Cedant arma togae, ‘let arms yield to the toga’. Thus begins the famous verse from Cicero's poem on his consulship that highlights the protagonist's suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy by favourably contrasting this political achievement with success on the battlefield.Footnote 1 But how does the line continue? Its conclusion is transmitted in two different versions, concedat laurea laudi and concedat laurea linguae, and scholars have long been divided over which one is Cicero's original text. In this paper, we revisit the issue and not only (1) propose an answer to the question of what Cicero actually wrote, but also (2) examine those attestations of the verse that date to the author's own lifetime, elucidating the contexts that account for the quotation of one variant rather than the other.
1. WHAT WAS WRITTEN?
How do we know about the famous line?Footnote 2 The first variant – ‘let the laurel (i.e. the symbol of military triumph) yield to praise (i.e. the praise accorded to the consul Cicero as a civic magistrate)’ – is quoted by Cicero himself (Pis. 74; Off. 1.77)Footnote 3 and alluded to in an exchange of letters between Cicero and Cato of 50 b.c.e. (Fam. 15.4–6 = 110–12 SB).Footnote 4 The second – ‘let the laurel yield to the tongue (i.e. speech or eloquence)’ – shows up in the pseudo-Sallustian invective against Cicero (6), in Quintilian (Inst. 11.1.24) and, in Greek paraphrase, in Plutarch's life of Cicero (51: τῇ γλώττῃ τὴν θριαμβικὴν ὑπείκειν δάφνην). It is further alluded to in Laus Pisonis (35–6; quoted below) and in a laudatory address to Cicero in Pliny the Elder (HN 7.117: in toga triumphum linguaeque lauream merite), which purports to be at least in part a quotation from Julius Caesar.
What speaks in favour of the laudi version is, of course, the fact that it is used by Cicero himself (who never quotes the variant with linguae in his extant works). The pairing of the words laurea and laudi furthermore not only creates a pleasing assonance but also brings out the functional parallelism of the two concepts: just as the victorious general receives the triumphal laurel, the successful civic magistrate earns praise (whereas lingua is not a reward but a characteristic or skill, and thus conceptually different from laurea). In addition, the juxtaposition of laurea and laus appears to be traditional: it occurs already in Plautus (Cist. 201: parite laudem et lauream, ‘bring forth praise and laurel’)Footnote 5 and is alluded to by Valerius Maximus (2.8.5) and Seneca (Hercules furens 828–9). The words' similarity in sound even gave rise to a folk etymology, according to which the name of the plant was derived from the praise it came to symbolize in the ritual of the Roman triumph (or vice versa). Thus, Servius Auctus on Ecl. 8.12 writes: cur ... triumphantes lauro coronentur, haec ratio est, quoniam apud ueteres a laude habuit nomen: nam laudum dicebant (‘the reason why triumphing generals are crowned with laurel [laurus] is that in early times it received its name from “praise” [laus]: for they called it laudus’).Footnote 6Laus and laurea thus appear to be a natural pair, combined by Cicero into a pithy maxim.
What the verse with linguae has going for it, however, is that it makes considerably better sense. Though commentators and translators are quick to gloss laudi with something like ‘civic praise’,Footnote 7 the noun in no way has this restrictive connotation, but is a general term for praise or glory.Footnote 8 As a matter of fact, it is often used for military renown, as the popular association of laus and laurea itself indicates. It is, then, not at all obvious how and why laurea should yield to laus: after all, the ‘laurel’, as we have seen, is typically understood to be the very manifestation of the ‘praise’ bestowed in the triumph. However, if laurea is taken metonymically to mean ‘military achievement’, then lingua, ‘excellence in speaking’, is easily interpreted as a rival property, with the contrasting pair laurea linguae picking up arma togae from the hexameter's first half. Cicero's self-contained aphorism thus opposes the laurel-crowned man-at-arms to the orator in the toga, as was well understood by the author of the Laus Pisonis, who paraphrases (35–6):
Already at the time when great Cicero flourished, laurel-bearing arms yielded to the eloquent wearers of the toga.
It is thus not surprising that the more easily comprehensible line with linguae wins out in the tradition: after 44 b.c.e., the date of De officiis, there is no further evidence for laudi. And while the majority of the quotations of the verse with linguae are admittedly considerably later than Cicero's own lifetime, the passage from Caesar reported by Pliny points to the currency of this version already before the Ides of March.Footnote 9
How are we to explain the existence of the two variants? Scholars have typically favoured one of the following two scenarios. According to the first, Cicero originally wrote linguae but, when the verse encountered criticism and ridicule, tacitly changed it to laudi – without, however, being able to influence the subsequent reception of the line where, as we have seen, linguae carries the day.Footnote 10 According to the second theory, by contrast, Cicero wrote laudi, and the version with linguae represents ‘a satirical distortion by some Ciceromastix’.Footnote 11
Both explanations are predicated on the belief that concedat laurea linguae was somehow more problematic and liable to attack and derision than the laudi variant;Footnote 12 however, there is no evidence that this is in fact true. We know that the verse was indeed assailed by assorted improbi, inuidi and maligni (cf. Cic. Off. 1.77; Quint. Inst. 11.1.24), but the texts that make such criticism explicit almost never address the second part of the line,Footnote 13 focussing instead on cedant arma togae and attacking it as either presumptuous or insincere. As for the first, Piso reportedly accused Cicero of downplaying the military achievements of Pompey in order to extol his own civic exploits: ‘tuae dicis’ inquit ‘togae summum imperatorem esse cessurum’ (‘“you claim”, he says, “that the greatest general will yield to your toga”’, Pis. 73; cf. the whole of sections 72–5). As for the second, the author of the pseudo-Sallustian invective questions Cicero's commitment to civic forms of conflict resolution as implied by the contrast of arma and togae: quasi uero togatus et non armatus ea quae gloriaris confeceris, atque inter te Sullamque dictatorem praeter nomen imperii quicquam interfuerit (‘as though you had really achieved the things in which you glory while wearing the toga and not bearing arms, and as if there were any difference between you and the dictator Sulla except the name of the office’, 6).Footnote 14
Not only does no surviving text specifically criticize linguae, but the passages in the Laus Pisonis and in Pliny/Caesar, as we have seen, explicitly praise Cicero's eloquence in the context of alluding to our verse. There is thus no reason to believe that ancient readers found ‘let the laurel yield to the tongue’ more outrageous or ridiculous than ‘let the laurel yield to praise’, and to posit either that Cicero deliberately tried to suppress the former version (all the while leaving the rest of the offending verse intact) or that a parodist would have invented it in order to poke fun at the author. So where do the line's two versions come from?
