Plutarch's Cicero

I was reading about Cicero the other day and the piece quoted Plutarch's Life a couple of times, which reminded me of my ongoing project to read the Lives and inspired me to see what Plutarch thought of this man.
The general impression one is left with is that Cicero was enormously intelligent but arrogant, with a big mouth that got him into trouble. He was a statesman and philosopher but it appears that he was almost more famous for his biting quips, a classical Oscar Wilde, such as when the rich Roman Crassus denied ever having said that members of his family never lived beyond sixty and asked why he would have said such a thing, Cicero replied: It was to gain the people's favour, you knew how glad they would be to hear it. The victims of his wit did not always appreciate being the butt of his satire and he made some powerful enemies.
Cicero was not a particularly brave man, which was unfortunate as he lived in turbulent times, surviving through several uprisings in Rome led by unsavoury characters such as Catiline, and the famous confrontation between Caesar and Pompey in which he eventually picked the wrong side. He was reprimanded for this by Cato, not for supporting Pompey as Cato was already in Pompey's camp, but for sacrificing his impartial position by which he could have done some good. Luckily for him, either through generosity or policy, Caesar was forgiving.
When a young man, the Oracle at Delphi told Cicero to follow his own genius, not the opinion of the people, but he soon ignored it and spent most of his life ambitiously politicking. He was a famed orator and would invariably win if he supported someone's cause in a legal battle. Unfortunately again his fatal flaw would show here, as he was quite unbearably arrogant about his talents.
From the point of view of two millenia later it appears that the most sucessful parts of Cicero's life were the points when he had been forced out of politics and pursued philosophical pursuits instead, writing a number of great works, but this was not enough for Cicero. From this Life the intellect of Cicero is hard to appreciate; he comes across as snivelling and arrogant in turns, and is quite unsympathetic. I feel I need to read his works now to appreciate just why Cicero was so lauded and how he gained such a popular following in Rome.
Cicero was a defender of the Republic, not by force but by his speeches in the Senate and his writing; he greatly feared what was happening to Rome as strong ambitious men vied for power, and it was this and the criticisms that he wrote that led to his ultimate downfall. He did not take part in Caesar's assasination, despite being a friend of Brutus as the conspirators feared his want of courage, but afterwards aligned himself with Octavian, helped him gain power but was then thrown aside. When Octavian, Antony and Lepidus met to decide the fate of various people in Rome, Octavian strongly defended Cicero for two days while Antony and Lepidus wanted him to be executed; Cicero had written harsh criticisms of Antony and they hated each other. On the third day Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, gave in and Cicero was murdered. The soldier who killed him cut off his hands to take and display in Rome, the hands that had dared to write criticisms of Antony.