Michael Fontaine

"At the age of 33, Tullia Ciceronis died from complications due to childbirth. Her father, the consul Marcus Tullius Cicero, was utterly distraught, as his contemporary letters and passages in the Tusculan Disputations make clear. And in an effort to grieve, Cicero did something new in world history: for the first time, he wrote a consolation speech-not for others, as had always been done, but for himself. This was his coping strategy, and it prefigures...

"Everyone knows that Marcus Tullius Cicero was one of the great statesmen, lawyers, and effective orators in the history of Rome. But did you also know he was regarded as one of the funniest people in Roman society as well? Five hundred years after his death, in the twilight of antiquity, the writer Macrobius ranks him alongside the comic playwright Plautus as the one of the two greatest wits ever. In this book, classicist Michael Fontaine, proposes...

A spirited new translation of a forgotten classic, shot through with timeless wisdom Is there an art to drinking alcohol? Can drinking ever be a virtue? The Renaissance humanist and neoclassical poet Vincent Obsopoeus (ca. 1498-1539) thought so. In the winelands of sixteenth-century Germany, he witnessed the birth of a poisonous new culture of bingeing, hazing, peer pressure, and competitive drinking. Alarmed, and inspired by the Roman poet Ovid's...