It seems to us the most economic assumption that both variants are correct: the verse appeared twice in De consulatu suo, once with laudi and once with linguae. Variations of this kind are not unheard of in Latin poetry. In the near-contemporary De rerum natura, Lucretius frequently repeats individual lines or even short passages, sometimes with subtle changes in wording.Footnote 15 Thus, for example, the famous metapoetic passage that first appears in 1.926–50 is repeated almost verbatim in 4.1–25.Footnote 16 However, while in the first version the poet tells his student that he wishes to hold his attention ‘until you perceive fully (perspicis) the entire nature of things, in what shape it is arrayed (qua constet compta figura)’ (1.949–50), in the second version he proposes to do so ‘until you understand (percipis) the entire nature of things and are fully aware of the profit (ac persentis utilitatem)’ (4.24–5). The changed wording reflects the progress of the student from the first to the fourth book: while he was previously supposed simply to study nature, he is now expected to understand it and reap the philosophical profit of his insights.Footnote 17
To return to De consulatu suo, we unfortunately have no evidence for the position of the famous line(s) in the poem. We may speculate that the laudi version occurred as part of the narrative of the consul's being honoured by Senate and/or people and was uttered either by the narrator or otherwise an internal speaker, possibly Cicero himself.Footnote 18 Whatever the placement, the context of the line must have made it clear that the term laus here had an unusually restricted meaning, referring specifically to praise won by civic, non-military measures and thus relating to laurea as toga does to arma.Footnote 19 As for the variant with linguae, which can be read as a kind of summary of Cicero's consular achievements, this may have been positioned at either the beginning or the end of the poem, spoken by the poet in the context of a proem or epilogue, or perhaps by one of the Muses or other divine interlocutors with whom Cicero notoriously interacted throughout the epic.Footnote 20 A prominent placement of this kind would make sense especially if we take cedant arma togae to have an additional metapoetic meaning and function as a kind of recusatio, in which the poet idiosyncratically chooses a poem of peace over a traditional martial epic.Footnote 21
Whatever the case may be and whichever version occurred first in the poem, the repetition of the verse, with one crucial word changed, would have surprised readers, who would first have had a sense of recognition before having their interest piqued by the change of semantic direction in the line's final word. While it can, of course, not be proven that Cicero included both verses in De consulatu suo, this assumption is the only one to account for the evidence as we have it while, incidentally, also according the author a measure of poetic sophistication not unlike that found in his contemporary Lucretius.
2. WHAT WAS QUOTED?
If we accept that Cicero himself wrote both concedat laurea laudi and concedat laurea linguae, we may still ask why individual sources chose to quote either the one or the other version. This is especially interesting for early citations of the line, by writers close in time to the work's composition, whom we might expect to know that two different variants existed. Later authors, by contrast, may not have read Cicero's text itself but have been familiar only with a few catchy lines, including our verse in its more comprehensible, and soon canonical, version with ‘tongue’. In what follows, we examine the early reception of cedant arma togae, attempting to explain why the four oldest witnesses to our fragment elected to refer to laudi or linguae, respectively.
(a) Cicero's In Pisonem of 55–54 b.c.e. (Pis. 74)
The earliest citation of the verse is by Cicero himself. Towards the end of his invective against L. Calpurnius Piso, after comparing Piso's consulate, governorship of Macedonia and re-entry into Rome to Cicero's own consulate, exile and return – much to Piso's detriment, of course – Cicero proceeds to consider Piso's intellectual accomplishments. Starting from his opponent's mistaken understanding of Epicureanism as sheer voluptuary hedonism (63), Cicero expresses sympathy for Piso's (unnamed) house-philosopher and poet, Philodemus: the poor man was compelled, by his patron's ignorance, gluttony and stupidity, to present Epicureanism in a manner befitting Piso's character rather than the true character of Epicurus' beliefs.
At that point (72), Cicero moves from Piso's misunderstanding of philosophy to his misunderstanding of poetry – in this case, Cicero's own De consulatu suo. Piso, according to Cicero, had offered praise for Cicero's achievements as consul, and added that it was not resentment for his actions but for his verse that had led to his exile: non illa tibi ... inuidia nocuit sed uersus tui (‘that it wasn't the resentment that hurt you; it was your verse’). According to Piso, the insult in Cicero's line cedant arma togae ... had so offended Pompey that he turned against Cicero and permitted, or even encouraged, Cicero's enemies to bring about his exile.
Whether Piso had actually commented on Cicero's line must remain uncertain, as all we know about the exchange between the two men comes from Cicero's speech. Back in Rome after his exile, Cicero blamed Piso and Gabinius, the consuls of 58, for what had happened to him and took every opportunity to attack Piso's conduct. Piso, not unnaturally, took exception to Cicero's attacks, and on his return from governing Macedonia (some time between July and September of 55), he spoke in the Senate in rebuttal. The extant In Pisonem is a rewritten and expanded version of what Cicero said in reply to Piso; it was probably completed and circulated in 54.Footnote 22 Cicero took the opportunity of the written text to attack Piso at length, and in particular to draw pointed contrasts between his own public actions and glory and the abysmal and evil behaviour of Piso.
In Pisonem is carefully structured as a set of comparisons between Cicero and Piso: their consulates, their achievements, their departures from and returns to Rome. In all this, as John Dugan has shown, the character of Piso is constructed as an anti-Cicero, as a model of how a consul should not behave.Footnote 23 Piso's criticism of Cicero's verse is introduced for several reasons: it provides yet one more opportunity for Cicero to contrast their public actions; it adds one more category to the range of Piso's incapacities and allows Cicero to lecture him on elementary poetic interpretation; it lets Cicero offer his own interpretation of his verse and of his relationship to Pompey; and, perhaps most important, the words of Cicero's poem are refashioned into a major thematic element of the speech as a whole.
