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Person

Cicero

A portrait of Cicero, wearing a red toga, with a contemplative expression and flowing white hair and beard.

Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar and writer (106–43 BCE). His surviving works include the only ancient literary reference to a device resembling the Antikythera Mechanism: in "De re publica" he describes a bronze sphere built by Archimedes that modelled the motions of the heavens. He saw it as a curiosity, not as ordinary technology — the strongest evidence that such machines were already rare in Cicero's own time.

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