大象传媒

Author of Cicero trilogy said Winston Churchill was as close as we've got in a long time. He added Jeremy Corbyn has a little Cato in him and vice versa.

"Politics is the most noble of callings". Not perhaps a sentiment to which we'd all subscribe today, but the words of the great Roman statesman, orator and philosopher Cicero a couple of thousand years ago. His extraordinary life spanned the collapse of the Roman republic and the birth of the Roman empire. He outlived Caesar by nearly two years and made a valiant last struggle to restore the republic to life before he was finally slaughtered on the orders of the next warlord, Caesar's great nephew Octavian. Today the novelist Robert Harris publishes Dictator - the last of his trilogy on Cicero's life. He's been commentating on British politics for more than thirty years so I asked him if he could slot Cicero into the modern political scene