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SCEPTICISM AT THE BIRTH OF SATIRE: CARNEADES IN LUCILIUS’ CONCILIVM DEORVM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Ian Goh
Ian Goh*
Affiliation:
Swansea University
*
i.k.l.goh@swansea.ac.uk
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Extract

The best-known fact about the interaction of the Republican Roman poet Gaius Lucilius (c.180–103/102 b.c.e.), the inventor of the genre of Roman verse satire, with the doctrine of Scepticism is probably a statement of Cicero: that Clitomachus the Academician dedicated a treatise to the poet (Cic. Luc. 102). Diogenes Laertius makes much of that writer's, Clitomachus’, industry (τὸ φιλόπονον, 4.67), with the comment: ‘to such lengths did his diligence (ἐπιμελείας) go that he composed more than four hundred treatises’. This phraseology surely reminds those interested in Lucilius’ influence on later Latin poetry of Horace's disparaging comment, in hora saepe ducentos, | ut magnum, uersus dictabat (‘as a bravura display, he would often dictate two hundred verses in an hour’, Sat. 1.4.9–10); moreover, Horace shortly afterwards calls his predecessor garrulus atque piger scribendi ferre laborem (‘talkative and too lazy to bear the work of writing’, 1.4.12). Yet, a sceptical view of Horace's critique might have to think of Lucilius as hard-working, like his putative friend the Academic philosopher, Clitomachus.

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Research Article
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The Classical Quarterly , Volume 68 , Issue 1 , May 2018 , pp. 128 - 142
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Copyright © The Classical Association 2018 

The best-known fact about the interaction of the Republican Roman poet Gaius Lucilius (c.180–103/102 b.c.e.),Footnote 1 the inventor of the genre of Roman verse satire, with the doctrine of Scepticism is probably a statement of Cicero: that Clitomachus the Academician dedicated a treatise to the poet (Cic. Luc. 102).Footnote 2 Diogenes Laertius makes much of that writer's, Clitomachus’, industry (τὸ φιλόπονον, 4.67), with the comment: ‘to such lengths did his diligence (ἐπιμελείας) go that he composed more than four hundred treatises’.Footnote 3 This phraseology surely reminds those interested in Lucilius’ influence on later Latin poetry of Horace's disparaging comment, in hora saepe ducentos, | ut magnum, uersus dictabat (‘as a bravura display, he would often dictate two hundred verses in an hour’, Sat. 1.4.9–10); moreover, Horace shortly afterwards calls his predecessor garrulus atque piger scribendi ferre laborem (‘talkative and too lazy to bear the work of writing’, 1.4.12). Yet, a sceptical view of Horace's critique might have to think of Lucilius as hard-working, like his putative friend the Academic philosopher, Clitomachus.Footnote 4

However, the second best-known fact about Lucilius and Scepticism, which will occupy the remainder of this discussion, is a reference by the satirist in his Book 1, the official start to Lucilius’ poetry in hexameters, to Carneades, whom we might call the oral-argument-only Socrates to Clitomachus’ Plato.Footnote 5 All commentators agree that the reference occurs in the book's Concilium Deorum (‘Council of the Gods’). At this meeting of the gods, a man named Lupus, most likely the Roman politician and judge Lucius Cornelius Lentulus Lupus, consul (156 b.c.e.), censor (147), and princeps senatus (131 onwards), was put on trial. That trial reflects an historical trial de repetundis, which occurred between Lupus’ consulship and his censorship. As Valerius Maximus puts it (6.9.10):

Let us now look at the variety of men's fortunes. L. Lentulus [Lupus], a Consular, after conviction on a charge of extortion under the Caecilian law (lege Caecilia repetundarum), was elected Censor with L. Censorinus. Fortune turned him this way and that between honours and disgraces, following Consulship with conviction, conviction with Censorship, suffering him neither to enjoy lasting good nor bewail unchanging bad.

The dating is problematic, because there is no record of a lex Caecilia concerning repetundae. It could be argued, as many have, that lex Caecilia is a confusion for the more famous lex Calpurnia de repetundis of 149 b.c.e.,Footnote 6 which set up the first standing court to try such cases before a senatorial jury. However, on balance the lex Caecilia is likely to have been a tribune's special measure, with an ad hoc court as for (or even part of) the accusation of praetors auaritiae nomine in 153 b.c.e. (Liv. Per. 47).Footnote 7 Carneades was in Rome in 155 b.c.e., as part of a famous embassy to Rome on behalf of Athens, who were appealing to the Romans to overrule the arbitration of the Sicyonians which had imposed a punitive fine, after an Athenian raid on Oropus (Paus. 7.11.4–8).Footnote 8 If the arraignment of Lupus and the appearance of Carneades in Rome were remembered as roughly contemporaneous events for Lucilius, then there may be grounds to posit a conflation of the two events in the imaginary Concilium Deorum, even or especially if it was written some time afterwards.

The motivation for this article is the fragment of the Concilium to which I have referred, preserved by Lactantius (Inst. 5.14.3),Footnote 9 who cites it by indicating that Neptune spoke, presumably in a meeting of some kind, to say that a difficult matter was impossible to explain (disserens Neptunus de re difficillima ostendit non posse id explicari), non Carneaden si ipsum Orcus remittat (‘not if the Underworld were to send back Carneades himself’, 35 Warmington = 31 Marx).Footnote 10 Since Neptune's statement implies that Carneades is dead, his death in 129/128 b.c.e. provides a terminus post quem for the satire.Footnote 11 The fragmentary statement is part of an adynaton, combined with an a fortiori argument: x would not happen even if something impossible happened, so how much less could it happen if that impossibility has not happened.Footnote 12 Lucilius’ Neptune is not advocating that Carneades should return, or even that he might return; the statement's force, rather, is that there is a limit to the power of the gods, who cannot even obtain the services of Carneades as an explicator, and thus must remain fallible and perplexed rather than omniscient and omnipotent. Were Carneades to be available, he would still not be able to provide clarity.

Why mention Carneades? Is it because he is an arbitrary choice, a casually mentioned emblematic philosopher, replaceable by a Socrates, Aristotle or Zeno? That is certainly possible, if reductive.Footnote 13 This paper aims to serve as a thought-experiment, though, to see whether the implications of the testimonia concerning Carneades, especially in Cicero and in Diogenes Laertius, can be reasonably, if tentatively, linked to Lucilius’ Concilium. The key assumption is that mentioning Carneades, even to say that he will not appear before the Concilium, makes a reader of Lucilian satire think of the embassy of the philosophers and wonder: what if he were to appear?Footnote 14 Another important assumption is that Lucilius knew of facts surrounding the biography of Carneades and used them in his poetry. I also revivify the idea that Lucilius’ mention of Carneades suggests that his Concilium owes a certain debt to the work of the hexametrical philosophizing poet Timon of Phlius.

This article utilizes persona theory, which has dominated the criticism of Roman verse satire for several decades,Footnote 15 most fundamentally holding that the narrator of satire is not responsible for the views in his satire, but also reaches beyond it to adopt a relatively historicist position. In this reading, Carneades’ adoption of opposing viewpoints, his interaction with Stoic thought, and his putative resistance to divinity are all grist to the mill of Lucilius’ satiric practice. In the first section, it is important that Carneades was seen, like Lucilius, to hold Stoic points of view for the sake of argument. While it is still assumed that anything Lucilius wrote in his poetry could be taken, and was taken in antiquity, as the authentic voice of Lucilius, regardless of its viewpoint, its aesthetic or its internal narrator (in the case of the motivating fragment, Neptune), I will argue that it is important that the speaker of the line was Neptune. And in the third section I show that Carneades was a figure of fun about whom anecdotes could be told, in a way like Timon's vignettes of philosophers in the Underworld. We can thus tell a story, in an explication which has never been attempted at length before,Footnote 16 of how Lucilius may have drawn on philosophical attitudes and biographical details in inventing the genre of satireFootnote 17—even within the limits imposed by the scanty nature of the fragments.

