Scipio’s downfall is superficially surprising: the charges were obviously invented, although he was not helped by his own arrogance. The disgrace and death in humiliating retirement of a successful, patriotic general seems a display of petty ingratitude. But in the Roman Republic, no individual, however gifted and successful, must be allowed to become too wealthy from booty or too politically powerful. The main agent of his disgrace (two phases, 187, 184), was Cato. Livy’s narrative is gripping but confused. Polybius treated the troubles of the Scipio brothers only as part of an anecdotal obituary. In 187, Cato put up two tribunes to demand an account of the money which Lucius received from Antiochus as part-payment of war indemnity. Publius, the real target, angrily tore up the account book which could have cleared him. He himself was prosecuted (184). It never came to trial. He died at his Campanian villa (183).

This chapter defines ‘criticism’, adapting John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, as a judicative, explicative, and appreciative encounter with literature. And in doing so, it sorts the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘essay’ into three rough groupings: (1) digressive essays in the manner of Montaigne; (2) treatise essays like Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie; and (3) periodical essays like The Tatler and The Spectator. Following a thread of allusions to Cato the Younger through the works of Montaigne, Addison, Pope, and Elizabeth Montagu, I show how an important feature of modern close reading, the grammatically integrated quotation, grows out of the eighteenth-century critical essay.

This chapter considers the impact of Greek on Latin Literature. Unlike the expectations of modern post-colonial theory, the imperial Romans were captured by Greek culture. Latin literature’s relation to Greek becomes a key moment in the cultural self-definition of Rome. This cultural history is explored first through Cato the Elder as a figure who publicly was scornful of the impact of Greek culture on Rome, and who became thus for later Romans an icon of conservative opposition to cultural change. The chapter then considers how much Latin Greek writers might be presumed to know and, conversely, how Romans explicitly paraded their adaption and adaption of Greek material and Greek language in their writings. Third, the chapter considers the politics of code-switching between Greek and Latin. Fourth, the chapter looks at how this cultural conflict becomes a matter of Christian ideology as part of a politics of translation between Hebrew, Greek and Latin: what changes when God’s word is transformed between languages? Finally, the chapter asks what is known by Latin literature that Greek does not know (and vice versa)? What boundaries should we place between Greek and Latin literature?

The Boston Massacre was a pivotal event in the radicalization of American colonists that led to the Revolution. Barely three months after the ‘massacre’ took place, the American Company advertised a performance of Julius Caesar that evoked the republican discourse surrounding the event. Indeed, the play would appear to present a perfect opportunity to foster the rhetoric of republican revolutionary fervour, and in fact Julius Caesar and its adaptations were often cited by revolutionary leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Yet, after this initial performance, the play was not produced very often during the revolutionary period. This essay explores the ideological conflicts within the Patriot movement that led to the relative scarcity of these productions, despite the drama’s centrality to the rhetoric of the revolution.

In De Officiis, Cicero undertakes sustained engagement with Roman exemplary ethics. He uses dozens of different exempla to serve a variety of functions including as inspirational paradigms as means of illustrating abstract concepts and to communicate the important principle of situational variation. In addition he reflects upon some of the challenges of exemplary ethics when viewed within the Stoic context and also develops new techniques for utilising exempla and exemplary modes within a Stoic framework. He achieves this partly by incorporating into his philosophical discussion some key features of Roman exemplary ethics including a sense of particularity and historical specificity emotional charge and injunction and indeterminacy. De Officiis anticipates to some extent ideas later developed more explicitly by Seneca; identifying these enables us to better appreciate the unfolding dialogue between Stoicism and exemplary ethics.

This is a tale of two Catos, the real-life man and the legend. The difference can be helpfully illuminated through two stories. Our first opens on 5 December 63 BC in Rome at the Temple of Concord where an important meeting of the Senate has been debating the fate of the Catilinarian conspirators.1 Should they face exile or death? Decimus Junius Silanus, the consul-elect for the following year, proposes execution and many others in the Senate agree. But Gaius Julius Caesar, the praetor-elect and new pontifex maximus, steps forth and makes a stirring speech against the death penalty, arguing instead for exile. The Senate is momentarily persuaded, but then something remarkable happens: Marcus Porcius Cato, only thirty-two years old and the tribune-elect, stands up and delivers a passionate, uncompromising speech against Caesar’s motion, articulating the need for decisive action to deter future treason. His speech sways his fellow senators back to a vote for execution of the conspirators. Everyone present takes note, for a new senatorial star is on the rise.

