Compitum

Andrew R. Dyck, Cicero. The Man and His Works, Cambridge, 2025.

Éditeur : Cambridge University Press
1117 pages
ISBN : 9781107085640
£ 150.00

Cicero is one of the most important historical figures of classical antiquity. He rose from a provincial family to become consul at Rome in 63 BC and continued to play an active role in politics before his murder under the triumvirs Octavian, Mark Antony, and Lepidus. He also engaged in Roman intellectual culture, writing key works on both rhetoric and philosophy. We have a very large body of written evidence by and about him – far more than for any other figure of the Roman Republic – including private correspondence not intended for publication. However, previous biographers – in mapping his political career – have mostly overlooked his other activities. Taking a broader perspective enables a much fuller and richer profile of him to emerge. This epochal new portrait of Rome's great orator offers a more complete picture of the man, his personality, and his works in the overall context of his remarkable life.

Source : Cambridge University Press

Frédéric Hurlet, Auguste et ses aristocrates. Les générations de la révolution romaine, Paris, 2025.

Éditeur : Les Belles Lettres
Collection : Mondes anciens, 14
392 pages
ISBN : 9782251457536
35 €

Auguste côtoya au quotidien les aristocrates, qui s'opposèrent à lui ou l'assistèrent, voire le conseillèrent pour l'aider à s'emparer du pouvoir, puis à le conserver. C'est à ce groupe social et à ses relations avec Auguste que ce livre est consacré. Il cherche à faire mieux comprendre comment les aristocrates vécurent en leur for intérieur la chute de la république et l'avènement d'un nouveau régime monarchique en sélectionnant en guise d'échantillon les trajectoires de neuf aristocrates à partir du critère de l'appartenance à une génération, définie comme une expérience commune de vie.

Rebecca Menmuir, Medieval Responses to Ovid's Exile, Cambridge, 2025.

Éditeur : Cambridge University Press
Collection : Classics after Antiquity
262 pages
ISBN : 9781009553926
£ 90.00

The Augustan poet Ovid exerted significant influence over the Middle Ages, and his exile captured the later medieval imagination. Medieval Responses to Ovid's Exile examines a variety of creative scholastic and literary responses to Ovid's exile across medieval culture. It ranges across the medieval schoolroom, where new forms shape Ovidian exile anew, literary pilgrimages, medieval fantasies of dismemberment and visits to Ovid's tomb. These responses capture Ovid's metamorphosis into a poet for the Christian age, while elsewhere medieval poets such as John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer demonstrate how to inhabit an Ovidian exilic voice. Medieval audiences fundamentally understood the foundations laid by the exilic Ovid, and so from antiquity and from exile Ovid shaped his own reception. The extent, enthusiasm and engagement of medieval responses to Ovid's exile are to such a degree that they must be considered when we read Ovid's exilic works, or indeed any of his poetry.

Robert Muller, Sénèque. Fragments et Témoignages. Épigrammes, Paris, 2025.

Éditeur : Vrin
Collection : Bibliothèque des textes philosophiques
136 pages
ISBN : 978-2-7116-3227-5
12 €

Sénèque est un auteur stoïcien majeur, le premier dont il subsiste un grand nombre de textes. Cette relative abondance, la chose est peu connue, ne représente pourtant qu'une partie de la production totale : on estime en effet que la moitié environ des écrits de Sénèque est perdue, ne subsistant qu'à travers des titres et des fragments. Ces restes, méconnus et rarement exploités, ne sont pourtant pas insignifiants, car ils contiennent des thèses et des sujets dont on n'a pas d'autres témoignages dans l'oeuvre conservée.
Sénèque est aussi un écrivain de talent, qui en dehors des textes philosophiques a écrit plusieurs tragédies. C'est pourquoi on n'a pas hésité à lui attribuer en outre un ensemble de poésies connu sous le nom d'Épigrammes. Si certains de ces poèmes sont sans doute de la main de Sénèque, il est difficile de l'assurer pour tous. Plutôt que d'en faire un choix arbitraire, on a préféré offrir aux lecteurs l'occasion de découvrir l'ensemble de ces textes rarement édités.

Source : Vrin

Charles Brittain et James Warren (éd.), Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, Cambridge, 2025.

Éditeur : Cambridge University Press
214 pages
ISBN : 9781009586054
£ 95.00

Cicero composed the Tusculan Disputations in the summer of 45 BC at a time of great personal and political turmoil. He was grieving for the death of his daughter Tullia earlier that year, while Caesar's defeat of Pompey's forces at Munda and return to Rome as dictator was causing him great fears and concerns for himself, his friends and the Republic itself. This collection of new essays offers a holistic critical commentary on this important work. World-leading experts consider its historical and philosophical context and the central arguments and themes of each of the five books, which include the treatment of the fear of death, the value of pain, the Stoic account of the emotions and the thesis that virtue is sufficient for happiness. Each chapter pays close attention to Cicero's own method of philosophy, and the role of rhetoric and persuasion in pursuing his inquiries.

Anthony James Boyle, Seneca: Phoenissae, Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, Oxford, 2025.

Éditeur : Oxford University Press
496 pages
ISBN : 9780198889168

Phoenissae is probably Seneca's final play, left unfinished at the time of his death in 65 CE from a suicide ordered by the emperor Nero. It is a work of great dramatic, poetic, and intellectual force, a paradigm of Rome's literature of civil war, packed with the latter's vocabulary and imagery and permeated by issues central to Senecan thinking and tragic practice. Prominent themes include: the imperatives of family and self, of identity and place; violence and cost (psychological, familial, social); anger, self-loathing, suicide, and moral action; fate, guilt, horror; the cyclicity and triumph of evil; the allure of power; the violation of nature; the failure of pietas. Also meriting notice are more formal issues of theatricality, literary self-consciousness, and belatedness. Especially important is the theme of incest, its dissolution of political, moral, social, and natural order, its collapse of individual identity, its function as metaphor for the evil of civil war. Like the unfinished epic of Seneca's nephew Lucan, Phoenissae is immediate precursor to the bloody internecine warfare of 68–69 CE and a prophetic mirror of Rome.