Cicero as Evidence - A Historian's Companion - Grand Format

This book suggests to historically minded readers of Cicero how they should read him, and guides them through his writings, showing how they can be exploited and enjoyed. Cornelius Nepos described Cicero's correspondence with Atticus as not far short of a continuous history of the period in which it was written. However, these letters form no more than half of the surviving correspondence, and we possess in addition the texts of many of Cicero's speeches and the greater part of his theoretical work The immense quantity of these writings makes Cicero's life and the period in which he lived especially attractive for the student of historybut at the same time especially difficult.
Though Cicero as Evidence is neither a complete biography nor a history of the late Republic, it seeks to provide fundamental material for both. Through its concentration on primary evidence, it is a corrective to the interpretations of Cicero and the late Republic that circulated after his death, which were inevitably affected by bitterness and the exploitation of history for political purposes. Part One discusses the problems in reading Cicero as historical evidence.
This theme is developed in the following Partin relation to Cicero's forensic speeches. Parts Three and Four follow the course of the correspondence from the mid-60s BC onwards, relating it to Cicero's other writing, and are for the most part chronologically organized. In Part Four, Andrew Lintott seeks in particular to integrate Cicero's theoretical works into the other material on his life and politics, so that his intellectual biography becomes richer and more revealing.