- Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic by Elizabeth Rawson (1985; ISBN 9781139025959) Entry-Level Cultural – This is still the classic handbook for understanding what intellectual life was like in the last few decades of the Republic. Rawson covers, with encyclopedic expertise, all the major fields and their players, such as education, medicine, rhetoric, mathematics, philosophy, ethnography, law, literature, historiography, music and so forth. She intelligently illuminates the dynamic interplays between political situations and cultural life, the dialogue between Greek and Roman identities, systems of patronage and institutions. The book is not written for the popular audience per se, but it is written clearly and entertainingly enough to work as a great first step to the wonderful world of Roman intellectual culture.
- The Birth of Critical Thinking in Republican Rome by Claudia Moatti (2015 [translation of a 1997 French original] ; ISBN 9781139025959) Intermediate Cultural – Moatti takes here a highly original and largely, very persuasive, approach to writing cultural history. She sees the Late Republic as a culmination of an “epistemological revolution”, whereupon the Republican Romans began a critical reassessment of their past and present and started (to some extent) replace old traditions and religious authority with new appreciation for rationality and logic. This process, she sees, was mainly set off by the political crises in the Mediterranean, the Roman expansion, and the development of Latin writing. It led to a period of great creativity and dynamism, a “Golden Age” of Roman intellectuals, where people like Cicero and Varro analysed and examined all areas of knowledge, history, language, and Roman society. My one criticism is that although Moatti treats the birth of critical thinking as a Republican “evolution”, the chronological outlines remain somewhat blurred and she sometimes uses later (Imperial) authors to illustrate the supposed mindset of earlier Romans. Regardless, a fantastic book that is well worth a read.
Culture, Art, and Architecture (200 – 27 BC)
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