Turn not your country’s hand against your country’s heart!

From his childhood on he had had an obstinate nature and his name became a byword for virtue and truthfulness. “That’s incredible, even if Cato says so,” was a common expression.

It was about such people that he complained to Atticus: “I will only say this, and I believe you know I am right: it was not enemies but jealous friends who ruined me.

One of these was Philo of Larisa, head of the Academy in Athens, founded by Plato three hundred years before. He inspired Cicero with a passion for philosophy, and in particular for the theories of Skepticism, which asserted that knowledge of the nature of things is in the nature of things unattainable. Such ideas were well judged to appeal to a student of rhetoric who had learned to argue all sides of a case.

Cicero had lived through terrible times and his fundamental aim was to make sure that they never returned. He stood for the rule of law and the maintenance of a constitution in which all social groups could play a part, but where the Senate took the lead according to ancestral tradition.

His biographer, Cornelius Nepos, a younger contemporary whom he knew personally, wrote that Atticus “behaved so as to seem at one with the poorest and on a level with the powerful.

Cicero was nothing if not a genius at character assassination.

Like Caesar, he was loyal but with this difference: he liked to do good by stealth, behind the scenes.

Slavery was endemic in the classical world and huge numbers of men, women and children, the captives of Rome’s ceaseless wars, flooded into Italy. Slaves provided a cheap workforce, contributing significantly to unemployment among free-born citizens.

In his early twenties Cicero wrote the first two volumes of a work on “invention” – that is to say, the technique of finding ideas and arguments for a speech; in it he noted that the most important thing was “that we do not recklessly and presumptuously assume something to be true.” This resolute uncertainty was to be a permanent feature of his thought.