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The Triumph of Letters: Rewriting Cicero in ad Fam. 15

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2017

Francesca Martelli
Francesca Martelli*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
*
fmartelli@humnet.ucla.edu
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Abstract

Readings of Cicero's ad Fam. 15 commonly focus on Cicero's bid for a supplicatio in 51 b.c.e., which supplies this book of letters with one of its most dominant refrains. Yet this emphasis sits oddly with the book's position within the letter collection as a whole. This article argues that whoever organized the books of the ad Fam. into sequence has invested the idea of the supplicatio, and of Cicero's aspiration for a triumph, with a new metaphorical significance that it would not have had at the time of the letters’ writing. My reading attempts to locate this retrospective significance and to trace the portrait of Cicero that emerges from it.

Keywords

Cicerocivil wareditorlettersRepublicrevisionismtriumphsupplicatio

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Type
Articles
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The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 107 , November 2017 , pp. 90 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2017. Published by The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies 

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References

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