Philosophical role-playing in Cicero's letters to Paetus, 46 BC

Pietas 2.1 (1-30), 2023

Recent discussion of Ciceronian constitutionalism has focused on Cicero’s efforts to revive the governing structure of the mixed regime as a solution to the crisis of the late Republic, neglecting the moral and philosophical aspect of his envisioned reform of Rome’s ruling class and his rhetorical strategies for advancing it. In De Re Publica, Cicero endorses the traditional republican regime, but in the preface of Book 5 he laments its disappearance due to the loss of the men who formerly defended it: since these men were themselves formed by a constitution now lost, how can such men, and the constitution, be restored? Limiting myself to the preface of the first book, I argue that Cicero strives to bring back the right kind of men in three ways: he disproves Epicurean quietism as self-defeating, shames decent men into embracing the risks of engaging in politics on behalf of the traditional regime by casting them as Epicureans, and encourages the ambitious to engage in politics from motives drawn from philosophy with the aim of moderating the potentially destructive passion for glory. In importing these novel motives from Greek philosophy, Cicero makes use of a brilliant rhetorical strategy of ethos, initially casting himself as contemptuous of philosophy; he also disguises their philosophical provenance by attributing them to Roman tradition. The cumulative effect of these arguments is the establishment of the secret rule of wisdom and a new role for republican rhetoric in the context of the philosophic dialogue

Cicero as Philosopher. New Perspectives on His Philosophy and Its Legacy, 2024

We sayt his with the caveat that as harp distinctionb etween Cicero's 'public' writings and 'private' letters is untenable. Cicero wasi ns everal respects engagingi np ublic or quasi-public acts when writinghis letters. Furthermore, the myriad letters he wrote vary with respectt ot heir privacya nd design. 2 On Cicero'ss elf-fashioning, see Bishop 2019 and Dugan2 005. 3 See Reinhardt 2022bfor adetailed summary of this scholarlydebate. See Allen 2022 for arecent accountofCicero'sradicalism that incorporates manyofthe features scholars have come to associatew ith mitigated skepticism.

The relation between philosophy and theatre has mostly been an ambiguous one, frequently informed with a certain playful irony. Plato's aversion to include the tragic poets in his Republic, which itself remains a philosophical work written in the dramatic form of dialogues, testifies to this traditional ambiguity. It is well known that in this tradition of philosophic dialogues, the name which perhaps immediately follows Plato is that of Marcus Tullius Cicero. This paper would examine certain Ciceronian dialogues in order to argue that a certain theatricality was also prominent in Cicero's thinking, which makes it distinct not only from other philosophical schools of his time but also from Socratic dialogues. The paper would try to argue that this theatricality was expressed not through irony but a process of masking philosophical presentations. At the same time, to such a theatrical gesture par excellence as that of masking was added the art of rhetoric to present such philosophical enunciations to an 'audience' in order to persuade them of the practical functions of philosophy. It is this public application of a private and leisurely practice of philosophy, which this paper would discuss through an examination of the style of Ciceronian dialogues and the nature of skeptic philosophy that Cicero's New Academy championed. he tradition of philosophical dialogues is not new to us. In its unique way of expressing concerns about meanings of life and death, about the order of things and the nature of beauty, about what constitutes truth, and about what is ethical and what is political, the technique of employing dialogues goes as far back as Socrates. In fact, to engage in dialogues was the Socratic method par excellence. In Socrates we have the apparent duality of silence and dialogue always at work. The anonymous T

Portraying Cicero in Literature, Culture, and Politics, 2022

This paper investigates textualizations of Cicero’s voice. On the one hand, we will show how the “vox Ciceroniana” is based on soundbites and catchphrases deriving from Cicero’s speeches, which do not allude to specific intertexts, but more generally create a Ciceronian aura. On the other hand, we ask whether and how far this textualized voice can be used as a representation of Cicero himself, not only of his voice, but of the whole personality. As we will argue, Cicero himself already initiated a process of detaching his voice from his physical presence and giving it its own agenda or even agency. This separation of person and voice was fruitful for later authors who restaged or even reinvented Cicero’s voice. They relied on the symbolic value he had attributed to his voice, but also changed the sound of his voice in their attempt to re-evaluate the historical period in which he had lived.

