M. Tullio Cicerone Le Catilinarie. Introduzione, testo, traduzione e commento

The four Catilinarians, delivered by Cicero against Catiline in 63 BCE, provide us with a fascinating overview of Cicero’s self-portrait as the ideal politician and a model of artistic prose. Grouped along with other discourses in a small corpus of consular orations, assembled three years after their deliv-ery, the Catilinarians demand special attention as they testify to Cicero’s ambition to immortalize his own consular persona and propagate his political project, based on the preservation of the values of the aristocratic republic, shared by the members of the upper classes. This new, extensive Italian commentary sheds fresh light on the political and historical background of the conspiracy, offers a vivid translation of the text, and details the stylistic-rhetorical features of Cicero’s prose, paying spe-cial attention to the orator’s deployment of the invective devices to demean the moral credibility of his adversary. This new scholarly work on Cicero will be of the greatest utility to Ciceronian scholars as well as no-specialists, who will appreciate the grandeur of Cicero’s style and will find out more about the extraordinary fortune of the Catilinarias in the ancient educational system.