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In 146 BC the armies of Rome destroyed Carthage and emerged as the decisive victors of the Third Punic War. The Carthaginian population was sold and its territory became the Roman province of Africa. In the same year and on the other side of the Mediterranean Roman troops sacked Corinth, the final blow in the defeat of the Achaean conspiracy: thereafter Greece was effectively administered by Rome. Rome was now supreme in Italy, the Balkans, Greece, Macedonia, Sicily, and North Africa, and its power and influence were advancing in all directions. However, not all was well. The unchecked seizure of huge tracts of land in Italy and its farming by vast numbers of newly imported slaves allowed an elite of usually absentee landlords to amass enormous and conspicuous fortunes. Insecurity and resentment fed the gulf between rich and poor in Rome and erupted in a series of violent upheavals in the politics and institutions of the Republic. These were exacerbated by slave revolts and invasions from the east. The instigation of Rome's first professional army to resolve the crises soon made its generals - Sulla, then Pompey, then Caesar - all too powerful. Meanwhile Greek ideas and culture had invaded Rome, contributing to the subversion of the Roman ideal of the free citizen, farmer of his own land, duty-bound to fight in its defence. Catherine Steel tells history of this crucial and turbulent century, focussing on the issues of freedom, honour, power, greed and ambition, and the cherished but abused institutions of the Republic which were central to events then and which have preoccupied historians ever since.

Cicero was one of classical antiquity's most prolific, varied and self-revealing authors. His letters, speeches, treatises and poetry chart a political career marked by personal struggle and failure and the collapse of the republican system of government to which he was intellectually and emotionally committed. They were read, studied and imitated throughout antiquity and subsequently became seminal texts in political theory and in the reception and study of the Classics. This Companion discusses the whole range of Cicero's writings, with particular emphasis on their links with the literary culture of the late Republic, their significance to Cicero's public career and their reception in later periods.

The ostensible function of the Brutus is to record the history of oratory at Rome and thereby confirm that it has ceased to exist under Caesar's dictatorship. But the gulf between Cicero's ideal of oratory and its actual use mean that he is unable to implement his inclusive selection criteria, as the absences of Marius, Sulla, Catiline and Clodius from the catalogue indicate; and his discussions of speakers have to concentrate on technique and not content. And whilst the narrative logic of the work tends towards Cicero himself as the culmination of Roman eloquence, his ultimate failure to inscribe himself into the canon shows that he is not yet willing to withdraw from political activity and cease to be an orator.

The four Harvard volumes of Cicero's \"Letters to Friends\" complete Shackleton Bailey's new Loeb edition of Cicero's letters, and offer what is now the most convenient and accessible compendium. The juxtaposition of the letter fragments with other letters to friends, in so accessible a form, is very welcome: it serves as a reminder of how extensive Cicero's correspondence was. All these volumes fulfil the aims of the Loeb series with flair and panache, and the new material in the volume of letters to Quintus and Brutus is a delight. (Quotes from original text)

Reviews 'Vom Handeln der Romer: Kommunikation und Interaktion der politischen Fuhrungsschicht vor Ausbruch des Burgerkriegs im Briefwechsel mit Cicero', by W. C. Schneider. The object of Schneider's study is how the political elite at Rome communicated and dealt with one another in the period before the outbreak of the Pompeius-Caesar civil war, and his approach is avowedly anthropological in inspiration, cast in terms of a search for the grammar ordering social relations. Cicero's letters are essential material for the enquiry, because they provide the only contemporary evidence. (Quotes from original text)

The ostensible function of the Brutus is to record the history of oratory at Rome and thereby confirm that it has ceased to exist under Caesar's dictatorship. But the gulf between Cicero's ideal of oratory and its actual use mean that he is unable to implement his inclusive selection criteria, as the absences of Marius, Sulla, Catiline and Clodius from the catalogue indicate; and his discussions of speakers have to concentrate on technique and not content. And whilst the narrative logic of the work tends towards Cicero himself as the culmination of Roman eloquence, his ultimate failure to inscribe himself into the canon shows that he is not yet willing to withdraw from political activity and cease to be an orator.

Pomas idea of adoption as a way of maintaining aristocratic power (Epigraphica 34 [1972], 169305), G. sees it neither as a reponse to the introduction of demes, nor, as argued by E. E. Rice (Adoption in Rhodian Society, S. Dietz and I. C. Papachristodoulou [edd.], Archaeology in the Dodecanese [Copenhagen, 1988], pp. 13844), a defence against a supposed rapid growth in the numbers of newly enfranchized Rhodioi. M. Jelme) and support from North in P&P 126, and has amplied his views in The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (Ann Arbor, 1998); and there Oxford University Press, 2001 191 have been recent monographs on a number of related issues: popular leadership (Vanderbroeck), the contio (Pina Polo), public order (Nippel), and popular participation (Laser). In dealing with the public space of Republican Rome D. systematically and extensively covers the Forum, the Capitol, and the Campus Martius: a useful and very detailed collection of material, although it is not easy (despite a detailed contents list), in the absence of any kind of index, to track down D.s discussion of particular events, and the quality of the plans and diagrams (unhelpfully located at the end) is atrocious. Some parts of detailed analysis were unconvincing, particularly in relation to Clodius: it seems highly problematic to treat his activities as exemplary of the limits on as well as the possibilities for political agitation in the last years of the Republic (p. 335): the point about Clodius, as Tatum shows (The Patrician Tribune: Publius Clodius Pulcher [Chapel Hill, 1999]; unfortunately too recent for D. to take into account), is that he transformed violence as a political tool. [...]in her focus on actual public disturbances the nuances of Clodius politics can get lost; so, the discussion of the exiling of Cicero (pp. 3416) does not fully bring out the way in which popular disturbances complemented Clodius adroit manoeuvrings to isolate Cicero from other optimates.