Cicero's De Provinciis Consularibus Oratio

Cicero's De Provinciis Consularibus Oratio
Author: Luca Grillo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2015-03-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190266376

Perhaps no other single Roman speech exemplifies the connection between oratory, politics and imperialism better than Cicero's De Provinciis Consularibus, pronounced to the senate in 56 BC. Cicero puts his talents at the service of the powerful "triumviri" (Caesar, Crassus and Pompey), whose aims he advances by appealing to the senators' imperialistic and chauvinistic ideology. This oration, then, yields precious insights into several areas of late republican life: international relations between Rome and the provinces (Gaul, Macedonia and Judaea); the senators' view on governors, publicani (tax-farmers) and foreigners; the dirty mechanics of high politics in the 50s, driven by lust for domination and money; and Cicero's own role in that political choreography. This speech also exemplifies the exceptional range of Cicero's oratory: the invective against Piso and Gabinius calls for biting irony, the praise of Caesar displays high rhetoric, the rejection of other senators' recommendations is a tour de force of logical and sophisticated argument, and Cicero's justification for his own conduct is embedded in the self-fashioning narrative which is typical of his post reditum speeches. This new commentary includes an updated introduction, which provides the readers with a historical, rhetorical and stylistic background to appreciate the complexities of Cicero's oration, as well as indexes and maps.

Models from the Past in Roman Culture

Models from the Past in Roman Culture
Author: Matthew B. Roller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2018-03-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108581676

Historical examples played a key role in ancient Roman culture, and Matthew B. Roller's book presents a coherent model for understanding the rhetorical, moral, and historiographical operations of Roman exemplarity. It examines the process of observing, evaluating, and commemorating noteworthy actors, or deeds, and then holding those performances up as norms by which to judge subsequent actors or as patterns for them to imitate. The model is fleshed out via detailed case studies of individual exemplary performers, the monuments that commemorate them, and the later contexts - the political arguments and social debates - in which these figures are invoked to support particular positions or agendas. Roller also considers the boundaries of, and ancient alternatives to, exemplary modes of argumentation, morality, and historical thinking. The book will engage anyone interested in how societies, from ancient Rome to today, invoke past performers and their deeds to address contemporary concerns and interests.

A Commentary on Livy, Books VI-X

A Commentary on Livy, Books VI-X
Author: S. P. Oakley
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 774
Release: 2005-08-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191569216

Livy's ninth book, one of his finest and most interesting, begins with his celebrated account of the Roman disaster in the Caudine Forks and its aftermath and contains also the famous digression on Alexander and our longest account of the censorship of Appius Claudius Caecus. This new commentary, which is a sequel to those on Books VI-VIII published in 1997 and 1998, deals comprehensively with all aspects of Livy's work, including the literary structure of his narrative, the purpose of the digression on Alexander, the historical and topographical problems of the Samnite Wars, Roman politics in the age of Appius Claudius Caecus, the poetical and archaic language sometimes affected by Livy, and the numerous textual problems posed by the extant manuscripts.

Approaching the Roman Revolution

Approaching the Roman Revolution
Author: Ronald Syme
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2016-11-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191091871

This volume collects twenty-six previously unpublished studies on Republican history by the late Sir Ronald Syme (1903-1989), drawn from the archive of Syme's papers at the Bodleian Library. This set of papers sheds light on aspects of Republican history that were either overlooked or tangentially discussed in Syme's published work. They range across a wide spectrum of topics, including the political history of the second century BC, the age of Sulla, the conspiracy of Catiline, problems of constitutional law, and the Roman conquest of Umbria. Each of them makes a distinctive contribution to specific historical problems. Taken as a whole, they enable us to reach a more comprehensive assessment of Syme's intellectual and historiographical profile. The papers are preceded by an introduction that places them within the context of Syme's work and of the current historiography on the Roman Republic, and are followed by a full set of bibliographical addenda.

Cicero: Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide

Cicero: Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide
Author: Oxford University Press
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 29
Release: 2010-05-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199802823

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of the ancient world find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated. A reader will discover, for instance, the most reliable introductions and overviews to the topic, and the most important publications on various areas of scholarly interest within this topic. In classics, as in other disciplines, researchers at all levels are drowning in potentially useful scholarly information, and this guide has been created as a tool for cutting through that material to find the exact source you need. This ebook is just one of many articles from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Classics, a continuously updated and growing online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through the scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of classics. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.aboutobo.com.

Reading Republican Oratory

Reading Republican Oratory
Author: Christa Gray
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2018-02-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191092312

Public speech was a key aspect of politics in Republican Rome, both in theory and in practice, and recent decades have seen a surge in scholarly discussion of its significance and performance. Yet the partial nature of the surviving evidence means that our understanding of its workings is dominated by one man, whose texts are the only examples to have survived in complete form since antiquity: Cicero. This collection of essays aims to broaden our conception of the oratory of the Roman Republic by exploring how it was practiced by individuals other than Cicero, whether major statesmen, jobbing lawyers, or, exceptionally, the wives of politicians. It focuses particularly on the surviving fragments of such oratory, with individual essays tackling the challenges posed both by the partial and often unreliable nature of the evidence about these other Roman orators-often known to us chiefly through the tendentious observations of Cicero himself-and the complex intersections of the written fragments and the oral phenomenon. Collectively, the essays are concerned with the methods by which we are able to reconstruct non-Ciceronian oratory and the exploration of new ways of interpreting this evidence to tell us about the content, context, and delivery of those speeches. They are arranged into two thematic Parts, the first addressing questions of reception, selection, and transmission, and the second those of reconstruction, contextualization, and interpretation: together they represent a comprehensive overview of the non-Ciceronian speeches that will be of use to all ancient historians, philologists, and literary classicists with an interest in the oratory of the Roman Republic.

Latin Word Order

Latin Word Order
Author: A. M. Devine
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 650
Release: 2006-02-23
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0199720509

Word order is not a subject anyone reading Latin can afford to ignore: apart from anything else, word order is what gets one from disjoint sentences to coherent text. Reading a paragraph of Latin without attention to the word order entails losing access to a whole dimension of meaning, or at best using inferential procedures to guess at what is actually overtly encoded in the syntax. This book begins by introducing the reader to the linguistic concepts, formalism and analytical techniques necessary for the study of Latin word order. It then proceeds to present and analyze a representative selection of data in sufficient detail for the reader to develop both an intuitive grasp of the often rather subtle principles controlling Latin word order and a theoretically grounded understanding of the system that underlies it. Combining the rich empirical documentation of traditional philological approaches with the deeper theoretical insight of modern linguistics, this work aims to reduce the intricate surface patterns of Latin word order to a simple and general crosscategorial system of syntactic structure which translates more or less directly into constituents of pragmatic and semantic meaning.

Cicero's Political Personae

Cicero's Political Personae
Author: Joanna Kenty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2020-09-10
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1108839460

Provides new insights into Cicero's political manoeuvring and the subtleties of his Latin prose.