Forgotten Thinkers: Cicero

well first thanks for finding us in our new location I think these are improved digs uh we've been we've been promoted upgraded to First Class um I guess or at least more room well and they've also room D has more uh material in it so we wouldn't have fit anyway so um and the crowd is very large so thanks for coming out I appreciate that this year's series I'm want to do forgotten thinkers um and the idea here is that what we remember says a lot about a culture but also what we forget or what we ignore or what we deemphasize also speaks a lot to our culture and so I want to use reflecting on philosophers and thinkers who used to be considered incredibly significant but have for whatever reason sort of fallen on hard times or no longer taken seriously or studied systematically um and and what that says both about why they were important when they were important but also what it says about us today um that that thinkers who may be still influencing us without us realizing it um are are still present in our culture and why we ignore them so the first one I want to start with is Cicero because he's just so easy and it's just you won't believe how influential Cicero was and how uninfluential he is today uh for those of you who studied Latin you may know that his name is pronounced something like karoo I'm not going to say karoo cuz I can't I can't bring myself since since the Middle Ages his name has been pronounced Cicero that translation took place sometime in the 15 or 1600s so let's just go with the medieval French pronunciation of Cicero because it karoo just sounds weird I don't know I can't I can't bring myself to do it uh so Cicero it is now the amazing thing about Cicero if what we know about Roman history around the time of Caesar in the Civil War largely comes from Cicero because Cicero left us 20 to 30 Works complete and partial 800 letters that he wrote still exist 100 letters written to him or more still exist so we have a uniquely large collection of material from Cicero and he lived at this amazing time in Roman history and then hence of course the ...