The politics and poetics of Cicero's Brutus : : the invention of literary history / / Christopher S. van den Berg.

• VerfasserIn: Van den Berg, Christopher Sean,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge : : Cambridge University Press,, 2023.
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (xiii, 290 pages) :; digital, PDF file(s)
• Notes: Also issued in print: 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 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. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.