O tempora! O mores! [Oh the times! The customs!]

Cicero’s exclamation “O tempora! O mores!” is famously associated with his First Catilinarian Oration (63 BCE), delivered in the Roman Senate during the crisis surrounding Lucius Sergius Catilina (Catiline). Cicero, then consul, denounced Catiline for an alleged conspiracy to overthrow the Republic. The phrase functions as a lament over Rome’s moral and political decay: Cicero expresses outrage that a man he portrays as a public enemy can still sit among senators and that the state’s guardians tolerate it. The line became emblematic of late-Republican anxieties about corruption, factionalism, and the weakening of traditional civic virtue.

The cry “O tempora! O mores!” compresses a moral judgment into a rhetorical sigh: the “times” and “customs” are blamed for enabling behavior that should be unthinkable in a healthy polity. In Cicero’s usage it is not neutral nostalgia but a strategic indictment—shaming the Senate and the broader political class for complacency and compromised standards. The phrase has endured because it is adaptable: it can be invoked whenever public life seems to tolerate wrongdoing, signaling both personal indignation and a broader claim that social norms have deteriorated. Its power lies in turning political critique into a memorable, almost proverbial lament.

O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit, consul videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? immo vero etiam in senatum venit, fit publici consilii particeps, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum.

O tempora, o mores!