Cicero

Our new MPs should read Cicero

6 July 2024 9:00 am

It would make a pleasant change if every elected MP was to make it their ambition to be honestus, Latin…

The ancients knew they couldn’t turn back time

29 January 2022 9:00 am

The singer Cher, now 75, has announced that, because she refuses to appear old, she is not going to allow…

How to be ‘liberal’, according to the ancients

6 February 2021 9:00 am

Certain parts of academia seem to wish to turn the study of classics away from a historical, language- and evidence-based…

What would BLM make of Cicero’s views on mutuality?

30 January 2021 9:00 am

The Black Lives Matter website (different from the new Black Liberation Movement) mostly presents an image of an organisation of…

The ancients knew the value of the natural world

7 November 2020 9:00 am

The ancients knew nothing about global warming, but they still reflected on the relationship between man and nature. In the…

Cicero would have been quick to end the lockdown

9 May 2020 9:00 am

The Prime Minister recently quoted Cicero’s famous dictum salus populi suprema lex esto, translating it as ‘Let the health (salus)…

The rejection of the people’s mandate – then and now

19 January 2019 9:00 am

The Transport Secretary Chris Grayling may be quite right (not words one often reads) to warn that failure to deliver…

John McDonnell might soon regret handing out copies of Cicero

7 July 2018 9:00 am

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell has given all his cabinet a copy of Cicero’s advice on how to win arguments. This…

BBC2’s Civilisations seems unable to decide what civilisation is

10 March 2018 9:00 am

The presenters of the BBC 2 programme on civilisations seem unable to decide what civilisation is. Socrates would therefore wonder…

Britain’s fight with European law goes back 750 years

30 April 2016 9:00 am

It is no surprise that the laws imposed on the UK by a European parliament in Brussels should so infuriate…

Cicero could have told you all about the MPs’ standards committee

26 March 2016 9:00 am

As Sir Kevin Barron, chair of the MPs’ ‘Standards’ committee, steps down so that his own MP-packed body can adjudicate…

Jean-Claude Juncker speaks to Britain like a Roman emperor

12 March 2016 9:00 am

Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the EU Commission, made a typically brilliant intervention in the EU referendum debate by arguing that…

Take up and read Augustine’s Confessions

2 January 2016 9:00 am

I usually throw away dust jackets but Robin Lane Fox chose his for a reason. He originally encountered Augustine of…

Is your quotation secretly Nazi?

2 January 2016 9:00 am

I couldn’t help laughing when I found that an Australian senator, Cory Bernardi, had deleted all his tweets from Twitter,…

Marcus Tullius Cicero: our guide to ‘the most tumultuous era in human history’

How the world's first great republic slipped into empire and one-man rule

3 October 2015 9:00 am

Marcus Tullius Cicero was the ancient master of the ‘save’ key. He composed more letters, speeches and philosophy books than…

Why Cicero would have liked shadow health secretary Heidi Alexander

3 October 2015 8:00 am

Heidi Alexander, Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow health secretary, has emphasised how important it is ‘to weave into [Labour’s] language, our narrative…

Ancient and Modern: Juvenal and Cicero on whether grunting has a place in sport

18 July 2015 9:00 am

What a pleasure it was to watch the men’s final at Wimbledon contested with a minimum of grunting, exclaiming and…

Cicero’s advice for defeated politicians (Alastair Campbell, take note)

16 May 2015 9:00 am

The great Robert Harris has defended the pollsters who got the elections so wrong by quoting Cicero on the electorate’s…

Latrines dating from the second century at Ostia Antica, outside Rome

How the Romans went about their business

18 April 2015 9:00 am

When Ovid was seeking ‘cures for love’, the most efficient remedy, he wrote, was for a young man to watch…

The fall of the Roman republic and the rise of Alex Salmond

4 April 2015 8:00 am

Alex Salmond, the ex-first minister who proved incapable of making Scotland independent, has assured the world that he and his…

For his supposed involvement in a conspiracy against Nero, Seneca is ordered to commit suicide — as depicted in The Nuremberg Chronicle , 1493

Men behaving badly: Nero, Claudius and even Seneca could be intensely cruel to women — and fish

21 March 2015 9:00 am

They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often…

The dreadful prospect of taking up agriculture in old age

Ancients on oldies: tips on ageing from the Romans are all Greek to Richard Ingrams

14 March 2015 9:00 am

A few months ago I went to a lunch at Univ, my old college in Oxford, to celebrate the 95th…

Cicero’s advice for Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw

7 March 2015 9:00 am

In responding as they did to the Daily Telegraph ‘sting’, Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind may well have done…

Old age is not for sissies

7 March 2015 9:00 am

The secret of eternal youth, according to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, is arrested development, and the penny dropped last week. The…

What Cicero knew that David Davis doesn't

14 February 2015 9:00 am

The MP David Davis has lamented that the British seem to prefer laws that protect their security rather than guard…