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Cicero, Letters to Quintus and Brutus, Letter Fragments, Letter to Octavian, Invectives, Handbook of Electioneering. Edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. 483. ISBN 0-674-99599-6. $14.50.
The Loeb volume dedicated to Cicero's correspondence with his brother Quintus and with Brutus has had a varied history. The first version came out back in 1954; this version, vol. III of the Letters, consisted of the last part (books XIII-XVI) of the letters ad familiares and of the letters to (and in some cases from) Quintus and Brutus. This arrangement was modified in 1972 when, the letters to his Friends having been reserved for a separate volume (to be numbered as vol. XXVII), a new volume (with the number XXVIII) came out consisting of the correspondence with Quintus and Brutus and, in addition to that, of the Commentariolum petitionis and the Letter to Octavian which now appeared for the first time in the Loeb series. The letters to Quintus and Brutus, by two different authors (W. Glynn Williams and M. Cary), were taken over without any apparent modifications from the 1954 version; the Commentariolum and the Letter to Octavian were due to M. I. Henderson, whose text seems to have been based on Watt's 1958 OCT (although I do not seem to be able to locate a clear statement regarding this). In any case, one sees that this volume was a fairly mixed bag.
The volume under review now is not simply the replacement of the 1972 volume, for in addition to the texts included in the 1972 volume this one also includes a selection (cf. p. 311) of the letter fragments and, moreover, the two Invectives, spurious, it is true, but not without interest. There are some traces of the 1972 version, for in the case of the Commentariolum the introduction, the translation and the notes are taken from Henderson's 1972 version. However, these have been revised in places by Shackleton Bailey who also supplied a new text; all the rest in this volume is due to Shackleton Bailey.
As Shackleton Bailey is without any doubt the most eminent Ciceronian critic active in our time, it may seem superfluous if I express an opinion on the...