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.