I. BOTH SIDES NOW

Carneades’ putative role as powerful explicator is somewhat strange, as it is set up to fail. As part of the 155 b.c.e. embassy of philosophers, it was he who especially dazzled his listeners by arguing, in some extra-ambassadorial capacity, perhaps in public lectures on successive days, first in favour of and then against just that topic, pertinent to Lucilius’ Concilium, of justice (Plut. Cat. Mai. 22; Cic. Rep. 3.6).Footnote 18 Cato is recorded as expressing some displeasure at the imputed attack on conventional Roman morality (by the Elder Pliny, HN 7.112, as well as by Plutarch). If this story is true, then at first glance Neptune is not entirely justified in invoking Carneades’ ability to solve knotty problems. For if he is thinking of Carneades as an authority, the double-edged and contradictory answer he might, on the evidence of the philosophers’ embassy, receive to any query might disappoint and confuse an already confused situation.

As leader of the Sceptical Academy, Carneades argued for a complex view of belief, in which it is possible to separate assent to the truth of an impression from approval of it (Cic. Luc. 104).Footnote 19 Part of his method was to take on the opposing position to expose it to criticism, the tactic labelled in utramque partem disputare, with the aim being ‘to convict the dogmatist of irrationality of various sorts: of inconsistency in his beliefs or in the grounds he offers for his beliefs’.Footnote 20 Thus Carneades, in responding to charges that the Sceptic suspends judgement and thus cannot act or indeed lead a good life, may have adapted the Stoic criterion of what was ‘plausible’ or ‘persuasive’, in order to argue nihilistically against it.Footnote 21 Taking on the Stoic position for the sake of argument complicates the nature of the author's propria persona and casts doubt on whether the wise man can hold opinions.Footnote 22 That formulation recalls persona theory as applied to Roman satire: the idea that Carneades adopted Stoic positions to which he was opposed is analogous to the vision of Lucilius as a Stoic propagated by scholars, based in part on his similarity to long-winded Stoics in Horace's Satires Book 1.Footnote 23 Several fragments of Lucilius, not from the Concilium, have been interpreted as taking on Stoic positions.Footnote 24 But if Lucilius was taking Carneadean practice as a model, it is not difficult to reconcile such claims with Porphyrio's comment (on Hor. Sat. 1.3.124)—in preserving 1189–90 Warmington = 1225–6 Marx, which adopts the Stoic paradox, ‘only the wise man is handsome’—that Lucilius ‘spoke in mockery of the Stoics’.Footnote 25 Lucilius may have advocated arguments he opposed in order to tear them down.

The possibility that the Sceptic need not take a position on assent or adherence has implications for Carneades’ abilities as an explicator,Footnote 26 and indeed for Lupus as a judge who has to come down in favour of one side (excessive cruelty in which role is a factor in Lucilius’ critique of him in a fragment from Lucilius, Book 28, 805–11 Warmington = 784–90 Marx).Footnote 27 That is why it is a surprise to find Carneades serving as a judge, in the telling of Cicero: ‘Carneades was accustomed to judge the controversy [of Peripatetics vs Stoics] as if a respected arbitrator’ (quorum controuersiam solebat tamquam honorarius arbiter iudicare Carneades, Tusc. 5.120).Footnote 28 Yet, Cicero, inspired by Carneades, is usually at pains to exercise free judgement (liberum iudicium),Footnote 29 which at least superficially resembles how Lucilius is supposed to have branded wrongdoers multa cum libertate (‘with great freedom’, Hor. Sat. 1.4.5). While this latter ‘freedom of speech’ (parrhēsia) is not exactly a philosophical concept attached to Sceptics such as freedom from care (ataraxia), being rather a Cynic trait, it is easy to see how a cod-philosophical interpretation might have developed whereby the two could be conflated.

Another area where Carneadean method may come into play in the satiric Concilium is connected to a fragment deemed by all editors to have come from it. It deals with a change in terminological usage, regarding the names to use for mundane furnishings which would be visible in a sympotic setting (15–16 Warmington = 15–16 Marx):Footnote 30

porro ‘clinopodas’ ‘lychnos'que ut diximus semnos
ante ‘pedes lecti’ atque ‘lucernas’
what's more, those ‘clinipods’ and ‘lanterns’, as we said before/instead
of with grauitas ‘bed-feet’ and ‘lamps’

The transmission of the fragment by Macrobius (6.18), though he does at least ascribe it to Book 1, has made much about this fragment unclear, especially what the speaker, possibly Romulus the newest god,Footnote 31 means by ut diximus semnos | ante. Interpretation rests on uncertainties: whether ut diximus semnos ante goes together with the Greek words before it or with the Latin words after it; whether semnos is joined to ante or there is an opposition between porro (‘from now on’) and ante (‘in the past’); whether ut diximus is joined to semnos | ante; whether semnos is a positive value (‘authoritatively’) or a negative one (‘pretentiously’);Footnote 32 and whether ante actually means ‘beforehand’ or just transliterates ἀντί, ‘instead of’. I would argue that the commonly held interpretation, that Lucilius is here commenting on the moral dysfunction in the replacement of prosaic but apposite Latin terms by highfaluting yet elegant Greek ones,Footnote 33 is too severe. In this fragment, the -que ending tacked onto the Greek word, the use of the description σεμνῶς and the possibility that ante means ‘instead of’ all indicate the speaker's Greek fluency. Therefore, if the speaker is condemning the replacement of Latin words with fashionable Greek words, then the argument is undermined by the further Greek in σεμνῶς and (possibly) ἀντί.Footnote 34 By giving alternatives, the satirist (via his divine characters) could simply be refusing to decide: a move counter to the spirit of a concilium where a judgement has to be made, but one which would be familiar to a Sceptic like Carneades who insists on the philosopher's ‘suspension of judgement’ (ἐποχή).Footnote 35 It is after all unclear in what language Carneades would have chosen to speak, had he appeared before the Concilium:Footnote 36 in 155 b.c.e. the ambassadors’ case was presented in a Latin translation by the senator C. Acilius.Footnote 37

For his part, Carneades’ amanuensis Clitomachus was from Carthage, with the original name Hasdrubal.Footnote 38 Whether or not he was present at the embassy of 155, it is noteworthy that he was not Carneades’ only transcriber. Carneades is said to have griped ungratefully that Clitomachus repeated the substance of his teaching, but Charmadas reproduced the style as well (eodem etiam modo, Cic. Orat. 51). The issue seems to be one of the survival of ephemeral Carneadean discourse after the event, and it raises the question of how well Lucilius might have reproduced the mannerisms of the participants in the original meetings of the 150s in his Concilium of several decades later. Relevant, therefore, are Cicero's observations on one of Clitomachus’ sets of Carneadean notes (Cic. Tusc. 3.54):

I have read the book which Clitomachus sent by way of comfort to his captive fellow-citizens after the destruction of Carthage; it contains in its pages a lecture of Carneades which Clitomachus says he had entered in his notebook: the question that had been proposed for discussion was that the wise man, it seemed, would feel distress at the fall of his country, and the arguments used by Carneades in opposing this proposition are given at length. The remedy therefore effectively applied to a recent disaster by the philosopher is one which no one even feels the want of in a disaster of long standing.

