With a series of electrifying speeches to the Senate, Cicero sought to rouse his fellow citizens from the torpor of despair, to school them in their deepest ideals, to remind them of what they had been and might be still. ‘Life is not merely a matter of breathing. The slave has no true life. All other nations are capable of enduring servitude – but our city is not.’ Here, in Cicero’s oratory, was a worthy threnody for Roman freedom: both a soaring assertion of the Republic’s heroic past and a rage against the dying of the light. ‘So glorious is it to recover liberty, that it is better to die
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