Cicero

I just finished Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician by Anthony Everitt. This was the first Classics-related book I've read since earning my degree in Latin in 2001, and it was great to get back into the ancient world for a bit. Everitt's book is a broadsweeping look at the life of Cicero, and serves as a good, populist narrative of Rome's time between Republic and Empire. I thought that Everitt could have included more of Cicero's own words (and Everitt's right when he points out that they are less vivid in translation than in the original Latin) in order to round out the portrait, but other than that, I thought the book was quite solid and very interesting. I don't know if I've ever read another historical biography. I read tons of nonfiction, but this was the first biography that I can remember reading of someone who's been dead for more than fifty years. One other minor qualm is with the fact that because Everitt's scope is so wide, one never gets to read any of Cicero's famous invectives in some of the cases he tried that didn't have huge historical implications.

And, in one of those little "That's cool" moments: the translator of Cicero whose translations Everitt uses was the professor of one of the professors I had at Bryn Mawr. That professor was also briefly a member of the Lemonheads. The mind reels.