Plutarch surprises many a modern reader of his Life of Cicero when he records that his subject, as a younger man, ‘was thought to be the best poet among the Romans’ (2.4). The subsequent rise and fall of his political career, combined with his notoriously self-indulgent poems De consulatu suo and De temporibus suis, rather dampened that hype. However, Cicero's real passion for Latin and Greek poetry persisted throughout his career, as the liberal presence of verse citations across his immense corpus of writings amply attests.
Cicero's poetic knowledge, and indeed tastes, ranged widely: he cites Latin epic, tragedy, comedy, satire and – occasionally – even farce and mime. More than 500 passages are quoted from twenty-odd poets from the late third and second centuries bce. Yet, for reasons never made explicit, Cicero seems not to have cited any poet more recent than Quintus Lutatius Catulus and Porcius Licinius – save, that is, for himself: there are 60 or so citations from four of Cicero's hexameter poems.
Such a treasure trove of citations is of immense value to the literary historian, since most of these quotations comes from lost works, with Cicero being our sole source for the text. In some cases, as for the poor comedian Trabea, an author's verses are found in Cicero alone. Even with a poem as famous as Catullus 64, it is a private letter of Cicero (Att. 8.5.1) that reveals verse 111 to be based on a (Callimachean?) Greek original.
As Č.-B. shows in this carefully compiled book, the fragments of poetry scattered throughout Cicero's sprawling works provide a revealing, if at times frustrating, window into not just lost Republican poems (and indeed poets) but also Cicero's relationship with the literature and culture of preceding centuries. Over five chapters she seeks to discover what role Cicero's poetic citations played in their distinct contexts, asking in tandem what we can infer of these verses’ original source and contemporary societal status.
On the basis of two large appendices of Cicero's quotations at the close of the book (pp. 231–72), we can observe that he had some pointed preferences. For instance, Cicero appears never to have cited the ‘first poet’ of the Roman tradition, Livius Andronicus; instead, he crowns Ennius as pater poesis, citing him more often than any other poet. While tragedy is the genre cited most across all his diverse modes of writing, comedy is deployed with more striking variation: Cicero cites comedians three times more frequently in his letters, and twice more in his speeches, than in both his philosophical and rhetorical works. While Terence is the stand-out favourite (41 citations from all the plays except Hecyra), Plautus finds only five citations (four of which are from the Trinummus).
The volume begins with a chapter, ‘Cicero and the Poets’, surveying Cicero's attitude to Greek and Latin poetry as well as his various practices of citation. Although he frequently quotes Homer and Attic tragedy, he seems content to leave it in Greek only within his private correspondence with Atticus; elsewhere he turns to his own Latin poetic versions. With the ground laid, the substantial Chapter 2, ‘Poetic Citation by Ciceronian Genre’, surveys how Cicero treats poetic citation differently across his philosophical, rhetorical, political, forensic and epistolary texts. Just as Aristotle (Metaphysics 2.995a7) records how some poetry can serve as a μάρτυς for supporting propositions, and Quintilian (Inst. 2.7.4) believes that such citations contribute ‘more authority’, so too Cicero knows that literary excerpts can have a significant pay-off.
This chapter in particular plays to Č.-B.'s strengths: her close readings of particular citations are alive to the various competing contextual and socio-political factors. She demonstrates well how, in the philosophical dialogues, early poetry could provide not just an authentic aesthetic to the historical dialogue but also evoke traditional Republican virtues. Different speakers can betray different attitudes to literature. Cato, for instance, stands out in Book 3 of De finibus by citing no poetry at all; or the interlocutor A., on hearing Cicero's versification of Aeschylus’ (lost!) Prometheus Vinctus at Tusculans 2.26, has to ask unde isti uersus? non agnosco. (At times we must ask this same question ourselves; at Att. 2.15.3, for example, the hexameter in montis patrios et ad incunabula nostra crops up. Is this a line from Ennius? Or Cicero? Or someone else? The question is insoluble.)
