Cicero and Roman Education
The Reception of the Speeches and Ancient Scholarship

Presents the first full-length, systematic study of the reception of Cicero's speeches in the Roman educational system.

Giuseppe La Bua (Author)

9781107068582, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 February 2019

406 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.4 cm, 0.71 kg

'… a helpful ... exploration of the lesser-known byways of Ciceronian reception combined with an impressive absorption and deployment of a vast range of secondary scholarship.' Anthony Corbeill, Religious Studies Review

Cicero saw publication as a means of perpetuating a distinctive image of himself as statesman and orator. He memorialized his spiritual and oratorical self by means of a very solid body of texts. Educationalists and schoolteachers in antiquity relied on Cicero's oratory to supervise the growth of the young into intellectual maturity. By reconstructing the main phases of textual transmission, from the first authorial dissemination of the speeches to the medieval manuscripts, and by re-examining the abundant evidence on Ciceronian scholarship from the first to the sixth century CE, Cicero and Roman Education traces the history of the exegetical tradition on Cicero's oratory and re-assesses the 'didactic' function of the speeches, whose preservation was largely determined by pedagogical factors.

1. Cicero presents himself: writing, revision and publication of the speeches
2. Beyond the author: Cicero's speeches from publication to the medieval manuscripts
3. Between praise and blame: Ciceronian scholarship from the early Empire to Late Antiquity
4. Teaching Cicero.

Subject Areas: Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], History: earliest times to present day [HBL], History [HB], Humanities [H], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature: history & criticism [DS]