Modern School Classics Series

The De Amicitia is one of Cicero's most carefully crafted philosophical treatises. It offers an excellent introduction both to the eleoquence of his expository prose style and to the ethical values of Roman society during the first century BC. Moreover, many of the issues raised by its content are not entirely divorced from the realities that present-day students may encounter in regard to friendship.This edition contains a full vocabulary, a biographical index, and notes which give assistance ewith translation, as well as informative and detailed coverage of language and content.

The Philippics

by Marcus Tullius Cicero

Published 1 January 1926

Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106-43 BCE), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era which saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, 58 survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.

Select Letters

by Marcus Tullius Cicero

Published December 1925

De Imperio

by Marcus Tullius Cicero

Published April 1966

This useful edition of Cicero's speech De imperio Cn. Pompe was first published in Macmillan's Modern School Classics series in 1966 and has been frequently reprinted. It contains a substantial introduction with sections on Cicero's and Pompey's lives, on Roman oratory, and on the historical and political background to the speech. The Latin text is followed by extensive notes on both language and context, and the edition is completed by maps and a vocabulary.