The letters transmitted to us as Cicero's Epistulae ad Familiares have long been valued as one of our most important documentary sources for the final decades of the late Republic.Footnote 1 Yet they are also the product of a later era. Only organized into books and collections and published as such by unidentified editors at some unknown date following Cicero's death, these letters are also inescapably an imperial (and post-imperial) publication. Scholars have now embarked in earnest on the preliminary work necessary to appreciating their status as such, by recuperating the books of this collection as meaningful hermeneutic frames for reading the letters transmitted therein.Footnote 2 No longer seen as a distraction from the real business of the letters (which is to say, getting us closer to Cicero, and using them to reconstruct the narrative of late Republican politics as it happened),Footnote 3 the books of the ad Fam. have rightly come to be appreciated as integral, rather than extraneous, to the letters' interpretation. These books, we now see, provide privileged frames for reading the letters, because the narratives that they construct may well have played a determining rôle in deciding which letters from among Cicero's vast correspondence were selected for inclusion and hence transmitted in the first place. Construing the books' narrative emphases has thus become the new interpretive game for readers of Cicero's letters, and has produced some of the most vital scholarship on the letters to date.Footnote 4
Thus far, however, this enterprise has not been accompanied by any particular consideration of the perspective imposed by the time lag that distances the letters' composition from their moment of publication.Footnote 5 Admittedly, the process of locating this perspective might well seem an impossible task, given that we do not know when the letters were first published, either in individual books or as an entire collection,Footnote 6 and certainly much of their significance is lost from not knowing when they were first published in either format. Yet simply by knowing that these letters were only published in book-form posthumously,Footnote 7 we know enough about the minimal degree of separation with which their editors were working in order to draw certain conclusions about the new meanings the letters took on when published. Cicero's death draws a line around the collection as a whole, and asks us to read the letters as a collection from the vantage point that we derive from looking back to it from across that watershed. The coincidence of the year of his death with the death of the Republic encloses the world contained within the ad Fam. as belonging to an era now dead and gone,Footnote 8 and subjects the Republican world it depicts to that process of rewriting which is the subsequent era's prerogative.Footnote 9 The distortions that may be produced by the (idealizing, in this case) lens of editorial retrospection are the subject of this article.
A further question that arises when we consider the ad Fam. as a collection concerns its format as a composite whole. What explains or determines the order in which the books of letters arise within this collection? And are they subject to the same kinds of artful organization and juxtaposition that critics have noticed operating within the books of letters themselves? The critical silence on this question suggests not,Footnote 10 and it is not hard to see why: given that the books of the ad Fam. were identified in antiquity by the name of their first addressee rather than by number,Footnote 11 we cannot conclude that they were organized into the sequence in which we find them until the codex tradition established it for good at some point before the fourth or fifth century c.e.Footnote 12 This makes the potential distance separating the editor of the collection from the editor(s) of the individual books replicate at an even further degree of remove the distance between the original author of the letters and the editor(s) responsible for compiling them into books, and takes us further and further away from the figure — Cicero — to whom we might have hoped these letters would bring us closer.
Yet this too is an inescapable aspect of the format of the ad Fam. that the manuscript tradition has bequeathed to us;Footnote 13 and because the same principle of deliberate selection, and exclusion, holds for the organization of the whole collection as it does for the individual books within it, it too deserves to be taken seriously as a meaningful part of the letters' overall frame. Whoever compiled the ad Fam. as a collection has crafted a quite particular set of narratives by selecting the sixteen books of which it consists for inclusion,Footnote 14 and by organizing them into a particular sequence, with its own symmetries and juxtapositions. Furthermore, there is at least one book in the ad Fam. which openly advertises the significance of its positioning, and encourages us to view this aspect of the collection's organization as one that merits closer consideration. Book 16 is composed entirely of letters addressed to (or about) Tiro, the figure who has seemed to many readers to make the most plausible and satisfying candidate for the rôle of editor of the collection as a whole.Footnote 15 And sure enough, this book of letters depicts Tiro performing precisely the kind of secretarial (and more than secretarial) work required of a good editor.Footnote 16 Tiro may, of course, have had little to do with the editing of the ad Fam. But by placing the book of letters to him last, in the paratextual position commonly reserved for editorial notices, the editor has presented us with a highly plausible editorial scenario, and has used the structure of the collection as a whole to inscribe this editorial identity into its parameters.
Another book that deserves our attention for the narrative meanings that its position in the overall sequence helps to draw out is ad Fam. 15. This, the penultimate book in the collection, and one that is only succeeded by the paratextual book dedicated to Tiro, is one of the most unified in theme and narrative, and provides us with our last glimpse in the ad Fam. of Cicero the public figure, exchanging letters with his senatorial peers. Which phase in his career does the editor choose to present us with for this our last look at Cicero the statesman? As it happens, a somewhat surprising one. The book opens with the year turning into 50 b.c.e., and finds Cicero nearing the end of his brief and extremely reluctant proconsular tenure of Cilicia,Footnote 17 and trying to transform the minor military victory that he has just celebrated over a band of Parthians into an event that would secure him a triumph.Footnote 18 At a time when other prominent men were bringing about the end of the Republic over their battle for military pre-eminence, it is fair to say that Cicero's military victory hardly contends with other events taking place at the time to register prominently in the narrative of mainstream political dramas.Footnote 19 This is not a figure contending with Julius Caesar or Pompey for the status of Rome's most successful general.Footnote 20 And yet two thirds of the book (fourteen letters out of twenty-one) charts the vigorous letter-writing campaign that Cicero embarked on at this time to garner support for his bid for a supplicatio.
