Party Politics in the Age of Caesar

Very informative, though rather outdated in approach and execrably written. And those two things are connected: Taylor's evidence is almost all textual, and I don't mean records and archival material, I mean Sallust and Cicero. And that has had an... interesting impact on her prose. Like a good Roman, Taylor is very keen to make sure a sentence's main verb comes as close to the end of the sentence as possible, which leads to huge amounts of this:

"Cicero, confident in the support of senate and knights, had the execution carried out."
"Although the good men, following Catulus, hailed Cicero as the father of his country, the real hero of the famous Nones of December was not Cicero but Cato."

Perhaps this worked when these pieces were show more delivered as lectures? Perhaps classicists in the forties and fifties just wrote like this? In any case, while reading this I happened to read a review of new classics books by the wonderful Peter Thonnemann. He cautioned us not to idealize the scholarship of the past, before it got all trendy. For example, one "cutting edge" volume of this time period featured nine chapters on individual poets, and one on Roman and Greek historians. Back then, classics was just the classic books. Taylor's book is okay, but very much a period piece. show less

Edition: // Descr: viii, 255 p. 23.5 cm. // Series: Sather Classical Lectures : Volume 22 Call No. { 947 T21 copy #1 } Contains Notes and Index. // //

Edition: // Descr: viii, 255 p. 20.5 cm. // Series: Call No. { 947 T21 copy #2 } Contains Notes and Index. // //