The politics and poetics of Cicero's Brutus : the invention of literary history /
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...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge ; New York :
Cambridge University Press,
[2021]
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| Summary: | 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 is the first study of 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. |
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| Physical Description: | xiii, 290 pages ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 256-280) and indexes. |
| ISBN: | 9781108495950 1108495958 9781108811354 1108811353 |