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So Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones ¡°would willingly obliterate every word of Cicero¡± for just one book of Ctesias¡¯ lost work Persian Things (¡°Listen, and let us take you back¡±, Books, 13 November). Farewell, then, to the following words, all of which, it appears, have come down to us via Cicero¡¯s neologistic translations from the Greek: definition, difference, image, individual, induction, infinity, notion, quality, quantity, species and vacuum. Farewell, too, to humanities, liberal arts, morality and science.

As Gian Bagio Conte puts it in Latin Literature: A History, Cicero ¡°laid the foundation for the abstract vocabulary that was to become the inheritance of the European cultural tradition¡±. Not for nothing did Michael Grant write that ¡°the influence of Cicero upon the history of European literature and ideas greatly exceeds that of any other prose writer in any language¡±.

Neil Foxlee
Visiting lecturer in rhetoric
Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts