Time was, back in the Renaissance, when barely a book would be published which did not feature some lavish hero-worship of Cicero. Machiavelli, Erasmus, Thomas More: they all regularly name-checked ‘Tully’. The same could hardly be said of authors today. Even those who do deign to mention Rome’s greatest orator have rarely tended to feel much admiration for him. Typical was Kingsley Amis. In Take a Girl Like You, the raffish schoolteacher, Patrick Standish, finds himself drilling his pupils in the Phillipics, the speeches which Cicero, with immense courage, delivered against Mark Antony, at the eventual cost of his life. To Standish, however, they convey, not the heroism of an active and dutiful citizenship, but only ‘boredom’ and ‘nasty silliness’. Drifting off into a daydream, he hails Cicero’s shade. ‘Antony was worth twenty of you, you bastard.’
Robert Harris would passionately disagree.
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