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Cicero in Letters - Epistolary Relations of the Late Republic (Hardcover)
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Cicero in Letters - Epistolary Relations of the Late Republic (Hardcover)
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Cicero in Letters is a guide to the first extensive correspondence
that survives from the Greco-Roman world. The more than eight
hundred letters of Cicero that are its core provided literary
models for subsequent letter writers from Pliny to Petrarch to
Samuel Johnson and beyond. The collection also includes some one
hundred letters by Cicero's contemporaries. The letters they
exchanged provide unique insight into the experience of the Roman
political class at the turning point between Republican and
imperial rule.
The first part of this study analyzes effects of the milieu in
which the letters were written. The lack of an organized postal
system limited the correspondence that Cicero and his
contemporaries could conduct and influenced what they were willing
to write about. Their chief motive for exchanging letters was to
protect political relationships until they could resume their
customary, face-to-face association in Rome. Romans did not
normally sign letters, much less write them in their own hand.
Their correspondence was handled by agents who drafted, expedited,
and interpreted it. Yet every letter advertised the level of
intimacy that bound the writer and the addressee. Finally, the
published letters were not drawn at random from the archives that
Cicero left. An editor selected and arranged them in order to
impress on readers a particular view of Cicero as a public
personality. The second half of the book explores the significance
of leading themes in the letters. It shows how, in a time of
deepening crisis, Cicero and his correspondents drew on their
knowledge of literature, the habit of consultation, and the
rhetoric of government in an effort to improve cooperation and to
maintain the political culture which they shared. The result is a
revealing look at Cicero's epistolary practices and also the world
of elite social intercourse in the late Republic.
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