Chapter 4 turns to the pedagogical workings of the Brutus: it instills in the reader a new sense of how to organize and assess the literary past. Syncrisis is central to conceptualizing the past and to portraying individuals and groups across cultures and generations. The dialogue also spends a considerable amount of time reflecting on historical accuracy, for example in the discussions of Coriolanus and Themistocles (41–44), the laudatio funebris (62), the beginning of Latin literature with Livius Andronicus (72–73), and Curio’s dialogue about Caesar’s consulship (218–19). Taken together these reflections on rhetorical presentation of the past help us to understand the freedom with which Cicero handles the data of his literary history. Several claims, exaggerations, and fabrications can be explained by Cicero’s desire to craft meaningful parallels in his history of Latin oratory and literature, including his insistence on Naevius’ death in 204 BCE (60). Such parallels reveal in turn the close interconnection of his intellectual and ideological commitments.

A simile in an ancient Greek or Roman epic poem uses the simile form “A is like B” to frame a brief tale about something outwardly unrelated to the poem’s main story. The simile structure asserts a kinship between two things that come from different conceptual domains. Similes tell highly concentrated immersive stories, which invite the reader to experience and not simply to observe the described situation. To do justice to epic similes, they should be studied both within the immediate narrative contexts in which they appear and within the many webs of meaning that they create. Some of these are found within a single poem, while others emerge across multiple poems over time. A detailed reading of Apollonius Argonautica 2.121–29, which compares a fight between the Argonauts and the Bebrycians to wolves stealthily attacking a flock of sheep, sets out the common features of shepherding similes, the ways that similes tell their stories, and the style and approach of the book’s argument. Shepherding similes embody several relationships that bring out a range of themes fundamental not simply to all the poems in this book, but to any exploration of the human experience.

Human beings become scarcer than before in the simile world of the Aeneid, contributing to a tale about the loneliness and sorrow of human beings who struggle to connect with each other or to affect the world around them. Both Aeneas and the characters in the simile world are marked by solitude and isolation. The human characters in the simile world of the Aeneid share few strong ties with other creatures, and they often fail to affect the world around them in ways that their fellows in Greek epic would take for granted. In the story world, similes highlight moments of furor, the overpowering rage that underlies both love and war and threatens not simply Aeneas’ mission to found Rome but also the existence of a rational world order. Similes draw out isolation and overwhelming passion as two poles of emotion in the poem with little in between. They use new storytelling techniques that appear rarely or not at all in the similes of earlier epics, and they often lack an exit expression joining a simile to the story. These features weaken the conventional distinctions between similes and other components of epic narrative.

Chapter 8 turns to the famous judgment of Julius Caesar’s commentarii (nudi, recti, venusti, 262). Not only textual aesthetics but also visual analogies and the plastic arts underlie Cicero’s judgments. An analysis of statuary analogies and of the fuller contexts for Cicero’s statements suggests a deft ploy on his part. He portrays himself as Phidias crafting a statue of Minerva (the Parthenon Athena) and Caesar as Praxiteles crafting a statue of Venus (the Aphrodite of Knidos). The fundamentally different symbolic resonances of the goddesses simultaneously challenge Caesar’s military accomplishments and underscore Cicero’s civic achievements. Cicero thereby promotes his vision of the need to restore the Roman republic once the civil war has concluded.

Chapter 6 shows how Cicero establishes a normative framework for the writing of literary history. Across the dialogue and through the various speakers he offers a sustained critique of literary historiography. Several fundamental tensions and conflicts emerge: absolute versus relative criteria in assessing literature and building canons; presentism and antiquarianism; formalism and historicism; and the recognition that all literary histories are subject to their crafters’ emphases and agendas.

