Lexington Books
Pages: 331
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-4985-2711-8 • Hardback • April 2016 • $110.00 • (£85.00)
978-1-4985-2713-2 • Paperback • May 2018 • $49.99 • (£38.00)
978-1-4985-2712-5 • eBook • April 2016 • $47.50 • (£37.00)
William H. F. Altman, an independent scholar now living in Brazil, is a retired public high school teacher with more than thirty years experience teaching history, Latin, and the humanities.
Preface
Introduction: Cicero as Platonis aemulus
Part 1: The Foundations of Cicero’s Platonic Revival
Chapter 1. Cicero’s Platonic personae and the Problem of De legibus
Chapter 2. Augustine’s Hortensius and the Invention of “Cicero”
Chapter 3. Self-Contradictory Skepticism in the Academica
Chapter 4. The Limits of Stoicism and Tullia’s Shrine in De finibus
Part 2: The Literary Fruits of Cicero’s Platonism
Chapter 5. Womanly Humanism in the Tusculanae Disputationes
Chapter 6. Phaedo and Timaeus in De natura deorum
Chapter 7. Interpreting Plato’s Dreams in De divinatione
Chapter 8. Epicurus, Chrysippus, and Homer in De fato
Chapter 9. The Ciceronian Renaissance in De senectute and De amicitia
Part 3: Cicero’s Platonism in Action
Chapter 10. Returning in Topica, De officiis, and the Philippics
Chapter 11. Brutus as Funeral Oration.
Chapter 12. Ending with Orator.
Bibliography
This is a book fizzing with energy, and full of learning of many sorts, from which any discriminating reader stands to gain.
— Classical Review
Altman’s essays, as he explores Cicero’s hidden and open Platonism, are as engaging and stimulating as one might imagine. Few if any contemporaries have read as widely and deeply in Cicero’s writings. With objectivity but no pretended scholarly detachment, he brings his immense erudition to his personal engagement of Cicero. He finds himself in awe at Cicero’s integrity and achievement as a thinker, writer and political leader. We and our modern republics, he rightly concludes, are much in need of a properly understood Cicero.
— Walter Nicgorski, University of Notre Dame