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Caesar saw Rome as something within what had become the Roman world, while Cicero saw the Roman world from within the viewpoint of the Roman state.
That difference of viewpoint is partly because of the different paths of their political careers: Cicero made his career from within the Roman courts and Senate, while Caesar gained power from his career as a proconsul abroad.
But while Cicero was politically minded toward the institutions of his aristocratic Republic, in cultural terms Cicero was of great importance in merging and consolidating the Graeco-Roman philosophy and literature--the culture that would characterize the entire Roman Imperial era.
Only half of Cicero's career was as a politician. The other half of Cicero's life was literary. While not an original philosopher, Cicero made Hellenistic thinking accessible and acceptable to his fellow Roman aristocrats, e.g. his work De Officiis ("On Duties"). Cicero chose the type of Greek thinking most natural to a Roman--Stoicism--and made it the ideological standard of the entire Roman ruling class from that time onward.
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