The manuscript reading iucundius has had a few defenders, but nearly all editors have chosen to emend, and of the several emendations proposed, the favourite has been Orsini's ieiunius, adopted recently in Jonathan Powell's Oxford Classical Text, in Andrew Dyck's magisterial commentary, and in the new edition of the fragments of the Roman historians.Footnote ¹ Although the emendation can now be considered canonical, it is nevertheless worthwhile to restate and augment the arguments for retaining the manuscript reading.

Cicero's De legibus, written in the late 50s,Footnote ² features as interlocutors of the dialogue Cicero himself, his brother Quintus, and Cicero's confidante and friend, Atticus. As the dialogue opens, Atticus and Quintus are engaged in an amusing and urbane give-and-take concerning an oak tree on the property where their discussion takes place. Atticus claims to recognize the grove and the oak from his frequent reading of Cicero's poem, Marius, and he says that if the oak of that poem still exists, the tree before him is certainly the one. Quintus responds by saying that ‘Cicero's’ oak lives and will live forever, because it was sown not by any farmer but by poetic genius. Challenged by Atticus to explain what poets ‘sow’, Quintus provocatively asks Atticus whether he believes that the olive tree on the Acropolis or the palm tree on Delos are as truly ancient as their inhabitants claim. Atticus does not answer this, but turns instead to Cicero, and asks whether Cicero himself invented the oak or recorded it from some report.Footnote ³ Cicero does not respond to the question, however, asking Atticus instead whether he believes that Romulus actually appeared to Julius Proculus to inform him that he was a god, or whether Aquilo carried off Orithyia not far from the spot where Atticus' house in Athens stands. When Atticus in turn asks the purpose of such a question, Cicero responds that one should not inquire too closely into tradition. Atticus counters by suggesting that there is an important difference between the recent and the distant past, and that people wish to know whether many parts in the Marius are ‘invented or true’, but Cicero again deflects criticism by saying that poetry has different standards from history, the one measured by truth, the other by pleasure.Footnote ⁴

The mention of history now suggests to Atticus an opportunity that he claims to have wanted often,Footnote ⁵ namely to persuade Cicero himself to write history. History, Atticus says, hardly exists at Rome, and to prove this he quickly reviews those who have attempted it, finding them all wanting. He begins his exhortation and brief overview as follows (1.6):

Atticus' remark that nothing could be more ‘pleasurable’ than the pontifical annals has been emended not on grounds of obvious corruption – the Latin text makes sense as it stands – but because it is thought that Atticus cannot possibly use an adjective such as iucundus to describe the Annales Maximi.

It is not difficult, of course, to see why editors have felt that emendation was necessary: Atticus is exhorting Cicero to take on the task of writing history, because the latter, if anyone, could bring to it the literary skill and labour, the style and polish that ‘great’ historiography demands and that the Greeks – but not the Romans – have displayed in abundance. Since the second part of the sentence expresses a harshly critical stance towards the early Roman historiographical tradition tout court, it would be odd for Atticus here to laud the pleasures of the Annales Maximi in a sentence that is at pains to point out the shortcomings of the entire early tradition. Moreover, Atticus' remarks here have clear associations and echoes with the remarks made by M. Antonius and Q. Lutatius Catulus in Book 2 of the De oratore, written just a few years before, where a similar belief about the stylistic deficiencies of the early Roman historians is expressed. (We shall come to this passage in a moment.) In both the De legibus and the De oratore passages, the speaker suggests that these early writers cared only to record the events themselves without giving them any elaboration or adornment. The adoption of ieiunius, therefore, which can easily be justified on palaeographical grounds, seems to give the sentence both a kind of internal consistency and a congruence with what Cicero expresses on the topic elsewhere.

