'Enslaved to the courts': slavery and/as politics in Cicero's early speeches
By Olivia Elder, University of Oxford
In this paper I explore the theme of enslavement in Cicero’s early speeches (81–66 BCE) and argue that Cicero instrumentalizes this theme to serve his rhetorical and political ends.
Mea Vox Occidit: Voice and Silence in Cicero's Letters from Exile
By Tiziano Boggio, University of Cincinnati
The rhetorical use of silence represents a peculiar feature of Cicero’s prose, which has recently attracted much scholarly interest (Gowing 2000, Guerin 2011, Taylor 2013, Marchese 2014, Stephan 2016, Winter 2021). The notion of silence appears particularly connected to the literature of exile since it symbolizes the void surrounding the exiled. Although silence has been interpreted as a key theme in Ovid’s exilic poetry (Natoli 2018), few scholars (Claassen 1999, Garcea 2005) have devoted attention to silence as a literary motif in Cicero’s letters during his banishment.
Dialogue across Fragments? Quotations of Republican Tragedy in Varro and Cicero
By Scott Di Giulio, Mississippi State University
Quotation occupies a curious position in the eyes of Classicists: it is a vital means of preserving fragments of otherwise lost literature, but it seemingly lacks the literary creativity of allusive intertexts. Recent efforts to study quotes have moved away from Quellenforschung and begun to explore specific authors’ quotation habits (Olson, Mitchell, Tischer 2017, 2019); work on Cicero has examined his engagement with earlier authors within his oeuvre, with increasing attention paid to his use of quotation in particular (Behrendt, Bishop, Čulík-Baird 2021, 2022).
Searching for the Crowd in Cicero's Second Catilinarian
By Julia Mebane, Indiana University
In the Bellum Catilinae, Sallust claims that omnino cuncta plebes favored Catiline’s revolutionary designs (BC 37.1). In the list of conspirators that dominates the second Catilinarian, however, these supporters are nowhere to be found (Dyck 2008: 148). Scholars have posited historical and rhetorical explanations for their absence. Some deny that Catiline’s program of debt relief would have appealed to those whose economic positions limited the accrual of debt in the first place (Harrison 2008).
Cicero’s Letters of Exile and The Space of Political Upheaval
By Vasileios Sazaklidis, University of Texas at Austin
The Roman conceptual understanding of geography and the circa-Mediterranean space has been predominantly Roman-centric, as Clarke (2008) has -rightly- demonstrated. The Tabula Peutingeriana reinforces the notion of a maximalized Roman epicenter and the subsequent coordination of the rest of the world on the basis of relativity to Rome, in terms of spatial proximity, commercial affiliations, and historical significance. The entire oikoumene revolves around the axon of Rome.