Letters to Friends

Cicero, Marcus Tullius; Shackleton Bailey, D. R. (EDT)

ISBN 10: 0674995880 / ISBN 13: 9780674995888

Published by Harvard University Press, 2001

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 623823-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Letters to Friends
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674995880
• ISBN 13: 9780674995888
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

The private correspondence of Rome’s most prolific public figure.

Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician, and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.

About the Author

D. R. Shackleton Bailey was Pope Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Harvard University.