Yet we should be cautious: both the speaker – Atticus – and the structure of the sentence indicate that the reading iucundius is neither so absurd nor problematic as it may seem, and is indeed far from indefensible. Let us take first the speaker. When Atticus speaks about the writing of history in Cicero's dialogues, we are not to imagine that he does so in a disinterested manner. He was himself a historian,Footnote ⁶ one whose work was greatly praised by Cicero and others for its care and scrupulousness.Footnote ⁷ Atticus' special interest lay in chronology and genealogy, and his chronographical Liber Annalis was considered a marvel of its kind, concise but also accurate and full.Footnote ⁸ Nepos says of it, ‘For there is no law or treaty nor important event in Roman history which is not recorded therein under its date and – this was very difficult – he so worked on the origins of families that from it we can learn the offspring of famous men’,Footnote ⁹ and he goes on to mention additional accounts of individual families made by Atticus for Brutus, Claudius Marcellus, Cornelius Scipio and Fabius Maximus,Footnote ¹⁰ observing that ‘nothing can be more delightful (dulcius) than these books for those who have some desire for knowledge about famous men’.Footnote ¹¹

Now one might argue, of course, that the pleasure being discussed by Nepos arises from the content, not from the style. We shall come to that in a moment. My point for now is simply that it is in no way ridiculous to consider chronographical works delightful or pleasurable. And indeed the author of a Liber Annalis might have a fondness for Annales of all sorts and could find – or at least claim to find – nihil iucundius than a perusal of the Annales Maximi. Georges de Plinval has defended iucundius and retains it in his Budé text of the De legibus, arguing that Atticus defends the iucunditas of the Annales in a witty spirit, and citing the passage of Nepos above with its mention of ‘sweetness’.Footnote ¹² Although I believe that the spirit of the opening exchange in the De legibus is indeed playful, I also think that Atticus is not making this claim in an ironic or paradoxical way. Naturally, it may seem strange to our sensibility that chronographical and genealogical works could be considered pleasurable, but their popularity in antiquity suggests that the ancients provided a ready audience for them.Footnote ¹³ It is all too easy to forget the importance attached to such things in the ancient world, and also that, given the difficulties of chronological arrangement in antiquity (either because of synchronizing different systems or because it was difficult to find out exactly when something happened), a work that actually arranged events in order for the reader and showed simultaneous (or near-simultaneous) actions together under one heading could in fact be something very pleasurable. The labour was indeed immense, bringing together as it did events that were narrated in widely scattered and different kinds of materials. Yet surely any modern scholar who has ‘enjoyed’ Broughton's Magistrates of the Roman Republic Footnote ¹⁴ will understand the pleasure of a work such as the Annales Maximi. Such pleasure is assuredly not that of a narrative history (we shall come to this in a moment), but narrative is not what one is looking for in such a work. So we can posit that whatever their shortcomings, the Annales Maximi could quite easily have provided pleasure for someone with an interest in chronology and/or genealogy.

We might then say that Atticus adopts an independent tone here, giving an opinion that could well have been held by the historical Atticus, but far from Cicero's own opinion. That same tone can be seen elsewhere in Cicero's works, especially in the Brutus, written not long after the De legibus,Footnote ¹⁵ where, in a well-known passage, Cicero is speaking of Themistocles and Coriolanus, discussing the similarity of their lives and their deaths, when he suddenly interrupts himself to say that he is quite aware that Atticus has a very different version of the death of Coriolanus:Footnote ¹⁶

Atticus here defends, and in an amused manner similar to that in the De legibus, the demands of truth in history against not poets this time but orators who, in the public arena, engage in the manipulation of the facts of history. The key disclaimer, of course – that it is permitted to speakers ementiri in historiis – gives the conditions under which Atticus ‘allows’ the misuse of history, but he and his interlocutors nevertheless recognize it for what it is. We are not left in doubt that Atticus and Cicero have different views about history, and there is no attempt to eliminate or elide their differences.Footnote ¹⁷

That is the point in the De legibus passage as well. Scholars have been perturbed that if Atticus is really praising the Annales there, it is difficult to square such a sentiment with Cicero's well-known and very clear aversion to the stylistic limitations of early Roman historians. After all, isn't Atticus' sentence in fact all about the poverty of the early Latin historiographical tradition? Here it is necessary to observe two points. First, it is not the character ‘Marcus’ who would be praising the iucunditas of the Annales but the character ‘Atticus’. As we see in the Brutus passage, Cicero does not demand from the characters in his dialogues complete fidelity to his own views. Indeed, as has been pointed out, the De legibus is especially marked by a vigorous dissension amongst its speakers.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus there is no reason why the character ‘Atticus’ could not maintain a belief different from that of Cicero. Second, one must make a clear distinction, even with Cicero, between the Annales Maximi and the early Roman historians.

