In mid-February 45 b.c.e., in a tragedy that was to plunge the orator into seemingly irreparable despair, Cicero's beloved daughter Tullia died. She had given birth nearly a month before and at first seemed to be doing well. Soon, however, her health gave out and Cicero took her to his Tusculan villa to recover. In the end, there was little that could be done. After her funeral, Cicero stayed for about three weeks with Atticus in Rome, but the constant stream of visitors offering condolences became too much to bear, and on the sixth of March the heartbroken father retired to a villa he owned on the coast at Astura, some 45 miles south of Rome. Three days later he dispatched the following anguished epistle (Att. 12.15):Footnote 1
Apud Appuleium, quoniam in perpetuum non placet, in dies ut excuser videbis. in hac solitudine careo omnium colloquio, cumque mane me in silvam abstrusi densam et asperam, non exeo inde ante vesperum. secundum te nihil est mihi amicius solitudine. in ea mihi omnis sermo est cum litteris. eum tamen interpellat fletus; cui repugno quoad possum, sed adhuc pares non sumus. Bruto, ut suades, rescribam. eas litteras cras habebis. cum erit cui des, dabis.
This brief and poignant letter has been well anthologized over the years, and justly so.Footnote 2 Cicero's portrait of himself wracked with grief and unable to hold back his falling tears from the loss of his precious Tulliola is one of the most touchingly personal scenes to have come down to us from antiquity; all the more so because the distinguished Roman statesman whom we are to imagine hiding away the whole day ‘in a thick, thorny wood’Footnote 3 was now over 60.
But there is something odd in this picture as well. After all, as anyone who has tried will know – although offering the perfect symbolic backdrop for expressing intense grief over the recent loss of a loved one (think of Orpheus, for example, famously conjuring a forest around him with his mournful song; e.g. Ovid, Met. 10.86–147) – there is no place less conducive to extended bouts of reading and writing (sermo cum litteris) than a rugged and uncultivated (densam et asperam) wood. (Spending a summer surrounded by the untamed redwood forests of northern California has taught me nothing more clearly than this.) Even if we grant that Cicero located a reasonably comfortable spot to sit, there is still the problem of securing sunlight enough to read and write by from dawn to dusk in so dense and wild a wood. And this need, of course, would have been felt all the more acutely by the aged ex-consul who, even at times when his eyes were not sore from constant crying, suffered from problems with his vision.Footnote 4 Finally, there is an issue of plain logic. Simply put, Cicero had forsaken the crowds of Rome for Astura precisely because there was no one to bother him there.Footnote 5 Thus we should ask, with an empty villa entirely at his disposal, what need would there have been to hide himself away in the dark and uncomfortable woods? Solitudo, to be sure, is something of a watchword in the letters from these weeks of, as some would have it, excessive mourning,Footnote 6 but on every other occasion except this one the empty villa seems to have been enough (cf. Att. 12.14.3: pro malis recte habebat).
So why did Cicero venture into the woods? My guess is, in fact, he never did. Rather, the key to understanding Cicero's silva rests in the sermo cum litteris, ‘conversation with literature’, already mentioned.Footnote 7 It is a well-known fact that the woods (Latin silva, Greek ὕλη) provided a central metaphor for literary production of all kinds in the ancient world, figuring an author's subject matter, models, rough drafts and even sometimes the physical material on which his works were written.Footnote 8 The metaphor is found most commonly among imperial authors – especially poets – but Cicero himself employs silva on numerous occasions in his rhetorical treatises to signify a collection or mass of raw materials.Footnote 9 In his early De inventione the term is used (along with materia, another rendering of ὕλη in Latin) of the shapeless raw materials for constructing arguments in a case (Inv. rhet. 1.34: verumtamen non incommodum videtur quandam silvam atque materiam universam ante permixtim et confuse exponere omnium argumentationum). In the third book of his De oratore, the character Crassus employs the metaphor on three separate occasions: first, in reference to the abundance of material available for students of rhetoric (De or. 3.93: rerum est silva magna); then, to signal the need to gather a mass of suitable material before speaking (3.103: primum silva rerum comparanda est); and, once more, when claiming that the entire topic, or locus, concerned with duties consists of virtues and vices (3.118: quae vero referuntur ad agendum, aut in officii disceptatione versantur – quo in genere quid rectum faciendumque sit quaeritur, cui loco omnis virtutum et vitiorum est silva subiecta). Last of all, in the Orator, Cicero's final treatise on the subject of oratory, our author returns, so to speak, to the metaphorical woods two more times: once, in claiming that the rich style and substance of oratory is drawn from the philosophers (Orat. 12: omnis enim ubertas et quasi silva dicendi ducta ab illis est); and later, in remarking that a mass of material is available with regard to the preparation of a speech (139: hoc in genere – nam quasi silvam vides – omnis eluceat oportet eloquentiae magnitudo).
