This selection of Cicero's letters illuminates the main phase of his mature years from 65 to 44 B.C. The letters have been chosen in order to highlight the political background of this period of Roman history and to give substance and immediacy to the study of the history of the late Republic.

This volume in the LACTOR Sourcebooks in Ancient History series offers a selection of Cicero's letters from the period of his government of Cilicia in 51/50 BC, with accompanying maps, chronology and a brief Introduction. It provides for the needs of students at schools and universities who are studying ancient history in English translation and has been written and reviewed by experienced teachers.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) introduced Romans to the major schools of Greek philosophy, forging a Latin conceptual vocabulary that was entirely new. But for all the sophistication of his thinking, it is perhaps for his political and oratorical career that Cicero is best remembered. He was the nemisis of Catiline, whose plot to overthrow the Republic he famously denounced to the Senate. He was the selfless politician who turned down the opportunity to join Julius Caesar and Pompey in their ruling triumvirate with Crassus. He was briefly Rome's leading man after Caesar's assassination in 44 BCE.And he was the great political orator whose bitter coflict with Mark Antony led to his own violent death in 43 BCE. In her authoritative survey, Gesine Manuwald evokes the many faces of Cicero as well as his complexities and seeming contradictions. She focuses on his major works, allowing the great writer to speak for himself. Cicero's rich legacy is seen to endure in the works of Quintilian and the Church Fathers as well as in the speeches of Harry S. Truman and Barack Obama.

Cicero: A Political Biography

Cicero in Letters is a guide to the first extensive correspondence that survives from the Greco-Roman world. The more than eight hundred letters of Cicero that are its core provided literary models for subsequent letter writers from Pliny to Petrarch to Samuel Johnson and beyond. The collection also includes some one hundred letters by Cicero's contemporaries. The letters they exchanged provide unique insight into the experience of the Roman political class at the turning point between Republican and imperial rule. The first part of this study analyzes effects of the milieu in which the letters were written. The lack of an organized postal system limited the correspondence that Cicero and his contemporaries could conduct and influenced what they were willing to write about. Their chief motive for exchanging letters was to protect political relationships until they could resume their customary, face-to-face association in Rome. Romans did not normally sign letters, much less write them in their own hand. Their correspondence was handled by agents who drafted, expedited, and interpreted it. Yet every letter advertised the level of intimacy that bound the writer and the addressee. Finally, the published letters were not drawn at random from the archives that Cicero left. An editor selected and arranged them in order to impress on readers a particular view of Cicero as a public personality. The second half of the book explores the significance of leading themes in the letters. It shows how, in a time of deepening crisis, Cicero and his correspondents drew on their knowledge of literature, the habit of consultation, and the rhetoric of government in an effort to improve cooperation and to maintain the political culture which they shared. The result is a revealing look at Cicero's epistolary practices and also the world of elite social intercourse in the late Republic.