As it happens, much is uncertain about the form of the Annales Maximi in the time of Cicero; scholarship has discussed, and continues to discuss, a host of problems that surround our understanding of the content and character of the Annales: when they began, what they contained, what influence they had on the historiographical tradition – not to mention how reliable they were for the events that they did record.Footnote ¹⁹ There is little purpose in entering that discussion here. It will suffice to note that Cicero does not often cite or mention the Annales Maximi: aside from the passages under discussion here, he refers to them only in two places in the De republica.Footnote ²⁰ More to the point is what can be discerned from Cicero's own writings. In the De oratore Antonius envisions history as, in the beginning, nothing other than an assemblage of annals, which recorded, ‘without any adornment, notices only of dates, of individuals, of places and of events’. Many writers thereafter followed a similar style of writing, ‘leaving behind, without any rhetorical adornment, bare records of dates, personalities, places and events’; these later writers thought that the historian's single merit was in brevity, but ‘they were not men who adorned events, but only narrated them.’Footnote ²¹

This is the crux of the issue. The procedure of the early historians that is criticized here entails a category mistake: these writers composed histories as if they were writing Annales, and thus were unable or unwilling to see that such a style of writing was inappropriate to narrative history and could not exploit the great possibilities inherent in events. Now it is, of course, possible that the Annales Maximi had a narrative structure, albeit rudimentary.Footnote ²² But the fact that the Annales gave ‘notices only’ suggests that there was no working up of the bare events into a satisfying narrative that could bring out all the circumstances and consequences of the events and thus move and delight the reader. On the other hand, it is these very ‘notices only’ of mere names, dates, places and events that the character ‘Atticus’ would have found appealing. In any case, Antonius' remarks are not concerned with the Annales themselves, nor does he criticize them. Rather, he concentrates on those who thought that an imitation of the style of these Annales constituted a fully formed historiography.

Returning to the De legibus passage, we note that Atticus, like Antonius, separates the Annales Maximi from the rest of the early Roman historiographical tradition. The argument that iucundius cannot be right given the overall ‘negative’ tone of the sentence fails to see the full import of Atticus' separation, in a clause beginning with post, of the Annales from the named individual historians. But why do the Annales need to be separated in a clause of their own? If the entire early tradition was dreadful, why single out the Annales Maximi, and why make a separate point that they were jejune or lacking in pleasure? If, on the other hand, Atticus had something positive to say about the Annales, then putting them in a clause of their own has point because he wants to say something different about the actual historians whom he goes on to mention. In other words, the Annales, qua Annales, were perfectly fine and appropriate to what one would expect for that kind of historical work. And Atticus' praise of the Annales – again, not absurd for a man who himself wrote a Liber Annalis – stands in contrast to his opinions about the writers who followed the style of the Annales Maximi and thus not only failed to achieve anything of note in historical narrative but made the mistake of thinking that what was appropriate for a chronicle was also appropriate for a more developed historical narrative.Footnote ²³ Atticus agrees with Marcus' view that history demands a certain voice and style – that is why he can make the demand that Cicero write ‘proper’ history – at the same time as he recognizes what is appropriate and pleasurable for the very different genre of chronographical works. In literature as in politics, Atticus retains his independence.

This is not to say that we have any reason to doubt that the Annales were not at all Cicero's idea of history.Footnote ²⁴ But surely the important point is that in this opening of the De legibus it is the character ‘Atticus’ who speaks, and in a position that is familiar from elsewhere, i.e. as a foil for Cicero and his approach to the past. The context is playful and dialogic, and a contextual reading of the passage ought to allow Atticus to keep intact both his playfulness and his pleasure.