Chapter 2 focuses on the dialogue’s intellectual filiations. It begins by examining the preface’s (1–25) insistence on remaining silent about the civic crisis even as the interlocutors' exchange of written texts incessantly circles back to the accomplishments and struggles of the Roman state. Atticus’ Liber Annalis and Brutus’ de Virtute inspired the Brutus, but to what extent and to what purpose remains initially unclear. In aligning their texts with de Republica and the Brutus, Cicero creates a complex web of learned exchange in the service of the republic. The chapter then considers other potential intellectual predecessors: Varro’s writings on literature, the history of the dialogue genre, and Cicero’s own works. The Brutus draws together several intellectual currents and promises significant innovations in how to document and conceptualize the literary past.

When Horace first published the Odes in 23 BCE, in an edition comprising the eighty-eight poems of books 1–3, Ode 3.30 stood as a self-reflexive epilogue in which the poet surveyed his work and announced the achievement of his own goals. Its clear and confident claims to poetic immortality resonate pointedly in form and tone with Horace’s earlier statements. The first two lines of the poem are particularly forceful, and feature one of the collection’s more memorable images and more durable phrases.

The chapter explores efforts to answer how a community premised on a dislocation from the past, but comprised of people who bring with them their own pasts, locates itself in time. How does a community constituted by other pasts not simply blur into those pasts? I argue that in both Rome and the United States a particular type of Stranger, the corrosive Stranger, is constructed in response to this question. The corrosive Stranger is not defined against some preexistent purity, but is used to construct an imagined purity that gives a community a genealogy that distinguishes it from other communities and also posits a notion of true belonging that is different from juridical membership. I look at the different efforts by Cato the Elder, Cicero, and Varro for the Romans and then by Noah Webster for the United States to craft a genealogy of national identity that is defined against the threats of the corrosive Stranger. I then look at attempts by W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington to confront the burden of memory reflected in the Stranger marked by race who carries America’s own memory.

The opening chapter examines the forebears of Cicero’s notion of will in Greek thought and Roman usage in the period before his birth, with special attention given to the playwrights Plautus and Terence. There was no “will of the people” in classical Greece. The demos wielded power not by delegation but in active, autonomous decision. There is no special discourse of representation in classical Athens, because in classical democracy (unlike today) there is no permanent governing class. In the Republic, Plato proposes that reason and appetite reside in different parts of the soul; though we succumb to appetite despite “knowing better,” in a harmonious soul as in a just city, reason must rule. Plato’s star student is the first to propose a full theory of human action, but neither Aristotle’s boulesis (the desire for ends) nor his prohairesis (the choice of means) map onto the faculty that Latin speakers would call voluntas. It is the Stoics, and particularly Epictetus, who have been credited by some as inventors of the will due to their intense focus on regulating our inner responses to events and forming the correct intention.

This chapter examines Varro’s depictions of teasing and banter in his dialogue De Re Rustica, with particular reference to issues of im/politeness. In many cases, this banter involves some kind of provocation of the addressee, and so risks being construed as impolite. In most instances, however, the witty phrasing conveys a playful intent, which ensures that the remark does not cause offence. The end result is usually heightened rapport among the participants. In several cases Varro’s teasing involves ‘collaborative’ banter, in which both participants contribute to the construction of a playful conceit. In other instances, however, the teasing quips are one-sided, with no response reported. In such cases the emphasis seems to be on the display of quick-witted inventiveness for its own sake. This energetic interaction differs from the highly conventionalized language of social negotiation typically used by the Roman elite. Indeed, it is significant that Cicero’s real-life epistolary relationship with Varro was marked by a degree of formality that eschewed the use of banter. In this respect, the right to tease was one extended only to a privileged sub-set of personal acquaintances

Chapter 3 marks the transition of Augustine’s argument in The City of God from politics to philosophy, by means of the civil religion of ancient Rome. In books VI and VII, Augustine endeavors to unmask counterfeits of virtuous humility – conventions propagated by civic and philosophic elites, including in some respects Varro and Seneca – and to exhort people to live and worship only in accord with their true dignity.

Discussion of Cicero’s quotations from Roman comedy in the context of contemporary trends of Roman scholarship which used comedy as the site of linguistic and philosophical analysis. Discussion of Cicero’s preference for Terence over Plautus. Discussion of the influence of Lucius Aelius Stilo’s scholarly methods upon his students, Cicero and Varro. Discussion of Cicero’s use of Roman comedy to define “good Latin”, and to establish philosophical definitions in Latin.

The chapter seeks to identify the triple historicity of Cicero’s relationship to philosophy. The first part presents Cicero the historian, who sought to clarify the history of philosophy and its reception in Roman society, as well as to analyze the resistance of his contemporaries to the practice of philosophy, which was considered incompatible with political action. The second part describes the intellectual revolution, under the designation of “reason,” which some of the Roman elite developed as a remedy to the crisis of the Republic; Cicero appears there as the witness par excellence of this intellectual experience in the service of the city. The third part of the chapter examines Cicero the philosopher himself, actor of this revolution. The analysis of his work allows us to see the multiple facets of this man who was also reader, translator, and disseminator of texts and ideas, and to identify his place in relation to his literary milieu, and in particular to his friend Varro.

