Portraying Cicero in Literature, Culture, and Politics

Portraying Cicero in Literature, Culture, and Politics PDF Author: Francesca Romana Berno
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110748703
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 507

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Book Description
Cicero has played a pivotal role in shaping Western culture. His public persona, his self-portrait as model of Roman prose, philosopher, and statesman, has exerted a durable and profound impact on the educational system and the formation of the ruling class over the centuries. Joining up with recent studies on the reception of Cicero, this volume approaches the figure of Cicero from a ‘biographical’, more than ‘philological’, perspective and considers the multiple ways by which different ages reacted to Cicero and created their ‘Ciceros’. From Cicero’s lifetime to our times, it focuses on how the image of Cicero was revisited and reworked by intellectuals and men of culture, who eulogized his outstanding oratorical and political virtues but, not rarely, questioned the role he had in Roman politics and society. An international group of scholars elaborates on the figure of Cicero, shedding fresh light on his reception in late antiquity, Humanism and Renaissance, Enlightenment and modern centuries. Historians, literary scholars and philosophers, as well as graduate students, will certainly profit from this volume, which contributes enormously to our understanding of the influence of Cicero on Western culture over the times.

Portraying Cicero in Literature, Culture, and Politics

Portraying Cicero in Literature, Culture, and Politics PDF Author: Francesca Romana Berno
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110748886
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Book Description
Cicero has played a pivotal role in shaping Western culture. His public persona, his self-portrait as model of Roman prose, philosopher, and statesman, has exerted a durable and profound impact on the educational system and the formation of the ruling class over the centuries. Joining up with recent studies on the reception of Cicero, this volume approaches the figure of Cicero from a ‘biographical’, more than ‘philological’, perspective and considers the multiple ways by which different ages reacted to Cicero and created their ‘Ciceros’. From Cicero’s lifetime to our times, it focuses on how the image of Cicero was revisited and reworked by intellectuals and men of culture, who eulogized his outstanding oratorical and political virtues but, not rarely, questioned the role he had in Roman politics and society. An international group of scholars elaborates on the figure of Cicero, shedding fresh light on his reception in late antiquity, Humanism and Renaissance, Enlightenment and modern centuries. Historians, literary scholars and philosophers, as well as graduate students, will certainly profit from this volume, which contributes enormously to our understanding of the influence of Cicero on Western culture over the times.

Why Cicero Matters

Why Cicero Matters PDF Author: Vittorio Bufacchi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350376701
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Why Cicero Matters shows us how the Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius, better known as Cicero, can help realize a new political world. His impact on humanitarianism, the Enlightenment and the Founding Fathers of America is immense. Yet we give Julius Caesar all our attention. Why? What does this say about modern politics and political culture? This book gives us Cicero as an antidote to the myth of the strong man of history. Reading Cicero's On Duties alongside two more introspective philosophical texts, On Friendship and On Old Age, we see how Cicero turned politics into a higher, intellectual form of art, believing in education, in culture and above all in the power of philosophy to instil morality. Cicero has reassuring words on the indispensable work philosophers make, and why the common good needs philosophy. In an age when anti-intellectualism runs rampant, Why Cicero Matters introduces us to an ancient thinker who argues culture is, or ought to be, the foundation of any modern democracy, and books its building blocks.

The Scholia on Cicero's Speeches

The Scholia on Cicero's Speeches PDF Author: Christoph Pieper
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004516441
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
This volume, the first one dedicated to the ancient scholia to Cicero's speeches, analyzes them from different angles and positions them in the broader context of late antique commentaries and learning.

Cicero in Basel

Cicero in Basel PDF Author: Cédric Scheidegger Laemmle
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111455025
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description


Cicero in Greece, Greece in Cicero

Cicero in Greece, Greece in Cicero PDF Author: Ioannis Deligiannis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111292770
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The volume aims at complementing the international literature on the interaction between Cicero and Greece. It offers new and unpublished material on Cicero's presence in Greece literally, deriving from his epistles, speeches and philosophical treatises, but also on his interaction with the Greek philosophical schools, the Greek language and politics, etc. Besides, it offers new knowledge on the appreciation and reception of Cicero and his texts by the Greek world from Late Antiquity to Byzantium and Modern Greece, based on material deriving from a variety of sources (papyri, manuscripts, compendia or encyclopaedias, imitations, translations, early editions, etc.), an aspect of the relationships between Cicero and Greece still understudied. Thus, the volume offers an image as illustrative as possible of various aspects of the presence of the Greek world in Cicero's works and of Cicero's presence in Greece from his own times to the present day.

