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"Cicero and Roman Poetry" by Dr. James E. G. Zetzel, Columbia University
Even
before Juvenal ridiculed "O fortunatam natam te consule Romam" in Satire
10, Cicero's poetry was reviled in antiquity, above all for the questionable
taste which led him to write not one, but two epic poems on his own career.
His egotism, his choice of epic, and his well-known admiration for Ennius
at the expense of the New Poets all encourage critics to make Cicero the
poet seem an archaic throwback in an age of literary experimentation. And
yet, as this talk will hope to demonstrate, things are not quite so simple.
Cicero was not a great poet, but he was aware of and very interested in
the growing understanding in Rome of Alexandrian poetics. A translator
of Aratus and a technically skilled metrician, Cicero even seems to have
used Callimachean narrative techniques in his lost De temporibus suis.
Nor did Roman poets divide clearly into Alexandrianizing and nativist:
all poets, even Cicero, were aware of the importance of Alexandrian aesthetics,
just as all poets, even Catullus, were aware of the Roman heritage of Ennius.
More than any of the others, I will suggest, Cicero saw clearly the nature
of the problem and proposed a solution that in some respects anticipated
the construction of Augustan classicism.
"Caesar and the Intellectual Statesman in Cicero's
Brutus" by Dr. Michele Lowrie, New York University
Cicero's description of Caesar's style in the Brutus is not just one
entry among others in his literary history. Caesar's actions have been
largely responsible for Cicero's retreat from politics into scholarship
and the current political situation hangs over the dialogue both in many
explicit references and in ways that are more covert. I will explore Caesar's
problematic position in literary history by looking at Cicero's treatment
of the relation of power to style.
"Is Cicero a Reliable Source for Peripatetic Rhetoric?" by Dr. William
Fortenbaugh, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In the last
few years, there have been several publications that have discussed with
a positive slant Cicero's rhetorical writings. These publications
are to be welcomed, but in an effort to free Cicero from old fashioned
Quellenforschung (what are Cicero's sources?), they suppress a different
question: Is Cicero a reliable source for his predecessors? It is
this question that I wish to address and answer in the negative.
"Reading Cicero Aloud, Observing Syllabic Quantities" by Dr. Stephen
Daitz, City College of New York I will work with a few volunteers
and then with the whole audience on Cat. 1.1-3, chanting our way through
those wonderfully oratorical long and short syllables |