This chapter examines the cultural status of ritual song and dance in the Roman Late Republican and Augustan periods. By applying the modern theoretical work of Paul Connerton on the social reproduction of memory, the chapter explores several strategies through which two of the most iconic religious associations in Rome – the Salian priesthood and the Arval Brethren – stored and transmitted their cultural traditions. The hymns of these collegia, as well as their performances, constitute unique artifacts for understanding the interconnected processes of writing and embodiment – what Connerton defines as “inscription” and “incorporation”– in the production of ancient musical memories.

Chapter 2 focuses on the dialogue’s intellectual filiations. It begins by examining the preface’s (1–25) insistence on remaining silent about the civic crisis even as the interlocutors' exchange of written texts incessantly circles back to the accomplishments and struggles of the Roman state. Atticus’ Liber Annalis and Brutus’ de Virtute inspired the Brutus, but to what extent and to what purpose remains initially unclear. In aligning their texts with de Republica and the Brutus, Cicero creates a complex web of learned exchange in the service of the republic. The chapter then considers other potential intellectual predecessors: Varro’s writings on literature, the history of the dialogue genre, and Cicero’s own works. The Brutus draws together several intellectual currents and promises significant innovations in how to document and conceptualize the literary past.

This chapter examines the discursive role of plaustrum, first plotting out its reliable representation in Latin literary texts as the sturdy uehiculum par excellence, repeatedly defined as a functional tool for agricultural (and other) hauling. It then moves on to unpack the different versions of two crucial episodes in which the conveyance is represented delivering much more, for the Roman republic – even saving it from disaster: first, before the Gallic occupation of Rome after the battle of the Allia in 390 BCE, Albinius’ legendary lending of his plaustrum for the delivery of the very religious life of the city; and second, in 311 BCE, the dramatic walk-out of the tibicines, and their drugged recovery by means of plaustra. In particular, Ovid’s version of the tale in the Fasti serves as an entrée to the final section of the chapter, which investigates the deep-seated metapoetics of this clunkiest and lowest of Roman vehicles.

Pliny, Gellius, Plutarch, and Athenaeus each give a religious frame to their miscellanies, and the most consistently cited deities are the Muses. This is no empty rhetorical convention but an attempt to connect their work to a tradition where the Muses preside over revelation of things hidden. Different strands of the Muse tradition are taken up, including revelation to the studious, solitary lucubrator and philosophical revelation where philosophy is the highest form of mousikê. The miscellanists develop forms of social and ascetic discipline to participate more deeply in the spirituality of this tradition, by refraining from sleep, food, or certain kinds of talk and by practising their labours by night or alone. Clement shows his intention to respond to this Classical tradition by framing his project in Christian paideia with allusions to the Classical tradition of mousikê. But he displaces Apollo (Muse-leader) with Christ, the bee (symbol of the Muses) with the Christ-Logos and either omits or debunks the Muses at every opportunity.

“Roman Revolutions” (the title is an allusion to the classic study by Sir Ronald Syme) celebrates the working landscapes of ancient Italy and Roman agrarian values. Romans in an age of decadence and excess are portrayed in this chapter as the first back-to-the-landers and trust-fund farmers—affluent urbanists yearning, like us, for a simpler, more “sustainable” way of life. Based on personal autopsy and field research at an unusual organic olive grove in the Sabine Hills, at which are preserved substantial remains of a villa rustica connected to Pompey the Great (10648 BCE), the author proposes that the establishment and growth of agriturismi in modern Italy re-instantiates early Roman farm culture and land-use policies, and that the agriturismo movement aligns closely, too, with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals regarding agriculture.

Cicero says that almost no philosophers held atheism or agnosticism. For him the Central Question of philosophy of religion is not the existence of the gods, but whether the gods care for us by providence. He says we must answer this question to moderate religion. I argue that although traditional Roman pagan religion required orthopraxy, and not orthodoxy, Cicero thinks that the actions of a pagan practitioner could be "moderated" by what she believed about her religious behavior: if she believes that the gods care for us more than they do, that is superstition, but if she believes that they care for us less than they do, that is impiety. Yet Romans, Cicero says, were bewildered by their ancestral religion. He offers Hellenistic philosophy as a new route to responsible beliefs about it. Philosophy might help a Roman form true beliefs on the Central Question, or (like Cicero) to refrain from risky beliefs either way. On the nature of the gods and On divination are carefully designed to present this debate, among Stoics, with rich theories that the gods care and give us divinatory information, Epicureans, with rich theories to the contrary, and Academics, who withhold judgment.

Representation of the kosmos is one of the leading themes of Roman decoration. If the evidence for public interest in cosmic representation is generally well known – for instance, at the Pantheon at Rome – it is worth noting that this phenomenon has not been sufficiently studied in the realm of private life. This piece investigates several examples of cosmic architecture and images known through written texts or archaeological monuments, all of them belonging either to aristocratic houses or to imperial palaces: the aviary that M. Terentius Varro built around 80 BCE inside his villa at Casinum; the Teatro Marittimo that the emperor Hadrian erected at his villa in Tivoli (early or mid-second century CE); the the cave of Sperlonga, which formed part of Tiberius’s Praetorium; and the Cenatio Rotunda, which belonged to Nero’s Domus Aurea. Kosmos-representations in the private sphere at Rome are arranged according to the particular point of view of the persons who frequent the place where they are located. Chief inspiration for these decorations would appear to have been the philosophers, especially Plato, but also the Greek astronomers, who fascinated the Roman elite, as demonstrated by the Latin translations of the Phaenomena of Aratus by Cicero and Germanicus.