According to Cicero, Piso had claimed that the phrase cedant arma togae meant that the greatest general should give way to a civilian, in other words, that Cicero's own accomplishments as consul, without an army, were greater than those of Pompey in the East, and that Pompey had rightly been offended. In fact, Cicero claims, all he meant was that war would give way to peace: bellum ac tumultum paci atque otio concessurum (73), in other words that the insurrection of Catiline and the war he threatened were being replaced by order and tranquillity.Footnote 24 Piso really ought to ask his house-Greek, the poet, how to interpret metonymy.
The difficulty of Piso's interpretation for Cicero, of course, was not that it was wrong, but that it was essentially right: Cicero's communications with Pompey did try to elevate his own accomplishments as at least comparable to Pompey's, and he viewed his supplicatio and acclamation as pater patriae as equivalent to a triumph.Footnote 25 And that, as Piso responds in Cicero's account (74), is exactly what is meant by the second half of the line, concedat laurea laudi. Cicero, understandably, at this point gives up the lesson in hermeneutics and returns to invective; he never offers an explanation of the last three words of the line to counter Piso's implicit (and correct) interpretation of it as saying that Pompey's military glory should give way to praise for Cicero's civilian accomplishments. Instead, he returns to one of the earlier topics of the speech, Piso's inglorious return to Rome from his (according to Cicero) disastrous proconsulate in Macedon – and especially his failure, not only to be awarded, but even to aspire to, a triumph. In Cicero's account, Piso disdained this honour, in line with his Epicurean beliefs but with despicable disregard for the traditional values of a Roman statesman and military commander (38–9, 44, 56–63, 74, 97). Piso's quotation of Cicero's (in)famous line is thus a godsend for the orator (74):
‘at in altero illo’ inquit ‘haeres, “concedat laurea laudi”.’ immo me hercule habeo tibi gratiam; haererem enim nisi tu me expedisses.
‘But you are in the soup’ (you say) ‘with that second part: “Let the laurel yield to praise”.’ By god, on the contrary: I'm grateful to you. I would have been in the soup if you hadn't pulled me out.
Cicero can't believe his luck: how can a man who himself rejected the triumphal laurel blame Cicero for having done the same?
In this context, the orator gleefully returns to a scene he has already mentioned twice before (53–5, 61), that is, Piso's inglorious re-entry into the city, during which he ditched the laurel associated with his acclamation as imperator at the Esquiline Gate, thus giving up his imperium and any possible claim to a triumph (74):
nam cum tu timidus ac tremens tuis ipse furacissimis manibus detractam cruentis fascibus lauream ad portam Esquilinam abiecisti, iudicasti non modo amplissimae sed etiam minimae laudi lauream concessisse.
For when, timid and trembling, you pulled the laurel from the blood-soaked fasces with your thieving hands and threw it away at the Esquiline Gate, you made a judgement that the laurel gave way not only to the most elaborate praise, but even to the tiniest.
Acting in this shameful way, Piso himself effectively made the point (thus Cicero) that the laurel had to yield to praise – and not just to immense praise (amplissima laus), such as the one earned by Cicero during his consulship, but even to the virtually non-existent praise (minima laus) that someone like Piso might possibly expect.Footnote 26
Piso's supposed abuse of his own token of military achievement enables Cicero to make the laurea into a sarcastic leitmotif of his speech. There are more laurels in In Pisonem than in any other work of Cicero: the ten occurrences of laurea and laureatus in the speech amount to 40 per cent of the occurrences of the words in the Ciceronian corpus.Footnote 27 All the laurels are attached to Piso, beginning (39, 53) with his laureate letter to the Senate and his decorated fasces. Thus, Cicero ironically compares Crassus' desire for an ovation (and laurel) for defeating Spartacus to Piso's alleged contempt for such trivial honours (58) and his deposit of his laurels at the Esquiline Gate (61) with more expressions of disdain (63). Even after the discussion of the verse from De consulatu suo (74), Cicero continues to use the withered laurels and Piso's failure to triumph as a sign of his utter failure and disgrace in Macedon (97, bis).
If Piso's rejection of the laurea thus appears as a perverted application of the sentiment expressed in the second half of Cicero's verse, it turns out that the disgraced man also shows a preference for the toga, all the while failing to understand what this garment stands for. After discussing Piso's disgraceful consulate, outstanding only in his and his fellow consul Gabinius' debaucheries (22), Cicero scornfully addresses his opponent: quid? tu in lictoribus, in toga praetexta esse consulatum putas? (‘Do you think the consulate is just lictors and a fancy toga?’, 23). Piso likes his toga, but shows no sign of living up to what it symbolizes. Contrast Cicero, who as a consul wearing the toga (togato) managed to save the Republic from certain disaster and was awarded the unprecedented honour of a supplicatio (6).
That Piso has taken to heart, without properly understanding, Cicero's maxim cedant arma togae becomes clear in the infamous incident at the Esquiline Gate. When the unambitious general dumps his laurels, his lictors change into civilian clothes, leaving behind their military accoutrements (55):
togulae lictoribus ad portam praesto fuerunt; quibus illi acceptis sagula reiecerunt, cateruam imperatori suo nouam praebuerunt.
At the gate, there were cute little togas ready for the lictors; they put them on and took off their military cloaks, providing their general with a new kind of retinue.
Piso the military commander is as much of a failure as Piso the consul, or Piso the reader of poetry. While criticizing Cicero's verse, Piso shows, through his actions, that he in fact subscribes to a greatly diminished version of it: in Piso's career, arms yield not to the toga, but to the pathetic togula, and the laurel gives way not to the kind of praise Cicero received, but to the minima laus that is all a nobody like Piso can aspire to.
From Cicero's point of view, Piso's attack on cedant arma togae was highly opportune; it gave him the chance not merely to criticize his enemy, but to use his own verse as a club with which to beat Piso. Concedat laurea laudi had its problems for Cicero, but he cleverly transformed it from being a comparison between himself and Pompey to a comparison between himself and Piso. Without the verse, he would have had to write In Pisonem very differently. He would also have had to write it very differently, if Piso (whether the actual Piso or the Pisonian dummy constructed by Cicero) had quoted the famous line with linguae rather than laudi. Cicero had no need to assert his oratorical excellence vis-à-vis Piso; what he wanted to make clear, once and for all, was that his own actions were, by all accounts, worthy of the highest praise, while those of Piso, by the latter's own admission, were nothing but a disgrace.
