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Cicero's Catilinarians

Online ISBN:
9780197510834
Print ISBN:
9780195326468
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Cicero's Catilinarians

D. H. Berry
D. H. Berry
Senior Lecturer in Classics, University of Edinburgh
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Published online:
23 July 2020
Published in print:
8 September 2020
Online ISBN:
9780197510834
Print ISBN:
9780195326468
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The Catilinarians are a set of four speeches that Cicero, while consul in 63 BC, delivered before the senate and the Roman people against the conspirator Catiline and his followers. Or are they? Cicero did not publish the speeches until three years later, and he substantially revised them before publication, rewriting some passages and adding others, all with the aim of justifying the action he had taken against the conspirators and memorializing his own role in the suppression of the conspiracy. How, then, should we interpret these speeches as literature? Can we treat them as representing what Cicero actually said? Or do we have to read them merely as political pamphlets from a later time? This first book-length discussion of these famous speeches clarifies what the speeches actually are and explains how we should approach them. In addition, the book contains a full and up-to-date account of the Catilinarian conspiracy and a survey of the influence that the story of Catiline has had on writers such as Sallust and Virgil, Ben Jonson and Henrik Ibsen, from antiquity to the present day.

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