The private correspondence of the most productive public figure of Rome. Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), a Roman lawyer, orator, politician, and philosopher, of whom we know more than any other Roman, lived in the tumultuous era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a decaying republic. His political speeches, as well as his correspondence, reveal the enthusiasm, intensity, and intrigue of politics and the role he played in the whirlwind of the time. Of approximately 106 speeches published before the Roman people or the Senate, if they were political, before judges, if they were judicial, fifty-eight survive (some of these incomplete). In the 14th century, Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters, over 800 of which were written by Cicero and nearly 100 from others to him. These reveal the man, particularly with intensity, as most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. The philosophical volumes include seven main compositions and several others. There is also poetry, some original and some as translations from Greek. Cicero's edition from the Loeb Classical Library is in twenty-nine volumes.