(b) Caesar's De analogia of 54 b.c.e. as reported by Pliny (HN 7.116–17) and Cicero (Brut. 253)
The second quotation poses much greater problems, and its elucidation is inevitably tentative, as it requires the reconstruction of a fragment of Caesar embedded in a remarkable passage of the Elder Pliny; and that in turn needs to be examined in connection with a related quotation of Caesar in Cicero's Brutus.Footnote 28 In what follows, we argue that the quotation in Pliny comes from the dedication of Caesar's De analogia; that Caesar in this text pointedly alluded to Cicero's verse using the version with linguae; and that Cicero quotes and paraphrases the very same Caesarian passage in his discussion of Caesar in the Brutus. As will become clear, the version with linguae was necessary for Caesar's purpose: to praise Cicero's oratorical accomplishments – but only his oratorical accomplishments.
In Book 7 of the Natural History, the elder Pliny offers an extensive encomium of Cicero. It comes as the culmination of a list of great ingenia, both Greek and Roman. On the Roman side, after praising Ennius and Varro – as Mary Beagon points out, a rather short list compared to the dozen Greeks he has mentionedFootnote 29 – Pliny turns to Cicero in a highly rhetorical apostrophe (HN 7.116–17):Footnote 30
innumerabilia deinde sunt exempla Romana, si persequi libeat, cum plures una gens in quocumque genere eximios tulerit quam ceterae terrae. sed quo te, M. Tulli, piaculo taceam, quoue maxime excellentem insigni praedicem? quo potius quam uniuersi populi illius genti<um> amplissimi testimonio, e tota uita tua consulatus tantum operibus electis? (117) te dicente legem agrariam, hoc est alimenta sua, abdicarunt tribus; te suadente Roscio theatralis auctori legis ignouerunt notatasque se discrimine sedis aequo animo tulerunt; te orante proscriptorum liberos honores petere puduit; tuum Catilina fugit ingenium; tu M. Antonium proscripsisti. salue primus omnium parens patriae appellate, primus in toga triumphum linguaeque lauream merite et facundiae Latiarumque litterarum parens aeque (ut dictator Caesar, hostis quondam tuus, de te scripsit) omnium triumphorum laurea maiorem, quanto plus est ingenii Romani terminos in tantum promouisse quam imperii.
If I wanted to go on, there are countless Roman examples: this one race has produced more outstanding figures than all other countries in whatever field you like. But how could I expiate keeping silent about you, Marcus Tullius, or what should I praise as your most outstanding area of excellence? What better, according to the witness of the entire population of the greatest race on earth, than by choosing out of your whole life only the accomplishments of your consulate? (117) At your say the tribes rejected the agrarian law, their own source of nourishment; at your persuasion they pardoned Roscius, the author of the theatre law, and endured with equanimity being branded by discriminatory seating; at your prayer they were ashamed to allow the children of the proscribed to seek office. It was your genius that Catiline fled; it was you who proscribed Mark Antony. Hail, you who were the first of all to be called pater patriae, the first to deserve a triumph in a toga and a laurel for your words, and as a parent just as much of Latin eloquence and letters (as your sometime enemy, the dictator Caesar, wrote about you) a laurel greater than that of all triumphs by as much as it is more to have so greatly extended the boundaries of the Roman genius than [to have extended those] of the [Roman] empire.Footnote 31
Pliny's words are not praise of Cicero in general, but are specifically directed at Cicero as consul. The list of speeches closely follows the collection that Cicero included in the volume of his consular speeches,Footnote 32 and the praise harks back to De consulatu suo: primus in toga triumphum linguaeque lauream merite.Footnote 33 With the single exception of the phrase tu M. Antonium proscripsisti there is nothing in Pliny's encomium that refers to anything later than the events of 63 b.c.e. and Cicero's subsequent references to those events.Footnote 34 But although Pliny is clearly quoting or paraphrasing Cicero in parts of the encomium, the only written work to which he explicitly refers here is not Cicero's, but Caesar's, although the fact that Caesar's name does not appear in the index to Book 7 suggests that Pliny is not citing him at first hand.Footnote 35
Perhaps because the citation of Caesar is indirect, Pliny does not name the specific work from which he is drawing (scripsit makes it clear that it was a written text, not simply an anecdote), and a number of candidates have been suggested. The Natural History contains no pointers to the quotation's origin or date. Pliny refers to the author as dictator Caesar and as Cicero's quondam enemy, but both of these are describing Caesar from the perspective of Pliny himself. Caesar was Cicero's enemy at some time in the past from the point of view of the 70s c.e., not at some time in the past relative to the time when Caesar wrote. Similarly, Pliny refers to dictator Caesar as a means of distinguishing him from other Caesars, not as a precise chronological indication: thus, in a striking anachronism, it is as dictator that Caesar breaks open the aerarium at the beginning of the civil war in HN 19.40.Footnote 36
Positive arguments for a date and source are harder to find, and tend to be subjective. A first possibility is that the quotation comes from Caesar's De analogia of 54 b.c.e., which was dedicated to Cicero and, as we know from Brutus 253 (written in 46 b.c.e.), in its preface contained praise of its dedicatee's skills as an orator. As we will discuss in greater detail below, this scenario – first suggested by G.L. Hendrickson in 1906 – is the one that we, too, believe to be correct.Footnote 37 However, a number of recent works of scholarship propose different origins for our passage. Bound up with the issue of the source is the question of how much of Pliny's encomium actually goes back to Caesar himself.
Thus, Hans Jürgen Tschiedel believes that most of the passage in Pliny is drawn from Cicero's own writings and that only the final praise of Cicero – that his glory was greater than that of any triumph because he had extended the bounds of the Roman ingenium – reflects Caesar's words. The quotation, so Tschiedel, cannot be taken from De analogia because Cicero, when referring to this work in the Brutus, would surely have made a great deal of this particular hyperbolic formulation of Caesar's. Hence, it must belong to the other work addressed by Caesar to Cicero, the Anticato of 46, written after the Brutus;Footnote 38 and the praise of Cicero reported in Pliny is so exaggerated precisely because it is intended to be cruelly pointed, drawing attention to Cicero's yearning for a military triumph for his Cilician campaign of 51 b.c.e., and suggesting that his literary triumphs were all that he deserved.Footnote 39
In finding irony here, Tschiedel is clearly right; but as will be suggested below, precisely the same irony, if not involving the Cilician campaign, can be found in the citation in the Brutus. What is more, the assignment to the Anticato makes little sense: the other two fragments of Caesar's preface to this work contrast Cicero's rhetorical skills to the simple style of Caesar as a plain military man (fr. 2 Tschiedel) and compare him to Pericles and Theramenes (fr. 3).Footnote 40 The emphasis was not on Cicero's accomplishments, verbal or military, but on the duplicity and verbal tricks that might deceive his readers into believing in Cato's greatness. Instead, as the subsequent fragments show, Caesar dwelt on the real Cato – an unpleasant drunk.