One wonders whether Lucilius’ Concilium, written by Clitomachus’ dedicatee, and coming as it does so long after the fact of the contemporary embassy and extortion trial, replies to the last sentence of the extract. Note that the arguments supposedly marshalled by Carneades in this case are only negative—Clitomachus, with his vested interest, may well have provided his own positive arguments. We cannot retrieve what Carneades actually believed: it is not for nothing that, in a different context (the defence of Calliphon's arguments), ‘Clitomachus used to declare that he had never been able to understand what Carneades did accept’ (Luc. 139).

II. GOD'S OWN COUNCIL

The fragment about Greek and Latin word choices bears further examination in relation to Lucilius’ and Carneades’ attitudes to divinity.Footnote 39 Granted that diximus is not the same as dicebamus, and that the reference is perhaps to a previous speech made in this self-same concilium,Footnote 40 if ante does mean ‘beforehand’, the fragment could be a dig at Neptune, who uttered 35 Warmington = 31 Marx.Footnote 41 So, too, all former councils are recalled, including the previous trial of Lupus de repetundis, after which he nevertheless made a political comeback, and the embassy of the philosophers. It has been thought that both 19 Warmington = 26 Marx, uellem cumprimis, fieri si forte potisset (‘especially could I wish, if by chance it had been possible to happen …’), and 20–2 Warmington = 27–9 Marx, uel <lem> concilio uestrum, quod dicitis olim | caelicolae <hic habitum, uellem> adfuissemus priore | concilio (‘I could wish that at that parliament of yourselves, which you say, O heaven-dwellers, was once held here—that we had been present at that former parliament’), are also spoken by Neptune.Footnote 42 These fragments may recall the context of Hom. Od. 5.280–90, when Neptune laments his absence from the council expressly held without him (Od. 1.22–6), on his way from a visit to the ‘blameless Ethiopians’, where he had enjoyed a feast (δαιτί, 1.26).Footnote 43 Quite aside from a divine predilection for banqueting, Neptune's judgement and sense of timing may be called into question here.Footnote 44

It is additionally trenchant that Neptune, of all gods, is made to mention Carneades’ name. Carneades was famous for performing a reductio ad risibile of Stoic arguments via the so-called ‘theological sorites’, or ‘heap’:Footnote 45 Stoics were ‘true pantheists’, who believed, absurdly in Carneades’ view, in the ‘presence of the divine rational element in all of nature’.Footnote 46 Neptune is explicitly part of that Carneadean sorites (Sext. Emp. Math. 9.182–3): ‘If Zeus is a god, Poseidon too is a god … . But if Poseidon is a god, Achelous too will be a god.’Footnote 47 The result of the sorites is to prove that gods cannot be omnipresent or omnipotent. Neptune serves as part of Carneades’ own critique of divine power and ubiquity—which makes his citation of the philosopher naive at best.Footnote 48

Neptune may be diminished purely by daring to mention, in divine council, the name Carneades which carries such associations. Another fragment of Lucilius mentions Lupus, the accused at the Concilium, in the same breath as a Neptuni filius (Cic. Nat. D. 1.63):

quid de sacrilegis, quid de impiis periurisque dicemus?

‘Tubulus si Lucius umquam

si Lupus aut Carbo [aut del. Scaliger] Neptuni filius’

(1138–9 Warmington = 1312–13 Marx)

—ut ait Lucilius—putasset esse deos, tam periurus, aut tam impurus fuisset?

What are we to say about the men guilty of sacrilege or impiety or perjury? ‘Suppose that ever Lucius Tubulus, or Lupus or Carbo, [or] the son of Neptune’, as Lucilius says, had ever believed in the gods, would he have been such a perjurer or a scoundrel?

Although this fragment's book number and, indeed, substance are unclear, the ‘son of Neptune’ referred to here is surely not the Cyclops Polyphemus, despite the claim of all editors of Lucilius, but instead a historical figure of the same order as the other three personages mentioned—or a description of Carbo.Footnote 49 If the reference is not literal, it gains force because, as with Carneades, Neptune did not have to be mentioned but is linked to the wrongdoers, one of whom he may be presiding over in judgement in the lost surrounding context.Footnote 50 While, of course, the sins of the son are not to be visited on the father, Neptune is not entirely free from blame, if his own (supposed) son refuses to believe in his (Neptune's) divinity; his title as ‘father’ is highlighted in the Concilium proceedings (Neptunus pater, 26 Warmington = 20 Marx, also preserved by Lactantius, Inst. 4.3.12).Footnote 51

Cicero has reproduced the Neptuni filius fragment in the context of a discussion of the existence of gods, a topic relevant to both the Carneadean sorites and Lucilius’ Concilium. We may remember that Carneades probably denied the existence of everlasting gods.Footnote 52 Now, if we see Seneca's Apocolocyntosis as belonging to a Lucilian tradition, then the Neronian author's dead Claudius, candidate for deification, who is presented as ‘a new kind of beast’, so strange-looking that even Hercules has trouble identifying him (5.2–3), could contain elements of the earlier portrayal of the resurrected Lupus.Footnote 53 Lupus’ (supposed) moral lassitude manifests itself in physical form, at fr. 52 Warmington = 53 Marx, serpere uti gangraena malum [Müller for Marx's malo] atque herpestica posset (‘so that the snake-like gangrene could come creeping horribly’). The movement here is, at face value, indicative of disease and death.Footnote 54 Lupus also looks ‘like death’: uultus item ut facies mors, icterus [for Marx's cetera] morbus, uenenum (‘his countenance is like his face—death, jaundice, poison’, 37 Warmington = 44 Marx).Footnote 55

Such inability was not Carneades’ style:Footnote 56 in Philostratus’ later Lives of the Sophists, he is characterized as memorable ‘in virtue of the force and vigour of his orations’ (1.4), and his voice was famously booming (Diog. Laert. 4.63).Footnote 57 His speech indicates not immobility but health and strength. And indeed, Clitomachus’ copying out of Carneades’ thoughts (disputatio) on suffering through the fall of one's country was ‘a treatment so effective that soon their wounds were only scars’ (Cic. Tusc. 3.54):Footnote 58 Carneadean philosophy has healing powers. Thus it should come as no surprise that Diogenes’ description of Carneades’ death reports that on that occasion ‘there was, they say, a lunar eclipse’ (φασιν ἔκλειψιν γενέσθαι σελήνης, 4.64). The eclipse is the kind of astral phenomenon which accompanies apotheosis:Footnote 59 so, while Diogenes merely diagnoses the moon's sympathy (συμπάθεια), it might not be too far-fetched to say that Carneades is located on the cusp of godhead himself. The upshot is that Lucilius’ Concilium uses Carneades to toy with the prospect of unexpected divinity for Lupus. Of course, Carneades is not coming, but no wonder: in a sense, he's already there among the gods.

III. PHILOSOPHERS AT PLAY

Several aspects of Carneadean biography seem to be jocular attempts to humanize the philosopher, in line with his own penchant for vivid storytelling.Footnote 60 For instance, Cicero tells a story, which depicts his interaction with a learned and interested Roman, dating from the time of the embassy of the philosophers (Luc. 137):Footnote 61

I have read in Clitomachus a bon mot by Aulus Albinus (the Albinus who was consul with your grandfather, Lucullus, and a rather learned man, as the history he wrote in Greek shows). The story goes that in the year of his praetorship, under the consuls Publius Scipio and Marcus Marcellus, when Carneades and Diogenes the Stoic were waiting on the Senate in the Capitolium, he quipped: ‘So it's your impression, Carneades, that I am not a praetor, this is not a city, and there are no citizens in it?’ But Carneades replied: ‘No, that's his, the Stoic, view!’