Laughing at domestica facta

Laughing at domestica facta PDF Author: Giuseppe Eugenio Rallo
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
ISBN: 3949189971
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In this monograph, the author embarks on a captivating journey to shed fresh light on the togata, a mid-Republican theatrical genre which survives only in fragments. The book seeks to answer pressing questions surrounding the togata's significance in identity construction during the middle Republic from a literary and cultural perspective. Delving deep into the fragmentary textual remains of the togata, the book explores how the Roman elite fashioned their identity. The author challenges the notion of monolithic identity construction, and explores the diverse forms of identity within the togata, offering a new perspective on the subject. This study thus positions the togata as a vital source for discerning the characteristics and beliefs by which the Romans distinguished themselves and their culture from others. By examining how Romans perceived themselves, their ideas about different social groups, and their literary and cultural ties to earlier traditions, this book aims to transform our understanding of the togata's role in Roman drama.

Roman Luxuria

Roman Luxuria PDF Author: Francesca Romana Berno
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192661523
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
In classical Latin, luxuria means 'desire for luxury'; it is linked with the ideas of excess and deviation from a standard. It is in most cases labelled as a vice which contrasts with the innate frugal nature of the Romans. Latin authors do not see it as endemic but as an import from the East in the aftermath of military conquests—and as a cause of fatal decline. Following these etymological and semantic origins, Roman Luxuria: A Literary and Cultural History discusses the influence of Greek culture on the Roman concept and the peculiar characteristics of Roman luxuria. It analyses Roman views on luxuria through close readings in historical order from Cato the Elder, who regards luxuria as the opposite of the ideal Roman way of life, to the Christian poet Prudentius, who represents it in an allegorical fight with Sobriety. The book attends both to key authors and to wider literary genres, such as historiography and satire. Particular consideration is given to the rhetorical device of personification, which can be traced from the first appearances of luxuria in Latin literature to those of late antiquity. Berno devotes detailed attention to Seneca the Younger, whose work is often preoccupied with this passion. Seneca both defends himself from the charge of luxuria and violently attacks it in others, describing it as the archenemy of a philosophical life. Along the centuries, the focus on luxuria shifts from the economic sphere (and the waste of money) to the erotic, to the extent that in the Christian world it becomes one of the Seven Capital Sins representing the vice of lust.

Afterlives of the Garden

Afterlives of the Garden PDF Author: Gregson Davis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111029735
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The collection of essays in this volume offers fresh insights into varied modalities of reception of Epicurean thought among Roman authors of the late Republican and Imperial eras. Its generic purview encompasses prose as well as poetic texts by both minor and major writers in the Latin literary canon, including the anonymous poems, Ciris and Aetna, and an elegy from the Tibullan corpus by the female poet, Sulpicia. Major figures include the Augustan poets, Vergil and Horace, and the late antique Christian theologian, Augustine. The method of analysis employed in the essays is uniformly interdisciplinary and reveals the depth of the engagement of each ancient author with major preoccupations of Epicurean thought, such as the balanced pursuit of erotic pleasure in the context of human flourishing and the role of the gods in relation to human existence. The ensemble of nuanced interpretations testifies to the immense vitality of the Epicurean philosophical tradition throughout Greco-Roman antiquity and thereby provides a welcome and substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of reception studies.

Reading Cicero’s Final Years

Reading Cicero’s Final Years PDF Author: Christoph Pieper
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110716399
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
This volume contributes to the ongoing scholarly debate regarding the reception of Cicero. It focuses on one particular moment in Cicero’s life, the period from the death of Caesar up to Cicero’s own death. These final years have shaped Cicero’s reception in an special way, as they have condensed and enlarged themes that his life stands for: on the positive side his fight for freedom and the republic against mighty opponents (for which he would finally be killed); on the other hand his inconsistency in terms of political alliances and tendency to overestimate his own influence. For that reason, many later readers viewed the final months of Cicero's life as his swan song, and as representing the essence of his life as a whole. The fixed scope of this volume facilitates an analysis of the underlying debates about the historical character Cicero and his textual legacy (speeches, letters and philosophical works) through the ages, stretching from antiquity itself to the present day. Major themes negotiated in this volume are the influence of Cicero’s regular attempts to anticipate his later reception; the question of whether or not Cicero showed consistency in his behaviour; his debatable heroism with regard to republican freedom; and the interaction between philosophy, rhetoric and politics.