in Rome continued and generals waged their war on the battlefield,

Cicero took to the floors of the Senate, confronting Antony with the greatest weapon in his arsenal,

the spoken word.

He called his speeches the Philippics, and they were influential in turning the Senate against

Antony.

He is Catherine Tempest.

Broadly speaking, the Philippics are Cicero's contribution to the intense power struggle that

took place in the wake of Caesar's assassination.

And specifically, they are the written retords of the speeches he delivered, whether that

was in the Senate, to the people, or in one case the speech he would like to have delivered,

but he didn't get the chance to and wrote it up anyway, condemning Mark Antony, who

Cicero believed was the next great threat to Rome.

So Cicero saw Mark Antony as an emerging tyrant, a man who, like Caesar before him, was

a threat to the kind of freedom that underpinned the Roman thinking about their political

constitution, the Republic.

It was really in opposition to one man rule.

And this idea of Antony as a threat to liberty also helps explain the title to the collection,

Philippic eye.

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