Melissa Lane, Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University, traces Cicero's life through five crises that defined the late Roman republic. She covers the Gracchi and land reform, Sulla's dictatorship and civil war, the Catiline conspiracy that Cicero crushed as consul, Caesar's tyranny and assassination, and Cicero's final confrontation with Mark Antony before his death. Lane frames Cicero as both philosopher and statesman, an enthusiast of Rome's mixed constitution who wrote his own theories of constitutional change while being repeatedly drawn into the ambitions of strongmen he could not control. The lecture, delivered at Gresham College, closes by asking whether Cicero should be remembered as the hero of the republic or complicit in its undoing. It is a chronological account grounded in political narrative rather than abstract theory, using Cicero's career as a lens on how republics fail.