Cliches versus Idioms

[busker]

Caesar probably said "kai su, teknon" [και συ τεκνον]... just saying, you might want to be a bit less ready to call people "semi-educated".

anyway, with regard to cliche, one surely wants to avoid them, unless that's part of it, part of the thing, part of the style, the conscious choice. Idioms are slightly different, as they are often regional or date specific. "Et tu, Brute!" is a cliche in literary circles. But if your eastern European cleaner said it to you... it's contextual. I say, write what you want. Cliche, boring, derivative. It doesn't matter. No one aims for originality anymore, so why bother. As long as you have a thousand little thumbs-up, you're golden.

Even though Greek was the Lingua Franca of the empire, surely for Jules Latin was his Mater Lingua?

You could argue about it, but wouldn't that be ironic. What is cliche to you pair of dipshits isn't to someone who's had a proper education.

No one actually knows what Caesar’s last words were in any case, and one of the chroniclers of the purported phrase was writing at the time of Nerva (who also made stuff up all the time), so give it a rest.