Toward the end of the last century Cicero's work came under attack from several angles. His political stance was sharply criticized for inconsistency by Theodor Mommsen and others, his philosophical works for lack of originality. Since then scholars have come to a better understanding of the political conditions that informed the views of Mommsen and his contemporaries about Caesar and Cicero, and as a result Cicero's writings have been restored to a more appropriate position in the literature and history of the Roman Republic.

Cicero in Letters: Epistolary Relations of the Late Republic

Cicero in Letters is a guide to the first extensive correspondence that survives from the Greco-Roman world. The more than eight hundred letters of Cicero that are its core pred literary models for subsequent letter writers from Pliny to Petrarch to Samuel Johnson and beyond. The collection also includes some one hundred letters by Cicero's contemporaries. The letters they exchanged pre unique insight into the experience of the Roman political class at the turning point between Republican and imperial rule.