It is intriguing that the philosophers are made to wait, at the mercy of the Senate, in a reminiscence of the focus on time in the Lucilian Concilium, as in Neptune's arguable reference to having missed the earlier concilium. But what of Carneades’ destructive criticism (and its prompting to disbelieve our senses) now that it is the butt of a joke? Carneadean argument allows, it seems, for him to weasel out of a challenge by claiming that the argument is owed to an opposing view. The evident flexibility of his views allows for the suspension of disbelief.

Carneades’ ghostly presence, as I have constructed it on the simple fact of his being name-checked in 35 Warmington = 31 Marx, is also relevant as a comparandum for the putative critique, in Lucilius’ Concilium Deorum, of Lupus’ luxurious lifestyle. A line thought by commentators to be part of the Concilium seems to depend on a joke whereby Lupus is a sea-bass, aptly enough because that is one meaning of his cognomen Lupus, smothered by other cheaper fishes.Footnote 62 It is preserved by Varro (Ling. 7.47): occidunt, Lupe, saperdae te et iura siluri (‘O Lupus/sea-bass, the sauces/laws of the shabar-fish and perch are the death of you’, 46 Warmington = 54 Marx). I wonder whether the smothering, here envisaged happening to Lupus as fish course,Footnote 63 evokes the famously overwhelming force of Carneadean rhetoric.Footnote 64 This would be a fine irony, because Carneades supposedly told off Epicurus for keeping a food diary (Plut. Mor. 1089c). Diogenes Laertius observed that Carneades, in similar killjoy vein, ‘declined invitations to dine out’ (4.63), because he was so critical and controversial. Carneades’ praise of Empedocles and Pythagoras, as reported by Cicero (‘not mediocre men but very great and learned’, Rep. 3.18), was on the grounds, in part, of their refusal to eat meat and therefore to apply the same justice to men as animals.Footnote 65 Still, we have at least three instances of Carneadean consumption. He is supposed to have purged himself with hellebore, a poison if taken in the wrong dosage, before debating with Chrysippus.Footnote 66 Likewise, when he hears about the Stoic Antipater of Sidon's suicide by taking poison, he calls for some too, and says it will be οἰνόμελι (‘honeyed wine’, Diog. Laert. 4.64). And as part of the argumentation against Stoic teleology, Carneades adopts—using the same methods we saw before—a Stoic position, apparently to ridicule it: ‘but the pig has been born for the natural purpose of being slaughtered and eaten’.Footnote 67

So how serious was Carneades for Lucilius? The mention of fish, in the last fragment from the Concilium discussed, could form part of the legacy of the philosopher-poet Timon of Phlius (325–235 b.c.e.), disciple of the older Sceptic Pyrrho. His three-book Silloi, in hexameters (the same metre as Lucilius’ Concilium), featured mockery of philosophers in both dialogue and monologue form (Diog. Laert. 9.111–12). It is likely that Timon's work featured jokes which compared philosophers to fish.Footnote 68 Moreover, Timon is well known for Homeric parody, and if his lines 805 SH = 31 D and 806 SH = 32 D, both of them preserved in Diogenes Laertius, are (as is likely) parodies of scenes from Odyssey 5, then we should remember that Neptune's regret over having missed a former divine conference also came from that book.Footnote 69 I therefore think that the opinion of Fiske, who claimed (showing no working) that Lucilius’ Book 1 was indebted to Timon's Silloi, should be resurrected.Footnote 70 Timon's Silloi Book 1 (and probably 2) may have incorporated a nekuia, where the shades of dead philosophers were seen, which would have to claim some descent from the Odyssey. Footnote 71

With that in mind, we can return to the Carneades fragment which occasioned this discussion. The mention of Orcus as having agency in 35 Warmington = 31 Marx serves notice that Lucilius’ Concilium is, in effect, a reverse nekuia, both a summoning of the recently deceased Lupus and a rejected (though at least mentioned) sending of Carneades from the Underworld to the gods, rather than a descent to the Underworld. I wonder whether Lucilius’ citation could dovetail with the claim of Diogenes Laertius that Carneades ‘seems to have shown some want of courage in the face of death’ (4.64—repeated with slight variation at 4.65). That attitude could be the inspiration for a reading of Lucilius’ line as a witticism about the remote prospect of Carneades’ being recalled from the dead.

Considering Timon's catalogue of philosophers, though, raises an important question: how does one tell the massed shades apart? The issue of absence and presence which has been a constant in the argument since Neptune uttered ‘if only Carneades were here … it wouldn't solve anything!’ is crystallized in Cicero's vivid recollections of Carneades’ influence on the topography of his old stamping-ground (Fin. 5.4):Footnote 72

Not long ago it was Carneades’ stage. I think I see him now (his likeness is well known), and I think that the very seat where he sat misses his voice and mourns the loss of a towering intellect.

Cicero's throwaway comment, ‘his likeness is well known’, is germane to our purposes.Footnote 73 Can Lucilius bring Carneades and Lupus back to life just by invoking them in the sacred space of his Concilium Senate, and how would we know it is them?Footnote 74 Once again, let it be stressed that the force of Neptune's lament is that Carneades, mooted and instantly dismissed, absolutely cannot return. Yet, Carneadean philosophy, in the discussion of how trust is encouraged by a cluster of features rather than just one, does—like Lucilius—use as an example (as Sextus Empiricus reports) the figure of a famous philosopher: ‘For we trust that this is Socrates from the fact that he has all his usual features too: colour, size, shape, opinion, ragged cloak and his being in a place where there is no one indistinguishable from him’ (Log. 1.178). This visualization reminds us of my original caveat that Carneades could serve as a placeholder for any old philosopher. Lucilius is, in effect, daring us to recognize Carneades before the Roman Senate in 155 b.c.e. from the mere mention of his name in a negative context in the Concilium—a situation of which Carneades would have disapproved, in view of its having too few features to identify him.

Carneades’ biography and philosophy, then, make him a figure of fun, and this is the tenor of the oddly literary anecdote which Diogenes retails about his love life. Carneades is said to have quoted Homer and Sophocles in assailing his pupil and love-rival Mentor, when trying to ban him from a lecture (Diog. Laert. 4.64). First, two lines from the Odyssey (4.384, 2.268) and then a slightly adapted line of Sophocles’ Antigone (203) were quoted, whereupon Mentor cited the Iliad in reply: οἱ μὲν ἐκήρυσσον, τοὶ δ’ ἠγείροντο μάλ’ ὦκα (‘those made the proclamation, and these quickly assembled’, Il. 2.52).Footnote 75 Mentor's comeback, taken from the aftermath of Agamemnon's dream which induces him to bring his troops together and offer them, near-disastrously, immediate exit from the Trojan War, is a clever riposte, which insinuates that Carneades is the credulous victim of a false dream.Footnote 76 It also suggests that an assembly would have turned out badly for Carneades, as Agamemnon's nearly went seriously awry. If Carneades were to suffer from participation in concilia, Lucilius, by having Neptune bring up the philosopher's name, may be alluding to the likelihood that the philosopher, had he been sent for, would fail to show himself. Indeed, we may consider whether Carneades could be considered a wrongdoer himself, and Lucilius’ mention of his name prompts his audience to consider the prospect of a (multiply) hypothetical trial, held to condemn not Lupus but Carneades,Footnote 77 which could result in exile.Footnote 78

