Untergang

[curiosus002]

Until then, which is to say for 500 years, ideas and catchphrases from Cicero's speeches and writings, together with the works of other Romans, filled the minds of educated western man and woman after bedeviling the young in school. The structure of thought and argument in the western languages has been influenced by Cicero... Besides Cicero's works, Livy's patriotic history of Rome and its wars with Carthage; the Annals and Germania of Tacitus; the tragedies and moral essays of Seneca; the comedies of Plautus and Terence; the poems of Virgil, Ovid, Lucretius, Catullus, and Horace; and - lone specimen - Pliny's encyclopedic natural history—made up the portrait of a complete culture... It is a noteworthy feature of 20C culture that for the first time in over a thousand years its educated class is not expected to be at least bilingual.