Gerhard Dobesch, in the other recent analysis of the fragment, also wants to date it after the Brutus, in part for the same reason put forward by Tschiedel (viz. that Cicero would not have left such hyperbolic praise unmentioned), but also because he takes the grandiose phrase about the bounds of Roman ingenium to refer not just to Cicero as orator, but to Cicero's larger contribution to Roman letters, particularly his philosophical work. For that reason, assigning the fragment to the Anticato will not do, because it was written before the bulk of Cicero's philosophical treatises; Dobesch thus has to posit some unidentified Caesarian work of 45 or 44.Footnote 41
All the arguments for locating the Caesarian source of the passage in the Natural History are based on the assumption that at least some of Pliny's words give an exact quotation from Caesar; assigning the quotation to the Anticato further requires that Caesar have written remarkably similar addresses to Cicero in two different works, but that, in the work that was most obviously an attack on Cicero's politics, the Anticato, he employed far more hyperbolic language than he had in offering both praise and polite disagreement in De analogia (as reported in the Brutus). In fact, however, the hyperbole of Pliny's citation is Pliny's, and what remains truly Caesarian in the passage reflects the same thoughts as the apparently verbatim quotation in the Brutus. But to demonstrate that, it is necessary to look more closely at Pliny's language.
In principle, the citation from Caesar might begin as early as salue primus omnium and presumably includes at least some of what follows the acknowledgment of Caesar as source. At the same time, however, there is no reason at all to believe that much of it – indeed any of it – is a verbatim quotation. Certain features of it are obviously not Caesarian. Thus, Pliny hails Cicero with an echo of Virgil's laudes Italiae: salue primus omnium parens patriae appellate recalls salue, magna parens frugum (G. 2.173).Footnote 42 The vocatives throughout are almost certainly Pliny's, and fit with his construction of the larger encomium as a hymn to Cicero. Other phrases, too, are quite clearly not Caesar's own words. In the unlikely event that Caesar explicitly mentioned Cicero's having been acclaimed as pater patriae, he would not have employed a poetic circumlocution like parens patriae. When Pliny refers to Cicero as facundiae Latiarumque litterarum parens, not only is it the case that facundia is extremely rare in Republican Latin, but it is never attested in Caesar or Cicero, and the meaning of ‘forensic eloquence’ appears first in Sallust (Iug. 30.4) and very rarely in prose at all.Footnote 43 Even more striking than facundia is the use of Latiae litterae for ‘Roman literature’,Footnote 44 a phrase that is in fact unique. Less rare, but found before Pliny exclusively in verse, is Latia lingua, a poetic equivalent for Latina lingua. Latiae ... linguae (it is attested only in this form) appears four times, two of them in a single passage of the elder Seneca (Suas. 6.27) that discusses verses of Cornelius Severus and Sextilius Ena on the death of Cicero.Footnote 45 The quotation of the former contains an expression strikingly similar to Pliny's words (fr. 13.10–11 Courtney):
A single day took off the glory of the age and, stricken with grief, the sad eloquence of the Latin tongue fell silent.
In all likelihood, Pliny in describing Cicero deliberately employed Cornelius Severus' language – and facundiae Latiarumque litterarum parens is therefore certainly not Caesar's phrase nor, for that matter, Cicero's.
The other part of the passage that is unlikely to reflect Caesar's language is the final comparison between extending the bounds of empire and extending the bounds of Roman ingenium. Cicero himself (Cat. 3.26) does compare his accomplishments as consul with Pompey's contemporary extension of the bounds of the Roman imperium, and that passage may well have served as the model for the phrase in Pliny. But he does not on that occasion play ingenium against imperium, nor does he when he refers metaphorically to the bounds of individual ingenium elsewhere (in connection with the orator Crassus in particular, De or. 1.214) – nor does Caesar anywhere in his extant works. But the two words are paired several times in Imperial Latin, and the first attestation, strikingly, is in the elder Seneca (Controv. 1 pr. 11) in connection with Cicero himself, whom the author describes as illudque ingenium quod solum populus Romanus par imperio suo habuit (‘that genius which was the only one the Roman people possessed that was equal to its empire’).Footnote 46 What is more, praise of Cicero as ‘the embodiment of verbal ingenium’ is characteristic of the rhetorical schools of the early Empire.Footnote 47
In certain respects, therefore, the language of Pliny's encomium seems very much like Pliny's language elsewhere; but it is perhaps significant also that in more than one case his choice of words seems to derive from early Imperial discussions of Cicero, perhaps directly from the elder Seneca, the preface to whose first book of Controversiae preserves one such juncture, and whose sixth Suasoria contains another. It is rhetorical language, influenced, quite clearly, by poetic diction. What it is not is Caesar's language.
If we approach the passage from the other direction, the organization of the citation, it is clear that the most likely words to be drawn from Caesar are those immediately surrounding the parenthesis citing his work.Footnote 48 In particular, to judge from Pliny's practice elsewhere, the phrase omnium triumphorum laurea maiorem ought to come from Caesar.Footnote 49 And if Caesar said this, then we must follow Pliny's syntax and extend the citation of Caesar: maiorem is a modifier of lauream twenty words earlier, and itself in turn governs the following quanto ... imperii. But as we have seen, the latter phrase itself is very unlikely to have been written by Caesar (or by Cicero). What remains likely to be echt-Caesarian, then, is the triumphal laurel, with some further elaboration – but this, in turn, leads us back to the earlier primus in toga triumphum linguaeque lauream merite. The tongue and the laurel come, of course, from Cicero's own poem, but the syntax is notably different: where Cicero had said that the laurel should yield to the tongue, the phrase in Pliny refers to a triumph won by eloquence itself. It is this ‘laurel of the tongue’ that we believe goes back to Caesar himself – and the phrase is very close to the comments of Caesar that Cicero reports in the Brutus.
