and dogged by a rival character of weighty provenance, the ampersand would spend a thousand years of uneasy coexistence with its opponent before finally claiming victory. The ampersand’s is a true underdog story.

The first century BC politician, philosopher, lawyer and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero was one of that select circle of Roman personalities who, in the manner of the most prominent of today’s footballers and pop stars, could go by a single part of his tripartite name and yet still be instantly recognised. Cicero, as he is and was invariably known, was alternately immersed in and exiled from Roman politics at the highest levels. His life and works are a fascinating microcosm of a Republic groaning under its own weight.

Born in 106 BC to an aristocratic but hithertohe felt at the disadvantages arrayed against him left the young Cicero with a fierce desire to succeed. Adopting the Homeric motto “Always to be best and far to excel the others”,3 he would live up to it in spectacular fashion.

A lawyer by his mid-twenties, Cicero used wisely the opportunities afforded by his vocation, becoming a practised orator, cultivating political contacts and coming to public notice at the head of high profile cases.4 Making the leap from law to public service, he scaled the political ladder known as the cursus honorum, or ‘honours race’, with almost indecent haste, elected at the first try and the youngest legal age to each of the successive political offices of Quaestor, Aedile and Praetor.5 His meteoric rise culminated in 63 BC with