#and ESPECIALLY not as original or interesting as her perfect blorbo gaius julius caesar | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

catilinas · 9 months ago

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one of my favourite running jokes in masters of rome is when publius rutilius rufus comes up with the phrase 'an iliad of woes' and then various other characters steal it from him and he gets more and more pissed off about it. especially since as far as i am aware the earliest extant use of the phrase is in cicero's letters? which means. in colleen mccullough's beautiful world cicero is just one in a fifty year long line of people stealing it. you know publius rutilius rufus' ghost is seething

#on one hand: interesting to think of how many phrases in ancient lit are intertexts or proverbs that we will never know about bcs we only #have one surviving use of them!#on the other hand: yeah i can believe that colleen is doing this specifically because she doesn't really like cicero and wants to #characterise him as Not As Original or Interesting An Author As We Usually Think Of Him As #and ESPECIALLY not as original or interesting as her perfect blorbo gaius julius caesar #masters of rome #beeps

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