Chapter 1 begins with the “Ciceropaideia” (301–29), the account of Cicero’s education and training. It begins with the end of the Brutus in order to provide a sense of what the dialogue has been building up to. Cicero’s concluding discussion of himself reveals and brings together several assumptions, problems, and techniques of presentation that are crucial to the earlier parts of the dialogue. In the Ciceropaideia he carefully shapes biographical and historical details into a tandem narrative, intertwining his ascent with the decline of Hortensius. The account suggestively documents Cicero’s development of a moderate “Rhodian” style and implicitly undermines his Atticist detractors.

Chapter 3 examines the Brutus as an intervention in contemporary politics. It begins by revisiting the preface but focuses on its discussion of the contemporary civic crisis and the immediate history of the civil war (1–25). In both the preface and the digression on Julius Caesar (254–57) Cicero presents an alternative civic vision as a response to the crisis. The chapter concludes by considering the portrayal of the younger generation of orators: Curio (filius), Caelius, Publius Crassus, and Marcellus. The last figure merits special attention because Cicero’s oratorical canon includes only two living figures: Marcellus and Caesar. Marcellus is accorded a prominent role as part of Cicero’s attempt to offer a coherent vision of the republic, one based on the restoration of the senatorial elite and the reinstatement of the traditional institutions of government.

Chapter 5 takes up the work’s beginnings: why did Cicero choose Marcus Cornelius Cethegus as the first Roman orator? Appius Claudius Caecus made much more sense, and Cicero’s reasons for excluding Caecus from his canon tellingly reveal his literary-historical principles. The literary history presented ultimately justifies his own role as a literary historian and confirms his prejudices about the past, present, and future of oratory. His manicuring of the past emerges prominently in the perplexing “double history” of Greek oratory (26–51), which is a methodological template for Roman oratorical history, and in Ennius’ special place as a literary historian (57–9).

The simile world of Homer’s Odyssey is teeming with human connections, and family relationships play a central role. This distinctive aspect of the simile world of the Odyssey helps to tell the poem’s tale of human relationships, the burden of sorrow when they are disrupted, and the heroic task of keeping relationships alive through danger, separation, and loss. The Odyssey is not just about Odysseus’ homecoming but also homecoming itself. How do we know when we are truly “home”? What if we reach our home, but we cannot return there? What are the costs of a long absence, both for the person who returns and for those who remain at home? In what way can homecoming be considered a form of heroism? What complex mixture of feelings accompanies a long-awaited return home? The intertwined gladness and sorrow that defines the Odyssey’s tale of homecoming arises from the characters and incidents of the simile world at least as much as from the story of Odysseus and from the process of integrating the two more than from either sort of narrative individually.

Similes in Apollonius’ Argonautica tell two contrasting tales. On the one hand, humans with skilled expertise can exert an exhilarating amount of control over the world around them. The power of knowledge reflects the contemporary culture of Hellenistic Alexandria where new forms of knowledge were sprouting up everywhere. But such skills are largely useless for women, and they fail in the face of human passions. While characters in the simile world of the Argonautica use strategy to overcome danger in a way that is largely out of reach in the Homeric simile world, similes also highlight the intractable power of erotic desire as powerful and deadly as the battlefield of the Iliad. The Argonautica represents the first post-Homeric chapter in the story of epic similes. Simile structures take on a range and variety that previously was found only in the content of the similes. These new forms bring forward simile features that are peripheral in Homeric to reshape the epic genre in ways that reflect the ideas of the Hellenistic period. At moments of powerful emotion in the Argonautica, similes weave “erudition” and “emotion” inextricably together.

Very few ancient Greek authors were read in any form in the Latin West during the Middle Ages. Though hugely popular in antiquity – and in Byzantium – Plutarch’s works are no exception to this. When the early Italian Renaissance humanists permanently changed the course of Greek studies in the West, Plutarch became one of the most widely read authors of the period. This chapter will discuss how Plutarch’s name first began to resurface in twelfth-century Latin writers, how he was among the earliest Greek writers to be translated into the modern vernaculars, and how, in a long series of Latin translations, the Parallel Lives became bestsellers in the fifteenth century. The chapter will also discuss how his works influenced Renaissance ideas about ethics and political thought.