The Lost Republic. Cicero's De oratore and De re publica

This book is a literary and cultural interpretation of Cicero’s two earliest dialogues, both modeled on Plato. It offers new readings of both De oratore and De re publica, including a reconstruction of the argument of the fragmentary De re publica. It explores Cicero’s highly ambivalent attitude to Plato and to the development of technical rhetoric and philosophy in the Hellenistic period, and at the same time uses the historical settings of the dialogues to re-create the development of Roman attitudes toward Greek thought in the second century BCE. It also examines Cicero’s views about the status and values of rhetorical education and of political experience and his deliberately ambiguous presentation of the settings and speakers of his own dialogues. One of Cicero’s goals, as is also true of other contemporary writers such as Catullus and Lucretius, is to explore Rome’s moral and cultural history in relationship to Greece and in relationship to Rome’s own heritage. The Lost Republic treats Cicero’s first dialogues as masterpieces of literary imagination that present a compelling vision of the intellectual, moral, and historical underpinnings of civil society.