The bulk of the fifteenth book thus leaves us with an image of Cicero thanking the recently elected consuls for their support in the first stage of his bid for a triumph, and, for all we know, happily anticipating its successful outcome. This is a striking editorial stroke of biographical reshuffling and reinvention, given that our last view of Cicero in his public guise, in ad Fam. 10–12, located him several years later, at a moment far closer to the end of his life, and at a point of far more natural closure for the collection as a whole, communicating with various members of the Republican resistance in the build-up to and immediate aftermath of Julius Caesar's death.Footnote 21 Here we find that chronology reversed in a stroke of biographical reorganization that is deeply puzzling. For while a triumph might have been all that Cicero wished for in 50 b.c.e., yet by the time the letters were published all this had changed. In an era when the bid for and award of a triumph might almost seem to stand for the fall of the Republic,Footnote 22 why make this our last view of a man not otherwise known to posterity for his military talents?
The editorial effort involved in writing this particular account of Cicero's triumphal bid is made the more conspicuous by the very different version of that ambition that we encounter elsewhere in the ad Fam. Letters to and from Caelius in the second and eighth books of the collection, for example, provide us with a completely different picture of the military skirmish that lay behind Cicero's triumphal ambitions.Footnote 23 We learn in these books of the opportunistic motives behind those ambitions, and of the machinations involved in trying to secure them — just enough fighting to warrant a triumph, advises Caelius, but not so much as to endanger Cicero or his men.Footnote 24 And we hear too that, in the event, this was exactly the kind of low-level military action that Cicero got — as he himself wryly acknowledges when observing to Caelius that the final siege of Pindenissus which ended his brief military campaign could be counted on to secure his triumphal claims, had anyone in Rome actually heard of the godforsaken place.Footnote 25 All this material is neatly edited out of Book 15, but still available to readers (and well known to those who have read the books of the ad Fam. in sequence).
We need only look to the identities of his addressees in this book — the Senate, Cato and the consul and consuls elect — to see that ad Fam. 15 gives us the official version of Cicero's triumphal narrative.Footnote 26 Yet, as a group, these identities also yield a further significance. The outgoing and incoming consuls in question happen to include Marcus and Gaius Marcellus, figures who would become Caesar's leading opponents in the year that led up to civil war. Their significance as such for ad Fam. 15 is reinforced not just by the juxtaposition of Cicero's letters to them alongside his exchange with Cato but by the sequence of letters to Cassius and Trebonius with which the book concludes. These letters, composed between 50 and 46 b.c.e. on a number of different subjects largely unrelated to the matter of Cicero's triumph, seem at first anomalous to the narrative thread of ad Fam. 15. It is only when we consider Cassius' and Trebonius' fated identities as two of the leading tyrannicides that the letters to them start to look like a more fitting epilogue to the book than they might have first seemed:Footnote 27 ad Fam. 15, we now see, unites Caesar's enemies on either side of the civil war around the book's other (now subsidiary) theme of a vote of thanksgiving for Cicero.
My argument in this article is that any ‘triumph’ that we encounter in this book has been converted from its original status as the end-goal of Cicero's petty ambitions for a mark of military distinction into a symbol for something else; and that investing the triumph with this new meaning is a feat of editorial rewriting worthy of closer scrutiny. We see the effect of the editor's work quite clearly at certain moments that actively encourage a bifocal reading of the letters: these are moments that invite us to consider what Cicero's appeals to his addressees mean in different contexts, between the moment of the letters' composition and publication — whenever exactly that was — but especially in light of certain transformative events, including civil war, that had arisen in the interim. This way of reading the letters becomes particularly pressing in the case of the letters to and from Cato, a figure who himself came to mean very different things on either side of the civil war.
I CICERO WRITES CATO
The bifocal potential of Cicero's letters, their capacity to mean different things in different reading contexts, is a facet in particular of the troping effects of language. Erik Gunderson has noted the surprising propensity for even the most quotidian language in Cicero's letters to turn into metaphor across the syntagmatic nexus that connects one letter to another in linear sequence.Footnote 28 His discussion provides an excellent platform for thinking in addition about the paradigmatic axis via which language gets transfigured in the collection: the new meanings that the language used in a single letter may derive from being read in different contexts, at its first point of reception in the hands of its named addressee, and in the new contexts it finds from being published (in a book, or collection of books) at a later point in time.
Fam. 15.4 contains just such a trope, one that opens up the letter as a whole (and the sequence in which it resides) to a bifocal reading, as we compare and contrast the alternative meanings that a single, particularly loaded word may take on in different contexts. This is Cicero's second letter to Cato, one of the most formal letters in the entire correspondence and his second longest letter in the ad Fam.Footnote 29 Much of the letter is taken up with Cicero's official account of the military events that led up to his victory, and is assumed to resemble closely the official dispatch that Cicero would have sent to the Senate.Footnote 30 It is above all at the end of it that we see him tailoring this formal account of events with marked self-consciousness to the difficult character of his addressee, by attempting to write Cato into a particularly well-chosen metaphor. And it is here that we encounter Cicero anticipating the editor's strategy of using the triumph as a metaphor for something else. Following his long account of the military operations that he oversaw, Cicero closes his letter with a ‘personal’ appeal to Cato for public support. He negotiates the problem of asking this favour by phrasing it as an appeal to their common commitment to philosophy (Fam. 15.4.16):Footnote 31
Extremum illud est, ut quasi diffidens rogationi meae philosophiam ad te adlegem, qua nec mihi carior ulla umquam res in vita fuit nec hominum generi maius a dis munus ullum est datum. Haec igitur, quae mihi tecum communis est, societas studiorum atque artium nostrarum, quibus a pueritia dediti ac devincti soli prope modum nos philosophiam veram illam et antiquam, quae quibusdem oti esse ac desidiae videtur, in forum atque in rem publicam atque in ipsam aciem paene deduximus, tecum agit de mea laude.