In his philosophical works Cicero addresses a number of questions concerning the role of old men in politics, most obviously in his dialogue De senectute of 44 bce. How best should the old participate in politics and the wider community – what, if anything, do the old have to offer that is special or unique? How should the generations fit together in the body politic, and should age be a factor in the structural organisation of states? Should the old rule? Through a close reading of De senectute, I argue: (1) Cicero develops a coherent line on the special political role of old men, which can be seen as a call to arms in the contemporary Roman political context; and (2) this line is not just a restatement of traditional Roman ideals: Cicero draws on and adapts some of the most important arguments from Plato’s Republic and his earlier De re publica when addressing these questions regarding the role of old men in politics.

This chapter is dedicated to the theory of selfhood Cicero presents in the De officiis: each person being a player of four personae. The allegory of four dramatic roles or masks (from the Greek prosopon) is borrowed from the Stoic Panaetius, whose ethical theory adapts the stringent demands of the sage to a morally imperfect and multifarious public. He who wishes to progress, Cicero explains, must play the roles of reason, of nature, of fortune, and, finally, the role “we ourselves may choose sets forth from our will” (quam personam velimus, a nostra voluntate proficiscitur). In this final treatise, the will comes most clearly into view as a mental capacity and rational force. I argue that when read in conjunction with related uses of voluntas and persona in other texts, Cicero’s will serves a recursive purpose within each of the other personae. Whether in actualizing reason, refining our inborn qualities, or navigating the forces of necessity and civic duty, voluntas creates a dialectic of actor and mask from which emerges a conscious moral self. Though the will develops richly as a moral faculty and principium individuationis in the hands of later thinkers, its terrestrial purposes disappear as divine ones take hold.

This chapter takes as its central focus the triumphal games given by the Roman praetor Lucius Anicius Gallus in 167 BCE. The chapter deconstructs the hostile account of this event in Polybius’ Histories by examining how Anicius manipulated the musical dynamics of the spectacle in order to amplify the importance of his triumph. The second half of the chapter situates the episode in the context of broader developments in Greek and Roman musical culture during the second century BCE. As well as discussing the general treatment of music in Polybius’s Histories, it considers how the dissemination of Greek musical culture during this period sparked a reaction from senior members of the Roman political elite, as evidenced most notably by the fragmentary speeches of Cato the Elder and Scipio Aemilianus.

De bello civili may be an anti-Aeneid, but the contrast depends on a deeper accord. Both poems look back: to the mythic backstory of Rome’s foundation and to the history of the Republic’s fall. Both comment on the present. The inscription of civil war tropes into Rome’s foundation asks whether internal violence is endemic, or if the Augustan refoundation can put Rome on a more secure footing. The Republic’s death at the hands of Pompey and Caesar founds the Empire on perennial discord. The civil war tropes undergirding Vergil’s integrative story become the literal plot of Lucan’s. Foundation and defoundation share tropes: fratricide and rape. In Vergil, these tell an alternative story to the golden age the poem proclaims. In Lucan, the Augustan settlement disappears. As in the Aeneid, discord subtly defines the present: The panegyric to Nero defers peace to an uncertain future as effectively as the Aeneid’s defers the Augustan peace. Alternative cities – Troy, Carthage – reveal Rome’s perverse nature in Vergil. Caesar, embroiled with Cleopatra, founds an oriental empire in Lucan. Turmoil within the soul, between lovers, within peoples, and in the cosmos belies both poems’ promise.

The rise of the epigram, that most distinctively early modern genre, emerged from the confluence of several elements of literary culture, including humanist Latin epigrams; the distinct (though related) tradition of moralizing and didactic distichs and other short poems; the role of verse composition in schools and universities; and the increasingly important role of translation and bilingual circulation. This chapter outlines the relationship between Latin and English epigram in England between the mid-sixteenth and the later seventeenth century: in doing so, it builds upon previous work which has concentrated on the English-language tradition, and extends the chronological range of the existing studies, none of which ranges beyond 1640. By focusing in particular upon the ways in which epigrams circulated in the manuscript record, it treats epigram culture as a bilingual phenomenon, the bilingualism of which evolved over the course of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and demonstrates how thekind of‘witty’, topical and frequently satiric epigram, which most critical work has prioritized, sits within a broader and on average more serious and more generalizing literary phenomenon.

Caesar’s tumultuous first consulship in 59 is often regarded as the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. Yet scholars have been too impressed with Bibulus’s and Cato’s obstructionist tactics, and too ready to concede that they were "correct" from a traditional republican perspective. A common modern perception of the year 59 is that by rejecting Bibulus’s attempted obstruction, Caesar demolished the constitutional constraints on executive and popular power that defined the Republic. But far from representing an established republican constitutional tradition, Bibulus, Cato, and those who followed their lead had pushed the obstructive devices available to them far beyond their customary limits. The notion that Caesar simply imposed his will in the assemblies through violence is also overly simplistic. Nor was the Senate reduced to a "rump" of Caesarian or Pompeian partisans. Caesar’s acta of 59 remained formally valid even while some senators, such as Bibulus himself, continued to try to cast doubt on their legitimacy.