In writing his history of Roman oratory, Cicero chose to exclude living people from his account, and thus managed to avoid speaking directly of the oratorical style of Julius Caesar. At the same time, however, he could not omit Caesar completely, and instead allows his interlocutors, Brutus and Atticus, to draw attention to Caesar's praise of Cicero, in the dedication of Caesar's work De analogia. In the context of this discussion, Cicero claims to offer a verbatim quotation from Caesar (253):Footnote 50
qui [sc. Caesar] etiam in maximis occupationibus ad te ipsum, inquit [sc. Atticus] in me intuens, de ratione Latine loquendi accuratissime scripserit primoque in libro dixerit uerborum dilectum originem esse eloquentiae tribueritque, mi Brute, huic nostro, qui me de illo maluit quam se dicere, laudem singularem; nam scripsit his uerbis, cum hunc nomine esset adfatus:
‘ac si, ut cogitata praeclare eloqui possent, non nulli studio et usu elaborauerunt, cuius te paene principem copiae atque inuentorem bene de nomine ac dignitate populi Romani meritum esse existimare debemus; hunc facilem et cotidianum nouisse sermonem num pro relicto est habendum?’
‘Although he was extremely busy, he wrote to you directly’, said Atticus, looking at me, ‘and wrote with great precision about the logic of the Latin language, and in the first part of his book he said that the choice of words is the origin of eloquence, and, dear Brutus, he provided our friend here (who wanted me to talk about him rather than to do so himself) unique praise. For he wrote the following, addressing Cicero by name:
“Quite a few people have both studied and practised [sc. oratory] so as to be able to enunciate their thoughts in a brilliant fashion, and you, Cicero, are as it were the princeps and discoverer of this abundance, and so we ought to think of you as having deserved well of the name and honour of the Roman people; but still, does that mean that we should abandon our familiarity with a straightforward everyday manner of speech?”’
Atticus makes the context clear: Caesar has written his book about the structure of Latin (ratio clearly is a paraphrase of analogia), addressed to Cicero (ad te ... scripserit), and in the first book, he has made the proper choice of words the foundation of eloquence. In his dedication, he praises Cicero for just this contribution to Roman speech. But despite Cicero's (Atticus') effort to describe Caesar's words as ‘singular praise’, the quotation itself is slightly more equivocal. Caesar's subject in De analogia is language, not rhetoric; and it is the logical formation of words, not the abundance of lexical treasures, that is central to his approach.Footnote 51 Indeed, the most famous quotation from De analogia, preserved by Gellius, is the injunction to avoid unfamiliar words: tamquam scopulum, sic fugias inauditum atque insolens uerbum (‘avoid an unheard-of and uncommon word as though it were a reef’, Gell. NA 1.10.4 = fr. 2 Garcea).Footnote 52 In that respect, the praise of Cicero (in the first half of the sentence) for having increased the range of rhetorical language is undercut by the desire (expressed in the second half) for plain speech: Cicero's emphasis, according to Caesar, is on copia, while Caesar's own is on clarity and sense.Footnote 53
This reading of Caesar's words fits neatly into what has been reconstructed of the context of De analogia, namely that it was, at least in part, a response to Cicero's De oratore, which Caesar would have received only shortly before the date generally assigned to De analogia. In Book 3 of De oratore, as Hendrickson showed more than a century ago, Cicero dismissed the importance of Latinitas as an element in good style, not because he did not consider it important but because, in his opinion, any fool with any education or background was already competent to write grammatical Latin. Of the four virtues of style – as Crassus at De or. 3.37 defines them: ut Latine, ut plane, ut ornate, ut ... apte congruenterque dicamus – Cicero combines the first two and hands them over to the grammarian as elementary, and concentrates instead on ornatus as the crucial element of oratorical style, on which Crassus elaborates at some length.Footnote 54 Caesar, quite clearly, took issue with this, and in addressing De analogia to Cicero, responded by emphasizing just those parts of language that Cicero had superciliously dismissed as trivial.Footnote 55
Cicero was not always self-aware, but even he cannot have missed the barb in Caesar's compliment, and his discussion of Caesar in the Brutus is very clearly a response to the dedication of De analogia. After ‘Atticus’ has quoted the sentence cited above, ‘Brutus’ glosses it (254) by excerpting from it Caesar's description of Cicero as principem atque inventorem copiae – leaving out paene – and the phrase about Cicero's having deserved well of the Roman people.Footnote 56 He proceeds to elaborate on that last point, exploring and expanding its military context. First, he explains it as a sign that Romans have overcome Greeks in the area in which the latter had previously defeated them, but then goes on to state, more emphatically, that Caesar's praise is worth more than many triumphs: hanc autem, inquit, gloriam testimoniumque Caesaris tuae quidem supplicationi non, sed triumphis multorum antepono (‘this glory and Caesar's testimonial I put ahead of many people's triumphs, if not ahead of your own supplicatio’, 255).
