Cicero composed his incendiary Philippics only a few months after Rome was rocked by the brutal assassination of Julius Caesar. In the tumultuous aftermath of Caesar’s death, Cicero and Mark Antony found themselves on opposing sides of an increasingly bitter and dangerous battle for control. Philippic 2 was a weapon in that war. Conceived as Cicero’s response to a verbal attack from Antony in the Senate, Philippic 2 is a rhetorical firework that ranges from abusive references to Antony’s supposedly sordid sex life to a sustained critique of what Cicero saw as Antony’s tyrannical ambitions. Vituperatively brilliant and politically committed, it is both a carefully crafted literary artefact and an explosive example of crisis rhetoric. It ultimately led to Cicero’s own gruesome death. This course book offers a portion of the original Latin text, vocabulary aids, study questions, and an extensive commentary. Designed to stretch and stimulate readers, Ingo Gildenhard’s volume will be of particular interest to students of Latin studying for A-Level or on undergraduate courses. It extends beyond detailed linguistic analysis to encourage critical engagement with Cicero, his oratory, the politics of late-republican Rome, and the transhistorical import of Cicero’s politics of verbal (and physical) violence.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

Cicero's Philippics and Their Demosthenic Model: The Rhetoric of Crisis

On the heels of his acclaimed bestselling debut Lost Girls, Andrew Pyper brings his darkly musical language, chilling suspense, and psychological complexity to a story of survival in the Amazon jungle. On the delirious eve of the new millennium, Marcus Wallace and Jonathon Bates, two twenty-four-year-old overnight dot-com millionaires, are on a trade mission in Brazil. Their product is Hypothesys, a virtual "morality machine" that promises to help people "make the best decisions of their lives." But when the decision is made to take an ecotour up the Río Negro deep into the Amazon jungle, the Hypothesys team members are forced to make choices for themselves -- choices that carry fatal consequences. In the dead of night, their boat is boarded by paramilitaries who kill the Brazilian crew and kidnap Wallace and Bates, their two older colleagues, and their enigmatic interpreter, Crossman. Blindfolded and thrown into a pit for a prison, they must fight to find the will to survive. But when the increasingly unstable Wallace engineers a violent escape, their own natures emerge as a threat potentially more dangerous than the boundless jungle that surrounds them, or the gunmen who relentlessly pursue them. A rare combination of literary skill, contemporary insight, and outstanding storytelling, The Trade Mission is an electrifying read that confirms Andrew Pyper's mastery of psychological suspense.

The Philippics form the climax of Cicero’s rhetorical achievement and political activity. Besides, these fourteen speeches are an important testimony to the critical final phase of the Roman Republic. Yet for a long time they have received little scholarly attention. This two-volume edition now provides a comprehensive scholarly commentary on Philippics 3-9, seven central speeches of the corpus. Full annotations explain the speeches in terms of linguistic, literary and historical issues (vol. 2); they are based on a revised Latin text with a facing translation into English as well as a detailed introduction dealing with problems relevant to the whole corpus; a bibliography and indices complete the edition (vol. 1). Besides a running commentary on each speech, the study shows these orations to be rhetorical constructs in a historical conflict; hence particular emphasis is placed on an analysis of Cicero’s rhetorical techniques and political strategies. The format of the commentary is also intended to present scholarly information to a wide and diverse readership.

Cicero's letters to friends span the period from 62 BCE, when his political career was at its peak, to 43 BCE, when he was put to death by the victorious Triumvirs. Cicero was a prodigious letter writer, and happily a splendid treasury of his letters has come down to us: collected and in part published not long after his death, over 800 of them were rediscovered by Petrarch and other humanists in the fourteenth century. Among classical texts this correspondence is unparalleled; nowhere else do we get such an intimate look at the life of a prominent Roman and his social world, or such a vivid sense of a momentous period in Roman history. The 435 letters collected here represent Cicero's correspondence with friends and acquaintances over a period of 20 years, from 62 BCE, when Cicero's political career was at its peak, to 43 BCE, the year he was put to death by the victorious Triumvirs. They range widely in substance and style, from official dispatches and semi-public letters of political importance to casual notes that chat with close friends about travels and projects, domestic pleasures and books, and questions currently debated. This new Loeb Classical Library edition of the Letters to Friends, in three volumes, brings together D.R. Shackleton Bailey's standard Latin text, now updated, and a revised version of his much admired translation first published by Penguin. This authoritative edition complements the new Loeb edition of Cicero's Letters to Atticus, also translated by Shackleton Bailey.