PALAMEDES 15 (2023/2024) 153 Piotr Berdowski REASSESSING CICERO’S PHILOSOPHY: NEW PUBLICATIONS AND CURRENT APPROACHES Keywords: Cicero's philosophy; Roman philosophy. Over the past three decades, the study of Cicero’s philosophical thought has undergone significant development. This has resulted in a revision of the pre- viously widespread and unjust assessment that reduced the merits of the Arpi- nate chiefly to the transmission of the doctrines of Hellenistic Greek philosophical schools into the Roman context. Scholars were also prepared to recognise, to some extent, Cicero’s originality in the fields of ethics and political philosophy. Three books published over two years (2022–2023) provide an example of a new, markedly deeper reading of Cicero’s philosophy. The studies they contain reveal that he was not only a prolific thinker, but also an innovative one. His syn- thesis of Greek philosophy within the Roman context was a thoroughly original project. Moreover, we come to see that Cicero had something valuable to contrib- ute to speculative thought, epistemology, theology, cosmology, and beyond. Many of the texts collected in the volumes under discussion further demonstrate that the synthesis of philosophy and rhetoric was not only a distinctly Roman endeav- our, but more precisely a Ciceronian one. * * * palamedes.indb 153 palamedes.indb 153 29.06.2025 17:00:28 29.06.2025 17:00:28