IV. CONCLUSION

Carneades’ biography and philosophy are useful to Lucilius’ Concilium Deorum. The one admittedly exiguous and flawed clue is the mention of Carneades by name in 35 Warmington = 31 Marx. It has been argued here that Lucilius incorporates into his poetry the historical coincidence of date for Carneades’ visit to Rome in the embassy of 155 b.c.e. and Lupus’ consulship followed by his putative trial for extortion. The fragment with Carneades’ name prompts the Lucilian audience to think about the (im)possibility of the philosopher appearing before the Senate, either alongside or in place of Lupus, the target of the Concilium. Three further reasons for mentioning Carneades are: that he was known for arguing both sides of a question, especially with regard to the Stoics, whose arguments he would adopt for the sake of argument—rather like Lucilius, who is sometimes labelled a Stoic; for his questioning of the gods, one of whom (known from Homer for missing concilia) utters the line mentioning Carneades; and for being a subject of anecdote, despite an abstemious lifestyle. The citation of Carneades fits Lucilius’ Concilium into the parodic mode of Timon of Phlius, if we accept the poet's challenge, relevant to Carneades’ own thoughts about believing one's judgement, to see the philosopher in the Concilium in the first place. That challenge, essentially the putting of philosophy and philosopher into satiric verse, is one of which it is to be suspected that the philosopher Carneades would have tolerated, if not approved: Carneades does not criticize the deployment of poetry in philosophical argument tout court. When he objects (in the record of Cicero citing Antiochus, Tusc. 3.59–60) to the quoting of Euripides (in this case specifically Hypsipyle, fr. 757.921–5 Kannicht), it is purely because to discuss how humans are subject to cruel necessity is no consolation at all.Footnote 79 However, while it is too much to claim that Lucilius’ use of Carneades prefigures Juvenal's exempla of Democritus and (to a lesser extent) Heraclitus at 10.28–35 and 10.47–53,Footnote 80 or indeed that it holds the key to Lucilius’ wider religious outlook,Footnote 81 the arguments here have aimed to provide an historical contextualisation of the Concilium in line with Carneades’ biography, in ways which avert scepticism about what the fragments of a satiric treatment of the Sceptic philosopher might tell us.Footnote 82

References

1 Fragments of Lucilius will be cited with the numberings of Warmington, E.H. (ed.), Remains of Old Latin, vol. III: Lucilius, The Twelve Tables (Cambridge, MA, 1938)Google Scholar, and Marx, F., C. Lucilii Carminum Reliquiae (Leipzig, 1904–1905)Google Scholar; the text is that of Marx with deviations noted, and translations are largely adapted from those of Warmington.

2 For this in conjunction with the idea that ‘philosophy at Rome was in the air’, see Zetzel, J.E.G., ‘Philosophy is in the streets’, in Williams, G.D. and Volk, K. (edd.), Roman Reflections: Studies in Latin Philosophy (Oxford, 2015), 50–62, at 61Google Scholar. Cichorius, C., Untersuchungen zu Lucilius (Berlin, 1908), 47Google Scholar goes too far in claiming that Lucilius was therefore an adherent of Academic philosophy.

3 Carneades could also be made into a prolific philosopher by a later generation. Varro's elaboration of the Carneadea diuisio on natural ends reached the number 288: Rawson, E., Intellectual Life in the Roman Republic (London, 1985), 139Google Scholar.

4 Clitomachus is also associated with Lucius Censorinus in the same passage of Cicero's Lucullus, with the result that his ‘practical credentials’ are ‘highlighted’: Woolf, R., Cicero: The Philosophy of a Roman Sceptic (London, 2015), 28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Interestingly, Censorinus features in Valerius Maximus’ anecdote about Lupus’ political trajectory (6.9.10, discussed below).

5 Note, though, that Carneades’ pronouncements were ‘not in dialogical, question-and-answer form’: Castagnoli, L., ‘How dialectical was Stoic dialectic?’, in Nightingale, A. and Sedley, D. (edd.), Ancient Models of Mind: Studies in Human and Divine Rationality (Cambridge, 2010), 153–79, at 156Google Scholar. Ioppolo, A.M., ‘L'assenso nella filosofia di Clitomaco: un problema di linguaggio?’, in Ioppolo, A.M. and Sedley, D. (edd.), Pyrrhonists, Patricians, Platonizers: Hellenistic Philosophy in the Period 155–86 b.c. (Rome, 2007), 225–67Google Scholar challenges the usual identification of Clitomachus’ role as that of an unquestioning scribe.

6 ‘Aus Versehen’: Mommsen, T., Römisches Strafrecht (Leipzig, 1899), 708 n. 3Google Scholar; see e.g. Ferguson, W.S., ‘The Lex Calpurnia of 149 b.c.’, JRS 11 (1921), 86–100, at 100Google Scholar.

7 Freudenburg, K., ‘Seneca's Apocolocyntosis: censors in the afterworld’, in Bartsch, S. and Schiesaro, A. (edd.), The Cambridge Companion to Seneca (Cambridge, 2015), 93–105, at 98–100Google Scholar follows Bauman, R.A., Lawyers in Roman Republican Politics: A Study of the Roman Jurists in their Political Setting, 316–82 b.c. (Munich, 1983), 205–6Google Scholar; cf. Gruen, E.S., Roman Politics and the Criminal Courts (Cambridge, MA, 1968), 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who supports the earlier date based on Lentulus’ inability to commit extortion in the 140s. See Brennan, T.C., The Praetorship in the Roman Republic (Oxford, 2000), 235Google Scholar, with the note at 349. It has been noted to me by Loren J. Samons that it was proconsuls who were tried de repetundis—hence Eden, P.T., Seneca: Apocolocyntosis (Cambridge, 1984), 16Google Scholar calls Lupus one—but I find no evidence for him holding this office.

8 Some of the vast bibliography is cited by Powell, J.G.F., ‘The embassy of the three philosophers to Rome in 155 b.c.’, in Kremmydas, C. and Tempest, K. (edd.), Hellenistic Oratory: Continuity and Change (Oxford, 2013), 219–47, at 231 n. 25Google Scholar, and passim. Schmidt, E.A., Musen in Rom: Deutung von Welt und Geschichte in grossen Texten der römischen Literatur (Tübingen, 2001), 33Google Scholar is alone in treating, albeit briefly, the embassy as relevant to Lucilius’ Concilium.

9 For doubts about the accuracy of Lactantius, who ascribes a whole speech in Cic. Rep. 3, spoken by Philus, to Carneades, see Glucker, J., ‘Carneades in Rome—some unsolved problems’, in Powell, J.G.F. and North, J.A. (edd.), Cicero's Republic (London, 2001), 57–82Google Scholar.

10 This fragment has been assigned to the first book since Dousa's edition. Krenkel, W., Lucilius: Satiren (Leiden, 1970), 1.64Google Scholar places the fragment later in Book 1 than other commentators, because he connects it with the judgement of Lupus, i.e. that even Carneades would not know what to do with him.

11 Michelfeit, J., ‘Zum Aufbau des ersten Buches des Lucilius’, Hermes 93 (1965), 113–28, at 125Google Scholar. Muecke, F., ‘Rome's first satirists: Ennius and Lucilius’, in Freudenburg, K. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire (Cambridge, 2005), 33–47, at 43–4Google Scholar merely states without elaboration: ‘His recent death was topical and suited the subject of the satire.’

