Republican Literature

The Epistula ad Tiburtes (CIL I2 586) is an inscription on a bronze tablet, recording a letter sent to the people of Tibur by a Roman praetor that summarizes the Senate’s response to an embassy of the Tiburtines defending themselves against unknown accusations. The inscription, found in modern Tivoli in the early seventeenth century but now lost, is exceptional both because of its material and its date: very few large public inscriptions, and even fewer in bronze, survive from the 2nd century BCE date scholars now generally assign this inscription.

Villas for Cicero functioned as much more than passive backdrops to his activities: they provided a key means to fashioning his political image both in the real world described in his letters and in literature as illustrated in his dialogues. This paper considers Cicero’s representation of two villas in Tusculum, firstly the record in his letters of his own villa there and secondly the estate of Lucius Crassus used as the fictional setting for De Oratore, in order to explore how Cicero employed these residences to pursue his political agenda.

In this paper, I reassess Cicero’s desire to publicly commemorate his daughter by evaluating it in the context of his other reactions to devastating loss, specifically his exile. While Cicero’s attempt to memorialize his daughter with a public shrine may be termed a “strange plan” (Shackleton Bailey in a footnote to his 1999 translation of Att. 12.18; see also Shackleton Bailey 1966, 404-13), this paper argues that such a commemoration offered Cicero a unique way to stabilize his response to this death in the face of the blistering evaluation of his mourning.

Messalla Corvinus’ Ciceronian Career

In recent studies Cicero has emerged as a much more interesting and intelligent philosopher than has been granted for a long time, and the Ciceronian dialogue form has recently begun to receive the attention that it deserves (Schofield 2008). In this paper, I will address one specific element in Cicero’s dialogues which characterises his particular take on this form of writing: the political and philosophical underpinnings of the dialogue form.