Before he had delivered his first speech in the Forum, Cicero was known to Rome’s literary elite as the young poet who first translated the Phaenomena of Aratus into Latin.
My talk explores Cicero’s Aratea as a foundational masterpiece of first-century poetry and traces its engagements with earlier Latin epic and moralizing traditions.

Brian Walters is an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign. In addition to a translation of Lucan’s Civil War (Hackett 2015), he has written a book on violent metaphors in Cicero and late-republican oratory, The Deaths of the Republic: Imagery of the Body Politic in Ciceronian Rome (Oxford 2020). He is currently working on a book on Cicero’s poetry.