In conclusion, as though lacking confidence in the efficacy of my plea, let me make Philosophy my advocate to you — than which nothing in life has been more precious to me, nor have the gods bestowed any greater gift upon mankind. Think then of the pursuits and accomplishments we have in common and to which we have been devoted heart and soul since we were boys. We two almost alone have brought back the old authentic philosophy, which some regard as the amusement of leisure and idleness, into the forum, into public life, one might even say into the battlefield. This companionship of ours pleads with you on behalf of my renown.
It is the verb deduximus, used to describe their importation of philosophical principle into the various forums of public office, which alerts us to the presence of a self-servingly chosen metaphor at work in these lines: the verb is often associated with the activity of bringing armies, captives or other military spoils back to Rome in triumph.Footnote 32 Framed within an appeal to help Cicero win his vote for the supplicatio necessary for securing a military triumph, the claim that he and Cato have mutually ‘triumphed’ in bringing philosophy into the various arenas of Roman public life (including the battlefield) seems especially pointed. It suggests to the reader that even at this point in history, Cicero knows that any triumph of his is liable to represent almost anything besides the distinction of military skill and military force — a semantic surplus that we can expect the editor to capitalize on when compiling this book. This, then, is a moment in Book 15 that opens up and invites a bifocal reading of the letters, one that asks us to consider what the triumph of philosophy means both at the time of composition and at the time of publication, both before and after the civil war.
How are we to read this passage from the perspective of its author writing in 50 b.c.e.? Most obviously, the triumphal metaphor provides Cicero with a way of telling Cato that he is not just another profligate general, but one whose military conduct is based on philosophical principle. This would be an important point to make to Cato, in light of his record as vocal champion of the rights of Rome's subject peoples not to suffer at the hands of her ambitious generals — and as noisy detractor, in particular, of Caesar's military conduct in Gaul.Footnote 33 More important, however, is the end that the triumphal metaphor serves in helping Cicero to negotiate a relationship with his addressee that is in fact fraught with personal differences. The complex dynamics of the triumphal trope enable us to unpack the separate elements of this negotiation process, and are best illuminated by turning to the Latin poetic tradition, which makes common reference to the triumph as a means of describing the activity of bringing Greek cultural spoils back to Rome. The highly polemical way in which a number of Roman poets use this metaphor to describe their acts of cultural appropriation lays bare the complex dynamics of self-positioning that it enables in other cultural spheres, and thus provides a useful comparandum for Cicero's use of the metaphor in Fam. 15.4.
The use that Latin poets make of the triumphal metaphor has been identified by Stephen Hinds as a site of highly competitive allusive engagement.Footnote 34 Hinds' starting point is Virgil's claim in the Georgics to be the first poet to triumph in bringing (deducere) the Muses from Helicon to Italy.Footnote 35 But this poet's claim to be the first to import literary goods from Greece to Rome maps neatly onto an ever-receding series of former poets, from Lucretius to Ennius,Footnote 36 who likewise assert their primacy in bringing back a similar set of literary symbols.Footnote 37 The amplification of triumphal claims to various forms of primacy corresponds neatly with the competitive dynamics of triumphal amplification taking place at the hands of Pompey and Caesar in the era of Cicero's writing.Footnote 38 Above all, though, the replication-cum-rivalry between these authors' use of the triumphal metaphor, establishes it as a live (as opposed to inert) topos,Footnote 39 one capable of pointed refinement or amplification. The separate elements of the trope may be tailored to target a particular precedent, or, as we shall see in the case of Cicero's letter to Cato, addressee. What, then, are these separate elements, and what can the poets' renderings of them tell us about Cicero's attempt to write Cato onto his side?
One of the most striking aspects of the metaphor, in the poets' hands, is to make the object of deducere a transliterated Greek word to convey the process of cultural translation involved in bringing cultural goods from Greece to Rome: in the Georgics, for example, Virgil brings back a mousa and translates it into a muse; at DRN 1.117–19, Lucretius' account of Ennius' triumphal return to the world of Roman letters, we find the poet bringing back a korone, which is transliterated into a corona.Footnote 40 In claiming that he and Cato have triumphed in bringing philosophia (a Greek word and, arguably, activity) into Roman public life, Cicero is clearly matching this practice. What is less clear, however, is the extent to which this marks a point of alliance or contention between himself and Cato. Cicero's vocal promotion of Greek philosophy in Rome was always coloured by reservations about certain cultural aspects of this discourse, in particular, about the sequestration in Greek culture of philosophical theory from the practice of politics.Footnote 41 Indeed, it seems to have been precisely this aspect of Cato's philosophical principle (i.e. its currency as abstract theory without adaptation or modification for the purpose of practical application) that had been such a source of frustration to Cicero in the past.Footnote 42 Certainly this is an issue that distinguishes the idealized Republic that Cato inhabits from the more grounded, Roman version that Cicero had set about constructing in his recently published de Re Publica.