12 I owe this formulation to an anonymous reader, with thanks.

13 The possibility is concomitant with the status of the adynaton figure as a type of proverb, as concluded by Rowe, G.O., ‘The adynaton as a stylistic device’, AJPh 86 (1965), 387–96Google Scholar.

14 Note the re- of remittat: one reason for it being ‘second time around’ would be that Carneades had already been before the Roman Senate in 155 b.c.e. (no matter that he was alive, that time).

15 Influentially stated in Anderson, W.S., Essays in Roman Satire (Princeton, 1982), 3–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Mayer, R., ‘Persona(l) problems: the literary persona in antiquity revisited’, MD 50 (2003), 55–80, especially at 71–8Google Scholar.

16 For instance, Hass, K., Lucilius und der Beginn der Persönlichkeitsdichtung in Rom (Stuttgart, 2007), 76–89Google Scholar on Lucilius’ apparent philosophy has only one page (77) on the key fragment, and ends her overview with an accurate but uninspiring conclusion: ‘Lucilius ist nicht Stoiker, Epikureer oder Akademiker—er ist Lucilius’ (89).

17 Cf. Dutsch, D., ‘The beginnings: philosophy in Roman literature before 155 b.c.’, in Garani, M. and Konstan, D. (edd.), The Philosophizing Muse: The Influence of Greek Philosophy on Roman Poetry (Newcastle, 2014), 1–25, at 21Google Scholar on Lucilius’ unsympathetic treatment of all schools in the surviving fragments: ‘Significantly, all the philosophers come under criticism.’ Krenkel (n. 10), 2.435 elliptically comments on Lucilius’ mention of Polemon (and Xenocrates?): ‘Lucilius kannte … die Geschichte der Akademie’.

18 Powell (n. 8), especially 237–45 is keen to scotch the existence of these extra-senatorial lectures as impossible to verify, and indeed as Cicero's invention. While that is certainly possible, it seems plausible that the tradition of Carneades’ doings in Rome, and especially the for-and-against nature of his discourses there, must have sprung up soon after the visit.

19 Cf. Perin, C., ‘Scepticism and belief’, in Bett, R. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism (Cambridge, 2010), 145–64, at 149–50Google Scholar.

20 Schofield, M., ‘Cicero for and against divination’, JRS 76 (1986), 47–65, at 55Google Scholar. Cf. Cic. Luc. 131: non quo probaret sed ut opponeret Stoicis (‘not because he held it himself but in order to combat the Stoics with it’).

21 Vogt, K.M., ‘Scepticism and action’, in Bett, R. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism (Cambridge, 2010), 165–80, at 170Google Scholar. Cf. Baraz, Y., A Written Republic: Cicero's Philosophical Politics (Princeton, 2012), 134Google Scholar (with references) on how Cicero's probabile (translating Carneades’ πιθανόν, ‘believable’) ‘refers to rhetorical persuasion’.

22 As at Cic. Luc. 78; cf. Ioppolo, A.M., Opinione e scienza: il dibattito tra Stoici e Accademici nel III e nel II secolo a.C. (Naples, 1986), 195Google Scholar.

23 Cf. the treatment of Lucilius as involved with Stoic anti-compositional theories of grammatical arrangement in Horace's Satires: see Freudenburg, K., The Walking Muse: Horace on the Theory of Satire (Princeton, 1993), 109–19, 132–9, 145–62Google Scholar. Mariotti, I., Studi Luciliani (Florence, 1960), 40Google Scholar claims that Panaetius via Scipio Aemilianus necessarily infused Lucilius with Stoic ideas, though note Raschke, W.R., ‘Arma pro amico: Lucilian satire at the crisis of the Roman Republic’, Hermes 115 (1987), 299–318, at 302–3Google Scholar.

24 749 Warmington = 738 Marx, certa sunt sine detrimento quae inter sese commodent (‘There are established things which men may give and take on loan among themselves without disadvantage’; cf. Cic. Off. 1.51); the infamous uirtus fragment (1196–208 Warmington = 1326–38 Marx), which Görler, W., ‘Zum virtus-Fragment des Lucilius (1326–1338 Marx) und zur Geschichte der stoischen Güterlehre’, Hermes 112 (1984), 445–68Google Scholar sees as Stoic, partly accepted by Dutsch (n. 17), 22–3, though Gruen, E.S., Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 310Google Scholar thinks it is straight parody; Raschke, W.R., ‘The virtue of Lucilius’, Latomus 49 (1990), 352–69, at 364–5Google Scholar claims it to be practical Roman moralizing, rejecting Greek influence.

25 See Chahoud, A., ‘Romani ueteres atque urbani sales: a note on Cicero, De Oratore 2.262 and Lucilius 173M’, in Kraus, C.S., Marincola, J. and Pelling, C. (edd.), Ancient Historiography and its Contexts: Studies in Honour of A.J. Woodman (Oxford, 2010), 87–96, at 94Google Scholar.

26 See e.g. Frede, M., ‘The Sceptic's two kinds of assent and the question of the possibility of knowledge’, in Rorty, R., Schneewind, J. and Skinner, Q. (edd.), Philosophy in History (Cambridge, 1984), 225–54, at 267–71Google Scholar, on the controversial interpretation of Carneades on opinions proposed by Catulus (and held by his father) at Cic. Luc. 148.

27 I have work on this fragment forthcoming elsewhere, and so do not treat it here; Ahl, F., Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets (Ithaca, NY, 1985), 95–7Google Scholar is one of many to note that Lupus’ overly harsh judgements are the basis for Lucilius’ critique of him.

28 Cf. Cic. Tusc. 4.7 on arbitration: ‘but let everyone defend his views, for judgement is free’. Gildenhard, I., Paideia Romana: Cicero's Tusculan Disputations (Cambridge, 2007), 201–3Google Scholar analyses Cicero's statements at Tusc. 4.5–7 in terms of writing under Caesar's dominatus.

29 Characterized by Atticus as ‘freedom of argumentation’ (libertas disserendi, Leg. 1.36); in that context, Cicero's argument is said to lack such Carneadean freedom, owing to his dependence on sources, but he counters the charge as necessary to deal with so important a matter as the Republic, and, in any case, he has exercised free judgement by choosing one source: Atkins, J.W., Cicero on Politics and the Limits of Reason: The Republic and Laws (Cambridge, 2013), 179–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Mariotti (n. 23), 53–4 notes the sympotic context.

31 See Cichorius (n. 2), 228; Classen, C.J., ‘Grundlagen und Absicht der Kritik des Lucilius’, in Klodt, C. (ed.), Satura lanx: Festschrift für Werner A. Krenkel zum 70. Geburtstag (Hildesheim, 1996), 11–28, at 17Google Scholar is more cautious.

32 σεμνῶς has a literary-critical role, as Aristotle uses it to describe the use of unfamiliar words at Poet. 1458a21. See Adams, J.N., Bilingualism and the Latin Language (Cambridge, 2003), 327CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Whitton, C., Pliny the Younger: Epistles Book II (Cambridge, 2013), 176Google Scholar. Arist. Rhet. 1406b3–7 characterizes τὸ σεμνόν as epic, then tragic; cf. Piwonka, M. Puelma, Lucilius und Kallimachos: Zur Geschichte einer Gattung der hellenistisch-römischen Poesie (Frankfurt, 1949), 14Google Scholar.

33 As argued by Baier, T., ‘Lucilius und die griechischen Wörter’, in Manuwald, G., Der Satiriker Lucilius und seine Zeit (Munich, 2001), 37–50, at 41Google Scholar.

