Why Were Cicero's Hands Nailed to the Roman Rostra?

On December 7, 43 BC, Rome's greatest orator was assassinated on Mark Antony's orders. His severed head and right hand were nailed to the Rostra in the Roman Forum — the very platform from which he had spent over a year denouncing Antony in his Philippic speeches. Antony's wife Fulvia reportedly pulled out Cicero's tongue and drove her hairpins through it.

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There is a slab of stone in the Roman Forum, worn by two thousand years of weather and foot traffic, that once served as the most powerful speaking platform in the world. The Romans called it the Rostra. From it, senators and orators addressed the people of Rome on matters of war, law, and the fate of the Republic. In December of 43 BC, the severed head and hand of the man who had been its most celebrated voice were nailed to it as a public warning.

The man was Marcus Tullius Cicero. The person who put him there was Mark Antony. What happened in the hours before those remains went on display is one of the most disturbing episodes to survive from classical antiquity.

Who Was Cicero, and Why Did Antony Want Him Dead?

Born on January 3, 106 BC in Arpinum — a town roughly 100 kilometres southeast of Rome — Cicero rose through Roman politics without the aristocratic lineage that normally smoothed a man's ascent. He served as consul in 63 BC, the highest elected office in the Republic, and over the following decades became regarded as the greatest orator Rome ever produced. His speeches defined Latin prose style for centuries. His readers included Machiavelli, Queen Elizabeth I, John Adams, and Winston Churchill. Anthony Everitt's biography, Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician, remains the most readable modern account of how a man from a minor Italian town became the voice of a Republic — and what that voice ultimately cost him.

The conflict with Antony had been building since Caesar's assassination on March 15, 44 BC. In the months that followed, Cicero delivered a series of fourteen speeches in the Senate — the Philippics, named after the orations Demosthenes had aimed at Philip II of Macedon — attacking Antony's character, his conduct, and his fitness to lead Rome. The first was delivered on September 2, 44 BC; the last on April 21, 43 BC. Across those months, Cicero called Antony a tyrant, framed him as a threat to the Republic, and successfully persuaded the Senate to declare him an enemy of the state. He was, briefly, the most powerful civilian voice in Rome.

It was a campaign of words that worked — right until it stopped working entirely.

What Was the Second Triumvirate, and Why Did It Mean Cicero's Death?

In October 43 BC, three men met near Bologna and agreed to divide the Roman world between them. Mark Antony, Octavian, and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus formalized their alliance through the Lex Titia, passed on November 27, 43 BC, granting them joint extraordinary powers for five years. One of their first acts was to draw up proscription lists — official registers of enemies to be killed and whose property was to be seized to fund their legions.

Cicero's name was near the top of that list. Ancient sources indicate that Octavian initially objected, having once considered Cicero a political ally, but Antony insisted. The Philippics had been too public, too damaging, and too personal to forgive. Cicero had to die.

How Was Cicero Killed?

Cicero fled south toward his coastal villa at Formiae, hoping to reach Macedonia. On December 7, 43 BC, soldiers caught him. The centurion Herennius beheaded him — according to Plutarch, Cicero leaned out of his litter and offered his neck without resistance. His right hand was then cut off separately: the hand that had written the Philippics. Both were taken back to Rome.

The historian Appian recorded the act with particular precision, noting that the hands were cut off for the specific offense of having written against Antony. The punishment was calibrated to the instrument of the crime. Cicero had used language as his weapon; now the physical apparatus of that language — the tongue's partner, the hand — would go on display as a trophy.

What Did Fulvia Do With Cicero's Head?

Before the head and hand reached the Rostra, they were brought to Antony and Fulvia. Antony, according to Cassius Dio, uttered bitter reproaches against the head. Then Fulvia took it. Cassius Dio's Roman History (47.8.4) is the primary source for what followed: she set the head on her knees, opened the mouth, pulled out the tongue, and pierced it with the pins she used for her hair, while uttering what Dio calls brutal jests. She also spat upon it.

The act was not random cruelty. Fulvia had her own history with Cicero: he had attacked her in his speeches, mocking her influence over Antony and her conduct during the proscriptions. The tongue that had done that damage was now, in the most literal sense, in her hands. She destroyed it with a weapon drawn from her own body — a hairpin, the intimate instrument of a Roman woman's appearance — in a tableau that ancient writers clearly intended to convey calculated, gendered vengeance.

