3. Civil War Letters (49 BC)

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we go through the three letters on the specification that were written during the civil war: (i) Att. 9.11a (to Caesar, March 49 BC); (ii) Att. 8.8 (to Atticus, February 49 BC); and (iii) Att. 9.4. (to Atticus, March 49 BC). In particular, we think about: (i) the political context of the civil war: (ii) the extent to which Cicero expected other people to read his letters; (iii) his attitude to events and to the key individuals; and (iv) the ways in which Cicero tries to decide what to do.

Course

In this course, Professor Catherine Steel (University of Glasgow) explores Cicero as a correspondent in a set of lectures designed to be used alongside the OCR A Level Classical Civilization option, ‘Politics and the Late Republic’. In the first module, we provide an introduction to Cicero’s letters a whole, thinking in particular about the importance of letters generally in the ancient world and the various letter collections that have come down to us. After that, in the following three modules, we go through each of the eleven set letter, which we have grouped into three distinct periods: letters written before the civil war (62-49 BC), letters written during the civil war (49 BC), and letters written after the civil war (49-43 BC).

Lecturer

Catherine Steel is Professor of Classics and Head of the Department of Classics at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests relate to the Roman Republic, the writings of Cicero and Roman oratory. Her recent publications include Reading Cicero: Genre and Performance in Late Republican Rome (2005), The End of the Roman Republic, 146-44 B.C.: Conquest and Crisis (2013) and (with Dr Henriette van der Blom) Community and Communication: Oratory and Politics in Republican Rome (2013).