If it’s true that men are always thinking about the Roman Empire, than roughly half of you should already be familiar with Marcus Tullius Cicero; but for those who aren’t, he was a Roman statesman who desperately and unsuccessfully tried to uphold republican values as the state descended into civil war and collapsed around him. None of that is important to our story, though, because Cicero had a bit of a side hustle. You see, when he wasn’t gaslighting, gatekeeping, girlbossing in the senate, Cicero was a big yapper—both in spoken and written form—and our story today is about one of his books.
It was March of 44 B.C.E. and our pal Cicero was very sad because his coworkers didn’t invite him to a very important group project—killing Julius Caesar. Heartbroken that he didn’t get to stab one of his greatest ops, he returned to writing his philosophical writings, which include the absolute behemoth On the Ends of Good and Evil, a Socratic dialogue on the major philosophical systems of the time.
Fast forward a year and Cicero has been up to some stuff, and the Roman Republic has been having some…major staff turnover, you could say. Let’s also say the new management, Mark Antony, is not a fan of Cicero, primarily on account of Cicero trying to declare war on him just a year ago. So, naturally, Mark Antony has Cicero summarily executed.
Now fast forward a couple thousand years. and there’s some pressman in the 1500s who finds the galley type for—take the pin out—On the Ends of Good and Evil. He takes that type and scrambles it up to create some dummy text. You might be familiar with it, it goes a little something like:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec velit…
That’s right, he created lorem ipsum, which continues to be used as dummy text for some more hundreds of years, and, over time, the context gets lost completely.
By the 1970s, people have no idea where lorem ipsum comes from until a Latin scholar by the name of Richard McClintock goes searching up the word “consectetur.” As it turns out, consectetur isn’t used in a whole lot of classical literature, so it’s pretty easy to pin it down to On the Ends of Good and Evil.
So there you have it, that’s how the great Cicero’s serious piece of philosophical writing became filler text. Listen, I know this story probably fits better in the last issue, but it’s the end of the semester and I’m burnt out, cut me some slack. Anyway, please enjoy the YouTube short that sent me down this rabbit hole:
Featured image edited by Helena Swiderski from Cicero Discovering Tomb of Archimedes by Paolo Barbotti, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
