Oratory

No one likes a pedant. But over the past few millennia, people have shunned pedants, bores and know-it-alls for a wide range of different, often conflicting, reasons. They have been accused of obscuring the path to true philosophical knowledge and of putting learning on too high a pedestal; they’ve been regarded as unfit to be democratic leaders; too unskilled in the aristocratic virtues; too keen to rise above their natural class; and as stubborn impediments to a true comprehension of the divine. At times they’ve been deemed too unmanly and too feeble; at others, far too boorish, charmless, unable to think for themselves and probably horrible at parties. Arnoud S.Q.

It is rare to read a book about Cicero that likens its hero to a demagogue. Rome’s prosecutor of conspiracy and corruption in the last years of the Republic is seen more commonly as a toga-draped crusader for virtue. Was he also a ranter steeped in violence, crude character-assassination, tendentious storytelling and racial stereotypes? Yes, argues Josiah Osgood, an American historian, whose book persuasively analyses a range of Cicero’s murder, fraud and extortion cases. Other men of the time were often no better, he writes, but, echoing Michelle Obama on Donald Trump: ‘Fortunately for Cicero, if his opponents went low, he knew how to go even lower.’ The defender of