Letters

This chapter hypothesizes about the nature of Cicero’s planned but never published letter collection, and argues that Cicero was inspired both by Greek epistolary theory and by Greek letter collections of classical figures like Plato and Demosthenes. Many of these letters were elaborate self-defences whose authenticity was vouched for by epistolary theory, in which letters were taken as unmediated glimpses of the sender’s true character. For this reason, this chapter argues that Cicero likely planned to publish a collection of his letters about the civil war. Many of these letters portray Cicero as an ideologically consistent statesman who foresaw the outcome of the war but joined the losing side out of a sense of duty. A version of this account published in letter form would have had a unique air of authenticity, and been an important component in the literary legacy of a classic.

Plato

This chapter demonstrates how Cicero’s adaptation of Plato in his three dialogues De Oratore, De Re Publica, and De Legibus (as well as his translation of the Timaeus) reflects his desire to become a similar model of classical prose. An overview of Plato’s Hellenistic reception shows that he had become a weighty authority who could be used to support even discordant philosophical systems. Cicero learned this fact at first hand in the bitter quarrel between his two instructors (and members of Plato’s Academy) Philo of Larissa and Antiochus of Ascalon. But it was not just Academics who haggled over Plato: as classicism began to take hold in the Greek world, Plato became an important authority for Stoics and Peripatetics too. For Cicero, who desired to become a figure of similarly classical authority as the founder of Roman philosophy, Plato was the only logical choice of model.

Aratus

This chapter considers the importance of Cicero’s Aratea, a translation of Aratus’ Phaenomena, to his classical ambitions. It argues that while Cicero likely translated the poem as part of his training as an orator, his creative incorporation within the translation of Aratus’ Hellenistic reception is a sign that he also had lofty plans for it. The Phaenomena was an instant classic in the Greek world: praised for its Hellenistic aesthetic, used as the primary source text in the instruction of astronomy, and appropriated by Stoics, who considered it a poetic reworking of their cosmology. Cicero’s savvy use of Aratus’ diverse commentary tradition allowed him to not just display his facility at turning Greek into Latin, but also produce an even better version of the Phaenomena that could itself become a canonical teaching tool for astronomy at Rome.

Conclusion

After a brief summary of the book’s argument, the conclusion turns to a consideration of how successful Cicero was in shaping his own reception as a classic. The ancient reception of Cicero’s poetry, philosophy, rhetoric, and oratory are all briefly outlined, and it is shown that the works in which Cicero evoked Greek models were among his most successful. This is because Roman literary criticism and scholarship had a powerful tendency to mimic the methods of Greek literary criticism and scholarship, and authors who had themselves mimicked Greek models were easy targets for this approach. A comparison is drawn between the ancient reception of Cicero and the ancient reception of Vergil, and the conclusion closes with the suggestion that the bids for classical immortality made by the Augustan poets (Vergil, Horace, Ovid) were modelled in part on Cicero’s successful construction of himself as a classic.

Demosthenes

This chapter discusses Cicero’s most successful co-option of a Greek figure, Demosthenes. Cicero primarily associated Demosthenes with his Philippics, in which he painted himself as an opponent to the tyranny of Philip II of Macedon and the saviour of democratic free speech—even though Demosthenes ultimately failed at both goals. Yet it was this very failure that made Demosthenes an appealing figure for Cicero after his defeat in the Roman civil war. This chapter demonstrates that Cicero implicitly and explicitly compared his own oratorical career to that of Demosthenes in his post-civil war rhetorical works (Brutus, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, and Orator), as well as in his speeches against Antony (Philippics) because he believed that drawing a parallel between Demosthenes’ noble failure and his own offered an attractive light in which he could cast his own mistakes and still survive as an object of classical veneration.

Aristotle

This chapter examines Cicero’s adaptation of Aristotle in his rhetorical works. Cicero considered Aristotle a somewhat remote figure, and associated him with times of political withdrawal and intense study. Yet he also held Aristotle in high esteem as a classic, especially for his contributions to rhetoric: Cicero was taught by his instructor Philo of Larissa that Aristotle invented the debate on both sides of a general rhetorical or philosophical question that for Cicero represented the tangible union of philosophy and rhetoric necessary for the ideal orator. When Cicero faced the prospect of further political inactivity after Caesar’s assassination, he decided to fully embrace Aristotle’s didacticism by composing his Topica, a how-to manual for this sort of debate that would make his ideal orator (who, of course, resembled Cicero himself) into a classic model in Roman rhetorical instruction.

Introduction

The introduction contextualizes Cicero’s decision to strive for a permanent position in the Roman canon as a classic. First, it demonstrates that Cicero used his literary works innovatively in order to extend his political self-fashioning across both space and time. It then discusses the flourishing of classicism in Greek intellectual culture of the second and first centuries BCE, the routes by which this culture came to Rome, and the ambivalent Roman response to Greece in this period. The chapter concludes by arguing that the Hellenized educational system at Rome had a powerful impact upon Roman canon formation, and meant that Roman authors could quickly become classics. For a new man like Cicero who had staked his career on his abilities with Latin prose—and who had learned to use writing and publication to further his career—this was an attractive prospect.

Cicero

This chapter investigates Cicero’s desire to enshrine himself as a classic from a different perspective than the rest of the book. It analyses Cicero’s appropriation not of a classical Greek figure but of himself, by examining his self-quotation of his earlier poetry (primarily the Aratea) within his late philosophical dialogues De Natura Deorum and De Divinatione. While Cicero likely found the Greek source for his poem, Aratus, quoted within the Greek philosophical works he used as sources for these dialogues, quoting his own poetry obviously carried a different charge. The chapter concludes that by staging the reading of his earlier works within these dialogues, Cicero was modelling the proper way to read his corpus: namely, as a set of works every bit as authoritative as the Greek classics he had adapted throughout his literary career.