ABSTRACT
Though Cicero’s friends repeatedly expressed the hope that he would embark on a major work of history,1 any such project remained unwritten by the time of his murder in December 43 BC. Cornelius Nepos, the dedicatee of Catullus’ poetry book and himself a historian, had no doubt that a unique opportunity had thereby been missed:2
This is the one branch of Latin literature which not only fails to match Greece but was left crude and inchoate by the death of Cicero. He was the one man who could and should have fashioned historical discourse in a worthy rhetorical manner [historian digna uoce pronuntiare]… I am uncertain whether the country or historiography lost more by his death.
