Cicero's 'Epistulae ad Familiares': Narratives of the Civil War

Abstract

The aim of my thesis is to study the editorial contribution to Cicero's Epistulae ad Familiares in telling a history of the Late Roman Republic. Although the collection is not arranged in a strict chronological order, it displays an overall forward movement from the early phases of Cicero's career to the Civil War and the fall of the Republic. The editor of the collection has arranged Cicero's letters in a way as to exploit their narrative potential and build a narrative running across the sixteen books through self-enclosed episodes. The individual narratives have been structured, layered, and connected through linguistic and thematic repetitions, allusions and echoes, flashbacks and dramatic turns. The result of the editorial operation on the orator's authentic letters is a sophisticated narrative, in which the boundaries between history and fictionality are often blurred. In this quasi-fictional space, the editor plays with notions of narratorial authority and reliability, contrasting perspectives, chronological shifts, and evolving space and power dynamics to re-write his history of Cicero and the Civil War.

Date of Award	31 Dec 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Maria-Ruth Morello (Supervisor) & Andrew Morrison (Supervisor)