Cicero's brief rhetorical dialogue Partitiones oratoriae has hitherto been largely neglected by scholars. Unjustly so, maintains Arweiler, who analyses the text as an independent textbook of rhetoric. He conducts his interpretation with constant reference to Cicero s great rhetorical works (primarily De oratore) and philosophical writings. Thus, rhetoric gives power over opponents in disputes, and consequently over political opponents. Against this background, the author shows how successfully Cicero projects himself in the Partitiones oratoriae as a 'scholar in politics'. In the eyes of his contemporaries, this dual function gave him a dominant role in Roman society and politics equal to that of Caesar, and it is no coincidence that Caesar dedicated his own linguistic publication De analogia to Cicero."

Although Antiquity itself has been intensively researched, together with its reception, to date this has largely happened in a compartmentalized fashion. This series presents for the first time an interdisciplinary contextualization of the productive acquisitions and transformations of the arts and sciences of Antiquity in the slow process of the European societies constructing a scientific system and their own cultural identity, a process which started in the Middle Ages and has continued up to the Modern Age. The series is a product of work in the Collaborative Research Centre "Transformations of Antiquity" and the "August Boeckh Centre of Antiquity" at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Their individual projects examine transformational processes on three levels in particular - the constitutive function of Antiquity in the formation of the European knowledge society, the role of Antiquity in the genesis of modern cultural identities and self-constructions, and the forms of reception in art, literature, translation and media.

In der 1968 gegrundeten Reihe erscheinen Monographien aus den Gebieten der Griechischen und Lateinischen Philologie sowie der Alten Geschichte. Die Bande weisen eine grosse Vielzahl von Themen auf: neben sprachlichen, textkritischen oder gattungsgeschichtlichen philologischen Untersuchungen stehen sozial-, politik-, finanz- und kulturgeschichtliche Arbeiten aus der Klassischen Antike und der Spatantike. Entscheidend fur die Aufnahme ist die Qualitat einer Arbeit; besonderen Wert legen die Herausgeber auf eine umfassende Heranziehung der einschlagigen Texte und Quellen und deren sorgfaltige kritische Auswertung.