In attempting to summarize recent developments and the present position in Ciceronian studies I have had to make somewhat arbitrary decisions in the matters of arrangement, selection, and approach.

Cicero’s writings fall into well-recognized groups: speeches, letters, writings on philosophy and rhetoric, and verse. I have followed precedent in treating the philosophical and rhetorical writings separately and last, and my own inclination in saying nothing of the verse. But the man is more than his writings, and I have in the main related consideration of the speeches and letters to the discussion of his life, and accordingly shall say little of purely linguistic and textual work in these fields.

Mommsen, as Warde Fowler wrote, ‘had a strange, passionate nature which never loved or hated men or things by halves, and was too apt to judge them from feeling and prejudice’; in his History of Rome ‘the force of his convictions was equalled by the strength of his language; the audacity of some of his judgements of men and institutions almost paralysed criticism, and we have only in recent years begun to shake ourselves free from the spell he laid upon us’. Nowhere of course is this truer than in his demolition of Cicero—like so many memorable and famous pieces of writing astonishingly brief when one goes back to look at it. But though still usually regarded as the villain (or the hero) of the anti-Ciceronian movement, he did not begin it all.

As visualizing the Roman orator and his role in their context the contributions of R. G. M. Nisbet and Christoff Neumeister are in different ways outstanding. Nisbet writes mainly from the political standpoint, and concludes that ‘Cicero could not or would not talk seriously about politics in public’. Neumeister is concerned with Cicero’s oratory as the art of persuasion, explicitly rejecting any views, such as Aristotle’s and Cicero’s own, that oratory is ever more than this (for Aristotle it is one avenue to truth, for Cicero it is a form of literature). His main contribution is to emphasize that a speech takes place in time: persuasion is a process. The bald section-by-section analyses of speeches common in commentaries, and some of the structural analyses, with their tendency (e.g. in Pro Caelio) to uncover repetitions of material, usually fail to take account of this fact, which is indeed not easy to set out on the printed page.

‘To read through the volumes [of Cicero’s letters] . . . is in itself an education.’ None the less it is primarily as rich sources of information—and problems—about Cicero’s life and times that the letters have concerned scholars. They also stand apart from Cicero’s other writings in the importance and fascination of the textual problems they present. Thus we have recently had Shackleton Bailey’s prolegomena, and volumes of a new Oxford text. The Budé edition, which, like Tyrrell and Purser, arranges the letters in chronological order, continues to progress.

No increase in the mere quantity of information—we have plenty— nor deeper study of the evidence—there has been plenty—will ‘solve’ the problem of Cicero’s personality. One can only recommend an approach based on common sense, imagination, a sense of humour, and even humility, qualities unevenly distributed among scholars as among the rest of mankind, and suggest a final consideration.

We may strike off the nineteenth-century charge-sheet item after item, yet one obstinately survives. Grant that Cicero was unlike most of the great men of his time, not cruel, nor avaricious, nor bloodthirsty, not sexually lax or perverse, yet every schoolboy knows, and even Cicero’s ‘friends’ maintain, that he was ‘conceited’. The survival of this one not too serious charge is perhaps not surprising: it goes back to antiquity, even to Cicero’s own day. Yet few have observed in this evidence a peculiarity: all these passages refer to the consulship. If one examines the speeches and correspondence, it is here and only here that the charge sticks. Anything else in the speeches merely confirms the principle that politicians do not say (ever): ‘I admit all my policies have been misguided in conception, unscrupulous in operation, and disastrous in outcome’. As for the letters, the one place where occasional swagger might be thought venial, they reveal a man rarely boastful, except in a half-ironical tone, much more often seeking reassurance, rueful or critical in his attitude to himself.

If eddies and cross-currents still complicate the charting of the study of Cicero as politician and orator, it is not at all difficult to determine the main movement of the tides in the study of his philosophical works.

It is still popularly believed that the Middle Ages got their philosophy from Cicero and that at the Renaissance he was replaced more or less overnight by the newly discovered Greeks. But of course the Middle Ages also learned philosophy from Aristotle via Boethius, then through Arabic sources, then in the original. It is easy enough to find medieval writers who knew Cicero’s De Amicitia and De Senectute, and a good many knew the Tusculans and De Officiis—the easy ones, it might be said. But it was Petrarch and the men of the Renaissance who put Cicero on the map, precisely because they rebelled against what they felt to be the arid theorizing of Aristotelian scholasticism and looked for a guide to life. After Petrarch, the belief that Cicero was outstanding both as statesman and thinker helped a great deal, and on the map he remained in that capacity for centuries. Plato profoundly influenced many, but often in bizarre manifestations which owed more to neo-Platonism and allied mysticisms than to the Plato of, say, Apology and Republic familiar to the modern student. Greek anyhow remained a scarce commodity until the nineteenth century: for the ordinary educated man what Tully said was good enough.

Ancient rhetoric was a big subject, though its main outlines became stereotyped enough to be easily grasped. More perhaps can be said in its defence as a means of education, if not as an influence on literature and criticism, than is commonly allowed, but it had two clear faults. As systematized in the Hellenistic period it became extremely technical and pedantic, and it concentrated excessively on the techniques of gaining victory in the law courts. Though Cicero regarded the great forensic battle, which of course often had political implications, as the outstanding challenge to the orator, he claimed for his ideal orator–statesman much more than a narrow forensic virtuosity, and he had little time for the technicalities and pedantries of the rhetoricians. The best example is his handling of the topic of ornatus (one of four ‘virtues of style’ which probably go back to Theophrastus) in the third book of De Oratore. Traditionally treated as providing scope for extensive classification and exemplifications of the rhetorical ‘figures’, ornatus is claimed by Cicero as the product of a well-stocked mind, and only after a long ‘digression’ on this theme does he provide, and then with deliberate perfunctoriness, a list of figures on the traditional pattern.

It is rash to attempt any summary of so large a field, particularly as there could easily be produced, and no doubt by anyone else there would have been produced, a quite different perspective, with a quite different set of footnotes. But it may be helpful to pull a few threads together.

As a politician, Cicero continues to fascinate, and to exasperate. I have argued that what is needed is neither vitriol nor whitewash, but a realistic approach to the problems and methods of a practising politician in his context, and that the latest scholarship is perhaps moving towards this happy issue. Granted this, we can then see if there is any respect in which Cicero is remarkable either for virtue or vice. To the historians in particular we owe it that he need no longer be treated in a vacuum. We should be able at last to get away from the two Ciceros, which with enough accuracy for a broad generalization, were described by Marrou as one for the historians and one ‘des littéraires’. Two points are essential. The speeches are of great historical importance, but they were preserved as literature. The neglect of this fact and its implications in favour of concentration on the speeches as historical documents has not always produced even very good history. Secondly, the letters, equally if not more important to the historian, are (mainly) a private correspondence. This has been said so often as to be a platitude: yet it is easy to forget as one actually reads the letters.