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Overall very good and clean. - Marcus Tullius Cicero[a] (3 January 106 BC � 7 December 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher and Academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises that led to the establishment of the Roman Empire. His extensive writings include treatises on rhetoric, philosophy and politics, and he is considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and served as consul in 63 BC. His influence on the Latin language was immense. He wrote more than three-quarters of extant Latin literature that is known to have existed in his lifetime, and it has been said that subsequent prose was either a reaction against or a return to his style, not only in Latin but in European languages up to the 19th century. Cicero introduced into Latin the arguments of the chief schools of Hellenistic philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary with neologisms such as evidentia, humanitas, qualitas, quantitas, and essentia, distinguishing himself as a translator and philosopher. - Augustus Samuel Wilkins (1843�1905) was an English classical scholar. He held a professorship of Latin in Manchester for 34 years. In 1868 Wilkins graduated B.A. as fifth in the first class of the classical tripos. A nonconformist, Wilkins was at that point legally disqualified from a college fellowship; that changed after the Universities Tests Act 1871, but by then Wilkins was married, still an impediment. The same year he took the M.A. degree in the University of London, receiving the gold medal for classics, and was appointed Latin lecturer at Owens College, Manchester; in 1869 he was promoted to the Latin professorship there. Wilkins's major work was his full edition of Cicero De Oratore, lib. i.�iii. (Oxford, 1879�1892). A critical edition of the text of the whole of Cicero's rhetorical works followed in 1903. As an editor he came into line with contemporary German scholarship. (Wikipedia)