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

di Christopher S. van den Berg (Autore)

Cambridge University Press, 2023

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.

• Autore: Christopher S. van den Berg
• Editore: Cambridge University Press
• Anno: 2023
• Rilegatura: Paperback / softback
• Pagine: 308 p.
• Dimensioni: 229 x 151 mm
• Peso: 470 gr.
• EAN: 9781009281355

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