Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) was a Roman statesman, orator, lawyer, and philosopher, one of the towering figures of the late Roman Republic. Rising as a “new man” without aristocratic lineage to the consulship, he was also the greatest prose stylist of the Latin language and, in periods of forced retirement from politics, the man who rendered Greek philosophy into Latin for a Roman audience.

Caught in the violent collapse of the Republic, he was proscribed and killed in 43 BCE, but his letters, speeches, and philosophical works became foundational to Western literature and learning. For the mind-power lineage, Cicero’s importance is chiefly as a transmitter.

Adhering to the moderate skepticism of the later Academy while drawing sympathetically on Stoicism, he composed dialogues—On the Nature of the Gods, On Duties, On Divination, Tusculan Disputations—that preserved and popularized Greek thought on the cosmos, the soul, providence, and the good life for the Latin West.

Most influential for the esoteric and mind-power tradition is the Dream of Scipio (the closing section of On the Republic), in which the soul of the elder Scipio reveals to his grandson a vision of the cosmos: the soul is immortal and divine, the earth small and lowly seen from the heavens, the universe ordered in concentric spheres sounding a celestial harmony, and the truest reward lies above, in the eternal life of the virtuous soul.

Transmitted with Macrobius’s commentary, this cosmic vision of the immortal soul and the harmonious heavens became a touchstone for medieval and Renaissance thought.