Portrayers of Cicero: Dom, Andrew, Alex, Sandi, Doug, Matt, Mark

You are Marcus Tullius Cicero, former consul and proconsul of Rome, leading statesman, brilliant orator and opponent of Iulius Caesar. It is the Kalends of January in the 466th year of the Respublica (44 BC). Caesar has been dead for more than nine months now, and in that time his grandnephew the young Octavian (the future Augustus) has returned to Rome, your sworn enemy Mark Antony is in command of troops in Northern Italy, and you have begun to attack Antony in a series of speeches delivered in the Senate (the Philippics, modelled on public attacks by the great Athenian orator Demosthenes against Philip II, father of Alexander the Great). Soon Rome will be engulfed in yet another phase of a civil war that began nearly 100 years ago with the Gracchi brothers' attempts to "reform" the system. You have come down to the Forum on the Kalends to offer a New Year's sacrifice to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, praying for a safer year than the one just ended. You mount the Rostra, the Forum's platform for public speaking, and deliver a carefully worded speech full of powerful rhetorical flourishes in which you proclaim the dangers that threaten Rome in this dire hour. You have offered your services to your fellow citizens at this critical juncture in Rome's history by submitting your curriculum vitae ("the course [or career] of your life"). You see a hand raised by a veteran of Rome's political wars, Lucius Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus, and steel yourself to answer any and all questions about your career, your behavior in the past, and the promises you might offer to enhance Rome's future.