Character Assassination in Ancient Rome In 63 BCE, the Roman orator Cicero delivered the First Catilinarian Oration against his fellow senator and political rival, Catiline. The speech is a great example of character assassination in the Roman Republic. Martijn Icks and Eric Shiraev have performed a word analysis to explore the workings of Cicero’s character attacks, using two English translations and checking them against the original Latin. This file contains a complete overview of the categories they established. The analysis of the speech has been published in: The Journal of Psychohistory 46 (4) Spring 2019, pp 270-289