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Ladies and gentlemen, today I am standing up for Cicero.

So Cicero, to give him his full name, Marcus Tullius Cicero, was born in 106 BCE at Arpenum.

It's about 65 miles outside of Rome, and he lives through a time of tremendous social and political and military upheaval, right from his teens, pretty much,

when the social wars happen.

Now, these sound like fun, don't they?

Script by George Lucas, directed by Ken Loach, surprising.

But they are not fun.

They are when Rome declares war on it,

Socki, its allies, hence social wars.

And that happens through Cicero's teens.

So perhaps it's no wonder that later in life he is accused of being overly timid in a military context. He was an incredibly prolific writer. We have 52 of his legal speeches surviving. He wrote over 80,

I think. We have 900 letters that he wrote to family and friends, six books on

rhetoric, fragments of another eight books on philosophy, which he wrote after his daughter's death

when he was in need of consolation. The thing is that because of his letters, because of those 900

letters, we have this extraordinary juxtaposition of this very bombastic, self-satisfied

public persona and this much more, I don't want to say humble, because obviously that wouldn't be

true, but let's go with self-deprecating. There's more self-deprecating persona that appears when he's

writing to his brother, Quintus, or to his wife, or to his friend, Atticus. Quite aside from anything else, they're full of extraordinary bits of gossip. There's one, it's like a month after Julius Caesar's assassination, where he refers to it, paraphrastically, you're welcome, as the Ides of March. It must be one of the very earliest instances of that phrase being used. You know what happened on the Iids of March?

He might as well wink as he writes it. There's a lovely sense of his absurdism, his love for kind of slight whimsy. You do not see this in his legal speeches very often. But there it is in his letters. There's one which he sends to a man named Kailius Rufus, who's trying to get wild animals together to put on a games. So he sends a message to Cicero away in a province saying,

can you get me some... a man named Kailius Rufus, who's trying to get wild animals together to put on a games.

So he sends a message to Cicero, away in a province,

...