This article argues that Cicero’s use of Demosthenes in his Brutus and Orator should be read in light of Caesar’s dictatorship. An examination of Demosthenes’ Hellenistic reception reveals that his significance in the Greek world centered on his rhetorical prowess and his (failed) opposition, as the last orator of democratic Athens, to the tyranny of Philip. Cicero, who now saw himself as the last orator of republican Rome, wanted to be remembered in the same way. For this reason he drew deliberate parallels between his career and Demosthenes’ in these two works, laying the groundwork for the associations he drew on in the Philippics and establishing a comparison that persists to this day.

2014

Journal of Roman Studies, 2019

Cicero is one of the most studied persons of antiquity. This status is based not only on the fact that he left a rich collection of writings, but that his speeches and letters allow for a detailed (elite and certainly biased) look at everyday life in late republican Rome. His writings, letters and speeches are and have constantly been mined for information about the ancient world. Likewise, his reception history is as varied as his own writings and began early on, shortly after his death, creating an image which changed and yet remained constant throughout the ages. The present volume contains the proceedings of a conference which took place at the Warburg Institute in May 2015, dedicated to the 'Afterlife' of Cicero. Its focus is on a segment of this afterlife, beginning in the thirteenth century, that is at the onset of the Renaissance. The focus of the book is two-fold: the rst six papers trace the impact of Cicero on Italian duecento to cinquecento politics, while the second group of papers goes beyond the Italian context to the Latin American, revolutionary French and Anglophone context. What is missing is a consideration of (the gure of) Cicero in the German-speaking world, which is only briey referenced in the contribution by Matthew Fox. However, this gap might well be due to the fact that other case studies have already focused on this aspect, notably various essays in William H. F. Altman (ed.), Brill's Companion to the Reception of Cicero (2015). Manuwald's edited volume instead puts much stress on the political inuence of Cicero in earlier centuries. That his inuence was continuously great becomes clear in the case studies presented for the Italian context. Contrary to (possible) expectations, Petrarch gures only in the contribution of Laura Refe (ch. 2), where she discusses the marginalia in the Troyes codex on Cicero's De natura deorum, underlining the 'discussion' Petrarch engaged in with the ancient author. Focusing instead on lesser-known examples, the volume offers a rich variety of instances in which Cicero the man, the philosopher, the politician and the authority were used to bolster the claims of one or the other, or both sides, to rule. The volume opens with Catherine M. Keen's contribution (ch. 1), in which she discusses the parallels Bruno Latini drew between himself and the Roman homo novus in the Guelf/Ghibelline conict, drawing on the gure of the rhetor to stress the importance of speech and oratorical skills in the Florentine polity. Carole Mabboux (ch. 3) then moves to the changing political landscape of due-and trecento Italian towns, demonstrating how the necessity for speech and thus eloquence assigned prime authority to Cicero, while also citing him as moral authority, demonstrating a continuous Ciceronian presence in the writings of that time, even where his perception as historical person shifted. The visual arts take centre stage in three contributions to the volume, the rst of which is Virginia Cox's juxtaposition of Martino Filetico's 'textual portrait' of Battista Sforza with Piero della Francesca's 'visual portrait' at the palace of Urbino (ch. 4). In both cases, the gure of Cicero serves to underline the supposed and desired virtues of the ruling house of Montefeltro, depicting Battista as a quasi female Cicero while her husband is portrayed as the embodiment of the togate consul, learned and wise. These virtues also explain the absence of a portrait type of Cicero in the Renaissance, as L. B. T. Houghton states (ch. 6), with artists of the cinquecento rather developing a type of Cicero which personied or translated the qualities of an exemplary character, above all eloquence and erudition. The nal paper considering Cicero in the visual arts, by Nina L. Dubin (ch. 11), considers the ambiguous role of letters in the context of the visual arts of the French Revolution. While documents in writing were supposed to provide proof, the introduction of the public postal service eroded trust in the written word, as letters were easily manipulated. By comparing various artwork of that time, the author outlines the crux of the revolution, 'grappling with what it meant to found a republic on contingencies of trustthat is, on paper' (196).

BMCR, 2021