The Roman Republic of Letters: Scholarship, Philosophy, and Politics in the Age of Cicero and Caesar

An intellectual history of the late Roman Republic—and the senators who fought both scholarly debates and a civil war

In The Roman Republic of Letters, Katharina Volk explores a fascinating chapter of intellectual history, focusing on the literary senators of the mid-first century BCE who came to blows over the future of Rome even as they debated philosophy, history, political theory, linguistics, science, and religion.

It was a period of intense cultural flourishing and extreme political unr...