Scholarly energy is shifting from investigating Cicero's own construction of his identity to the reception of Cicero as a cultural phenomenon after his death: Cicero the self-fashioner is yielding to Cicero the other-fashioned. K.’s elegantly argued and illuminating study, a revision of his 2014 Harvard doctoral dissertation, is an important contribution to that growing body of work on Cicero's reception and influence.Footnote ¹

Cicero's impact upon subsequent Roman literary, rhetorical, philosophical and political culture is, of course, immense. All subsequent Latin prose literature can be read as a reaction, in one way or another, to Cicero's looming importance. The methodological challenges of charting Cicero's influence are daunting: how are we to give shape to a near omnipresent phenomenon that seems to resist containment?

K.’s fruitful solution to telling this story in a well-articulated narrative is to begin where the reception of Cicero begins, both chronologically and institutionally. He starts his investigation directly after Cicero's assassination in 43 bce and analyses how Romans would get their first and enduring impressions of the author: in the schools where, as children, they read texts of his speeches and, later in their training, in the lecture halls where they debated his demise. Examining Cicero's reception from these foundations gives K.’s analysis inherent social-historical plausibility. He anchors his study within reasonably well-documented institutional settings that we can surmise were influential upon a broad swath of educated Romans. K. then can progress confidently into his analyses of Cicero's broader influence upon Roman literary culture.

The book has a diptych structure: the first four chapters investigate the reception of Cicero within the Roman educational culture of the early empire, while the next three offer readings of Cicero's reception within individual canonical authors – Seneca, Tacitus and Pliny the Younger. In Chapter 1, ‘Pro Milone: Reading Cicero in the Classroom’, K. seeks to replicate how a Cicero speech might typically have been taught in schools of the early empire. Through a triangulation of sources (Quintilian, Asconius and the Scholia Bobiensia), K. constructs a detailed account of the likely experience of students reading the Pro Milone, and the impression that Cicero left on the minds of these young readers. Their first ‘Cicero’ was a textual entity dissected for exemplary lessons in persuasion. He was not presented with historical and psychological complexity but as a decontextualised ‘rhetorical figure’ (p. 28). Chapter 2, ‘Eloquence (dis)embodied: the Textualization of Cicero’, expands upon Cicero's transformation in the early empire into an abstraction, a process driven by declamatory culture. K. draws from a broad range of literary evidence to show how Cicero appears as either a disembodied ideal of ‘eloquence’ or metonymically as a ‘tongue’ or ‘public voice’. In Chapter 3, ‘Remaking Cicero in the Schoolroom: Cicero's Death’, K. offers a detailed analysis of how declaimers returned repeatedly to the scene of Cicero's murder, and how these speeches, with their embellishments, established memories later found in historiographical accounts. While the influence of the declamation upon historians has been recognised since M. Roller's important article of 1997 (‘Color-blindness: Cicero's Death, Declamation, and the Production of History’, CPh 92 [1997], 109–30), K.’s analysis digs deeper and offers a nuanced explication of this phenomenon, tackling such thorny issues as how the story of Cicero's murder was co-opted for Augustan propaganda, and how declamatory style, as well as content, colours the accounts of Valerius Maximus, Florus, Velleius Paterculus and, later, those of Cassius Dio and Appian. In Chapter 4, ‘Pro Cicerone/In Ciceronem: How to Criticize Cicero’, K. analyses a group of pseudepigraphic texts, the pseudo-Sallustian Invective against Cicero, the pseudo-Ciceronian Invective against Sallust, Speech delivered the day before he went into exile and Letter to Octavian, and a pair of letters supposed to have been written by Brutus to Cicero and Atticus (Cic. Ad Brut. 1.16 and 1.17), all showing the hallmarks of declamatory origins. These texts, of uncertain date but ranging perhaps from the first to fourth centuries ce, depict controversial and pivotal incidents within Cicero's life (consulate, exile and showdown with Marc Antony). K. makes an excellent case for the historical value of these ‘forged’ texts, noting how these texts are ‘precious artifacts of cultural memory’ (p. 93) that allow us to follow threads originating in the declamatory classrooms and later woven into the fabric of the broader literary and historiographic culture.

Chapter 5, ‘Seneca the Younger and Cicero’, begins the book's second part, where K. leaves the classroom and tackles Ciceronian presences within canonical authors. Cicero appears in Seneca more as an absence than a presence, a figure rejected ‘as a stylist, as a philosopher, as a generic model, and as an educational theorist’ (p. 197). K. makes an excellent case for Seneca's use of Cicero as a negative exemplar, a figure against whom he constructs his own distinctive persona and literary contribution. In Chapter 6, ‘Tacitus: Dialogus de Cicerone?’, K. delves into the Dialogus’ extensive and direct engagement with the legacy and ideas of Cicero. The Dialogus’ Ciceronian style is, in K.’s account, not just a generically suitable register for literary dialogue, but also sets an overall tone for the work's systematic critique of Cicero. Finally, Chapter 7, ‘Est … mihi cum Cicerone aemulatio: Pliny's Cicero’, moves from authors who reject Ciceronianism to one who found in Cicero a congenial literary model. Pliny the Younger dutifully accepted Quintilian's championing of Ciceronian stylistic dictates and exploited Cicero as ‘an important part of [his] self-fashioning’ (p. 281). Unlike Seneca's thoroughgoing and productive obliteration of Cicero, and Tacitus’ profound engagement and subversion of Cicero in the Dialogus, Pliny makes modest genuflections in Cicero's direction. The epilogue, ‘The Early Empire and Beyond’, offers a brief but helpful collection of fingerposts to later engagements with Cicero, especially in Christian authors of Late Antiquity (Ambrose and Augustine).

This is a closely-argued, well-researched and insightful study that anyone interested in Cicero's Nachleben or the educational culture of the early empire will want to read. The Cicero K. sees arising from the early imperial school culture could easily seem an unsatisfying caricature that does not account for the richness of Cicero's reception. But K. is aware that this classroom Tully does not limit the engagement that later authors might make (‘not every ancient writer is limited to this classroom construction of Cicero … but for everyone it is foundational’, p. 336). His readings of Seneca, Tacitus and Pliny reveal how far beyond this two-dimensional Cicero the engagement could go.

K.’s book treats the imposing presence of Cicero within Roman literary culture largely as a given without seeking to explain the underlying reasons. While this question could be considered part of a different project, K. might profitably have offered more explicit analysis of the issue of canon formation and why Cicero's literary corpus particularly lent itself to becoming institutionalised within Roman educational culture. But this quibble does not detract in the least from this rich, intelligent study.