Cicero and Roman Religion

Abstract

This e-book gathers eight papers devoted to specific aspects of Cicero's engagement with Roman religion, and seeks to make a wider contribution to the understanding of Cicero's work as historical evidence. By engaging with religion as a fundamental factor of social cohesion and political stability, both in his theoretical works and his speeches, Cicero shaped a wide-ranging and ambitious discourse around themes and images that were firmly located in first-century BCE Rome. His contribution also proved very influential in the centuries to come. The volume focuses on the relationship between law, religion, and religious authority in Cicero; the interplay between divine images, ritual contexts, and the conceptualization of the divine; Cicero's construction of a Greek deity for a Roman audience; the role of religious elements in the shaping of a Roman political identity; the tension between 'natural law' and Roman pietas; the problem of divine and human foresight; the relationship between theoretical views of the gods and late Republican public cult; and the reception, use, and readaptation of Ciceronian theology in the English Enlightenment.