Hi, a couple of months ago I read a very interesting book called "Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician" by Anthony Everitt. The book mostly concerned itself with what Cicero did during his life and his motivations, but there wasn't a lot about his overall effects on history. Wikipedia says that Cicero's influence was so great that "His influence on the Latin language was so immense that the subsequent history of prose in not only Latin but European languages up to the 19th century was said to be either a reaction against or a return to his style."
Is it true that Cicero remained so influential for over 2000 years after his death, or is there some exaggeration to it? It's hard to believe that one man could have such an impact on the entirety of European languages like it says he did.
Thank you!
Cicero certainly had a tremendous influence on Latin. Cicero's vocabulary and style became the thing to emulate. Here's a quote from the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism:
Petrarch, the first great humanist, grasped the difference between the Latin of his own time and that of antiquity.... He idolized Cicero as the supreme embodiment of classical Latin eloquence.... By the beginning of the fifteenth century, however, humanists had a different perspective. They criticized Petrarch's Latin as insufficiently classical. More importantly, they were Ciceronians.... They had drawn the consequences of two fundamental Petrarchan premises: first, that classical Latin was true Latin; and, second, that Cicero represented the pinnacle of classical Latin prose.
It's possible to argue that Petrarch created the influence of Cicero, but so much of Cicero's stuff survives that it's hard to imagine it survived by accident. In any case, Cicero's Latin became the language of the intelligentsia of Europe.
As a politician, I don't think he was so effective. He couldn't decide if he was joining Caesar or Pompey until the last minute; he wasn't able to defeat Antony or control Octavian. If anything his political legacy is putting Octavian in a position he could leverage to dominate the state.
On a personal note, I much prefer Caesar's Latin to Cicero's, and my life would have been much easier if Cicero hadn't have the influence he does. I will never forgive him for that.