The Politics and Poetics of Cicero's Brutus : The Invention of Literary History

著者名：van den Berg, Christopher S.

Cambridge University Press（2023/07/20発売）

• 言語：ENG
• ISBN：9781009281355
• eISBN：9781009281348

Description

Cicero's Brutus (46 BCE), a tour-de-force of intellectual and political history, was written amidst political crisis: Caesar's defeat of the republican resistance at the battle of Thapsus. This magisterial example of the dialogue genre capaciously documents the intellectual vibrancy of the Roman Republic and its Greco-Roman traditions. This book studies the work from several distinct yet interrelated perspectives: Cicero's account of oratorical history, the confrontation with Caesar, and the exploration of what it means to write a history of an artistic practice. Close readings of this dialogue-including its apparent contradictions and tendentious fabrications-reveal a crucial and crucially productive moment in Greco-Roman thought. Cicero, this book argues, created the first nuanced, sophisticated, and ultimately 'modern' literary history, crafting both a compelling justification of Rome's oratorical traditions and also laying a foundation for literary historiography that abides to this day. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Ciceropaideia; 2. The intellectual genealogy of the Brutus; 3. Caesar and the political crisis; 4. Truthmaking and the past; 5. Beginning (and) literary history; 6. Perfecting literary history; 7. Cicero's Attici; 8. Minerva, Venus, and Cicero's judgments on Caesar's style; Conclusion.