Published by De Gruyter

CICERO

Studies on Roman Thought and Its Reception

Compiled by: Veronica Revello
Funded by: Patrum Lumen Sustine-Stiftung (PLuS)
Edited by: Ermanno Malaspina

ISSN: 2567-0158

e-ISSN 2567-0166

Overview
Volumes

Open Access

CICERO – Studies on Roman Thought and Its Reception features monographs, edited volumes, text editions, and commentaries in all areas of Roman philosophy, history, rhetoric, politics, law, culture, and their reception, including patristics and Christian philosophy.

This thematically wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, multilingual series was named after Marcus Tullius Cicero, who was not only a politician but also an influential orator and philosopher.

The peer-reviewed series is published by the Patrum Lumen Sustine foundation in Basel under the scholarly direction of the Société Internationale des Amis de Cicéron (SIAC, Paris).

Series Editor

Ermanno Malaspina

Advisory Board

Mireille Armisen-Marchetti, Francesca Romana Berno, Carmen Codoner, Perrine Galand, Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, Robert Kaster, David Konstan, Carlos Lévy, Sabine Luciani, Rita Pierini, Mortimer Sellers, Jula Wildberger

Managing Editor / Editorial Office (for any enquires and/or submission of book proposals)

Veronica Revello (cicero_siac_de[at]tulliana.eu)

Book Open Access 2025

Cicero in Basel

Locating Classical Reception in a Humanist City

Cédric Scheidegger Laemmle

Volume 10 in this series

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The fifteen contributions to the multilingual volume together chart Cicero’s presence in the cultural history of Basel – from the city’s foundation to the heyday of humanist print culture, to the cultural politics of the modern day. Written by scholars working from different academic traditions and organised in four sections, they trace a broad range of engagements with Cicero in Basel across time, thus offering the rudiments of a localised form of reception history: "Ciceronian Foundations" focuses on Cicero’s role in the city’s (and her university’s) foundation myths; "Editions and Commentaries" centres on the Ciceronian editions and commentaries in the heyday of humanist printing culture; "Discussions and Engagements" situates his reception in the intellectual currents that define humanist Basel – from stylistic and literary debates to the controversies of the theologians; lastly, "Scholarship and Education" explores the entanglements of academic and civic life that come to define Cicero’s place in Basel from the 17^th century. For all their diversity, the contributions are united in their aim to contribute both to the study of Ciceronian reception and to the cultural history and development of Basel in its European context.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.0000/9783111454641
ISBN:: 9783111454641
ISBN:: 9783111455020
ISBN:: 9783111447827
Subject:: Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Subject:: Classical Studies
Subject:: Latin
Subject:: Latin Language and Literature
Subject:: Classical Tradition and Reception
Subject:: Ancient Philosophy
Subject:: History
Subject:: Historical Periods
Subject:: Early Modern History
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2024

Cicero in Greece, Greece in Cicero

Aspects of Reciprocal Reception from Classical Antiquity to Byzantium and Modern Greece

Ioannis Deligiannis

Volume 9 in this series

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The volume aims at complementing the international literature on the interaction between Cicero and Greece. It offers new and unpublished material on Cicero’s presence in Greece literally, deriving from his epistles, speeches and philosophical treatises, but also on his interaction with the Greek philosophical schools, the Greek language and politics, etc. Besides, it offers new knowledge on the appreciation and reception of Cicero and his texts by the Greek world from Late Antiquity to Byzantium and Modern Greece, based on material deriving from a variety of sources (papyri, manuscripts, compendia or encyclopaedias, imitations, translations, early editions, etc.), an aspect of the relationships between Cicero and Greece still understudied. Thus, the volume offers an image as illustrative as possible of various aspects of the presence of the Greek world in Cicero’s works and of Cicero’s presence in Greece from his own times to the present day.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111292779
ISBN:: 9783111292779
ISBN:: 9783111292861
ISBN:: 9783111215891
Subject:: Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Subject:: Classical Studies
Subject:: Latin
Subject:: Latin Language and Literature
Subject:: Ancient Philosophy
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2024

Afterlives of the Garden

Receptions of Epicurean Thought in the Early Empire and Late Antiquity

Gregson Davis, Sergio Yona

Volume 8 in this series

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The collection of essays in this volume offers fresh insights into varied modalities of reception of Epicurean thought among Roman authors of the late Republican and Imperial eras. Its generic purview encompasses prose as well as poetic texts by both minor and major writers in the Latin literary canon, including the anonymous poems, Ciris and Aetna, and an elegy from the Tibullan corpus by the female poet, Sulpicia. Major figures include the Augustan poets, Vergil and Horace, and the late antique Christian theologian, Augustine. The method of analysis employed in the essays is uniformly interdisciplinary and reveals the depth of the engagement of each ancient author with major preoccupations of Epicurean thought, such as the balanced pursuit of erotic pleasure in the context of human flourishing and the role of the gods in relation to human existence. The ensemble of nuanced interpretations testifies to the immense vitality of the Epicurean philosophical tradition throughout Greco-Roman antiquity and thereby provides a welcome and substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of reception studies.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111029733
ISBN:: 9783111029733
ISBN:: 9783111021928
ISBN:: 9783111029856
Subject:: Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Subject:: Classical Studies
Subject:: Latin
Subject:: Latin Language and Literature
Subject:: Ancient Philosophy
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2023

›Mos uetustissimus‹ – Tito Livio e la percezione della clemenza

Elisa Della Calce, Stephen Oakley

Volume 7 in this series

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Clemency plays an important role among Livy’s concepts of value.

