Includes bibliographical references and index.

Cicero was a prolific writer, his writing covering an astonishingly wide spectrum: oratory, letters, epic and didactic poetry, pamphlets, philosophical and rhetorical treatises. He was also a major political figure at Rome during the Late Republic. The relationship between these two facets of his career is the subject of this book, which argues that our understanding both of Cicero's oeuvre and of the practice