Cicero Superstar

Writing in First Things, Mary Ann Glendon on the extraordinary career of an extraordinary man:

Cicero’s ideal statesman was the man whose actions are illuminated by philosophy, by which he meant mainly ethics and political theory. The best statesman of all, at least for Rome, would be someone steeped in the city’s history, someone who combined civilized values with “intimate knowledge of Roman institutions and traditions and the theoretical knowledge for which we are indebted to the Greeks.” In other words, someone like Marcus Tullius Cicero.

[BTW: For a great biography of Cicero, check out the one by Anthony Everitt.]