This work offers a wide-ranging analysis of this virtue, in order to highlight its impact and pattern of distribution in Livy’s History of Rome. Clemency is pleaded, exercised or denied within different areas (family, especially concerning fathers and sons, justice and army), which are all characterized by an uneven relationship between those who decide to exercise it or not, and those who may benefit from it. The conception that comes out is not monolithic at all, but evolves throughout the course of Livy’s work, and is related to various characters and situations. In this regard, clemency is a relevant ingredient for resolving conflicts at a political and diplomatic level, as well as a strategy for gaining the consent of the defeated.

Lastly, special attention has been paid to the political and cultural environment contemporary to Livy, with the aim of ascertaining its influence on the author’s perception of clemency.

This book is addressed to those who are interested in Livy’s historical work and, more specifically, in the role that clemency plays in Livy’s political and moral ideology.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111292649
ISBN:: 9783111292649
ISBN:: 9783111292816
ISBN:: 9783111212371
Subject:: Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Subject:: Classical Studies
Subject:: Latin
Subject:: Latin Language and Literature
Subject:: Ancient Philosophy
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2023

Healing Grief

A Commentary on Seneca’s Consolatio ad Marciam

Fabio Tutrone

Volume 6 in this series

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Both our view of Seneca’s philosophical thought and our approach to the ancient consolatory genre have radically changed since the latest commentary on the Consolatio ad Marciam was written in 1981. The aim of this work is to offer a new book-length commentary on the earliest of Seneca’s extant writings, along with a revision of the Latin text and a reassessment of Seneca’s intellectual program, strategies, and context.

A crucial document to penetrate Seneca’s discourse on the self in its embryonic stages, the Ad Marciam is here taken seriously as an engaging attempt to direct the persuasive power of literary models and rhetorical devices toward the fundamentally moral project of healing Marcia’s grief and correcting her cognitive distortions. Through close reading of the Latin text, this commentary shows that Seneca invariably adapts different traditions and voices – from Greek consolations to Plato’s dialogues, from the Roman discourse of gender and exemplarity to epic poetry – to a Stoic framework, so as to give his reader a lucid understanding of the limits of the self and the ineluctability of natural laws.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111014845
ISBN:: 9783111014845
ISBN:: 9783111014890
ISBN:: 9783111007427
Subject:: Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Subject:: Classical Studies
Subject:: Latin
Subject:: Latin Language and Literature
Subject:: Ancient Philosophy
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2022

›Amicus Lucretius‹

Gassendi, il ›De rerum natura‹ e l'edonismo cristiano

Enrico Piergiacomi

Volume 5 in this series

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Many scholars have studied the dialogue between the Epicurean tradition and Pierre Gassendi. However, no one so far has ever attempted to conduct a full analysis of the latter’s specific reception of Lucretius. The book attempts to show that Gassendi was the first to discuss almost the whole De rerum natura, as part of an ambitious project. He sought to provide a Christianized version of Lucretius’ theory or to develop an atomistic worldview “freed” from the many dangerous errors that were often imputed to atomism (impiety, debauchery, and irrationality). In particular, Gassendi developed a dialectical strategy that led him to recover a providential atomism, an Epicurean psychology that saves the immortality of the soul, and a Christian hedonism from the De rerum natura. The last goal was especially important. Gassendi here emerges as the culmination of a tradition of Christian philosophers, like Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus of Rotterdam, who have tried to merge Epicurean hedonism with the Christian religion. The volume could therefore attract both scholars of Antiquity and Renaissance/modern philosophy. It is also a rewarding reading for scholars of the reception of Latin poetry from a philosophical perspective.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110768084
ISBN:: 9783110768084
ISBN:: 9783110768114
ISBN:: 9783110767216
Subject:: Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Subject:: Classical Studies
Subject:: Latin
Subject:: Latin Authors
Subject:: Latin Language and Literature
Subject:: Ancient Philosophy
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2022

Portraying Cicero in Literature, Culture, and Politics

From Ancient to Modern Times

Francesca Romana Berno, Giuseppe La Bua, Patrum Lumen Sustine-Stiftung (PLuS)

