Marcus Tullius Cicero belongs near the top of the long and lengthening list of writers and statesmen more quoted than read, more revered than pondered. This great republican of Rome, the exemplar of civic virtue and prudent statesmanship, comes to us today wrapped in a mute magnificence. His name rings bells, but rarely are his works mined for the wealth of practical wisdom and elegant style for which untold generations have known him, and in pursuit of which they turned to him with habitual confidence. He’s a stained white statue to most of us, nothing more. O tempora, O mores!
How to explain the new ignorance? Not so longago Cicero’s stature in the public mind was high and firm, his academic presence constant—perhaps a little too relentlessly constant, armies of high-school Latin students might well have moaned. Challenged or disgruntled students knew they had reached the apex of Latin prose when, Caesar’s Gallic Wars behind them, they were assigned Cicero’s famous orations against Catiline, with their haughtiness, dense vocabulary, and elongated sentences. This was Latin for grownups.
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