In other ways too, the triumphal trope enables Cicero to negotiate (and, in the process, expose) a number of delicate personal differences with his addressee: firstly, Cicero claims not that he and Cato have triumphed in bringing philosophy from Greece to Italy, which would simply be untrue, but that they have triumphed in bringing it into public life (including the battlefield, no less). The target of these lines, with their claim that Cicero and Cato have wrested philosophy away from those who regard it as the amusement of leisure and idleness, would appear to be Epicureanism.Footnote 43 Yet in making common cause with Cato by claiming that together they have rescued philosophy from the Epicureans, Cicero also thereby exposes how little philosophically he and Cato do share in common.Footnote 44 Cicero the Academic Sceptic and Cato the die-hard Stoic did not bring the same school of philosophy into the forum of Roman public life: Cicero had, in his speech in defence of Murena, publicly criticized Cato for doggedly pursuing Stoic principles into political contexts that made those principles completely unrealistic and damaging to the State to boot.Footnote 45 Here it seems the best way that Cicero can write Cato onto his side is through their mutual rejection of Epicureanism.
This is not where it ends. A significant emphasis for the poets is the pioneering isolation of the cultural triumphator: the claim to be the first (primus) to have imported cultural goods back to Italy is an integral part of the triumphal trope, as one cultural triumphator after another claims to outdo the last by bringing back something new.Footnote 46 Again, we see Cicero trying to approximate to this position of primacy, yet again falling flat in the process of doing so — when he claims not ‘we were the first’, nor even ‘we were the only ones', but ‘we were very nearly the only ones' (‘nos soli prope modum …’), phrasing that draws more attention to the position that Cato and Cicero have not quite achieved than to any mark of distinction that they can claim together. How to explain all this hedging and fudging?
One answer may be found in the position in Roman cultural history that Cicero wants to claim for himself at this stage in his career — a position which Cato cannot (and would not want to) share with him. In a passage from de Legibus, the theoretical work that was in progress at the time of this letter, Cicero lists the philosophers who have combined philosophical learning with an interest in politics, before suggesting that there is only one man, Demetrius of Phalerum, who may be said to have applied his philosophical principles to the practice of state governance. The passage shares striking verbal parallels with Fam. 15.4.16, and gives Atticus (his interlocutor) the opportunity to retort that Cicero himself may be added to this singular number, an accolade that would make him the first Roman to have achieved such a feat.Footnote 47 Cicero's list of philosophers includes Stoics as well as Academics/Sceptics and Peripatetics, but notably contains no mention of Cato.Footnote 48 One possible explanation for the omission derives from the fact that all the philosophers included on Cicero's list in the de Legibus passage had written philosophical treatises, either περὶ πολιτειῶν or περὶ νόμων (or both), including those like Demetrius of Phalerum and Cicero, who stand out for combining philosophical learning with political experience. The further function of this exchange in the de Legibus, which purports to be about praising Cicero for putting his philosophical learning into political practice, thus becomes that of situating him within a genealogy of philosophical writers.Footnote 49 Cato, whose Stoicism is expressed in the performance of his life rather than in writing, does not belong in the company of philosophical writers with which Cicero aligns himself here. The ‘nos soli prope modum’ of Fam. 15.4.16 thus draws attention to, rather than elides, the quite different places in Roman cultural and political history that Cato and Cicero want to own.
In itself, the triumphal trope falls flat for a number of reasons, as Cicero's attempt to write Cato into the terms of his self-fashioning cannot work for a figure who writes his own identity according to such different rules. Yet this letter has been selected for this book for a reason, and it is within the context of the book that the triumph of philosophy takes on a new significance: the uncompromising congruence between philosophical principle and the performance of his life, which had been such a trial to Cicero in the years leading up to civil war, becomes all part of Cato's Republican legend after that event. In retrospect, of course, it was precisely the fact that Cato's philosophy was expressed in the performance of his life — and particularly in the performance of his death — rather than, say, in writing, that would transform him into a martyr and a symbol of the lost Republic. This was his way of triumphing over Julius Caesar at the end.Footnote 50 And in light of the status that the posthumous Cato accrues, we may now look at this passage in Fam. 15.4 and wonder who is writing whom? We might have thought that Cicero was drawing Cato into the terms in which he writes his identity; yet in retrospect, it seems more as if it were the dead Cato writing Cicero into his, conferring some of the prestige that his philosophical triumph over Caesar at the end of the civil war brought him onto his epistolary correspondent here.
II CATO WRITES CICERO
Cato's reply to Cicero brings out a new dimension to this. This letter too invites a bifocal reading: while normally simply treated as an example of the curmudgeonly behaviour for which Cato's name was a byword at the time of the letter's composition,Footnote 51 it takes on a completely new significance in light of subsequent history, and therefore does something plainly important for ad Fam. 15 as a published book (Fam. 15.5.3):
