This monograph explores Marcus Tullius Cicero's awareness and interpretation of contemporary political events as reflected in his private correspondence during the last years of both the Roman republic and his own life. Cicero's correspondence gives a detailed view of current political events in Rome and constitutes, together with Caesar's writings, our major contemporary evidence for the circumstances of the civil war of 49 BC.

Cicero's Haruspex takes as leitmotiv Cicero's own judgment of the state as 'sacrificial victim' to the ambitions of individual politicians, using as metaphor his examination of a 'deceased' body politic in the manner of a haruspex inspecting the entrails of a sacrificial animal. It raises the question as to whether Cicero understood the message of political decline signaled by the 'entrails' of the 'carcass' of the res publica, and whether this ability enabled him to anticipate future political development in Rome.

The theoretical input of Cicero's predecessors, their perceptions of constitutional development (in particular of Roman politics) as well as Cicero's perception of their political theories are scrutinized to determine the extent of Cicero's awareness of a larger pattern of political events. Furthermore, this study investigates how consistent Cicero was in his analyses of such patterns, so as to determine to what extent he may be taken seriously as a political observer.

Dr. Maridien Schneider has a BA with Honours in modern history from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Her MA thesis dealt with Cicero's rhetorical use of historical exempla and the place of the conventions of historiography as literary genre within rhetoric. In this book, a reworking of her Stellenbosch doctoral dissertation, the author once again turns a conventional approach on its head by taking issue with the frequently-held view that Cicero was in his final years a naive political has-been who did not really understand what was happening around him.