Publius Clodius Pulcher was a prominent political figure during the last years of the Roman Republic. Born into an illustrious patrician family, his early career was sullied by military failures and especially by the scandal that resulted from his allegedly disguising himself as a woman in order to sneak into a forbidden religious ceremony in the hope of seducing Caesar's wife. Clodius survived this disgrace, however, and emerged as a major political force. He renounced his patrician status and was elected tribune of the people. As tribune, he pursued an ambitious legislative agenda, winning the loyalties of the common people of Rome to such a degree that he was soon able to summon forceful, even violent, demonstrations on his own behalf. The first modern, comprehensive biography of Clodius, The Patrician Tribune traces his career from its earliest stages until its end in 52 B.C., when he was murdered by a political rival. Jeffrey Tatum explores Clodius's political successes, as well as the limitations of his popular strategies, within the broader context of Roman political practices. In the process, Tatum illuminates the relationship between the political contests of Rome's elite and the daily struggles of Rome's urban poor.

This volume is intended as a companion to the study of Cicero's oratory and rhetoric for both students and experts in the field: for the neophyte, it provides a starting point; for the veteran Ciceronian scholar, a place for renewing the dialogue about issues concerning Ciceronian oratory and rhetoric; for all, a site of engagement at various levels with Ciceronian scholarship and bibliography. The book is arranged along roughly chronological lines and covers most aspects of Cicero's oratory and rhetoric. The particular strength of this companion resides in the individual, often very original approach to sundry topics by an array of impressive contributors, all of whom have spent large portions of their careers concentrating upon the oratorical and rhetorical oeuvre of Cicero. A bibliography of relevant items from the past 25 years, keyed to specific Ciceronian works, completes the volume. Brill's Companion to Cicero will become the standard reference work on Cicero for many years.

Cicero's speeches provide a fascinating window into the political battles and crises of his time. In this book, Joanna Kenty examines Cicero's persuasive strategies and the subtleties of his Latin prose, and shows how he used eight political personae – the attacker, the grateful friend, the martyr, the senator, the partisan ideologue, and others – to maximize his political leverage in the latter half of his career. These personae were what made his arguments convincing, and drew audiences into Cicero's perspective. Non-specialist and expert readers alike will gain new insight into Cicero's corpus and career as a whole, as well as a better appreciation of the context, details, and nuances of individual passages.

This is the first book in English to take Cicero's forensic speeches seriously as acts of advocacy, i.e. as designed to ensure that the person he represents is acquitted or that the person he is prosecuting is found guilty. It seeks to set the speeches within the context of the court system of the Late Roman Republic and to explore in detail the strategies available to Roman advocates to win the votes of jurors. The volume comprises a substantial introduction, fourteen chapters by prominent Ciceronian scholars in Britain, North America, and Germany, and a final chapter by a current British Appeal Court judge who comments on Cicero's techniques from the point of view of a modern advocate. The introduction deals with issues concerning the general nature of advocacy, the Roman court system as compared with other ancient and modern systems, the Roman 'profession' of advocacy and its etiquette, the place of advocacy in Cicero's career, the ancient theory of rhetoric and argument as applied to courtroom advocacy, and the relationship between the published texts of the speeches as we have them and the speeches actually delivered in court. The first eight chapters discuss general themes: legal procedure in Cicero's time, Cicero's Italian clients, Cicero's methods of setting out or alluding to the facts of a case, his use of legal arguments, arguments from character, invective, self-reference, and emotional appeal, the last of these especially in the concluding sections of his speeches. Chapters 9-14 examine a range of particular speeches as case studies - In Verrem II.1 (from Cicero's only major extant prosecution case), Pro Archia, De Domo Sua, Pro Caecina, Pro Cluentio, Pro Ligario. These speeches cover the period of the height of Cicero's career, from 70 BC, when Cicero became acknowledged as the leading Roman advocate, to 49 BC when Caesar's dictatorship required Cicero to adapt his well-tried forensic techniques to drastically new circumstances, and they contain arguments on a wide range of subject-matter, including provincial maladministration, usurpation of citizenship rights, violent dispossession, the religious law relating to the consecration of property, poisoning, bribery, and political offences. Other speeches, including all the better-known ones, are used as illustrative examples in the introduction and in the more general chapters. An appendix lists all Cicero's known appearances as an advocate.

The ancient Romans quite literally surrounded themselves with the dead: masks of the dead were in the atria of their houses, funerals paraded through their main marketplace, and tombs lined the roads leading into and out of the city. In Roman literature as well, the dead occupy a prominent place, indicating a close and complex relationship between literature and society. The evocation of the dead in the Latin authors of the first century BCE both responds and contributes to changing socio-political conditions during the transition from the Republic to the Empire. To understand the literary life of the Roman dead, The Ghosts of the Past develops a new perspective on Latin literature's interaction with Roman culture. Drawing on the insights of sociology, anthropology, and performance theory, Basil Dufallo argues that authors of the late Republic and early Principate engage strategically with Roman behaviors centered on the dead and their world in order to address urgent political and social concerns. Republican literature exploits this context for the ends of political competition among the clan-based Roman elite, while early imperial literature seeks to restage the republican practices for a reformed Augustan society. Calling into question boundaries of genre and literary form, Dufallo's study will revise current understandings of Latin literature as a cultural and performance practice. Works as diverse as Cicero's speeches, Propertian elegy, Horace's epodes and satires, and Vergil's Aeneid appear in a new light as performed texts interacting with other kinds of cultural performance from which they might otherwise seem isolated.

A compelling account of the assimilation and adaptation of Greek culture by the Romans during the middle and later Republic.