Classical Essays – serie

M. Tullius Cicero was a prolific writer, his writing covering an astonishingly wide spectrum: oratory, letters, epic and didactic poetry, pamphlets, philosophical and rhetorical treatises. He was also a major political figure at Rome during the Late Republic. The relationship between these two facets of his career is the subject of this book, which argues that our understanding both of Cicero's oeuvre and of the practice and theory of public life in the Late Republic is transformed if Cicero's writings are read as a unified whole in the context of Roman politics. Writing offered Cicero a huge range of opportunities to impress himself upon an audience much wider than could be reached through the traditional mechanisms of politics at Rome; it also enabled him to construct a distinct identity in the public sphere as a substitute for his lack of political ancestry. A chapter on genre sites Cicero's writing in the late Republican context and stresses both his inventiveness and his flexibility; then the ways in which Cicero's public personas and his relationships with others are articulated in his works are considered; the book concludes with a consideration of the connections between wr

The history of the Achaemenid Persian empire has been largely rewritten in the last thirty years by an international group of scholars, inspired partly by new sources of information, but also by a concerted attempt to look at Ancient Persia in its own terms, rather than through the lens of neighbouring societies, and to excise the pejorative bias of the Greek sources. This essay is a critique of this new Achaemenid historiography, concentrating on the difficulties of using Greek sources for the writing of Persian history. It argues that the excising of Greek bias should be seen to be, if possible at all, a much more complex procedure. It then examines two themes in more detail: the representation of the Kings and Queens (in Greek sources and in recent histories of Persia), and the accounts given of the Persian Wars and the conquests of Alexander. It concludes with an analysis of past versions of Persian history, suggesting that there is a much greater degree of continuity between earlier accounts of Persia (often derided as narrowly Hellenocentric or orientalist) and those of the new Achaemenid historiography.

Leisured Resistance examines the varied ways in which cultured Roman aristocrats, of very different periods, used their country estates as a political and literary tool. While for some the villas were retreats in which to compose literature and to escape from politics, others adapted this same tradition of cultured otium (or deliberate retirement from everyday politics) to present radical and competing visions of society and literature alike. Examining in-depth sources from both prose and verse from the time of Cicero to the last centuries of the Roman Empire in the west, the title demonstrates how the traditional image of the Roman aristocrat on his country estate was politically and socially very flexible: allowing authors, as times and circumstances changed, to present themselves or their patrons and friends as being in retreat from politics, or alternatively, as providing a focus for political opposition through the deliberate embracing of cultural values and schools of philosophy that offered resistance to prevailing political orthodoxy. The title ends by exploring how this tradition was adapted in the greatly changed world of the barbarian-ruled kingdoms that replaced direct Roman rule in Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Leisured Resistance examines the varied ways in which cultured Roman aristocrats, of very different periods, used their country estates as a political and literary tool. While for some the villas were retreats in which to compose literature and to escape from politics, others adapted this same tradition of cultured otium (or deliberate retirement from everyday politics) to present radical and competing visions of society and literature alike. Examining in-depth sources from both prose and verse from the time of Cicero to the last centuries of the Roman Empire in the west, the title demonstrates how the traditional image of the Roman aristocrat on his country estate was politically and socially very flexible: allowing authors, as times and circumstances changed, to present themselves or their patrons and friends as being in retreat from politics, or alternatively, as providing a focus for political opposition through the deliberate embracing of cultural values and schools of philosophy that offered resistance to prevailing political orthodoxy. The title ends by exploring how this tradition was adapted in the greatly changed world of the barbarian-ruled kingdoms that replaced direct Roman rule in Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries.