Politics and Poetics of Cicero's Brutus

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.