TY - BOOK ID - 119321658 TI - The politics and poetics of Cicero's Brutus : the invention of literary history PY - 2023 SN - 1009281380 1009281356 1009281348 1009281372 PB - Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Poetics. KW - Politics. KW - Cicero, Marcus Tullius, KW - Cicero, Marcus Tullius. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:119321658 AB - Cicero's Brutus (46 BCE), a tour-de-force of intellectual and political history, was written amidst political crisis: Caesar's defeat of the republican resistance at the battle of Thapsus. This magisterial example of the dialogue genre capaciously documents the intellectual vibrancy of the Roman Republic and its Greco-Roman traditions. This book is the first study of the work from several distinct yet interrelated perspectives: Cicero's account of oratorical history, the confrontation with Caesar, and the exploration of what it means to write a history of an artistic practice. Close readings of this dialogue-including its apparent contradictions and tendentious fabrications-reveal a crucial and crucially productive moment in Greco-Roman thought. Cicero, this book argues, created the first nuanced, sophisticated, and ultimately 'modern' literary history, crafting both a compelling justification of Rome's oratorical traditions and also laying a foundation for literary historiography that abides to this day. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. ER -