Editing Cicero from antiquity to the 21st century

M. Tullius Cicero ( 106-43) is without any doubt the author of the late Roman Republic whose works are both the most prolific and the best known today. This is due to the exceptional encounter between the brilliant author and another great scholar, T. Pomponis Atticus (110-32), Cicero’s close friend who became his outstanding editor. Cicero’s second decisive encounter was with Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), the first of the humanists. Thanks to his study on Cicero’s works, Petrarch played an essential role in the history of philology and classical culture in modern Europe.
The aim of the seminar is to retrace both these stages of the editorial and cultural adventure of Cicero’s works, through the voices and writings of Cicero himself, Atticus, Petrarch and their contemporaries, and to show their reception, sometimes questionable, in the main contemporary editions (Teubner, Loeb classical library and les Belles Lettres).

Ginette Vagenheim is Professor of Latin Language and Literature and Humanistic Philology at the Université de Rouen Normandie, Life Member of Clare Hall in Cambridge and Former Fellow of Harvard University and Columbia University (NYC). After a Degree in Classical Philology at the Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, she obtained a Master in Medieval and Renaissance Philology supervised by Giuseppe Billanovich at the Università del Sacro Cuore di Milano; she then obtained a Phd in Ancient Art History and Archaeology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa supervised by Salvatore Settis. She has published more than one hundred and fifty contributions in several academic journals (rank A) in the fields of classical scholarship in the Renaissance, antiquarianism (especially on Pirro Ligorio) and the historiography in the 19th Century. Her last two book are Pirro Ligorio’s Worlds: Antiquarianism, Classical Erudition and the Visual Arts in the Late Renaissance, co-edited with F. Loffredo, Leiden, Brill, 2018 and Falsificazioni e collezioni epigrafiche with Lorenzo Calvelli, Roma Erma di Betschneider, 2025.

Informations

edwardj@unimelb.edu.au