Appius Claudius Caecus: The Sources, The Record, The Man (Forgotten Men of the Roman Republic) - Softcover

Valenti, Marco

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798996991457

Publisher: Duo Lepores Press, 2026

Synopsis

Every traveler who has walked the ancient basalt paving of the Appian Way has been in contact with a decision made in 312 BC. The road that Appius Claudius Caecus ordered built during his censorship became the military spine of Roman Italy and the artery of an empire. In the same year he built Rome's first aqueduct, enrolled the sons of freed slaves in the Senate, redistributed the votes of the urban poor across the tribal assembly system, and engineered the publication of the legal calendar. This had been a monopoly of the priestly elite.

Thirty years later, old and blind, he was carried into the Senate on a litter to deliver the speech that blocked Rome's peace with Pyrrhus of Epirus—a speech Varro called the first prose speech in Latin and that Cicero still had a copy of three centuries after it was delivered.

His road is among the most famous in history. But the man who built it has never been assembled in English as a single subject—his censorship discussed in institutional histories, his speech in works on oratory, his blindness in discussions of old age, the career as a whole never examined together until now.

The fourth volume in the Forgotten Men of the Roman Republic series draws on Michel Humm's landmark study Appius Claudius Caecus: La République accomplie (École française de Rome, 2005) and two centuries of scholarship to argue that the reforms of 312 BC were not the opportunism of a demagogue but a coherent program for a republic that was growing faster than its institutions. Includes full source analysis, Latin texts of the surviving speech fragments, four appendices, and ten original illustrations.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duo Lepores Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798996991457
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 135