Tuesday, April 25, 2023
Cicero's Reputation
Harold C. Gotoff, Cicero's Elegant Style: An Analysis of the Pro Archia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 3:
Newer› ‹Older
It would be difficult to think of any other figure of Western cultural history who has suffered the eclipse of reputation that Cicero has undergone. To the humanists, he was the quintessential model for and of the Renaissance man. In our time he is generally considered to be a vain and long-winded, essentially ineffectual politician, derivative as a thinker and pretentious as a man of letters. Half a millennium ago educated men rejoiced when the manuscript of a new work of Cicero was discovered; today, it sometimes takes all the piety for the Classical discipline a student can muster even to read him.
