Baraz examines the rhetorical battle that Cicero stages in his philosophical prefaces - a battle between the forces that would oppose or support his project. He presents his philosophy as intimately connected to the new political circumstances and his exclusion from politics.

This book explores the uniquely Roman articulation of pride as a negative emotion and traces its partial rehabilitation that begins in the texts of the Augustan poets at the time of great political change using a combination of a lexical approach and a script-based approach that considers the emotion as a process.