LAUSR

CICERO’S BRUTUS (46 BCE) has largely been understood thus far in terms of its most salient feature, that is, as an evolutionary catalogue of orators culminating in Cicero’s and Brutus’ own accomplishments. The collection and the teleology underlying it were a significant achievement and a methodological advance over the works of previous Hellenistic and Roman scholars. Yet attention to the self-serving and somewhat predictable teleological design can shed only somuch light on thework’s accomplishment as literary history. Such a narrow interpretation of Cicero’s objectives helps to explain why modern scholars at a more general level tend to chastise the ancient authors for failing to anchor the development of literature in the details of historical context. As D. A. Russell put it some decades ago, “the historical study of literature in antiquity was very rudimentary by modern standards.” It also explains why the scholarly gaze in the case of the Brutus has tended to fall on a select number of adjacent issues, including prosopography, the history of early poetry, the textual economy of Cicero’s work and afterlife, its possible function as a commemoration and swan song of Republican oratory, the technical oratorical polemic with the so-called Atticists, the debate over Analogy and Anomaly, or the oblique relationship to Caesar’s political monopoly under the shadow of the Republican losses in Africa. This article considers the larger design of the Brutus as a whole and offers a new account of the dialogue. It argues that the single unifying thread across the