Volume 4 in this series

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Cicero has played a pivotal role in shaping Western culture. His public persona, his self-portrait as model of Roman prose, philosopher, and statesman, has exerted a durable and profound impact on the educational system and the formation of the ruling class over the centuries. Joining up with recent studies on the reception of Cicero, this volume approaches the figure of Cicero from a ‘biographical’, more than ‘philological’, perspective and considers the multiple ways by which different ages reacted to Cicero and created their ‘Ciceros’. From Cicero’s lifetime to our times, it focuses on how the image of Cicero was revisited and reworked by intellectuals and men of culture, who eulogized his outstanding oratorical and political virtues but, not rarely, questioned the role he had in Roman politics and society. An international group of scholars elaborates on the figure of Cicero, shedding fresh light on his reception in late antiquity, Humanism and Renaissance, Enlightenment and modern centuries. Historians, literary scholars and philosophers, as well as graduate students, will certainly profit from this volume, which contributes enormously to our understanding of the influence of Cicero on Western culture over the times.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110748703
ISBN:: 9783110748703
ISBN:: 9783110748888
ISBN:: 9783110748420
Subject:: Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Subject:: Classical Studies
Subject:: Latin
Subject:: Latin Authors
Subject:: Latin Language and Literature
Subject:: Classical Tradition and Reception
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Topics in Literary Studies
Subject:: Antiquity
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2020

Reading Cicero’s Final Years

Receptions of the Post-Caesarian Works up to the Sixteenth Century – with two Epilogues

Christoph Pieper, Bram van der Velden, Patrum Lumen Sustine-Stiftung (PLuS)

Volume 3 in this series

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This volume contributes to the ongoing scholarly debate regarding the reception of Cicero. It focuses on one particular moment in Cicero’s life, the period from the death of Caesar up to Cicero’s own death. These final years have shaped Cicero’s reception in an special way, as they have condensed and enlarged themes that his life stands for: on the positive side his fight for freedom and the republic against mighty opponents (for which he would finally be killed); on the other hand his inconsistency in terms of political alliances and tendency to overestimate his own influence. For that reason, many later readers viewed the final months of Cicero's life as his swan song, and as representing the essence of his life as a whole.
The fixed scope of this volume facilitates an analysis of the underlying debates about the historical character Cicero and his textual legacy (speeches, letters and philosophical works) through the ages, stretching from antiquity itself to the present day. Major themes negotiated in this volume are the influence of Cicero’s regular attempts to anticipate his later reception; the question of whether or not Cicero showed consistency in his behaviour; his debatable heroism with regard to republican freedom; and the interaction between philosophy, rhetoric and politics.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716313
ISBN:: 9783110716313
ISBN:: 9783110716399
ISBN:: 9783110715064
Subject:: Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Subject:: Classical Studies
Subject:: Latin
Subject:: Latin Authors
Subject:: Latin Language and Literature
Subject:: Classical Tradition and Reception
Subject:: Ancient Philosophy
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2020

La fine del mondo nel ›De rerum natura‹ di Lucrezio

Manuel Galzerano

Volume 2 in this series

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La fine del mondo costituisce uno dei temi centrali del De rerum natura, testo che rappresenta inoltre la nostra principale fonte sull'escatologia cosmica epicurea. Mosso dall'intento d'indagare questo aspetto cruciale (che non è mai stato in precedenza oggetto di studi monografici), questo libro propone un commento delle principali sezioni escatologiche del poema: i finali del primo e del secondo libro, i vv. 91-415 del quinto e la rassegna dei fenomeni meteorologici più violenti nel sesto. L'analisi delle fonti filosofiche e degli obbiettivi polemici permette di dare risposte alla questione del "fondamentalismo" di Lucrezio, ponendo inoltre le basi per un esame del suo peculiare "sublime apocalittico". Le appendici forniscono ulteriori considerazioni sull'immaginario escatologico lucreziano, concentrandosi sul modello offerto da Empedocle, le strategie comunicative del poeta e la possibile influenza del trattato pseudo-aristotelico De mundo. Questo esame mostra che il poeta richiama dottrine e fonti filosofiche successive a Epicuro, senza però cadere nell'eclettismo: uomo del suo tempo, Lucrezio "attualizza" le dottrine del maestro, proponendole come risposta per le angosce della propria epoca.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110674668
ISBN:: 9783110674668
ISBN:: 9783110674682
ISBN:: 9783110659627
Subject:: Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Subject:: Classical Studies
Subject:: Latin
Subject:: Latin Language and Literature
Subject:: Ancient Philosophy
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2019

Traduire Cicéron au XVe siècle - Le ›Livre des offices‹ d'Anjourrant Bourré

Olivier Delsaux

Volume 1 in this series

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This book provides the first critical edition of the first French translation of Cicero's De officiis. Anjourrant Bourré's Livre des offices offers a new perspective on the reception of Cicero's moral and political thougth in late medieval and early Renaissance France. The critical edition, based upon all surviving testimonies, provides, besides the edited text, a study of the textual transmission, an analysis of the linguistic aspects as well as of the translation process, a glossary, explicative notes and an index.This book provides the first critical edition of the first French translation of Cicero's De officiis. Anjourrant Bourré's Livre des offices offers a new perspective on the reception of Cicero's moral and political thougth in late medieval and early Renaissance France.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110621365
ISBN:: 9783110621365
ISBN:: 9783110621396
ISBN:: 9783110620306
Subject:: Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Subject:: Classical Studies
Subject:: Latin
Subject:: Latin Language and Literature
Subject:: Ancient Philosophy
Subject:: Philosophy
Subject:: History of Philosophy
Subject:: Medieval Philosophy
Publisher:: De Gruyter