Nostalgia, rimpianto e memoria nell’ultimo Cicerone: una lettura del Brutus

This paper aims at pointing out the lexical and metaphorical representations of desiderium in Cicero’s Brutus. The Modern criticism of nostalgia in ancient Rome concern love and exile elegy, while this paper deals with the emotional process in Cicero’s work: it starts with a phase of perception, represented by the absence ensuing from Hortensius’ death, resulting in two different outcomes. The first one is the affect-laden response, the dolor, seen as a reaction of the whole of community, since Hortensius represents here the “voice of oratory”, lost as a consequence of Caesar’s autocracy; the other one is the intellectual response, the use of private and public memory, a reference to the past designed to embody the traditional categories of speech and thought in a form that is appropriate to the present and useful for the future