Description
Book SynopsisCicero 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
Trade ReviewWhite is a splendid guide to the strategies of Cicero's letters and to the social values and motives underpinning those strategies. * William Fitzgerald, Times Literary Supplement *
One of the outstanding virtues of this fine book is that within it we seem to hear the living voices of the last generation of the Republic. Through his elegant and colloquial translations and accompanying elucidation [White} gives us a vivid sense of how elite discourse was carried on at this critical moment * Ann Vasaly, Classical Review *
a valuable treatment of Cicero ... Whites book is conversational and dialogic, engaging the reader at every stage with its processes of development. * Eleanor Brooke, Phoenix *
Table of ContentsPreface ; I. Reading the Letters from the Outside In ; 1. Constraints and Biases in Roman Letter-Writing ; 2. The Editing of the Collection ; 3. Frames of the Letter ; II. Epistolary Preoccupations ; 4. The Letters and Literature ; 5. Giving and Getting Advice by Letter ; 6. Letter-Writing and Leadership ; Afterword: The Collection in Hindsight ; Appendix 1: Quantifying the Letter Corpus ; Appendix 2: Contemporary Works Mentioned in the Letters ; Bibliography of Titles Cited
