Summary: Aspects of Petrarch’s role in Cicero’s Rezeptionsgeschichte are well known. What
remains uninvestigated, however, is the context in which Petrarch laboured to reconstruct
Cicero’s biography. An analysis of the biographical texts on Cicero from Antiquity to Petrarch,
with special attention given to the Troyes epitome of Cicero’s life, shows how the
rebirth of Cicero’s biography, and of a scholarly acumen and historical perspective to which
we are heirs, radically developed in the fourteenth century.