Thinkers Timeline

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman lawyer, statesman, philosopher, and writer. He is one of the most influential figures in the history of Western law and political thought. He was born on 3 January 106 BCE in Arpinum, a small town about 70 miles south-east of Rome. His family was wealthy but not noble. They belonged to the equestrian class, the second tier of Roman society below the senators. His parents wanted him to rise. They sent him to Rome and then to Greece for the best education available. He studied law, rhetoric (the art of public speaking), and philosophy. By his mid-twenties he was working as a lawyer in Rome. He rose quickly. He became famous for his speeches in court cases. In 63 BCE, at the age of 43, he was elected consul, the highest political office in Rome. That year he uncovered the Catiline Conspiracy, a plot to overthrow the Roman state. The Senate executed the conspirators on Cicero's authority. The Romans gave him the title 'Father of the Country'. His later career was difficult. He was exiled briefly in 58 BCE. The Roman Republic was collapsing. Julius Caesar took dictatorial power. After Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE, Cicero attacked Mark Antony in a series of fierce speeches called the Philippics. Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus formed the Second Triumvirate and made lists of enemies to be killed. Cicero was on the list. He was caught and executed on 7 December 43 BCE, aged 63. His severed head and hands were displayed in the Roman Forum.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, and theologian whose synthesis of Christian theology with Aristotelian philosophy became the most influential intellectual achievement of medieval Catholic thought and remains a central reference in Catholic philosophy and theology today. He was born around 1225 at the family castle of Roccasecca, in the Kingdom of Sicily (in present-day Italy), to the noble family of the Counts of Aquino. His parents sent him at age five to the nearby Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, intending him for a monastic career that would eventually make him abbot. In 1239 political conflicts disrupted this plan and he was sent to the University of Naples, where he encountered the works of Aristotle and the new Dominican Order. In 1244 he joined the Dominicans — a decision his family opposed so strongly that they kidnapped him and held him under house arrest for over a year. He persisted, reached Paris in 1245, and became a student of the great Dominican scholar Albertus Magnus. He followed Albertus to Cologne, then returned to Paris, where he became a master of theology in 1256. Over the next eighteen years he wrote at an extraordinary rate — the Summa contra Gentiles (1259-1265), the Summa Theologiae (begun 1265, unfinished), extensive commentaries on Aristotle, commentaries on several books of the Bible, disputed questions, and many other works. He held teaching posts at Paris and at the Dominican study house in Rome and spent his final years in Naples. In December 1273, while celebrating Mass, he had some experience that he described only as straw compared to what he had seen, and he stopped writing. He died a few months later, in March 1274, while travelling to attend the Council of Lyon. He was canonised in 1323. His works have been studied continuously in Catholic institutions for over seven centuries and have influenced philosophy and theology well beyond Catholicism.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was an Italian poet, writer, and political thinker. He was born in Florence, one of the most important cities in medieval Italy, into a family of modest nobility. He fell deeply in love as a young man with a woman named Beatrice, who died young and became the central figure of his poetic imagination. He was active in Florentine politics and held several public offices. In 1301, when a rival political faction took power in Florence, Dante was accused of political offences, sentenced to death if he returned, and exiled from his city forever. He never went back. He spent the rest of his life wandering from city to city in northern Italy, writing, and composing the work for which he is remembered above all others: the Commedia, known in English as the Divine Comedy. This long narrative poem, written in Italian rather than the Latin used by educated writers of the time, describes a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. It was immediately recognised as a masterpiece and has remained one of the most admired works in world literature for seven hundred years.

Christine de Pizan was a medieval Italian-French writer. She is widely considered the first woman in Europe to make her living as a professional author. She was born in 1364 in Venice. Her father, Tommaso da Pizzano, was a doctor and astrologer. When she was four, the family moved to Paris because her father had been invited to serve as court astrologer to King Charles V of France. Christine grew up in the French royal court. Her father supported her education, which was unusual for a girl at the time. She read Latin, history, philosophy, and poetry. She had access to the king's library, one of the best in Europe. At fifteen she married Étienne du Castel, a court notary. By all accounts the marriage was happy. They had three children. In 1389, her husband died of the plague. Christine was 25. Her father had also died the year before. She suddenly had to support her three children, her widowed mother, and a niece. She had no inheritance and no easy way to earn money. Most widows in her position would have remarried or entered a convent. Christine chose neither. She decided to write for a living. She found patrons among the French royal dukes. She wrote poems, biographies, advice books, political works, and history. By her death around 1430, she had produced over forty works. Her best-known book, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), is one of the earliest defences of women in European literature. She is buried in the convent of Poissy, where she spent her final years writing in support of Joan of Arc.

Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian artist, scientist, and inventor. He was born in 1452 in the small town of Vinci, near Florence, in what is now Italy. His name means 'Leonardo from Vinci'. He was the son of a young woman named Caterina, who was probably a peasant or servant, and a wealthy notary named Ser Piero. His parents never married. Leonardo grew up in his father's family but was treated as a separate, somewhat outside figure. He showed great talent young. As a teenager he was apprenticed to the artist Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. He learned painting, sculpture, and many practical crafts. Around the age of 30, he moved to Milan to work for the Duke, Ludovico Sforza. He stayed in Milan for nearly 20 years. He painted, designed weapons, planned buildings, and filled notebooks with ideas. When French armies invaded Milan, Leonardo moved on. He worked in Florence, Rome, and other Italian cities. He served various rulers, including Cesare Borgia and the Medici. In 1516, the king of France, Francis I, invited him to come and live in France. Leonardo accepted. He spent his last three years in a small castle near the king's palace at Amboise. He died there in 1519, aged 67. He never married and had no children. He was probably gay, though the evidence is indirect. He was vegetarian, unusual for his time. He left thousands of notebook pages full of drawings and ideas, most of which were not read for centuries.

Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian writer, diplomat, and political thinker. He was born in 1469 in Florence, then a powerful Italian city-state. His family was middle-ranking and not rich, but his father had a good library. Machiavelli was educated in Latin, history, and the classical writers of ancient Rome. In 1498, at the age of 29, he became a senior official of the Florentine Republic. For the next fourteen years he served as a diplomat and adviser. He travelled across Italy and Europe on missions, meeting popes, kings, and warlords. He watched up close how power actually worked. He saw cruelty, betrayal, and luck shaping politics far more than virtue or law. In 1512 the Republic fell. The Medici family, who had ruled Florence before, returned to power. Machiavelli lost his job. He was suspected of plotting against the Medici, arrested, and tortured. Released and sent into rural exile, he spent his days farming and his evenings writing. In 1513 he wrote The Prince, a short, sharp book of advice for rulers. He hoped it would win him a job back in Florence. It did not. He also wrote a longer work, the Discourses on Livy, a study of Roman republican history, plus comedies, histories, and military essays. He died in 1527, just before the Republic briefly returned. The Prince was published five years after his death. It became one of the most controversial and influential books in the history of political thought.

Maria Montessori (1870-1952) was an Italian educator and doctor whose method of teaching young children has spread to thousands of schools around the world. She was born in Chiaravalle, in central Italy, to a middle-class family. Her father worked for the government; her mother was well-read and encouraged Maria's ambitions. At that time, few women in Italy went to university. Maria wanted to study medicine, which was almost impossible for a woman. She faced strong opposition but did not give up. She entered the University of Rome in 1890 and became one of the first women in Italy to earn a medical degree, graduating in 1896. Her early work as a doctor focused on children with learning difficulties. She worked at a clinic in Rome where she observed these children closely and developed teaching materials that helped them learn. When many of her students then passed the same state exams as children without special needs, she began to wonder whether her methods might work for all children. In 1907 she opened her first school, the Casa dei Bambini (Children's House), in a poor neighbourhood of Rome. The children were aged between three and seven. The results surprised everyone. Children who had been thought wild or undisciplined became focused, calm, and eager to learn. News of the school spread rapidly. Within a few years, schools using her methods opened across Europe, then in the United States and Asia. She wrote many books, including The Montessori Method (1909) and The Absorbent Mind (1949). She was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize because of her work on education for peace. During the Second World War she was trapped in India for seven years, where she continued teaching and developed her ideas about the education of older children. She died in the Netherlands in 1952 at the age of eighty-one. Her schools now educate more than a million children in more than a hundred countries.

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, and political organiser. He was born in Sardinia, the island off the coast of Italy, into a poor family and grew up in significant poverty. He won a scholarship to the University of Turin, where he became involved in socialist politics. He was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party in 1921 and became its leader. When Mussolini's fascist government came to power, Gramsci was arrested in 1926 and sentenced to twenty years in prison. The fascist prosecutor famously said at his trial: we must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years. The effort failed. In prison, Gramsci wrote the Prison Notebooks, a collection of philosophical and political reflections covering more than three thousand pages, which he smuggled out in fragments and which were published after his death. He died in prison in 1937, aged 46, his health destroyed by years of harsh imprisonment. The Prison Notebooks were eventually published in the 1950s and became one of the most important works of political philosophy of the twentieth century.

Umberto Eco (1932-2016) was an Italian philosopher, semiotician, literary theorist, and novelist. He was born in Alessandria in northern Italy and studied philosophy at the University of Turin, writing a doctoral thesis on the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas. He then worked in Italian public broadcasting and as a journalist before becoming a professor of semiotics, the study of signs and meaning, at the University of Bologna, where he taught for the rest of his career. He was an enormously prolific scholar who published major academic works on medieval aesthetics, semiotics, the interpretation of texts, and the philosophy of language. In 1980, when he was nearly fifty, he published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, a detective story set in a fourteenth-century Italian monastery. It became an international bestseller translated into dozens of languages, and was followed by several more novels of similar ambition. Eco was unusual in being genuinely important both as an academic philosopher and as a popular novelist, and he saw these two activities as deeply connected: both were explorations of how human beings make and interpret meaning.

Mariana Mazzucato is an economist. She was born in Rome, Italy, in 1968. Her father was a physicist, and when she was a child the family moved to the United States, where her father worked at Princeton University. She grew up mostly in the United States and later returned to Europe. She holds both Italian and American citizenship. Mazzucato studied history and international relations as an undergraduate, then moved into economics for her doctorate. Today she is a professor at University College London, in Britain, where she founded a research centre called the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. She became widely known in 2013 with her book 'The Entrepreneurial State'. It argued that governments, not just private companies, are major drivers of new technology. Later books include 'The Value of Everything' (2018), 'Mission Economy' (2021), and 'The Big Con' (2023). Mazzucato is unusual among economists for her direct influence on real policy. She has advised governments and international bodies around the world, including in Britain, Italy, South Africa, and the European Union, and she works with the United Nations and other organisations. She is also a strong communicator who reaches a wide public. As a living, working economist, her ideas are still developing and are actively debated.