M. CATO S. D. M. CICERONI IMP.
Quod et res publica me et nostra amicitia hortatur, libenter facio, ut tuam virtutem, innocentiam, diligentiam, cognitam in maximis rebus domi togati, armati foris pari industria administrari gaudeam: itaque, quod pro meo iudicio facere potui, ut innocentia consilioque tuo defensam provinciam, servatum Ariobarzanis cum ipso rege regnum, sociorum revocatam ad studium imperii nostri voluntatem sententia mea et decreto laudarem, feci. supplicationem decretam, si tu, qua in re nihil fortuito, sed summa tua ratione et continentia rei publicae provisum est, dis immortalibus gratulari nos quam tibi referre acceptum mavis, gaudeo: quod si triumphi praerogativam putas supplicationem et idcirco casum potius quam te laudari mavis, neque supplicationem sequitur semper triumphus et triumpho multo clarius est senatum iudicare potius mansuetudine et innocentia imperatoris provinciam quam vi militum aut benignitate deorum retentam atque conservatam esse, quod ego mea sententia censebam. atque haec ego idcirco ad te contra consuetudinem meam pluribus scripsi ut, quod maxime volo, existimes me laborare ut tibi persuadeam me et voluisse de tua maiestate quod amplissimum sim arbitratus et quod tu maluisti factum esse gaudere. vale et nos dilige et instituto itinere severitatem diligentiamque sociis et rei publicae praesta.
Patriotism and friendship alike urge me to rejoice, as I heartily do, that your ability, integrity, and conscientiousness, already proven as a civilian in great events at home, are no less actively at work in arms abroad. Accordingly, I did what my judgement allowed me to do: that is to say, I paid you tribute with my voice and vote for defending your province by your integrity and wisdom, for saving Ariobarzanes' throne and person, and for winning back the hearts of our subjects to a loyal support of Roman rule. As for the decree of a supplicatio, if you prefer us to render thanks to the immortal gods in respect of provision taken for the public good by your own admirable policy and administrative rectitude, not at all the result of chance, rather than put it down to your own credit — why, I am very glad of it. If, however, you regard a supplicatio as the guarantee of a triumph, and on that account prefer the praise to go to accident rather than to yourself, the fact is that a triumph does not invariably follow a supplicatio. On the other hand, the Senate's judgement that a province has been held and preserved by its governor's mild and upright administration rather than by the swords of an army or the favour of the gods is a far greater distinction than a triumph; and that is what I proposed to the Senate. I have written to you at some length on this subject (contrary to my normal habit) so that you may realize, as I most earnestly hope you will, my anxiety to convince you of two things: firstly, as regards your prestige, I desired what I conceived to be most complimentary to yourself; secondly, I am very glad that what you preferred has come to pass. Goodbye, remember me kindly, and follow your chosen course, rendering to our subjects and to the state their due of a rigorous and conscientious administration.
On the face of it, the personal differences that Cicero may have tried desperately hard to plaster over are unflinchingly exposed by Cato's reply: not only does he refuse Cicero's request, but the short length of his reply in comparison with Cicero's letter to him — an imbalance witheringly underscored by the claim that he has written at greater length than usual — displays the stark polarity between the ways in which these two figures express themselves in pursuit of their respective goals. Moreover, Cato's pointed remark about the true recipient of a supplicatio being the gods rather than the Roman generals in whose name this vote of thanksgiving was decreed, brings out a particularly difficult point of difference. It reminds us of the rôle that Cicero had himself played in transforming the form and function of the supplicatio to accommodate the honorific demands of Rome's leading generals in the preceding years.Footnote 52 Given the state of crisis to which these two generals' competition for honours had brought politics at Rome at the time of writing, Cato's remark about the true beneficiaries of the supplicatio being the gods may be read as an open accusation to Cicero for his rôle in precipitating this crisis.
Yet the barbed accusations that seem to dominate this letter when viewed in the context of its compositional moment are not necessarily its most prevailing features when read with the benefit of a few years' hindsight. Viewed from this retrospective position, it is the letter's kinder appraisals that begin to stand out. In the course of explaining why he chose not to vote for the supplicatio, Cato praises Cicero for the various virtues that he has displayed in the course of his proconsular tenure, and claims that the reason for his refusal lies in the fact that he prefers to give Cicero the credit for his upright conduct rather than thanking the gods for them. Extremely significant here are the virtues with which Cato accredits Cicero: virtus, innocentia (twice), diligentia (twice), ratio and continentia, and most tellingly, perhaps, at the very close of the letter, severitas. Just as Cicero had tried to write Cato into the terms of his self-fashioning, so Cato here tries to write him into the terms of his, accrediting him with all the virtues that he had displayed when sent out to oversee the annexation of Cyprus in 58 b.c.e., a post that (we are told by Plutarch) he had accepted not for military glory or financial gain, but as an opportunity to show by his upright behaviour the responsibilities of empire.Footnote 53
But the virtues that Cato prized meant very different things to his contemporaries before and after the civil war. A point nowhere better illustrated than by Cicero's own evaluation of them: in a letter to Atticus written in January 60, we find Cicero decrying the nexus of qualities that led Cato to act obstructively in the Senate (Att. 1.18.7):Footnote 54 ‘unus est qui curet, constantia magis et integritate quam, ut mihi videtur, consilio aut ingenio, Cato’ (‘The one man who cares for that [i.e. the res publica] with more resolution and integrity, it seems to me, than judgement or intelligence, is Cato).’ Yet after the civil war, it is precisely this nexus of qualities that Cicero explains to Atticus he cannot afford to ignore when composing his eulogy of Cato, the pamphlet that helped transform Cato into a republican martyr in the immediate aftermath of his death (Att. 12.4.2):Footnote 55
sed de Catone, πρόβλημα Ἀρχιμήδειον est. non adsequor ut scribam quod tui convivae non modo libenter sed etiam aequo animo legere possint; quin etiam si a sententiis eius dictis, si ab omni voluntate consiliisque quae de republica habuit recedam ψιλωσque velim gravitatem constantiamque eius laudare, hoc ipsum tamen istis odiosum ἂκουσμα sit. sed vere laudari ille vir non potest nisi haec ornata sint, quod ille ea quae nunc sunt et futura viderit et ne fierent contenderit et facta ne videret vitam reliquerit.