The transition made here between a generalized description, in the quotation from Caesar, of Cicero's services to Rome (bene meritum) to a more specific analogy between Cicero's accomplishments and a military triumph might be Cicero's, but the parallel between Cicero's language here and Pliny's citation of Caesar makes us believe that Caesar himself figuratively referred to Cicero's work – literary, rather than political, as will be seen below – as a kind of triumph. Cicero himself is very sparing of that metaphor in speaking of his accomplishments in 63: at Cat. 3.26 – in animis ego uestris omnis triumphos meos, omnia ornamenta honoris, monumenta gloriae, laudis insignia condi et conlocari uolo (‘it is in your minds that I desire all my triumphs, all the distinctions of office, the memorials of my glory, the marks of praise to be placed and established’) – the sequence of (metaphorical) honours is the culmination of Cicero's account of the supplicatio decreed for his achievements as consul. Actual triumphs, of course, he pretended to reject, both in our line from De consulatu suo and, for example, at Cat. 4.23, where he speaks of the literal (if imaginary) triumphs that he has foregone by giving up his province.Footnote 57
The question of what precisely Caesar's language was, at last, brings us back to Cicero's poem. Pliny twice in three lines refers to triumph and laurel together when paraphrasing Caesar, and the first of those references, primus in toga triumphum linguaeque lauream merite, is, as seen above, itself a pointed reference to Cicero's concedat laurea linguae with a distinct difference in meaning. The formulation is Caesar's, not Pliny's, and it explains Cicero's treatment of Caesar in the Brutus. After ‘Brutus’ has referred to Cicero's supplicatio for the capture of the conspirators in December 63, Cicero in his own voice stresses first (255) that the supplier of dicendi copia, whoever he might be, contributed more to Rome than the conquerors of innumerable castella in Liguria, and then, more emphatically (256), that while outstanding generalship is of paramount importance, great orators contribute much more than minor generals with petty triumphs: ‘Even though it was more valuable to the Athenians to have sturdy roofs on their houses than the exquisite ivory statue of Minerva, I would still rather be Phidias than even the very best carpenter’ (257). By making the comparison between Cicero's contribution and minor generals with petty triumphs rather than with Caesar, Cicero avoids direct confrontation with the dictator; but just as Caesar's compliment was barbed, so too is Cicero's response. The orator is more important than the general.Footnote 58
When Caesar describes Cicero as bene de nomine ac dignitate populi Romani meritum for his contributions to Roman rhetoric, his (oblique) aim is to emphasize the civic, indeed purely verbal, nature of Cicero's public service: not military, not even the suppression of the conspiracy.Footnote 59 Cicero's response not only mentions the supplicatio decreed by the Senate in his honour, but elevates the civic impact of his verbal accomplishments above minor military successes. Caesar diminishes the public effect of Cicero's words; Cicero's words, in return, diminish the value of military triumphs.Footnote 60 And it might be added that Cicero's subsequent description of the style of Caesar's Commentaries – nudi enim sunt, recti et uenusti, omni ornatu orationis tamquam ueste detracta (‘they are naked, direct and charming: every ornament of speech has been stripped off like a garment’, 262) – is equally barbed: from Cicero's point of view, as opposed to Caesar's, the absence of ornatus is scarcely admirable. The emperor (or, in this case, the dictator) has no clothes.Footnote 61
Caesar's stress on Cicero's contributions to the language of Rome and Cicero's corresponding stress on the importance of language beyond mere ornatus are oblique and courteous double-edged statements. In this context, Pliny's evidence is very important. Caesar, according to Pliny's version, offered praise for Cicero's contributions to Rome – his verbal contributions. He extolled Cicero's linguistic achievements, but emphasized that it was in language, not action, that Cicero had been effective: in Caesar's view, the orator had earned a triumph indeed, but it was a highly circumscribed laurea linguae.Footnote 62 The irony in all this is clear: Cicero himself chose, in his poem as in his speeches during and after his consulate, to emphasize the dramatic effectiveness of his oratory in mobilizing Rome against Catiline – to make his success equivalent to military victory. But in the early Empire and beginning with Caesar himself, Cicero's self-assessment was both accepted and reduced: he became a figure of verbal genius entirely divorced from political action or political effect.Footnote 63
As far as we can reconstruct from both the Brutus and Pliny, Caesar in the preface of De analogia ingeniously adapted the famous line from De consulatu suo to the end of both praising his dedicatee and obliquely putting him in his place: Cicero is the acknowledged princeps of eloquence, but should (we understand) rest on his oratorical laurels and leave military action as well as statesmanship to others, that is, of course, Caesar himself. In appropriating Cicero's own verse, Caesar obviously chose the version that fitted his own argument: concedat laurea linguae.
(c) Cicero's correspondence with Cato of 50 b.c.e. (Fam. 15.4–6 = 110–12 SB)
Four years after De analogia, we find a further set of allusions to our verse, one that has not generally been recognized as such but that supports the evidence of the quotations and adaptations by Piso, Caesar and Cicero himself to show that the line had become a well-known tag, a Ciceronian slogan that lent itself to creative citation and distortion.Footnote 64 At the conclusion of his proconsulship in Cilicia in 51–50 b.c.e., Cicero lobbied the Senate to be voted a supplicatio in recognition of his successful military actions in securing the borders of the province against the threat of Parthian invasion and pacifying restive tribes and cities. A supplicatio was typically the first step to a triumph, and Cicero's hopes were set on ultimately being awarded this highest military honour. Though there was some resistance in the Senate, the supplicatio was duly decreed and celebrated. The triumph, however, never materialized: upon Cicero's return to Italy, the political situation quickly deteriorated, finally leading to the civil war between Pompey and Caesar.Footnote 65
As part of his campaign to receive a supplicatio, Cicero in late 51 or early 50 wrote a long letter to M. Porcius Cato (Fam. 15.4 = 110 SB), whom he suspected – rightly, as it turned out – to be less than favourably inclined to supporting such an award. Cicero describes his military achievements in detail and explains to Cato why he is eager for the supplicatio and believes that he deserves it. In his attempt to persuade his correspondent to vote in favour of any such motion in the Senate, he portrays himself as desirous first and foremost of Cato's praise (laus), the award of which he hyperbolically describes as the pinnacle of achievement (11):
me existimaturum summam mihi laudem tributam si tu honorem meum sententia tua comprobaris.
I believe that I will have received the greatest praise if you approve my being honoured through your vote.
After reminding Cato that he has extolled Cicero summis laudibus (11) in the past, he makes the following extravagant claim (ibid.):
cuius ego semper tanta esse uerborum pondera putaui ut uno uerbo tuo cum mea laude coniuncto omnia adsequi me arbitrarer.
I have always considered your utterances so significant that with one word of yours in my praise, I believed I had attained everything.
At the end of the letter, Cicero even brings on personified Philosophy to plead with Cato to award Cicero his laus (tecum agit de mea laude, 16); by contrast, he declares he has no interest whatsoever in the ‘empty praise of the masses’ (inani laude ... uulgi, 13).
In his lobbying for laus, Cicero is aware that this sudden desire for a triumph might appear to contradict the attitude espoused in De consulatu suo and so many other Ciceronian works, viz. that civic achievements trump military ones. He thus reminds Cato that the latter voted for his supplicatio in 63 (11), when Cicero was togatus, but tells him that, in contrast to earlier times, he now wishes for triumphal honours as well: eum honorem, qui a senatu tribui rebus bellicis solet, neglectum a me olim, nunc mihi expetendum puto (‘I now believe that I should seek out the honour that is customarily awarded by the Senate for military achievements and that I previously eschewed’, 13).
