The Politics and Poetics of Cicero's Brutus
The Invention of Literary History

Cicero's dialogue on oratory responded to the political crisis of Julius Caesar but ultimately invented 'modern' literary history.

Christopher S. van den Berg (Author)

9781108495950, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 September 2021

348 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2 cm, 0.59 kg

'… van den Berg's book is an ambitious, well-argued, and timely work that offers a wealth of approaches to a challenging text with a complex reception history. Like the Brutus itself, it deftly straddles the often-siloed disciplines of history and literary criticism to provide valuable insight into the confluence of art and politics at a critical point in the story of Rome.' Noah Segal, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

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.

Introduction
1. Ciceropaideia
2. The intellectual genealogy of the Brutus
3. Caesar and the political crisis
4. Truthmaking and the past
5. Beginning (and) literary history
6. Perfecting literary history
7. Cicero's Attici
8. Minerva, Venus, and Cicero's judgments on Caesar's style
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1]