Cicero’s Letters

Oxford Latin Anthology – Marital Conflict

In this course, Professor Christopher Whitton (University of Cambridge) explores the marriage and divorce of Quintus Cicero and Pomponia. It will be particularly useful for those reading the ‘Marital conflict’ set text for OCR Latin GCSE (J282). In the first lecture, we provide a broad introduction to (Marcus Tullius) Cicero’s Letters, our main source for the relationship between (Quintus) Cicero and Pomponia. After that, in the second lecture, we look more closely at the difficult relationship between Quintus and Pomponia, which ends in their divorce. And in the third lecture, we think more broadly about the lives of women in ancient Rome, including their role in marriage, and the extent to which they are fairly represented in ancient literature.

Cicero’s Letters

In this lecture we provide a broad introduction to Marcus Tullius Cicero and his Letters, focusing in particular on: (i) the figure of Marcus Tullius Cicero; (ii) the figure of Titus Pomponius Atticus (known as Atticus); (iii) the extent to which Cicero’s letters to Atticus represent a complete history of Rome for this period; (iv) letter-writing in the Roman world more generally, including the idea that “a letter is like half a conversation” (Demetrius, On Style 223); and (v) the extent to which Cicero’s Letters should be considered as literary as opposed to historical documents.