This article reviews two monographs recently published on the subject of Cicero’s reception in the imperial period: Keeline’s 2018 The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire and La Bua’s 2019 Cicero and Roman Education. As Cicero’s Nachleben is assuming a position of increasing salience in classical studies, this review contextualizes these two volumes within over a century of scholarship on the subject. Keeline’s book demonstrates the critical importance of the schoolroom in shaping almost every aspect of Cicero’s posthumous reception, while La Bua’s methodically elucidates how Cicero’s speeches were taught and read in the classrooms of the empire. The article concludes with an argument for a new approach to studying the reception of Cicero in this period.

pp. 46-7 alone I count at least seven mistakes: 'publically' instead of 'publicly,' 'as such' used incorrectly to mean 'therefore' (a common quirk of D.'s), negotiaores instead of negotiatores, 'duel' rather than 'dual', the omission of the word 'they' in one sentence and the misspelling of feriae two different ways in two different places as ferriae (n. 12) and ferae (n. 13). The mistakes in Latin orthography are indeed particularly egregious (Greek too; cf. the 21 diacritical and spelling errors in less than two lines quoted from App. BC 1.39 on p. 106). Thus negotiatores is variously spelled negotiores (p. 16) and the aforementioned negotiaores (p. 46), provinciae appears as provincae (p. 120), externarum as exterarum (p. 121 n. 103), annales as anales (p. 144 [twice]), singillatim as sigillatim (p. 181 [twice]) and iudiciariam (Liv. Per. 71) as the very scribal-looking corruption, iudiciariariam (p. 74 n. 32). D.'s word-processor's auto-correct function is mostly to blame for many Latin errors, having rendered regionibus as regions (p. 41 n. 63), promulgatis, promulgates (p. 56), multitudo and futurae, multitude and future (p. 64), orationes, orations (pp. 86 n. 81 and 106 n. 40), defectiones, defections (pp. 105 n. 38 and 119 n. 88) and senes, sense (p. 157 n. 36). Sometimes D. uses a consonantal v in Latin words, sometimes a u. My purpose is not to embarrass D. or to belittle the very important contribution he has made to our knowledge of an important episode in the history of the Late Republic. My point, rather, is to warn young scholars against rushing their work into print before seeing to it that it is carefully edited. Lamentably, as the present case shows, it is a fact of modern life that some publishing houses are simply unwilling to put the time, the effort and, most crucially, the money into properly editing scholarly manuscripts, and so it must increasingly fall to the scholarly writer herself to do so. Ashgate has done a great disservice to D. by not subjecting his manuscript to the careful scrutiny and copy-editing it deserved as an important piece of scholarship, and should be ashamed of its slipshod editorial practices.

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