34 Petersmann, H., ‘The language of early Roman satire: its function and characteristics’, in Adams, J.N. and Mayer, R.G. (edd.), Aspects of the Language of Latin Poetry (Oxford, 1999), 289–310, at 298Google Scholar thinks Ennius’ use of Greek is Lucilius’ target.

35 Cicero uses a fragment of Lucilius (1249 Warmington = 1305 Marx) to illustrate ἐποχή (Att. 13.21.3).

36 For the question, see Schmidt (n. 8), 33. Cf. Sen. Apocol. 5.2 on Claudius.

37 Gell. NA 6.14.9, Plut. Cat. 22.4; see Gruen, E.S., Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy (Leiden, 1990), 176Google Scholar.

38 Cicero comments, perhaps somewhat acidly (implying ‘Punic faith’), that ‘he was a clever man, as you'd expect from a Carthaginian’ (Luc. 98).

39 On the language issue, there are newer Roman gods such as Liber, Janus and Quirinus in attendance (24–7 Warmington = 21–2 Marx), not to mention Lupus. Chahoud, A., ‘The Roman satirist speaks Greek’, Classics Ireland 11 (2004), 1–46, at 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar raises the possibility that ‘the gods were imagined to speak an idiom of their own’.

40 Puelma Piwonka (n. 32), 30–1.

41 For Lucilius on further mortal imitation of divine banquets, see also 469 Warmington = 444 Marx, idem epulo cibus atque epulae Iouis omnipotentis (‘the same food and festive dishes in a feast of all-powerful Jupiter’), with e.g. Marx (n. 1), 2.165.

42 These fragments stem from different sources, hence the split: the former is preserved by pseudo-Asconius, the latter in Rufinianus’ De Figuris Sententiarum.

43 Fiske, G.C., Lucilius and Horace: A Study in the Classical Tradition of Imitation (Madison, 1920), 153Google Scholar, who quotes Il. 1.423 (the epithet ‘blameless’ is not Odyssean).

44 Intriguingly, the book of Clitomachus dedicated to Lucilius covered the same subjects as an earlier work of the same author dedicated to somebody else (Cic. Luc. 102): such a do-over is much like the holding of a new council.

45 Cf. Cic. Nat. D. 3.44, where Carneades is named; Meijer, P.A., Stoic Theology: Proofs for the Existence of the Cosmic God and of the Traditional Gods (Delft, 2007), 180–206Google Scholar. For the sorites, see e.g. Burnyeat, M.F., ‘Gods and heaps’, in Schofield, M. and Nussbaum, M. (edd.), Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy (Cambridge, 1982), 315–38, at 326–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Frede, D., ‘Theodicy and providential care in Stoicism’, in Frede, D. and Laks, A. (edd.), Traditions of Theology: Studies in Hellenistic Theology, its Background and Aftermath (Leiden, 2002), 85–117, at 112Google Scholar.

47 For Carneades as a positive atheist, or at least an agnostic via ‘suspension of judgement’ (cf. Sext. Emp. Math. 9.191), see Sedley, D., ‘From the Presocratics to the Hellenistic age’, in Bullivant, S. and Ruse, M. (edd.), The Oxford Handbook of Atheism (Oxford, 2013), 139–51, at 147–50Google Scholar; Whitmarsh, T., Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (London, 2016), 161–5Google Scholar.

48 Cf. Long, A.A., ‘Scepticism about gods in Hellenistic philosophy’, in Griffith, M. and Mastronarde, D.J. (edd.), Cabinet of the Muses: Essays on Classical and Comparative Literature in Honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer (Atlanta, 1990), 279–91, at 287Google Scholar: ‘nor is it difficult to imagine Carneades anticipating Plutarch in ridiculing the very notion of perishable gods’. See e.g. Thorsrud, H., Ancient Scepticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2009), 60–5Google Scholar on the nuances of Carneades’ arguments (as represented at Cic. Nat. D. 3.29–34).

49 Contra e.g. the bald statement of Krenkel (n. 10), 2.705. I do not follow the justification of Marx (n. 1), 2.419 that this is the ‘wit of a most elegant poet who has mixed in his satire the human with the divine, immortal with mortal, living and dead’. See the important discussion of Pease, A.S., ‘The son of Neptune’, HSPh 54 (1943), 69–82Google Scholar.

50 The early Lucilian editor Dousa assigned the fragment to Book 1, though Cichorius (n. 2), 347 guesses that its place is somewhere in Books 2 to 10, on complex dating grounds (between 119 and 112 b.c.e., he claims).

51 Cf. the scenario sketched by Waszink, J.H., ‘Zur ersten Satire des Lucilius’, in Korzeniewski, D. (ed.), Die römische Satire (Darmstadt, 1970), 267–74, at 270Google Scholar, where Neptune speaks against Rome and in Lupus’ defence; see also Martin, S. Romano, El tópico grecolatino del concilio de los dioses (Hildesheim, 2009), 171Google Scholar on the ‘humanization’ of Neptune in the Carneades fragment and on the attack on Apollo's divination, the latter not treated here.

52 Cf. Knuuttila, S. & Sihvola, J., ‘Ancient Scepticism and philosophy of religion’, in Sihvola, J. (ed.), Ancient Scepticism and the Sceptical Tradition (Helsinki, 2000), 125–44, at 131–2Google Scholar.

53 See e.g. Fantham, E., ‘Mime: the missing link in Roman literary history’, CW 82 (1989), 153–63, at 161 n. 47Google Scholar for Lucilius as the possible start of a tradition of divine councils. I do not share the opinion supported by Skutsch, O., Studia Enniana (London, 1968), 109–12Google Scholar that the hexameter-ending feruentia rapa uorare (Apocol. 9.5) was originally from Lucilius.

54 There is no link, contra Pierini, R. degl'Innocenti, ‘Il concilio degli dèi tra Lucilio e Ovidio’, A&R 32 (1987), 137–47Google Scholar, with Ov. Met. 1.190–1. However, a better comparison involving Carneades might be Cic. Fin. 2.59: ‘as Carneades says, imagine you know that a viper is lurking somewhere, and that someone whose death would benefit you is about to sit down on it unawares.’

55 Ascribed to Book 1 by Nonius, here with Scaliger's rendering icterus for transmitted citer, not ‘Lachmann's’ as claimed at Goh, I., ‘Trebonius’ allusion to Lucilius (Cic. Fam. 12.16.3)’, SO 87 (2013), 79–89, at 87CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where teter is adopted. I do not see the ‘consternation’ that Muecke (n. 11), 46 identifies. Krenkel (n. 10), 1.121 claims that ‘Ein Gott beschreibt den Lupus mit kräftigen Worten’.

56 That said, Diogenes claims that Carneades grew his hair and nails owing to his devotion to philosophy (4.62), which suggests an uncivilized and bestial aspect to his lifestyle.

57 See Goldhill, S., ‘The anecdote: exploring the boundaries between oral and literate performance in the Second Sophistic’, in Johnson, W.A. and Parker, H.N. (edd.), Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome (Oxford, 2009), 96–112, at 106Google Scholar for this passage in the context of the Second Sophistic chreia tradition.

58 White, S.A., ‘Cicero and the therapists’, in Powell, J.G.F. (ed.), Cicero the Philosopher (Oxford, 1995), 219–46, at 242Google Scholar; the Latin seems to indicate that this remedy is as effective as the passage of time, with the same kind of ‘even if’ as in 35 Warmington = 31 Marx. Cf. Carneades on freedom from pain (Cic. Fin. 2.38).

