Ancient Greek history

How should we think about Cicero? He was the orator who claimed that he did his best to save the Roman Republic from decadence. To more recent readers, he has come to seem regressive as well as ridiculous: he opposed the redistribution of land and loathed the idea of doling out grain rations. But it’s his self-promotion that makes us roll our eyes. Early in her biography, Catharine Edwards understates the obvious: ‘False modesty was never Cicero’s problem.’ What she does best throughout her surprisingly page-turning account is to reveal Cicero through his own words. (Admittedly, she has many, many words to choose from.) She quotes him reflecting on an early, junior role as a quaestor in Sicily: ‘What Sicilian quaestor has won greater renown or popularity?

The most important thing to know about ancient Greek mathematics is how little anyone knows about it. The scant evidence available today is tremendously indirect: reconstructions from unrepresentative survivals of fragments of translations of transcriptions of commentaries on compilations of summaries of allusions to refutations of excerpts of documents produced as part of an oral culture of learning in which the original writing may never have been expected to encapsulate what really mattered. Many centuries separate the people we want to know about and even the oldest materials we have to know them with, and most of what they did and thought is simply and definitively lost. But that is only the start of the difficulty.