Lucius Saufeius and his lost prehistory of Rome : intellectual culture in the Late Republic.

Abstract

THE SCATTERED EVIDENCE FOR the life and activities of Lucius Saufeius allows us to catch glimpses of a colorful, opinionated, and well-connected Roman knight who chose to abstain from political office and instead devoted himself to the cultivation of literary interests and the study of Epicurean philosophy. Saufeius is precisely the sort of individual who is usually invisible to the modern historian, and for that reason he offers a valuable, concrete illustration of what the life of a well-off Roman outside the political limelight might have looked like. Moreover, the survival of a possible fragment of a lost Latin treatise by Saufeius can shed light on his small but unique contribution to the development of Latin literature and its relationship with Greek philosophy and historiography.