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The Roman Republic of Letters: Scholarship, Philosophy, and Politics in the Age of Cicero and Caesar - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

The Roman Republic of Letters: Scholarship, Philosophy, and Politics in the Age of Cicero and Caesar

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An intellectual history of the late Roman Republic—and the senators who fought both scholarly debates and a civil war

In The Roman Republic of Letters, Katharina Volk explores a fascinating chapter of intellectual history, focusing on the literary senators of the mid-first century BCE who came to blows over the future of Rome even as they debated philosophy, history, political theory, linguistics, science, and religion.

It was a period of intense cultural flourishing and extreme political unrest—and the agents of each were very often the same people. Members of the senatorial class, including Cicero, Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Cato, Varro, and Nigidius Figulus, contributed greatly to the development of Roman scholarship and engaged in a lively and often polemical exchange with one another. These men were also crucially involved in the tumultuous events that brought about the collapse of the Republic, and they ended up on opposite sides in the civil war between Caesar and Pompey in the early 40s. Volk treats the intellectual and political activities of these “senator scholars” as two sides of the same coin, exploring how scholarship and statesmanship mutually informed one another—and how the acquisition, organization, and diffusion of knowledge was bound up with the question of what it meant to be a Roman in a time of crisis.

By revealing how first-century Rome’s remarkable “republic of letters” was connected to the fight over the actual res publica, Volk’s riveting account captures the complexity of this pivotal period.

ISBN-13: 9780691193878

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Publication Date: 11-09-2021

Pages: 400

Product Dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

Katharina Volk is professor of classics at Columbia University. She is the author of Ovid; Manilius and His Intellectual Background; and The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The Roman Republic of Letters aims to make sense of the extraordinary flourishing of intellectual activity during the final decades of the Roman Republic by situating this activity within the period’s political uncertainty. As Katharina Volk notes, with few exceptions the chief intellectual and literary figures of the period are also those most deeply enmeshed in political events. Her engaging narrative considers not just specific areas of scholarly and philosophical endeavor, but also the interaction among the various players.”—Anthony Corbeill, University of Virginia

“The Roman Republic of Letters offers an impressively broad-ranging and novel take on the many intellectual currents of the late Roman Republic. Rather than privilege one field of inquiry or debate (philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, religion), Katharina Volk magisterially elucidates the extent to which Roman elites coupled intellectual curiosity and civic tradition amidst the insurmountable political crisis of the Republic’s final years.”—Christopher van den Berg, Amherst College

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Abbreviations xi

1 Introduction 1

2 Respublica of Letters 22

3 Engaged Philosophy 55

4 Philosophy after Pharsalus 111

5 The Invention of Rome 181

6 Coopting the Cosmos 239

7 Conclusion 313

Bibliography 319

Index locorum 355

General Index 371