Caesar’s famous intervention in the Catilinarian Debate of 63, too often viewed as fundamentally opposed to the Senate's authority, instead illustrates the kind of "patrician republicanism" discernable in his early career. His failed proposal for permanent imprisonment seems to have been intended to avoid the kind of popular backlash against the Senate’s authority that was inevitable if the laws protecting citizens against execution without the People’s authorization against were blatantly violated by that body. His advice was ultimately rejected, but his view of the matter would be vindicated by Cicero’s expulsion in 58. Caesar’s praetorship and successful Spanish command brought further clashes with Cato, whose development of his favored tactic of the filibuster in these years shows that he did not as a rule carry the majority of the Senate, while Caesar’s own pursuit of military glory and cultivation of a "popular" though not aggressively populari persona was consistent with long-standing republican tradition.

Caesar decamped to Gaul to fulfill his high military ambition, but he was far from immune from senatorial interference. A swift series of successes protected his precarious position down to the renewal of his command in 55; thereafter down to his decisive victory at Alesia in 52 he strove despite some memorable disasters to realize his repeated exaggerated claims to have "pacified the whole of Gaul." Final victory at Alesia brought the sustained applause not only of the People but also of the Senate. Caesar had a vital interest in making sure that Roman senators and the Roman People received a flow of positive news about his campaigns in Gaul, but his control over this multifocal network of communication is often greatly overstated. The chief media for this communication were not the Gallic War Commentaries but a dense network of "letters, rumor, reports" bringing a steady flow of news from various sources in the war zone to numerous recipients in Rome. Just as Caesar could not control the flow of information between the Army of Gaul and Italy, he also could not control political events in Rome, as the development of the crisis over his return shows.

Caesar is usually supposed to have sought to exploithis legal immunity as proconsul to escape judgment for his "crimes," and when he was prevented from doing so, to have plunged Rome into the first of the civil wars that would destroy the Republic. This is based on the ill-founded hypothesis that he was bound to face prosecution on his return to Rome with a predetermined verdict engineered by his enemies. In fact, what Caesar demanded was an honorific return from his victory in Gaul that was consistent with republican norms and traditions, while his inveterate enemies, now joined in increasing anxiety by Pompey, rejected his demands, fearing that if they did not do so he would escape the reckoning that they hoped for. To quash Caesar’s plans his enemies were "forced" to jettison various core principles of the Roman republican tradition, but most Roman citizens likely saw Caesar not as a rebel against "the Republic" but as its defender against a faction bent on vengeance. Neither Caesar nor Pompey appears to have sought this war; ultimately Cato and his faction forced this confrontation.

The chapter analyses a series of puns throughout Lucan’s Bellum Civile on the insubstantiality and ephemerality of the reputation of Pompey the Great, showing how his former military glory is a thing of the past, and arguing that Pompey only achieves true and lasting fame in his death.

This chapter examines eighteenth-century moral debates about wealth, poverty and corruption in the emerging commercial state. In particular, it discusses four important moments in these debates: Bernard Mandeville’s celebration of avarice and vice, the fustigations of writers like Bolingbroke, Trenchard and Gordon about the corruption they attributed to financial and commercial innovations, Adam Ferguson’s worries about the corruptions of commercial modernity, and, finally, Adam Smith’s indignation at the spirit of monopoly that threatened to undermine the moral and material gains of commercial society.

This chapter examines the role of the storm as a setting for rhetorical performance in Roman epic, starting from the first simile of the Aeneid in which Neptun is compared to an orator and tracing its reception in Lucan and Silius. I argue that the orator in the storm becomes a key figure through which poets playfully question rhetoric’s claim to master the grand style that is traditionally assimilated to stormy natural phenomena. These scenes of “embedded” rhetorical performance provide a self-conscious commentary on rhetoric and its relation to poetry. Far from being “seduced” or “victimized” by rhetorical influence, poets address and react to the cultural narratives about poetry’s relation to rhetoric found in rhetorical texts, for example, in Cicero.

This chapter examines the role of the storm as a setting for rhetorical performance in Roman epic, starting from the first simile of the Aeneid in which Neptun is compared to an orator and tracing its reception in Lucan and Silius. I argue that the orator in the storm becomes a key figure through which poets playfully question rhetoric’s claim to master the grand style that is traditionally assimilated to stormy natural phenomena. These scenes of “embedded” rhetorical performance provide a self-conscious commentary on rhetoric and its relation to poetry. Far from being “seduced” or “victimized” by rhetorical influence, poets address and react to the cultural narratives about poetry’s relation to rhetoric found in rhetorical texts, for example, in Cicero.