Rather than privilege one field of inquiry or debate (philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, religion), Katharina Volk magisterially elucidates the extent to which Roman elites coupled intellectual curiosity and civic tradition amidst the insurmountable political crisis of the Republic’s final years. “The Roman Republic of Letters offers an impressively broad-ranging and novel take on the many intellectual currents of the late Roman Republic. Her engaging narrative considers not just specific areas of scholarly and philosophical endeavor, but also the interaction among the various players.”-Anthony Corbeill, University of Virginia As Katharina Volk notes, with few exceptions the chief intellectual and literary figures of the period are also those most deeply enmeshed in political events. “ The Roman Republic of Letters aims to make sense of the extraordinary flourishing of intellectual activity during the final decades of the Roman Republic by situating this activity within the period’s political uncertainty. Volk treats the intellectual and political activities of these “senator scholars” as two sides of the same coin, exploring how scholarship and statesmanship mutually informed one another-and how the acquisition, organization, and diffusion of knowledge was bound up with the question of what it meant to be a Roman in a time of crisis.īy revealing how first-century Rome’s remarkable “republic of letters” was connected to the fight over the actual res publica, Volk’s riveting account captures the complexity of this pivotal period. These men were also crucially involved in the tumultuous events that brought about the collapse of the Republic, and they ended up on opposite sides in the civil war between Caesar and Pompey in the early 40s. Members of the senatorial class, including Cicero, Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Cato, Varro, and Nigidius Figulus, contributed greatly to the development of Roman scholarship and engaged in a lively and often polemical exchange with one another. It was a period of intense cultural flourishing and extreme political unrest-and the agents of each were very often the same people. It is a modification of the classical Latin alphabet and consists of 31 letters, five of which have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language: Letter Name A, a a, , din a B, b be / b C, c ce / c D, d de / d E, e e F, f ef / fe / f G, g ge / ghe / g H, h ha / ha / h Letter Name I, i i, din i J, j je / j K, k ca. 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. The Romanian alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Romanian language.
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