The Age of Cicero

Year: 2

Module description:

Cicero is our most important witness to the last days of the Roman republic: his letters, speeches, and philosophical writings take us from the Catilinarian conspiracy to the assassination of Julius Caesar and beyond – until Cicero’s own violent death.

Taking Cicero’s work as our guiding thread, we will discover the significance, for the Romans of the late republic, of friendship, love and sex, morality and immorality, leisure and business, the role of rhetoric and politics, ambition and competition.

Cicero’s contemporaries, Catullus, Lucretius, and Sallust will be part of the core reading for the module, enabling students to form a complete picture of the literature and culture of the final years of the Roman republic.