If eddies and cross-currents still complicate the charting of the study of Cicero as politician and orator, it is not at all difficult to determine the main movement of the tides in the study of his philosophical works.

It is still popularly believed that the Middle Ages got their philosophy from Cicero and that at the Renaissance he was replaced more or less overnight by the newly discovered Greeks. But of course the Middle Ages also learned philosophy from Aristotle via Boethius, then through Arabic sources, then in the original. It is easy enough to find medieval writers who knew Cicero’s De Amicitia and De Senectute, and a good many knew the Tusculans and De Officiis—the easy ones, it might be said. But it was Petrarch and the men of the Renaissance who put Cicero on the map, precisely because they rebelled against what they felt to be the arid theorizing of Aristotelian scholasticism and looked for a guide to life. After Petrarch, the belief that Cicero was outstanding both as statesman and thinker helped a great deal, and on the map he remained in that capacity for centuries. Plato profoundly influenced many, but often in bizarre manifestations which owed more to neo-Platonism and allied mysticisms than to the Plato of, say, Apology and Republic familiar to the modern student. Greek anyhow remained a scarce commodity until the nineteenth century: for the ordinary educated man what Tully said was good enough.