Since Classics has overcome its reservations concerning Cicero's philosophical and theoretical writings in recent decades, intensive research has emerged that is working on an unbiased reassessment of the Roman author and his oeuvre, revising the negative judgements that go back far into the nineteenth century. This research concentrates primarily on the content of his work and, without negating Cicero's repeated recourse to Greek models, successively exposes the specific autonomy of his philosophical and theoretical endeavours. Recently, increasing importance has been attached to the cultural conditions of his thought. However, current interest in Cicero has so far been less focused on the stylistic and argumentative strategies of his writings and the question of the extent to which specific characteristics can be identified in them, which are possibly complementary to their content-related characteristics.
G.'s monograph, which is based on a dissertation at the Freie Universität of Berlin, makes a substantial contribution to this. Its aim is threefold: firstly, it wants to analyse the use of the anecdote in Cicero's philosophical and rhetorical writings, and, secondly, building on this, to consider the implications that arise from Cicero's specific use of this so-called miniature narrative for the understanding of his oeuvre as a whole. Finally, it aims to make a fundamental contribution to sharpening the anecdote as a genre and, in particular, its epistemological potential. This quite complex objective requires the skilful combination of modern theory and philologically exact analysis of the ancient texts, which G. succeeds in doing in a thoroughly convincing manner.
The volume begins with a concise introduction, in which G. outlines the project, justifies the choice of corpus and develops the structure of the study. This opening reveals the two decisive areas of tension in which G. wants to situate the anecdote in principle, but especially in relation to Cicero's philosophical and rhetorical oeuvre: on the one hand, between its character as a small narrative unit and its presumed significance for larger argumentative structures and, on the other hand, between its generally life-world content and the theoretical content of the philosophical writings in which it is embedded. Against this background, G. strives to prove that the anecdote marks a specific form of knowledge within Cicero's philosophical writings and thus has to be considered an integral part of their argumentative logic.
Chapter 2 serves to lay the foundation for the study by providing a description and definition of the anecdote on the basis of a conceptual history, which G. does not limit to the relevant modern period, but traces back to antiquity. In this way, he succeeds on the one hand in achieving a broad understanding of the phenomenon, which, with recourse to the structural features occasio, provocatio and dictum or factum laid down as characteristics in modern definitions, includes further specific features in a well-balanced manner, such as brevity, which is not understood absolutely but relationally, realism as the text-internal representation of factuality, the impression of resting on oral tradition as well as the claim to be a concise unit of larger content-related or argumentative contexts. On the other hand, this overview exposes a corresponding discussion in antiquity, especially in Cicero with his theoretical reflections on facetiae in the second book of De oratore. This is all the more significant because G. rightly points out that the anecdote is hardly discussed in scholarship in Classics and is at best blurredly distinguished from comparable small forms such as the apophthegma or the exemplum. Against this background it becomes clear that it is not only a matter of expanding the textual basis for a theory of the anecdote to include antiquity, but also of establishing a research context for it in the first place on the basis of Cicero.
In Chapter 3 G. turns to Cicero's oeuvre and clarifies the potential of the anecdote for biographical profiling. The starting point for this is his attentive eye for the specifics of literary dialogue, in which topics are not only developed in dependence on the speakers, but these are themselves characterised more closely through their conversation. Cicero's approach in this regard is made clear by an analysis of various dialogue figures from his oeuvre. On the basis of a convincing reading of the two late dialogues Cato maior and Laelius, G. shows in detail that the anecdote is used by Cicero to shape different speakers. In the case of the two eponymous figures, for example, G. reveals a specific understanding of philosophy on the basis of a conversational style rich in anecdotes, which, in view of their biographical location in the second century bce, also points to an epochal style in which the anecdote advances within Cicero's understanding of philosophy to become a compositional indicator of an autochthonous Roman sapientia.
Chapter 4 turns to an examination of Cicero's De divinatione and the tension between factuality and fictionality of anecdotal narratives and shows how Cicero discusses the problem of the contingency or explicability of the divinatio relevant to the Roman cult by means of his dialogue figure and that of his brother Quintus. Through finding a constitutive strangeness of the events discussed by the two brothers, from which Quintus wants to derive the validity of divinatory practice, G. demonstrates that the speaker Marcus Cicero, by pointing out their constitutive contingency, conceives the anecdote as a kind of enlightening medium, which does not so much guarantee reliable knowledge as instruct to test it. In this way he exposes Quintus’ hasty admiratio of the events described and is able to separate superstitio from appropriate religio. In his dialogue figure's critique of unambiguous attributions of meaning in anecdotes that are supposed to prove the truth of divinatio Cicero thus negotiates not only the question of the facticity or historicity of the narratives, which is crucial for a theory of the anecdote, but ultimately once again a topic that refers to his understanding of philosophy.
Thus, this chapter connects with the preceding, but also with the following fifth chapter, in which G. comprehensively explores the philosophical dimension of the anecdote in Cicero and convincingly proves it to be an essential structural element of Cicero's scepticism. G.'s focus is primarily on proving the anecdote to be a constitutive medium of epistemology. In his comprehensive approach, however, he provides nothing less than a kind of archaeology of the Ciceronian concept of sapientia. In an effort to present the anecdote as the privileged space of thought of Ciceronian scepticism, he first considers the significance of the anecdote in Nietzsche's concept of a history of philosophy and Blumenberg's understanding of the anecdote as a crystallisation medium of thoughtfulness and thus as a philosophical narrative form par excellence, which he understands as the original narrative of all theory. After illuminating explanations of Cicero's efforts to use the anecdote to record in writing knowledge that had hitherto been passed down orally in traditional Roman educational contexts and thus to gain a monopoly on its interpretation, G. portrays the anecdote as a seismograph for the mobility and dynamism of Cicero's sceptical conception of knowledge in opposition to the static nature of a dogmatic understanding. Accordingly, he opens up the anecdote as a fragment of knowledge, as it were, which indicates the lack of closure of philosophical discourses and thus becomes recognisable as a narrative complement for the constitutive openness of Cicero's dialogues. Finally, G. illuminates the function of the anecdote as a medium of an aitiology of the presuppositions of Cicero's concept of philosophy.
A concise summary, an exhaustive bibliography and a list of anecdotes in Cicero's works conclude a study that represents a substantial contribution to the understanding of Cicero's philosophical and rhetorical writings in terms of literary studies and the history of philosophy as well as to the further refining of a systematic theory of anecdote. In doing so, G. not only expands the formation of theory with a view to Cicero's oeuvre to include antiquity, hitherto marginalised, but also demonstrates the significance of the genre for ancient literature, which has hardly been considered in Classics in the past. With regard to Cicero, G. not only demonstrates the recurrence of the anecdote in his writings, but also that it characterises his understanding of philosophy to a particular degree. One of the particular achievements of the work is to prove that the recurrent use of the anecdote manifests Cicero's sceptical attitude on the one hand and, above all, the Roman character of his philosophy in a privileged way on the other.
