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G. MANUWALD (ED.), THE AFTERLIFE OF CICERO (Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 135). London: Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2016. Pp. ix + 218, illus. isbn 9781905670642. £65.00.
Cicero is one of the most studied persons of antiquity. This status is based not only on the fact that he left a rich collection of writings, but that his speeches and letters allow for a detailed (elite and certainly biased) look at everyday life in late republican Rome. His writings, letters and speeches are and have constantly been mined for information about the ancient world. Likewise, his reception history is as varied as his own writings and began early on, shortly after his death, creating an image which changed and yet remained constant throughout the ages.
The present volume contains the proceedings of a conference which took place at the Warburg Institute in May 2015, dedicated to the ‘Afterlife’ of Cicero. Its focus is on a segment of this afterlife, beginning in the thirteenth century, that is at the onset of the Renaissance. The focus of the book is two-fold: the first six papers trace the impact of Cicero on Italian duecento to cinquecento politics, while the second group of papers goes beyond the Italian context to the Latin American, revolutionary French and Anglophone context. What is missing is a consideration of (the figure of) Cicero in the German-speaking world, which is only briefly referenced in the contribution by Matthew Fox. However, this gap might well be due to the fact that other case studies have already focused on this aspect, notably various essays in William H. F. Altman (ed.), Brill's Companion to the Reception of Cicero (2015).
Manuwald's edited volume instead puts much stress on the political influence of Cicero in earlier centuries. That his influence was continuously great becomes clear in the...