Whether the scene happened exactly as Dio describes is a matter of ongoing scholarly debate. The Cambridge Classical Quarterly notes that the hairpin detail appears in Dio and is echoed in later sources including the Suda and John of Antioch, while acknowledging that most earlier authors who describe the episode omit it. Plutarch, writing around AD 100, confirms Fulvia abused and spat on the head but says nothing of the hairpins. What is not disputed is the destination: Antony then ordered the head and hand nailed to the Rostra, more prominently than the other heads displayed there, specifically so they would be visible in the place where Cicero had most often spoken against him.

What Was the Rostra, and Why Did the Display Matter?

The Rostra was the curved speaking platform at the western end of the Roman Forum, its name taken from the bronze ship-rams (rostra) mounted on its face after Rome's victory at the Battle of Antium in 338 BC. It was from this platform that consuls, tribunes, and orators addressed the Roman people. Cicero had spoken from it during his consulship, during his prosecution of Catiline's conspirators, and during the years he spent as the Senate's most prominent voice against Antony's ambitions. It was the platform most identified with his authority.

By displaying his remains there, Antony inverted that meaning entirely. The Rostra became not a monument to Cicero's power but to its end. Every senator who crossed the Forum saw the evidence. The message required no translation: this is what speech costs. This is what happens when you stand on this platform and name the men who hold the legions as tyrants. To walk through the Forum after December 43 BC was to walk past a demonstration of what the Republic had become.

The base of the Rostra still stands in the Forum Romanum today. If you want to understand what you're standing in front of — not just the archaeology, but the long history of power and consequence this stone witnessed — a guided tour of the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill puts the site into the kind of context that the ruins alone cannot provide.

Did the Display of Cicero's Remains Achieve What Antony Intended?

In the short term, yes. The Senate fell silent. The Republic did not recover. Brutus and Cassius were defeated at Philippi in 42 BC. Antony and Octavian divided the empire between them, fought for it, and Octavian won at Actium in 31 BC. He became Augustus in 27 BC. The system Cicero had spent his life defending was gone.

But Cicero's texts survived. His letters, his philosophical works, his speeches — all fourteen Philippics — were copied, preserved, and passed forward. Medieval scribes kept them. Renaissance scholars revived them. Jefferson read him. Adams called him unmatched. The tongue Fulvia pierced with a hairpin in December 43 BC went on speaking for two thousand years afterward, outlasting everyone who ordered it silenced and every empire that rose in the Republic's place.

Where Exactly Did These Events Take Place?

Cicero was killed near his villa at Formiae, on the Tyrrhenian coast of Latium — modern Formia, roughly 130 kilometres south of Rome. His head and right hand were then carried to Rome and displayed on the Rostra in the Forum Romanum, the ancient civic centre of the city. The Rostra's base remains visible today in the Forum Romanum archaeological zone, in the area between the Temple of Saturn and the Temple of Julius Caesar. The full political weight of the site — the platform from which Rome was governed and ungoverned, praised and condemned, for five centuries of the Republic — is best absorbed in person, with its history intact around you.

How Reliable Is the Story About Fulvia and the Hairpin?

The hairpin episode rests almost entirely on Cassius Dio, who wrote his Roman history approximately 270 years after the events. He presents the scene as fact, not rumour, but he is the only source to include the specific detail of tongue mutilation. Plutarch confirms abuse and spitting. Appian confirms the head was delivered to the triumvirs. Modern historians disagree about whether Dio preserved an accurate oral tradition or amplified an existing story for rhetorical effect — Fulvia was already a figure of extreme hostility in ancient sources, and the scene fits a pattern of ancient writing about powerful women as agents of savage revenge. The core facts, however — the proscription, the assassination, the decapitation, the display on the Rostra — are corroborated across multiple independent ancient sources and are not in doubt.

The full arc of Cicero's life, from his origins in Arpinum to the platform in the Forum where it ended, is laid out with remarkable clarity in Anthony Everitt's biography, which draws on Cicero's own letters — one of the largest surviving collections of private correspondence from the ancient world — to reconstruct not just the politics but the private experience of watching a Republic die from the inside.