Marcus Tullius Cicero

Cicero is Rome's most celebrated orator, a senator whose voice carries real weight in a Republic edging toward crisis. He is vain, fastidious, and endlessly pleased with his own eloquence, forever weighing which faction to flatter next. Caesar's rise unsettles him, and he watches the shifting alliances with the anxious calculation of a man who prefers survival to principle.

David Bamber plays him as a fusspot genius, all pursed lips and wounded dignity, which makes his self-regard funny rather than merely contemptible. The writing lets his famous rhetoric curdle into excuse-making in private, and Bamber times that gap between public grandeur and private panic beautifully, turning a textbook statesman into someone startlingly recognisable.