Now about the Cato: it's like trying to square a circle. I can't work out how to write anything that your dinner companions could read with pleasure or at least without losing their temper. Even if I were to steer clear of his votes in the Senate, his whole political outlook and his public opinions and choose simply to praise his seriousness of purpose and steadfastness, even this would grate on their ears. But no genuine eulogy of that remarkable man is possible without paying tribute to the way he foresaw our present situation and tried to avert it, and abandoned his life rather than witness its materialization.
These, then, are the very qualities that would identify Cato as the staunch optimate defender of the Republic after his death, even if they were viewed very differently in the years that led up to that moment. By including Fam. 15.5, in which Cato attributes to Cicero the range of qualities for which he himself would be posthumously lionized, the editor of the ad Fam. has found an opportunity to identify Cicero as a prime exemplar of Catonian virtues. So that despite Cato's refusal to comply with Cicero's request, and despite the provocative dig with which he concludes when claiming that he has a better idea than Cicero of what is good for his (Cicero's) maiestas, all these gestures pale into insignificance beside the litany of Catonian virtues that Cicero is commemorated as possessing by their most authoritative exponent.
Cicero's posthumous eulogy of Cato remains an important unspoken intertext throughout ad Fam. 15. In the following letter, Cicero's answer to Cato's reply, we find the former musing testily over the question of what one man's praise of another might mean. He opens his reply to Cato with one of his favourite literary quotations (Fam. 15.6):
M. CICERO S. D. M. CATONI
‘Laetus sum laudari me,’ inquit Hector, opinor apud Naevium, ‘abs te, pater, a laudato viro’; ea est enim profecto iucunda laus, quae ab iis proficiscitur, qui ipsi in laude vixerunt. ego vero vel gratulatione litterarum tuarum vel testimoniis sententiae dictae nihil est quod me non adsecutum putem, idque mihi cum amplissimum, tum gratissimum est, te libenter amicitiae dedisse, quod liquido veritati dares. Et, si non modo omnes, verum etiam multi Catones essent in civitate nostra, in qua unum exstitisse mirabile est, quem ego currum aut quam lauream cum tua laudatione conferrem?
I think it is Hector in Naevius who says, ‘Glad thy praise doth make me, father, praise from one that is praised’. Praise is pleasant, you will agree, when it comes from those who have themselves led honoured lives. Yes, I assure you that the congratulatory terms of your letter and the testimonial you gave me in the Senate represent to my mind the sum of attainment. I am particularly flattered and gratified to feel that you were glad to accord to friendship what you would have had no hesitation in according to truth. And if many (not to say all) members of our society were Catos (the marvel being that it has produced one), how could I think of comparing the triumphal car and crown with an encomium from you?
The Naevius quotation gives way to an admission of flattery as Cicero tells Cato how honoured he is to have received his praise. Again, we can see the different meanings that this letter takes on in different contexts — before and after Cato's death. Appropriately enough, given the rôle that Cicero's eulogy of Cato had played in producing this transformation, that difference comes to hinge in this letter on the question of praise. The quotation from Naevius takes us back to a famous letter written some years earlier to Lucceius, in which Cicero set about trying to persuade his addressee, a distinguished writer, to write a eulogy of his career (Fam. 5.12.7):Footnote 56
atque hoc praestantius mihi fuerit et ad laetitiam animi et ad memoriae dignitatem, si in tua scripta pervenero, quam si in ceterorum, quod non ingenium mihi solum suppeditatum fuerit tuum, sicut Timoleonti a Timaeo aut ab Herodoto Themistocli, sed etiam auctoritas clarissimi et spectatissimi viri et in rei publicae maximis gravissimisque causis cogniti atque in primis probati, ut mihi non solum praeconium, quod, cum in Sigeum venisset, Alexander ab Homero Achilli tributum esse dixit, sed etiam grave testimonium impertitum clari hominis magnique videatur; placet enim Hector ille mihi Naevianus, qui non tantum ‘laudari’ se laetatur, sed addit etiam ‘a laudato viro’.
There is a further reason why a place in your works as compared with those of other writers will bring my mind a more lively satisfaction and my memory more signal honour. You will confer upon me the benefit not only of your literary skill, as Timaeus did upon Timoleon or Herodotus did upon Themistocles, but of your authority as a famed and admired public man, tried and notably approved in public affairs of the greatest moment. Not only shall I gain a herald, such as Alexander when he visited Sigeum said Homer was to Achilles, but a witness — the weighty testimony of a great and famous man. For I am of one mind with Naevius' Hector, who delights, not in praise, but he adds, ‘from one that is praised’.