Cicero's awkward letter was unsuccessful: though Cato apparently spoke favourably about Cicero's provincial administration in the Senate, he did not vote for the supplicatio, and in his no less awkward reply to Cicero (Fam. 15.5 = 111 SB; spring 50) makes but a token effort to explain his actions. Responding to Cicero's harping on laus and picking up on his correspondent's newly formed wish to be recognized equally for his civic and his military achievements, Cato begins his letter with an insidious allusion to the famous verse from De consulatu suo:
quod et res publica me et nostra amicitia hortatur libenter facio, ut tuam uirtutem, innocentiam, diligentiam cognitam in maximis rebus domi togati, armati foris pari industria administrare gaudeam. itaque, quod pro meo iudicio facere potui, ut innocentia consilioque tuo defensam prouinciam, seruatum Ariobarzanis cum ipso rege regnum, sociorum reuocatum ad studium imperi nostri uoluntatem sententia mea et decreto laudarem, feci.
I gladly do what both the common good and our friendship encourage me to do, that is, rejoice that your excellence, integrity and diligence, recognized in affairs of great moment at home when you were wearing the toga, are equally effectively at work abroad when you are in arms. Thus, I did what I was able to do according to my judgement: I praised with my voice and vote the defence of the province through your integrity and planning, the preservation of the kingdom of Ariobarzanes together with the king himself and the renewal of our allies' loyalty to our empire.
In Cato's rewriting of Cicero's verse, arms no longer yield to the toga since Cicero now has shown that he is equally capable as a general as he was as a consul; however, the laurel still very much gives way to praise. Rather than approving Cicero's supplicatio, Cato does exactly what his correspondent asked him to do: he praises him. It is hard not to believe that in delaying the verb laudarem until the end of the sentence, Cato means to string Cicero along, especially since sententia mea and decreto raise the expectation that he chose to recognize the achievements listed in the sentence by his actual vote – that is, in favour of the supplicatio. Cato adds a further barb a little later, when he implies that a triumph, which may or may not be awarded, means praise for ‘chance’ rather than for the triumphant general himself (casu<m> potius quam te laudari, 2).
It seems to us that while Cicero in his letter used laus and the language of praise in the context of talking about his hoped-for triumph without necessarily thinking of or wishing to allude to his famous verse (which would, at any rate, have been counterproductive), Cato specifically and rather meanly draws attention to the line, in an effort to make it appear as though, in merely praising Cicero, he is in fact following his correspondent's famous maxim. Given that laus is the issue at stake in the correspondence, Cato's choice of this version of the verse – rather than the one with linguae – is obvious.
In his response (Fam. 15.6 = 112 SB; July 50), Cicero decides to play along and continues to pretend that Cato's laus is the best thing that ever happened to him. He lays it on thick, starting off with a quotation from Naevius to make the point that he is ‘happy to be praised by [Cato], a man praised himself’ (laetus sum laudari me ... abs te ... laudato uiro, 1). He continues (ibid.):
ea est enim profecto iucunda laus quae ab iis proficiscitur qui ipsi in laude uixerunt.
For that praise indeed is pleasant that comes from those who have lived in praise themselves.
Having thus used four forms of laus and laudare in two sentences, Cicero a little later explicitly acknowledges Cato's allusion to his verse, asking rhetorically, ‘What triumphal chariot or laurel could I compare to your praise?’ (quem ego currum aut quam lauream cum tua laudatione conferrem?, ibid.). Cato, thus Cicero implies, was ever so right: the laurel must yield to the praise, especially if the praise is that pronounced by Cato himself. Indeed, ‘nothing can be a greater source of praise than that speech of yours [in the Senate]’ (nihil potest esse laudabilius quam ea tua oratio, ibid.).
It is hard to know whether we are to take Cicero's letter as an expression of severe annoyance, dripping with sarcasm, or as a more playful reply to Cato's allusion that pokes fun not only at his correspondent's self-importance but also at Cicero's own earlier flattery of Cato.Footnote 66 Whatever the case may be, at the end of the correspondence the letter-writers have jointly determined that in the hierarchy of arms, togas, laurels and praises, it is the laus bestowed by Cato that trumps everything. Just as we have seen in In Pisonem and De analogia, Cicero's famous line was good to think, and play, with.
(d) Cicero's De officiis of 44 b.c.e. (Off. 1.77)
The last occurrence of our verse in Cicero's own lifetime is the author's own quotation in Off. 1.77, composed in 44 b.c.e. It occurs in the course of an argument to the effect that res urbanae are by no means inferior to res bellicae, as is often assumed (74). The examples Cicero adduces to show that civic achievements frequently rival or even surpass military ones naturally culminate in the mention of the author's consulship, fittingly introduced by cedant arma togae, concedat laurea laudi (77). Given the context, Cicero obviously chose to quote the line in the version with ‘praise’: the contrast he is interested in is not that between general and orator, but more broadly between warfare and domestic politics.
In this work and at this point in his career – after his consulate, his failed bid for a triumph and the deaths not only of his one-time rival Pompey but of Caesar as well – Cicero has no need to be diplomatic or to use his own tag strategically to mean something not originally implied. He unabashedly calls the verse optimum (77) and unequivocally states that no wartime deed or triumph can vie with his suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy (quae res igitur umquam gesta in bello tanta? qui triumphus conferendus?, ibid.). Addressing his son and dedicatee Marcus, Cicero claims the right to praise himself in front of the one person who will inherit these achievements and be held to the example of his father. After all, even Pompey, a ‘man showered with military glory’ (uir abundans bellicis laudibus, 78), once admitted (or so Cicero says) that he could not have held his third triumph if Cicero had not saved the Republic and thus the very venue for the general's procession.Footnote 67
Carving out his legacy in what turned out to be his last surviving work, Cicero was finally explicit about his conviction that even Pompey's laurel had to yield to the praise accorded to his own accomplishments as a statesman. As we have seen, this is the final appearance of ‘praise’: whether fairly or not, later generations followed Caesar's lead in considering Cicero's lingua more significant than his political laus. We owe it to the diverse agendas and rhetorical ingenuity of our early sources (Caesar, Cato and Cicero himself) that we still possess the two original versions of this catchiest of Ciceronian phrases.
