Making a New Man: Ciceronian Self-Fashioning in the Rhetorical Works

By John Dugan

In Making a New Man John Dugan investigates how Cicero (106-43 BCE) uses his major treatises on rhetorical theory (De oratore, Brutus, and Orator) in order to construct himself as a new entity within Roman cultural life: a leader who based his authority upon intellectual, oratorical, and literary accomplishments instead of the traditional avenues for prestige such as a distinguished familial pedigree or political or military feats. Eschewing conventional Roman notions of manliness, Cicero constructed a distinctly aesthetized identity that flirts with the questionable domains of the theatre and the feminine, and thus fashioned himself as a "new man."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0199267804
• ISBN13: 9780199267804
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 9.1"