Cicero

The 7th installment of #EuropeanBios is Cicero, and honestly it was a poor choice. Cicero was almost exactly contemporaneous to Caesar (who I just did), so it was 15 hours of exactly the same events from only a very slightly different perspective. So this will be very brief.

Unlike Caesar, who is a rags-to-riches story, Cicero grew up rich and stayed rich. He appears to have been a mediocre student at school who gained popularity by being funny, and that's pretty much the place in society he occupied for his entire life.

In terms of connections to my other bios, Cicero is deeply entangled in every aspect of Caesar's life, and was present at his assassination (but not invited by the conspirators to participate). He also traveled to Syracuse and found the tomb of Archimedes (which they'd lost).

In terms of fun facts Cicero's life is untranslatable. He was a politician famous for being witty, but his humor relied heavily on puns and rhymes, none of which translate from the original latin. His contemporaries thought him hilarious but we mostly take their word for that.

The contrast between Cicero and Caesar is between a conservative and a revolutionary. Both saw Rome's government as dysfunctional; Caesar thought it needed to be torn down and rebuilt, while Cicero thought electing the right person could fix it.

Rome's political turmoil around the time of Cicero would be familiar to those watching the US election in 2020: one candidate thinks you can tweak the system to fix it, another thinks you have to replace it, while the actual person in charge is fucking it up while getting rich.

Beyond that his biography is a tedious re-treading of the events of Caesar's life, endless political machinations of little relevance or interest to modern readers. Oh well. On to Cleopatra!