2025.04.7 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Vittorio Bufacchi, Why Cicero Matters, Bloomsbury Academic, 2023, 175pp., $26.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781350376687.
Reviewed by Raphael Woolf, King’s College London
It is hard not to warm to a book whose preface begins: ‘This book is about the greatest chickpea in the history of humanity’ (‘Cicero’ being the Latin for ‘chickpea’). The opening words give a pretty good flavour of the book’s light, conversational style. However, as one might gather from the title, it also carries a serious message—that at a moment of peril for contemporary democracy, under threat from populism and authoritarianism alike, Cicero still has important things to say. It is not, to judge from its style and content, aimed at a philosophically sophisticated audience, but at a wider readership for whom Cicero may be little more than a name but who are curious to find out about his ideas and how…
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