 Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) was the most famous “homo novus” or new man of Roman politics, hailing from a minor provincial landowning family rather than the great clans of hereditary nobility. He rose to the office of consul and the lifetime Senatorial membership it subsequently conferred by his audacious wit as a lawyer and orator in public prosecutions. His greatest moment as consul in 63 BCE came in exposing a conspiracy by Catiline; the brutal suppression of the conspiracy by executing Roman citizens without trial, however, would tar his political legacy. He became an enemy of Julius Caesar (though accepting a pardon from him at the end of a stretch of civil wars in 47 BCE), seeing the assertion of power first by Caesar and then Marc Antony as fatal to the republic. Having defended in his De officiis the kind of tyrannicide that he took the killing of Caesar in 44 BCE to have constituted, and attacked Antony mercilessly in his series of fourteen Philippics the following year, Cicero was murdered in response by partisans of the then-ruling Triumvirate to which Antony belonged.