In particular, citations from comedy serve as safe vectors of shared cultural inheritance and distilled Roman attitudes. Her detailed treatment of Pro Sestio (pp. 121–32) – the oration with the most poetic citations – reveals how the interaction between contemporary politics could be bidirectional, with actors and audiences adapting ancient dramatic context to present-day concerns.
Chapter 3, ‘Roman Comedy and Scholarship’, moves in a rather different direction, placing Cicero in the context of his scholarly milieu, shaped by Aelius Stilo and dominated by Varro. Although this survey is more cursory, it reveals how Cicero approached earlier literature, and comedy in particular, as a source of linguistic authority demanding careful textual analysis. Chapter 4, ‘Singing in Cicero’, is rather more speculative; by analysing a few instances of tragic cantica cited by Cicero it juxtaposes sung or chanted poetry with his own attitude to feeling and expressing emotions, and the gender politics bound up in those processes. Finally, Chapter 5, ‘Poetry as Artefact’, gathers together various threads relating to historical enquiry: how Cicero used ancient poetry (especially Ennius and Lucilius) to learn about the past, either as it was or – what in practice amounts to the same thing – how we should choose to remember it.
Despite being packed full of interesting detail, often relegated to lengthy footnotes, the book does have some methodological shortcomings. To name the most prominent, it is unfortunate that Cicero's citation of his own poetry is not used as a control of sorts against his citation of earlier poetry; the reasons behind his failure to cite contemporary poetry would also have merited further reflection. While Č.-B. observes how Cicero's poetic translations are of a markedly different register from prose, the surface is only scratched in analysing what effects are achieved through his handling of these often well-known texts. More statistical analysis of the welter of material gathered in the appendices would have been valuable, if readers could be given not just numerical figures but also frequencies of citation (of all verse and of individual authors) weighed against the size of text.
The valency and character of different metres is left largely undiscussed, even though it had a significant bearing on how these quotations struck the listener or reader. (Rather strangely, the metres of dramatic verses are only explicitly marked up in Chapter 4.) It should not need saying that metre was second nature to Cicero and to much of his audience. While it is possible (if not probable) that the senarius sentin senem esse tactum triginta minis at De or. 2.257 was fabricated by Cicero off the cuff (p. 102), it is impossible that he mistakenly thought aut consolatione aut consilio scanned at Att. 9.6.5 (pp. 148–9): either consolatione is a subsequent scribal corruption of Terentius’ consolando, or this is meant to be an echo by loose paraphrase of a comedic commonplace. More broadly, when Cicero offers a text that differs from the non-Ciceronian tradition, the distinction needs to be drawn between four possibilities: (i) Cicero's particular source had corrupted the text; (ii) Cicero corrupted it by error of memory; (iii) Cicero deliberately changed it; (iv) Cicero cited the text correctly but the subsequent transmission of his work has introduced a corruption.
The prose style is clear throughout; Č.-B.'s translations are snappy, if at times unhelpfully loose. The bibliography is substantive, but it does not do justice to the earlier scholarly tradition. W. Zillinger's pioneering thesis (Erlangen, 1911) is largely restricted to bare references in the footnotes. While M. Radin's article on ‘Literary citations in Cicero's orations’ (CJ 6 [1911], 209–17) may be thought too brief to mention, several substantive theses are ignored: E. Lange's Quid cum de ingenio et litteris tum de poetis Graecorum Cicero senserit (Halle 1880); J. Kubik's De M. Tullii Ciceronis poetarum Latinorum studiis (Vienna 1887); W. Dammann's Cicero quomodo in epistulis sermonem hominibus, quos appellat, et rebus, quas tangit, accomodaverit (Greifswald 1910); E. Howind's De ratione citandi in Ciceronis Plutarchi Senecae Novi Testamenti scriptis obvia (Marburg 1921); P.T. Putz's De M. Tulli Ciceronis bibliotheca (Münster 1925); P.J. Armleder's Quotation in Cicero's Letters (Cincinnati 1957). Much in these works is of enduring value; perhaps Č.-B. disagrees with such a claim, but if so, we at least deserve to be told why.
