Cicero: Select Letters

Cicero: Select Letters

Author: Marcus Tullius Cicero

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1980-07-03

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780521295246

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A collection of representative letters from Cicero's vast correspondence, with introduction and commentary.


Cicero

Cicero

Author: Anthony Everitt

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2011-11-30

Total Pages: 487

ISBN-13: 1588360342

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “An excellent introduction to a critical period in the history of Rome. Cicero comes across much as he must have lived: reflective, charming and rather vain.”—The Wall Street Journal “All ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher combined.”—John Adams He squared off against Caesar and was friends with young Brutus. He advised the legendary Pompey on his botched transition from military hero to politician. He lambasted Mark Antony and was master of the smear campaign, as feared for his wit as he was for his ruthless disputations. Brilliant, voluble, cranky, a genius of political manipulation but also a true patriot and idealist, Cicero was Rome’s most feared politician, one of the greatest lawyers and statesmen of all times. In this dynamic and engaging biography, Anthony Everitt plunges us into the fascinating, scandal-ridden world of ancient Rome in its most glorious heyday—when senators were endlessly filibustering legislation and exposing one another’s sexual escapades to discredit the opposition. Accessible to us through his legendary speeches but also through an unrivaled collection of unguarded letters to his close friend Atticus, Cicero comes to life as a witty and cunning political operator, the most eloquent and astute witness to the last days of Republican Rome. Praise for Cicero “ [Everitt makes] his subject—brilliant, vain, principled, opportunistic and courageous—come to life after two millennia.”—The Washington Post “ Gripping . . . Everitt combines a classical education with practical expertise. . . . He writes fluidly.”—The New York Times “In the half-century before the assassination of Julius Caesar . . . Rome endured a series of crises, assassinations, factional bloodletting, civil wars and civil strife, including at one point government by gang war. This period, when republican government slid into dictatorship, is one of history’s most fascinating, and one learns a great deal about it in this excellent and very readable biography.”—The Plain Dealer “Riveting . . . a clear-eyed biography . . . Cicero’s times . . . offer vivid lessons about the viciousness that can pervade elected government.”—Chicago Tribune “Lively and dramatic . . . By the book’s end, he’s managed to put enough flesh on Cicero’s old bones that you care when the agents of his implacable enemy, Mark Antony, kill him.”—Los Angeles Times


The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy

The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy

Author: Kathy Eden

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-11-06

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 022652664X

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In 1345, when Petrarch recovered a lost collection of letters from Cicero to his best friend Atticus, he discovered an intimate Cicero, a man very different from either the well-known orator of the Roman forum or the measured spokesman for the ancient schools of philosophy. It was Petrarch’s encounter with this previously unknown Cicero and his letters that Kathy Eden argues fundamentally changed the way Europeans from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries were expected to read and write. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy explores the way ancient epistolary theory and practice were understood and imitated in the European Renaissance.Eden draws chiefly upon Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca—but also upon Plato, Demetrius, Quintilian, and many others—to show how the classical genre of the “familiar” letter emerged centuries later in the intimate styles of Petrarch, Erasmus, and Montaigne. Along the way, she reveals how the complex concept of intimacy in the Renaissance—leveraging the legal, affective, and stylistic dimensions of its prehistory in antiquity—pervades the literary production and reception of the period and sets the course for much that is modern in the literature of subsequent centuries. Eden’s important study will interest students and scholars in a number of areas, including classical, Renaissance, and early modern studies; comparative literature; and the history of reading, rhetoric, and writing.