How can one possibly encapsulate Cicero in a single volume? One notable recent attempt employed gigantism; Yelena Baraz’ is in Oxford University Press’ Very Short Introduction series, so its brevity was non-negotiable.[1] Faced with the apparently impossible task of Cicero in 100 or so (small) pages, she has pulled off a tour-de-force of compression and insight.
Sensibly, she does not choose between chronology and themes: two chapters on his career are followed by one each on the speeches, philosophy, poetry and letters. Best of all, Baraz starts at the end, using Cicero’s death as the starting point for a glittering opening summary of his reception which takes in the familiar landmarks of Petrarch, the Founding Fathers and Mommsen and finds time also for Robert Harris, Richard Nelson, and HBO’s Rome.
Cicero’s career is summarised usefully, but the volume comes into its own in its treatment of Cicero’s writing. If the chapter on oratory can sometimes feel like a trot through the speeches most likely to be on undergraduate curricula, Baraz’ treatment of his philosophy is quite superb: she grasps that technical detail is not helpful in this kind of work, concentrating instead on lucid and contextualised summaries which show how Cicero developed practically-engaged philosophy. Baraz’ discussion of De amicitia (76–77) is a wonderful analysis of the work and of the phenomenon of friendship at Rome, which far outstrips other much longer treatments in its incisiveness, and I don’t know of a better summary of De officiis (77–79). We should all be thankful to be able to direct our students towards a mere seventeen pages, at the end of which they will have a basis on which to read Cicero’s philosophica.
Baraz does a brave job in arguing for the poetry, and tackles the letters as a record of Cicero’s relationships; if this obscures the extent to which the epistolary Cicero is mediated by his editors, it shines welcome light on the range of his correspondents and the social forces, notably enslavement and gender, which shaped his expression therein——and that of Quintus frater, whose chilling letter to Tiro (Fam 16.26) Baraz quotes at length. One of the many virtues of this volume, indeed, is Baraz’ willingness to give some of her words to Cicero, with substantial quotations from all his genres, barring only the verse.
If I have a criticism, it is this: I do not know if the reader will finish the book with the desire to explore Cicero’s writings more extensively—and if they do, it is more likely to be the philosophy and the letters than the oratory. What can stand for Cicero’s oratory apart from the thing itself? And how can those of us who became Ciceronians because we were seduced by his language explain the seduction when we are reading him in translation? It is hardly fair to Baraz to blame her for not finding a way through this conundrum in her allotted 35,000 words, but the quality of her achievement within those parameters in every other respect cannot but draw attention to this central gap.
The VSIs have been going since the start of the century—with Beard and Henderson’s Classics, let us not forget, being one of the first five published back in February 2000—and perhaps it is a surprise that we have had to wait so long for Cicero. On the other hand, the task was a daunting one; we should be very glad that it has finally been accomplished so formidably.
Notes
[1] Andrew Dyck, Cicero: the man and his works, Cambridge 2025, pp. 1117, with, e.g. Zetzel (https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2025/2025.10.11/)