There are decades where nothing happens,” it’s been said, “and weeks where decades happen.” True enough, but there are also decades where pretty much everything happens.

In the failing Roman Republic, the decade of 54–43 B.C. was one of them. Those years saw the rise and fall of Julius Caesar, the former consul whose first name lives on as July and whose last name came to mean “emperor,” as well as civil unrest on an unprecedented scale. Those years also saw key concepts in philosophy, language, religion, political theory, history, science, and pseudoscience codified for the first time or freshly examined. The extraordinary thing, as Katharina Volk, a Latinist at Columbia University, emphasizes, is that the same six or seven men were responsible for all of it.

Well, not all the political unrest, of course. But it is impossible to disentangle from the story of that decade a few main political leaders—names like Caesar, Cicero, and Brutus—who were also highly literate men and, more, were writing for one another. Calling these and four others “senator scholars,” Volk begins her fascinating monograph by demonstrating how close-knit, prolonged, and reciprocal their contacts were, even though some wound up on opposite sides of the civil war that Caesar unleashed halfway through the decade. Borrowing an apt metaphor from the eighteenth century, Volk dubs this tiny subset of senators—there were six hundred in total at the time—the “Roman Republic of Letters.”

Can you imagine a sitting senator publishing a