Is Cicero worthy of our praise?

In Glasgow, at the joint conference of the Classical Association/Classical Association of Scotland, the Guardian's rather timely leader in praise of Cicero (in this morning's paper) has not gone unnoticed.

I ran into Professor Mary Beard during the conference coffee break – who last night was bigging up Cicero as antiquity's greatest wit. She noted archly that Cicero was, in her view, rather an unpleasant man. A great man, but a thoroughly nasty one.

I suspect we can expect Beard to air her views more fully on her brilliant blog.

Anyway, over at Comment is Free (the bit of our network where leaders live), there's a bit of Ciceronian discussion underway already.

And, if it's not too much of a personal plug (OK, it probably is) – I'm on the BBC2 programme we mention (Yes We Can: The Lost Art of Oratory). The show is worth watching – and not because of me! There are some great contributors, including Bill Clinton and Gore Vidal.

Finally, if you are suddenly feeling desperate to learn or brush up your Latin, here is a useful page of links and resources, hosted by the brilliant Iris Project, a charity that aims to get Latin teaching into state schools.

It's nice and short, so I reproduce the full text of the leader here:

Marcus Tullius Cicero, born in 106 BC and decapitated by his political enemies in 43 BC, was for centuries regarded with peculiar dread by British schoolboys (few girls had the benefit of a classical education). Here was a man responsible for countless reams of Latin prose, written in intricate, hard-to-translate periods; here was an unsympathetic figure supposedly obsessed with his own reputation. But recent scholarship is separating the true Cicero from the caricature, peeling away the facade of pompous authority figure to reveal Cicero the philosopher and sceptic, and - as the Classical Association's meeting in Glasgow is hearing this weekend - something of an urbane wit. He was a self-made man, who rose, Obama-like, from unlikely origins to take the consulship, Rome's chief political prize. What propelled him up the greasy pole was the power of the spoken word, a fact to be celebrated on BBC2 tomorrow in Yes We Can!: The Lost Art of Oratory, which, inter plurima alia, looks at the long shadow Cicero has cast on rhetoric. Two millennia after his death, his speeches remain the model for modern orators, his tricks and tropes - tricolon, anaphora, praeteritio and the like - are still the stock in trade of the public speaker. But Cicero was no mere purveyor of polished platitudes. In his theoretical works he sought to unite the political word and the political deed in a single, dynamic ideal of civic and political responsibility - and this is where he surely stands as a true model for the politicians of today.