59 See e.g. Cole, S., Cicero and the Rise of Deification at Rome (Cambridge, 2013), 90CrossRefGoogle Scholar (on Cic. Rep. 1.25), 94 (on Rep. 2.17), 100 (on Rep. 6.24)—all concerning Romulus, though cf. Plut. Aem. 17.7. Gärtner, H.-A., ‘Politische Deutungen von Sonnenfinsternissen in der Antike’, in Köhler, H., Görgemanns, H. and Baumbach, M. (edd.), “Sturmend auf finsterem Pfad …”: Ein Symposion zur Sonnenfinsternis in der Antike (Heidelberg, 2000), 35–48, at 44Google Scholar discusses this eclipse, recorded in the Suda as a solar eclipse, at the death of Carneades as intended to oppose Carneades, the moon, to Plato, the sun. Thanks to Lynette Mitchell and Karen Ní Mheallaigh for assistance on this point.

60 Cf. Annas, J., ‘Cicero on Stoic moral philosophy and private property’, in Griffin, M. and Barnes, J. (edd.), Philosophia Togata: Essays on Philosophy and Roman Society (Oxford, 1989), 151–73, at 157Google Scholar: ‘Carneades’ speech [against justice] was clearly a source of good examples.’

61 Cf. Cic. Luc. 98: ‘Carneades used to joke (ludere): “if my conclusion is valid, I stick to it; but if it's invalid, Diogenes should pay me back my mina”.’

62 Connors, C., ‘Epic allusion in Roman satire’, in Freudenburg, K. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire (Cambridge, 2005), 123–45, at 127–9Google Scholar. Waszink (n. 51), 270 notes that Neptune, as god of the sea, may well have spoken this line, and observes the Greek diction at 272.

63 There is here a possible onomastic pun, of the type identified by Gale, M., ‘Etymological wordplay and poetic succession in Lucretius’, CPh 96 (2001), 168–72Google Scholar: Carneades’ name begins with carn-, the root of the Latin word for ‘flesh’ (caro, carnis, f.). Cf. the second Homeric quotation in Diog. Laert. 4.63, which incorporates Mentor and thus juxtaposes Homer's Mentor with the interlocutor Mentor, who was cuckolding Carneades: Usher, M.D., ‘Carneades’ quip: orality, philosophy, wit, and the poetics of impromptu quotation’, Oral Tradition 21 (2006), 190–209, at 195CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Cf. e.g. Numenius, fr. 27 = Eusebius, Preparation 14.738d: ‘And if there were ever a need of marvellous statements, he would rise up as violent as a river in flood, overflowing with rapid stream everything on this side and that, and would fall on his hearers and drag them along with him in a tumult.’

65 See e.g. Sorabji, R., Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate (Ithaca, NY, 1993), 127–8Google Scholar. Cf. Cic. Nat. D. 3.29, where Carneades is claimed to have argued that every living thing is mortal because corporeal and changeable.

66 Val. Max. 8.7 ext. 5; in Plin. HN 25.51, Gell. NA 17.15 it is Carneades before debating Zeno; at Petron. Sat. 88.4 it is Chrysippus himself who takes the hellebore; see Bartsch, S., Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural (Chicago, 2015), 88Google Scholar.

67 Porph. Abst. 3.20.3, with Sedley, D., Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007), 236–8Google Scholar.

68 I support, though, the cautious conclusions of Clayman, D.L., Timon of Phlius: Pyrrhonism into Poetry (Berlin and New York, 2010), 107–12Google Scholar, who is loath to believe in Diels's influential attribution of a full-blown fishing scene to Timon (based on Lucian's Piscator).

69 For these fragments, see now Lurie, M., ‘Der schiffbrüchige Odysseus oder: Wie Arkesilaos zum Skeptiker wurde. Zu Timon von Phleius Fr. 806 SH (32 D)’, Philologus 58 (2014), 183–6Google Scholar, with Clayman (n. 68), 108–9.

70 Fiske (n. 43), 152–3, endorsed by e.g. Richlin, A., The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor (New York, 1992), 172Google Scholar.

71 Clayman (n. 68), 81–3, with Ax, W., ‘Timons Gang in die Unterwelt: ein Betrag zur Geschichte der antiken Literaturparodie’, Hermes 119 (1991), 177–93Google Scholar.

72 Cicero thus participates in a ‘symbolic heroizing of Carneades’: Lévy, C., ‘The Sceptical Academy: decline and afterlife’, in Bett, R. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism (Cambridge, 2010), 81–104, at 83Google Scholar.

73 Yet, the statue of Carneades in Athens which inspired Cicero's recollection is more conciliatory than might be expected from the anger he showed towards the Stoics (‘against whose teaching his temper had grown hot’, Cic. Tusc. 5.83): Zanker, P. (trans. Shapiro, A.), The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995), 180–3Google Scholar.

74 Cf. Cic. Fat. 19 with its example regarding causation that ‘Carneades is going down to the Academy’, and the explanation (with piquant ‘boredom’) at Woolf (n. 4), 90.

75 Usher (n. 63) has the details, in the context of oral composition in spontaneous philosophy.

76 Usher (n. 63), 204.

77 Cf. the comparison at Numenius, fr. 27 (= Eusebius, Preparation 14.738d) of Carneades to a robber; van Nuffelen, P., Rethinking the Gods: Philosophical Readings of Religion in the Post-Hellenistic Period (Cambridge, 2012), 76Google Scholar is too quick to dismiss this.

78 Note that Cicero says that Carneades and Clitomachus were ‘in exile’, from Cyrene and Carthage respectively, as they lived permanently abroad in Athens (exsilium … quantum tandem a perpetua peregrinatione differt, Tusc. 5.107): the phrasing is suggestive for the similarity of Carneades and Lupus here posited, given that, although repetundae was not a capital charge (cf. Sherwin-White, A.N., ‘The extortion procedure again’, JRS 42 [1952], 43–55Google Scholar), those convicted routinely fled Rome to avoid paying large sums of money in damages: see e.g. Alexander, M.C., ‘How many Roman senators were ever prosecuted? The evidence from the Late Republic’, Phoenix 47 (1993), 238–55, at 243–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Tusc. 5 passage is linked to the Luc. 137 joke (reproduced above) by Ioppolo, A.M., ‘Carneade e il terzo libro delle Tusculanae’, Elenchos 1 (1980), 76–91, at 89–90Google Scholar.

79 Despite what Sextus Empiricus says about ‘the myth-making of poets … full of every impiety’ (Math. 9.192), and contra Wardle, D., Cicero on Divination: De divinatione, Book 1 (Oxford, 2006), 132Google Scholar on Cic. Div. 1.13. Caston, R.R., ‘Pacuuius hoc melius quam Sophocles: Cicero's use of drama in the treatment of the emotions’, in Cairns, D. and Fulkerson, L. (edd.), Emotions between Greece and Rome (London, 2015), 129–48, at 147Google Scholar claims that Carneades here ‘shows an unwillingness to confront pain in a realistic way’.

80 See now Keane, C., Juvenal and the Satiric Genre (Oxford, 2015), 117–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with Lucilius’ uirtus fragment referred to at 149.

81 See, for another example beyond the Concilium, Feeney, D., Literature and Religion at Rome (Cambridge, 1998), 93–4Google Scholar.

82 This article has been helped by advice from many readers, both anonymous and known to the author, including Alessandro Barchiesi, Kirk Freudenburg and Emily Gowers, and the editors of CQ. A large debt is also owed to audiences at Boston University, especially James Uden, and Dartmouth College, particularly Michael Lurie and Roberta Stewart, with special thanks to Margaret Graver.