The Politics and Poetics of Cicero’s Brutus

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, both crafting 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.

Christopher S. Van Den Berg is Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank ’55 Professor in Classical Studies and Professor of Classics at Amherst College. He is the author of The World of Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and has published and researched broadly in ancient and modern political rhetoric.