Peter White, professor of classics at the University of Chicago, presented the classics department Winslow Lecture. White presented the lecture "Absence and Risk in the Correspondence of Cicero," on Thursday, Dec. 2.
White is the author of Promised Verse: Poets in the Society of Augustan Rome (1993), which was awarded the Goodwin Award of Merit by the American Philological Association. He has published numerous articles on Roman history and society and has also been editor of the journal Classical Philology.
In his lecture White noted that the collection of Cicero's letters to his friends contains letters that are very different from the kind of letters friends would exchange today. Most of Cicero's correspondence deals with the management of his relations with senatorial peers, which are particularly at risk whenever one of the two parties is away from Rome.