When we compare the two letters, we cannot help but notice the difference in Cicero's version of the quotation in his letter to Cato, when he pointedly chooses to stress the fact that Hector is addressing his father — a detail laden with caustic irony in this context given that he is addressing Cato as an older to a younger man.Footnote 57 The pater that Cicero includes in the quote is one way of reminding Cato of how patronizing and inappropriate his high-handed treatment of Cicero (his elder, in years as also in consular status) is — without spelling it out in so many words. Praise from Cato is all very well, but according to the rules of epistolary politesse it should fall on Cicero, the elder, to dispense or withhold praise — a point reinforced by his attempt, as the letter goes on, to restore paternalistic hierarchies in the traditional economy of praise by praising Cato himself.Footnote 58
Yet however bristling with insult the original attempt to gain the senior hand may be in this letter, its discussion of the value of praise by those who have themselves led honoured lives gains an entirely new meaning in light of Cicero's posthumous eulogy of Cato. The praise that Cicero bestows on Cato when dead demonstrates the mutual benefits that eulogizer and eulogized receive when they lend each other their political, moral and (in Cicero's case) literary capital in a perfect example of the situation that Cicero had described to Lucceius when trying to persuade him to write a eulogistic history of his career: a public and honourable subject lends dignity to the writer, just as the public status of the writer enhances the dignity of his subject. Now Cicero has turned eulogizer and the benefits of Cato's posthumous reputation are his to capitalize on if he can only find the words to get this polarizing figure into writing.
In retrospect, this exchange of letters seems to anticipate the work that Cicero will do after the civil war to help transform Cato into the staunch upholder of Republican virtue that he almost certainly did not represent at the time of the letters' writing. This posthumous gloss on Cato obviously postdates the composition of these letters to (and from) him. Yet it must be treated as an integral part of their meaning, since Cicero's eulogy of Cato nevertheless precedes the publication of the letters within this book, and may therefore be a determining premise behind their inclusion in ad Fam. 15.
III CICERO WRITES MARCELLUS
The letters to Cato are followed by a group of letters written to various members of the Marcellus gens, congratulating them on the election of Gaius Marcellus to the consulship for the following year and reminding them of their long-standing alliance to Cicero himself. The publication of these letters within ad Fam. 15 continues the project of rewriting that we have seen at work in the letters to and from Cato. For while the immediate function of these pledges of mutual support and approval is to persuade the Marcelli to support the vote for a supplicatio in Cicero's favour and to assist his recall to Rome, their expression of intimate alliance with this particular family assumes a new set of meanings in light of subsequent history. In this instance, moreover, the rewriting process exploits a larger historical gap than that which we saw at work in the letters to and from Cato, one that encompasses not just the period of civil war but also the aftermath of that war up to and including Julius Caesar's death.
As with all the letters in this book, choice of addressee constitutes the editor's most powerful rewriting tool: Fam. 15.7–11 include letters addressed not only to Marcus Claudius Marcellus, consul for the current year (51 b.c.e.), but also to his cousin, Gaius Claudius Marcellus, consul designate for the following year, as well as other members of their family.Footnote 59 The timing of these letters to the Marcelli, in the middle of one Marcellus' consulship and anticipating the next, is crucial. The chief legacy of these two relatives' successive consulships was the collective use they made of this office to attack Caesar, through a series of measures that served to exacerbate political frictions in 51–50 b.c.e. and thus to precipitate civil war. Marcus Claudius Marcellus' opposition to Caesar as consul in 51 b.c.e. is well known. He had marked it from the outset when calling upon the Senate to annul the citizen rights of the colonists settled by Caesar at Novum Comum, and subsequently having one of them publicly flogged.Footnote 60 But his consulship is most strongly identified with the attempt to force the Senate to debate the question of Caesar's recall to Rome, and hence to force Caesar's hand in choosing between his army and the consulship, and, more particularly, to make him relinquish the cherished privilege of the ratio absentis.Footnote 61 The length of time that it took to persuade the Senate of the need to have this debate only identifies it the more insistently as the dominant issue of his consulship.Footnote 62 As consul in 50 b.c.e., Gaius Claudius Marcellus had followed through his cousin's anti-Caesarian measures, by picking up the question of Caesar's recall to Rome in the face of repeated attempts by Curio to block the debate with the persistent threat of veto.Footnote 63 When Curio retaliated with the motion that Pompey should give up his army as well,Footnote 64 a motion that proved overwhelmingly popular in the Senate,Footnote 65 Marcellus refused to listen, but rather exploited (or invented) rumours about Caesar's plans to invade Italy as the pretext he needed to cross the pomerium and authorize Pompey to defend the State against Caesar's advances.Footnote 66 This Marcellus not only saw through the implementation of his cousin's consular initiatives, but was moreover prepared to bring the conflict with Caesar to a head in his refusal to let those initiatives be diverted away from their direst conclusion.
These activities do little to align the Marcelli with what we know of Cicero's own position toward Caesar at this time: maintaining a public position of neutrality until the end of March 49, Cicero's letters to Atticus for this and the preceding years do certainly reveal his despair about the tyrant he knew Caesar to be, but say nothing to endorse the attacks lodged against him by the Marcelli and their supporters.Footnote 67 Indeed, the only direct mention of either Marcellus in his correspondence with Atticus at this time is to register his consternation at some of their more incendiary actions.Footnote 68 Yet despite the fact that we hear nothing in Cicero's letters to the Marcelli in Fam. 15.7–11 of the anti-Caesarian activities that would characterize their consulships, his effusive expressions of support for their election to this office look, in retrospect, like an implicit endorsement of the measures for which their consulships would later become notorious.
