A Textual History Of Cicero S Academici Libri

This book performs for the "Academici Libri" what P.L. Schmidt achieved for the "De legibus" - it studies the entire tradition of the work, including its original publication, its influence in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Renaissance, manuscripts and printed editions.

This book addresses the problems surrounding Cicero's Academici Libri, including why the work exists in two different editions, why and when the work became fragmentary, and how it managed to survive. It achieves this by tracing the history and influence of the work from Antiquity to the present day. The main part of the book studies the manuscript tradition of the work. All extant manuscripts are fully described and their textual relationships are established. Historical information is assessed in order to show the part which manuscripts played in intellectual life, conclusions are reached on the archetype of the work and a full stemma of the tradition is built. The book contains a wealth of bibliographical information and will serve as a base for further study in the transmission of Cicero's works.

This book uses a previously overlooked Neo-Latin treatise, Cicero Illustratus, to provide insight into the status and function of the Ciceronian tradition at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and consequently to more broadly illuminate the fate of that tradition in the early Enlightenment. Cicero Illustratus itself is the first subject for inquiry, mined for what its deliberately erudite and colorfully polemical passages of scholarly stratagems reveal about Ciceronian scholarship and the motives for exploring it within the context of early Enlightenment thought. It also includes an analysis of the role played by the Ciceronian tradition in the broader political and radical movements that existed in the Enlightenment, with particular attention paid to Cicero’s unexpectedly prominent position in major political and philosophical Republican and Erastian works. The subject of this book together with the conclusions reached will provide scholars and students with crucial new material relating to the classical tradition, the history of scholarship, and the intellectual history of the early Enlightenment.

Cicero's so-called Academica is a significant text for European cultural and intellectual history: as a substantial and self-contained body of evidence for one of the two varieties of scepticism in antiquity, as evidence for Stoic thought presented on its own terms and in interaction with objections, as a key text in a broader tradition which is devoted to the possibility of knowledge arising from perceptual experience, and as evidence for the fate of Plato's Academy in its final phase as a functioning school. This volume is the first detailed commentary on this set of texts since Reid's, published in 1885. It takes full account of the scholarly debate to date and seeks to elucidate the dialogues and fragmentary remains from a philosophical, historical, literary, and linguistic point of view.

Classica et Mediaevalia is an international, peer re¬viewed journal covering the field of the Greek and Latin languages and literature from classical antiq¬uity until the late Middle Ages as well as the Gre¬co-Roman history and traditions as manifested in the general history, history of law, history of philos-ophy and ecclesiastic history. Articles are published mainly in English, but also in French and German. The present issue includes chapters on divination as a convention of war in Classical Greece; pornographic allusions in Catullus; Sophistic oratory and styles in Roman Asia Minor; suspense and surprise in Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon; narrative time and mythological tale-types focusing on Beowulf andOdysseus; and Petrarch’s reading of Cicero’s letters, among others..

Cicero's so-called Academica is a significant text for European cultural and intellectual history: as a substantial and self-contained body of evidence for one of the two varieties of scepticism in antiquity, as evidence for Stoic thought presented on its own terms and in interaction with objections, as a key text in a broader tradition which is devoted to the possibility of knowledge arising from perceptual experience, and as evidence for the fate of Plato's Academy in its final phase as a functioning school. This volume is the first detailed commentary on this set of texts since Reid's, published in 1885. It takes full account of the scholarly debate to date and seeks to elucidate the dialogues and fragmentary remains from a philosophical, historical, literary, and linguistic point of view.

Charles Brittain's elegant new translation of Cicero's Academica makes available for the first time a readable and accurate translation into modern English of this complex yet crucial source of our knowledge of the epistemological debates between the skeptical Academics and the Stoics. Brittain's masterly Introduction, generous notes, English–Latin–Greek Glossary, and Index further commend this edition to the attention of students of Hellenistic philosophy at all levels.