Pro Milone

Author / Creator

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, author

Available as

Physical

Summary

"In my perhaps biased opinion, the Pro Milone is Cicero's best speech. And now that I've finished writing a commentary on it, well, I feel just about ready to start writing one. But life is short, ...

"In my perhaps biased opinion, the Pro Milone is Cicero's best speech. And now that I've finished writing a commentary on it, well, I feel just about ready to start writing one. But life is short, and I've already spent more time thinking about this speech than Cicero himself ever did. So: manum de tabula! My goal in this book is to help students and scholars understand the Pro Milone both as a literary masterpiece and as a historical document. Much of the commentary is an attempt to build a bridge between what we know today and what Cicero's contemporary audience would have known. Now this is ultimately an unbridgeable gap - Cicero's contemporaries were native speakers of Latin who knew the people involved in the trial and had an intuitive grasp of the social and political background to the case, to say nothing of their shared cultural knowledge of Roman life and the Roman world more generally ca. 52 bc. Today we can only do our best to reconstruct that knowledge by diligent philology, careful historical work, and constant attention to Cicero's rhetorical artistry. Our reconstruction will necessarily remain fragmentary and incomplete. But I don't think we should despair: even if the gap between us and them is unbridgeable, we can still make a lot of progress, and the journey itself has much to offer"--

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