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Hello, Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in 106 BC.

He was a lawyer, a politician, a Roman philosopher and the founding father of humanism.

His academy, the Studia Humanitas, taught the art of living well and blessedly through learning

and instruction in the fine arts. Centuries later, Cicero's teaching had been metamorphosed

into a classical humanism, a faith in what could be called the soft arts of the Greek world.

But how did Cicero's ideas become renaissance ideals?

And how did a small Greek curriculum later become a world philosophy and why does some contemporary

thinkers think that the humanist tradition is responsible for elitism, sexism and

even Nazism.

Win me to discuss humanism as a professor of literature, an intellectual historian and a classicist.

Tony Davis is head of the Department of English at the University of Birmingham, and he's a jardines

professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University London and the classicist

Simon Goldhill is reader in Greek literature and culture at King's College

Cambridge. Tony Davis, Cicero's Academy of the Studio Humanitars, called out for a complete system of education focusing heavily on personal development.

Now what were the Roman values that Cicero was reacting against?

Two things I think one can say he was reacting against.

One was a tradition of Roman Philistonism, pragmatism.

And although Cicero's adaptation of Greek ideas is in part a translation of them into a more pragmatic

and Roman register than they had in their Greek original.

So that's the first thing.

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