To be sure, none of these examples provides an exact parallel to Cicero's bold and unqualifiedFootnote 10 claim in our letter to have hidden himself away in the woods (me in silvam abstrusi). Reasons for this discrepancy, however, are not hard to find. After all, there prevails in the treatises a certain literary decorum that is entirely absent from – and even alien to – Cicero's private correspondence with his closest friend, in which, we might note, are found numerous expressions unattested in Cicero's strictly public works.Footnote 11 More to the point, as has already been suggested with reference to Orpheus above, there is something altogether fitting about the conceit of the lone figure weeping in the wilderness that perhaps even helped recommend the unexpected twist here given to a common metaphor. Utterly forlorn he may have been, but Cicero never lacked the capacity for apt expression. In this case, unfortunately, he was a bit too apt. The image of the inconsolable statesman crying alone in the woods from dawn to dusk is so compelling that over time it has all but obscured Cicero's primary meaning: surely, that he has buried himself for the entire day in literary work to forget his sorrows.Footnote 12
In what literary wilderness, then, was Cicero taking refuge? While at Atticus’ house in Rome we know that he had busied himself with all the philosophical books about dealing with grief that he could get his hands on in his friend's vast library (Att. 12.14.3: nihil enim de maerore minuendo scriptum ab ullo est quod non domi tuae legerim). After two weeks in Astura, he is still filling his days and nights (for sleep will not come) with the same books – a densa et aspera silva indeed!Footnote 13 What were these works the raw material for? Sadly, the same Fates who stole Tullia away from her loving father have also snatched from us the final fruits of Cicero's anguished labours, the now lost Consolatio or De luctu minuendo.Footnote 14 The grieving statesman addressed the treatise about managing sorrow to himself,Footnote 15 and wrote it during his first couple of days at Astura. The earliest reference comes, in fact, in the letter immediately preceding our own, where Cicero mentions that he has completed the work and will be sending a copy along to Atticus as soon as he can (Att. 12.14.3). Actually, the version included for Atticus’ perusal was little more than a draft, written in haste and lacking the details of numerous exempla he still intended to include, and subsequent letters reveal Cicero asking his friend for specifics regarding other famous Romans who had lost their children (cf. Att. 12.20.2, 12.22.2, 12.24.2).Footnote 16 Exactly when he completed the final draft of this treatise is unknown, but the sketchy and preliminary character of the version sent to Atticus cannot help but put us in mind of the silva that Quintilian would later disparage in his chapter on how to write (Inst. 10.3.17):
Diversum est huic eorum vitium qui primo decurrere per materiam stilo quam velocissimo volunt et sequentes calorem atque impetum extempore scribunt: hanc silvam vocant. repetunt deinde et componunt quae effuderant; sed verba emendantur et numeri, manet in rebus temere congestis, quae fuit, levitas.
It is commonly maintained with regard to silva that the term's semantic extension from a composition's raw materials to a rough composition itself took place in the early Empire.Footnote 17 But Cicero's letters reveal that this is clearly not so. Rather, in the dense wood mentioned in Ad Atticum 12.15, raw materials and rough draft merge: Cicero's silva simultaneously points to the mass of consolatory literature that the bereaved statesman was busy reading and the hastily drafted Consolatio that he was then writing (and would go on writing) as a result. The harsh wilderness of literary production here uncovered thus not only reconfigures our picture of the landscape at Astura in which Cicero was hiding from his sorrows in March 45 b.c.e.; it ultimately rewrites our understanding of Latin's extant metaphorical landscape as well.
