Profile:
Michael Alexander teaches courses on Roman history. His research has focused on the criminal trials of the Late Roman Republic. His first book, Trials in the Late Roman Republic, 149 BC to 50 BC (University of Toronto Press, 1990), lists the basic information (individuals, dates, and charges) about the criminal and civil trials in that period. His second book, The Case for the Prosecution in the Ciceronian Era (University of Michigan Press, 2002), reconstructs the prosecution arguments in eleven trials for which a defense speech of Cicero survives. In his publications he has tried to understand these trials as legal and historical phenomena apart from Cicero’s life and oratory, even though most of the evidence is Ciceronian. He is currently working on a reinterpretation of the Commentariolum Petitionis as a historical source for Roman election campaigns.