Professor Tom Keeline’s 2018 book, The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend (Cambridge University Press), has just been selected to win the 2019 First Book Award from the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. This award is administered by a committee of scholars that looks for books exhibiting “excellent quality, wide significance within their genres, and awareness of international trends in their fields,” with the potential to “shift the conversation substantially in their fields.”
Summing up their impressions of Professor Keeline's work, the committee members wrote that it is “well-written and meticulously researched book [which] analyzes the role played by the rhetorical schoolroom in shaping the way Cicero was imitated and remembered in the early principate.” One committee member described it as a “wittily written study of Cicero’s reception in the two centuries after his death,” and a “compelling and original” work which “enters a very congested area and truly says something new.” In the committee’s view, The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire is “a detailed study of the construction of a cultural legend” which has much to offer to students of Cicero as well as those interested in the role of rhetorical education during the early Empire.
