Roman Republican Prose and its Afterlife

This paper examines Cicero’s choice in the Brutus to begin oratorical history with Marcus Cornelius Cethegus (cos. 204). Based on Cicero’s own criteria for constructing oratorical history, I argue, we would expect Cicero to begin his history earlier, with Appius Claudius Caecus (cos. 307, 296). The paper begins by closely analyzing Cicero’s citations of Ennius as his evidence for choosing Cethegus. Careful reading of these passages will show Cicero’s distortions and manipulations.

In the summer of 57 BCE, Cicero received the news for which he had long been waiting: a law was to be put before the assembly recalling him from exile. Setting out from Dyrrachium on 4 August, the day of the vote, he arrived in Rome later that month. When he reached the Porta Capena, he found the streets teeming with people shouting his name and applauding wildly. In the Forum and on the Capitoline, the crowd was even more remarkable: in foroque et in ipso Capitolio miranda multitudo fuit (Att. 4.1.5).

The influence of the Greek historian Thucydides on the Roman Sallust has long been noted, particularly regarding language and style, but also in famous passages of Thucydides that Sallust uses as models (Patzer, Parker, Syme, Scanlon). An educated Roman audience would have been familiar with Thucydides, and recognized both how Sallust reworks these passages and how he uses these intertextual relations to further comment on the history and personages of his own time.

The “Third Continent” has long been a controversial territory for classicists, particularly in the debates following Martin Bernal’s Black Athena monographs (e.g. Bernal 1987-2006, Lefkowitz 1996). However, for all the recent work on colonial classics (e.g. Bradley 2010, Stephens and Vasunia 2010, Vasunia 2013) and classics Africana (e.g. Greenwood 2010, McConnell 2013), the role of antiquity in shaping Maghrebian discourses remains an underexplored topic.