Orator

A wonderful book . The complexities and paradoxes of Cicero’s character are as fascinating as those which characterised the Roman Republic in the final decades of its existence – and no biography I have read does richer justice to both

A wonderful book . The complexities and paradoxes of Cicero’s character are as fascinating as those which characterised the Roman Republic in the final decades of its existence – and no biography I have read does richer justice to both

Wonderful... Edwards has done a marvellous job of showing us Cicero the man, the scholar and the politician in highly entertaining style

A man of thought in an age of thugs, a pen amongst swords: every age needs its Cicero and Edwards has written a resonant Cicero for ours

Edwards has crafted an intimate and deeply informed portrait of a man struggling to make sense of his world’s slide into civil war and chaos… Compelling and beautifully written

Orator brings Cicero to life as a brilliant, complicated, flawed human being; it is also an ideal introduction to the end of the Roman Republic

It is a very tall order to make readable sense both of the brutal politics of late-republican Rome and of the complex inconsistencies of Cicero’s own character – but Catharine Edwards has carried it off superbly . Written with grace , pace and scrupulous annotation, Orator is an exemplary historical biography

Catharine Edwards is a professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck, University of London where she has taught since 2001, and is one of the world’s foremost experts on Roman History. A Fellow of the British Academy, she has published extensively on Roman cultural history. She translated Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars for Oxford World’s Classics, is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, presented a three-part TV series on Roman imperial women for BBC Four in 2018, and writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement .