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concerned with the social and political ideas of Cicero?’ And he echoes Gottoff’s sombre analysis –Cicero’s merit as philosopher is so deflated, and his popularity as a sage and stylist has so declined,that he may as well be dismissed as irrelevant to the modern age. And yet, Wood points out, he wasthe foremost social and political theorist of Roman republicanism, and was deeply admired byeminent social and political thinkers of early modern Europe. His letters, discovered in theRenaissance, gave great insights into his character and were studied for both their content and theirstyle. For humanists he was a venerated teacher of civic virtue, a staunch republican apostle ofLiberty, and a relentless foe of tyranny. His speeches, letters and philosophical works were studied inschools in England, Italy and France and influenced generations of young minds. During the DarkAges, when original Greek and Roman texts were lost to Western Europe, Cicero’s texts provided theonly source of ancient Greek philosophy. The early Church Fathers used Cicero extensively as theydrew up the doctrines of the early Church, and although they were at odds with Cicero’s Academicscepticism and stoicism, they based many of their concepts on arguments set out by Cicero as theytranslated his pagan concepts into Christian ones, bending his logic to fit their dogma. 35 Eloquentpassages from Cicero’s works, praising the glory of the divine power behind the universe, wereadopted by the Church and incorporated into Christian prayer books. As a consequence of hisinfluence on the Church (the main conduit of learning in the Middle Ages), Cicero’s representation ofGreek philosophy informed all subsequent discussions of epistemology, ethics, politics, and religionup until the time of the Renaissance.As a politician, Cicero had a great influence on Machiavelli, and the authority of his workscontinued to inform Elizabethan culture. In the seventeenth century he was the guiding light for theEnglish Republicans: James Harrington, John Neville and Algernon Sidney; and his political conceptsdefined the old Whig values that continued to inform the principles of eighteenth-century republicanthinkers, including Wordsworth. 36 In France Cicero was praised by Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot,and Rousseau – who called him the ‘Prince of Eloquence’ as he emulated his rhetorical skills. Frenchrevolutionaries, from Mirabeau to Robespierre, held him in high esteem, and Brissot, ‘the FrenchCicero,’ modelled his own ideal life on Cicero’s De Oratore. John Locke stated that he was deeplyindebted to Cicero’s works and praised him among the ‘truly great men’, and Shaftesbury’sCharacteristics drew extensively on Ciceronian principles. Both David Hume and Adam Smith readwidely in his philosophical works, and Hume’s devastating sceptical attitude was based on Cicero’srepresentation of Academic Scepticism, a perspective that owed more to Socrates than to Pyrrho.Cicero’s manner was imitated by a number of accomplished ‘Ciceronian’ stylists and orators:Gibbon, Johnson, Pitt, Fox, and Sheridan – and Wood notes that there was no more devoted aCiceronian than Edmund Burke whose thought has been likened to ‘a Cicero filtered through theChristian scholastic tradition’ (Wood 3). James Beattie quotes from Cicero extensively in his essays,primarily for his social commentary, which provides a useful and helpful context for defining Cicero’s placein greater history.35 St Augustine and St Jerome both greatly admired Cicero’s philosophy. Bertrand Russell describes the twomen’s struggle to turn their backs on Cicero’s divine reasoning in favour of the Church’s demands for a faiththat overrode that reason. A History of Western Philosophy pp. 354 -85.36 See Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman.36