This volume is based on A.-B.’s 2019 postdoctoral thesis (Habilitation). By situating herself at the intersection of two blossoming fields, ancient bilingual codeswitching and philosophy in Cicero’s letters, A.-B. has a well-defined, though artificially restricted, object of study: Greek words of philosophical import in Cicero’s letters. Not Latin philosophical loanwords (of course, they are discussed throughout incidentally). Not unphilosophical Greek words (of course, A.-B. acknowledges room for particular disagreements about what belongs to a philosophical context). Not Greek philosophical words in the dialogues (though general differences between dialogical and epistolary uses are discussed, pp. 93–101). The letters are particularly dense with codeswitching due to the epistolary genre’s power to define in-groups by means of informal and exclusionary sermo. As A.-B. writes (p. 25), her study promises to repudiate approaches that separate the philosophical from the historical and literary study of Cicero. A separate point of methodological interest, worth repeating, is that A.-B.’s focus on Greek words in the letters qualifies our understanding of Cicero’s preference for domesticating translations elsewhere.
A.-B.’s study proceeds in two parts. The first elaborately defines and describes the elements of the corpus under examination. The definition of the corpus comprises a series of tables running over 80 pages, and its description is no less exhaustive, divided into the categories of nominals and attributive adjectives, verbs and adverbs, titles and names, clauses (citations and doctrines) and propositions (anonymous proverbs and, in verse and in prose, citations, paraphrases and allusions). For each of these categories A.-B. offers formal and functional explanations of their use. The formal explanations are often of less interest: nominals, besides their statistical preponderance, are often technical terms difficult to translate; attributive adjectives are often school-specific; verbs are rare but can relate Cicero or his addressee to philosophical actions; vel sim. Still, there are many useful observations about the general contours of Cicero’s philosophical Greek, such as that citations need not be introduced by speech verbs or preserve direct speech (pp. 164–5), that greater density of philosophical Greek in the letters tracks periods when Cicero is at one of his libraries, Asia Minor or Athens (p. 184), and that the variety and scale of philosophical Greek in the letters implies Cicero and his addressees regularly read whole books of philosophy in addition to keeping personal anthologies (pp. 185–90).
As for the function of Greek philosophical citations, A.-B., following a model offered by A. Gangloff (p. 173), identifies three purposes of interest: as practical models, to motivate action without recourse to argument; as aesthetic ornaments, to change and direct one’s attitude in a conversation; and as authorial proof, to persuade by the agreement of a credible source. By the last A.-B. does not mean that Cicero, most of the time, cites Greek to get around a demand for argument, but that citation (by asserting a source’s auctoritas) is a way of sponsoring a philosophical view or concept, so that it receives due consideration. The distinction can be difficult to maintain, as when A.-B. invokes W. Görler’s analogising of philosophical to political authority (p. 178): difficult, since in the senate authority did allow one to carry the day without argument. The last chapter of the first part is an extended prosopography of thirteen of the most important correspondents in the corpus. Without committing herself to conclusions, A.-B. presses the correspondence for evidence of philosophical allegiance among contemporaries whose relation to philosophy is more uncertain (e.g. Trebatius Testa, Appius Claudius Pulcher, Servius Sulpicius Rufus and Decimus Iunius Brutus).
The second half of the book is a grand survey of the corpus organised by affiliation: Plato, Socratics and Academics; Aristotle and Peripatetics; Stoics; and Epicureans. The Platonic/Socratic/Academic line gets the most attention from Cicero and, so, from A.-B. (in nearly 150 pages). As with certain sections in Part 1, the structure of chapters is perhaps too subtle: it does not help to know where one is to come to a subtitle starting ‘I.A.4.iv.c.’. On the topic of Plato, A.-B. proceeds from preliminary remarks about Cicero’s knowledge of Plato (likely from an edition prepared by Atticus by way of Alexandria), to citations and references to the name of Plato (only once in Greek), to paraphrases and allusions to Platonic language, and to Platonic window references (mostly to Homer). As before, A.-B.’s observations are perceptive, such as Cicero has a habit of alluding to Plato with a bilingual tag. For instance, ἀλλὰ δὴ ταῦτα μὲν τῷ θεῷ μελήσει (Pl. Phd. 95b) becomes sed μελήσει in three letters to Atticus (Att. 12.3.2; 14.17.3; 15.4.2); what makes the identification convincing is that the dates of all three letters coincide with the composition of Tusculan Disputations 1. A.-B. turns this method around to propose, with less force, that the translation of Protagoras can be dated to around winter 50 to spring 49 bce: three times in this period Cicero uses forms of σκέμμα (Att. 7.8.3; 7.21.3; 10.1.3) in apparent reference to Prt. 351e (but the noun is also used in the Crito and the Republic). The proposal, if right, would mean that what we have of the translation is an incomplete fragment, not that Cicero started and soon quit.
These two Platonic examples exemplify the strengths and limits of A.-B.’s study. By its own standards, the book is a success and will continue the push to bring the letters into more familiar debates about Cicero’s and Hellenistic philosophy. With its extensive scope and richness of detail, it is a valuable resource that ought to be consulted. The breadth and depth of the investigation means that one cannot absorb and remember everything on offer in a single reading. The inevitable cost of putting so much material in the book is that there is far more that is exploratory than probative. A.-B. acknowledges this, flagging hypotheses as fragile (e.g. on Epictetus, Diss. 3.24.87 and Att. 4.8a as Stoic intertexts, p. 562) or even less (e.g. on Philo’s ethics as the context for παραινετικῶς in Att. 10.10, pp. 431–2).
The book’s usefulness as a resource has been impeded by cost-cutting in production: the long tables that make up the majority of Chapters 1 and 2 were originally color-coded but have been printed in greyscale. For one table (II.A.1: ‘Tableau des occurrences grecques’) this matters, and readers are left to compare shades of grey against a key. Ideally, these tables could be made available as digital files. The index of letters is also inadequate: it would have been helpful to be able to work backwards from a citation of a Platonic or Ciceronian dialogue, or the name of a philosopher, to see whether it bears on philosophical Greek in the letters. A book slimmer than this one may also not have been afforded more costly production, but readers may have welcomed such a trade-off.