In Fam. 15.9, addressed to Marcus Marcellus, Cicero presents his cousin Gaius' election to the consulship as the final reward for Marcus Marcellus' devotion to the Republic as well as the culmination of his consulship's achievements (Fam. 15.9.1): ‘Te et pietatis in tuos et animi in rem publicam et clarissimi atque optimi consulatus C. Marcello consule facto fructum cepisse vehementer gaudeo’ (‘I am highly delighted that by the election of Gaius Marcellus to the consulship you have reaped the reward of your family affection, patriotism, and your own most illustrious and admirable consulship’). A ringing endorsement of Marcus Marcellus' consulship here, and one that presents his relative's election to the same office as his natural successor and just reward. Cicero cannot have known at the time of writing the precise manner and extent to which Gaius' consulship would build on the policies that marked his cousin's tenure of this office. But the editor of Fam. 15 does know this, and may have drawn on this insight when selecting the letter for publication in Book 15.
The entire sequence of letters to the Marcelli in ad Fam. 15 presses home this sense of a common purpose and shared political ethic between the different members of this family, thereby reinforcing the identity of the Marcellus gens as a political as well as a social unit. Equally striking is the way in which Cicero seeks to insert himself into the relationships of familial resemblance that he draws between the Marcelli. Again, in Fam. 15.9, Cicero follows up his congratulations to Marcus Marcellus over his cousin's election to the consulship first by tracing the friendship between them back to childhood, and then by describing the delight he feels when being told of the resemblance between himself and his addressee.Footnote 69 Moreover, in the following letter, this time addressed to Gaius Marcellus, Cicero presents his addressee's election to the consulship as the final fulfilment of his own political achievements.Footnote 70 The quasi-familial alignment with a political ally is not unusual in the ad Fam.Footnote 71 But it is marked in the context of this sequence of letters by the strong lines of familial resemblance that Cicero draws between a succession of addressees who are all actual members of the same family. In this way, Cicero inserts himself into the familial bonds of the very family who were aligning politically at this time with the express purpose of attacking Caesar. Cicero's motives for ingratiating himself with the Marcelli may have been largely self-interested at the time of writing, but, following the subsequent outbreak of civil war (and with the knowledge in hindsight of the rôle played by the Marcelli in precipitating civil war), the particular terms in which he expresses that ingratiation in these letters make him look, in retrospect, like an accomplice.
The anti-Caesarean manoeuvres of 51–50 b.c.e., which the Marcelli oversaw as consuls, are not the only events to transform the meaning of these letters in the period following their composition. The publication of this correspondence in ad Fam. 15 also assumes, and exploits, the intervention of a further transformative moment, with the event six years later of Caesar's death. Up until this moment, the letters serve only to situate Cicero on the losing side of history. But Caesar's assassination vindicates Cicero's support for the dictator's erstwhile enemies, and, furthermore, requires him to demonstrate that support (for enemies past, whether or not he can do so for enemies present). His own exclusion from the assassination plot had, after all, laid him open to the potential charge by posterity of holding a compromised stance on Caesar up until the latter's death.Footnote 72 This sequence of letters enables the editor of the ad Fam. to rebut this view, by allowing him to trace Cicero's support for Caesar's enemies back to a much earlier date. Although in themselves the letters offer few overt clues to read them specifically in light of Caesar's death, they connect closely with another text which does offer such directives, and which makes us revisit the letters in light of this event.
The Pro Marcello, which records Cicero's response to Caesar's unexpected decision to pardon one Marcellus (Marcus) at the behest of another (Gaius), picks up the narrative of the Marcellus family's (and, by extension, Cicero's) relations with Caesar at a later stage in their story from where Cicero signed off in Fam. 15.12, following Caesar's victory over all of them. The speech, which marked an impromptu and short-lived return to public speaking on Cicero's part, has long been read in ambivalent terms.Footnote 73 The fawning praise with which Cicero welcomes the dictator's show of clemency is taken by some as a sign of precisely that accommodating stance toward Caesar that would lead to his exclusion from the assassination plot.Footnote 74 Others view his lavish praise of Caesar as figured speech, underwritten by a desire to instil murderous designs on the dictator in the minds of his fellow senators.Footnote 75 In particular, the warning issued to Caesar at the end of the speech to beware the daggers of his enemies has tempted some readers to take this message as a coded encouragement to potential assassins. The latter view, of course, assumes a new urgency following Caesar's death, when the particular manner of that death makes Cicero's warning (or encouragement) in this speech take on a prophetic significance. With this warning, the Pro Marcello offers its readers an unavoidable invitation to re-read this text in light of Caesar's death, some two years after it was first published.
The mode of rewriting that the Pro Marcello undergoes following Caesar's assassination has hermeneutic implications for the letters to the Marcelli contained in ad Fam. 15, the publication of which within this book of letters only ever postdates the event of Caesar's death. Verbal correspondences between the speech and Fam. 15.7–12 invite us to read these texts against each other,Footnote 76 and to locate the points of narrative contact between them. Prior to Caesar's death, the scope of this narrative is limited to the fortunes of the Marcelli before and after the civil war. But Caesar's death, which transforms the meaning of the Pro Marcello, has an inevitable knock-on effect on how we read its prequel. The encouragement of Caesar's assassins that Cicero may (or may not) have intended with his warning to Caesar of the danger posed by potential murderers at the end of the Pro Marcello now finds its prelude in the letters to the Marcelli published in ad Fam. 15. Together these texts construct a narrative of sustained resistance that places Cicero unambiguously behind Caesar's enemies, not only before the civil war, but also after that war and before Caesar's death, in an effort to refute the more complex picture of his allegiances that we derive from elsewhere in the corpus. Cicero emerges from this act of editorial rewriting as the missing link between these two sets of Caesarian enemies, who now appear in retrospect to share in common the fact that they were encouraged in their hostility to Caesar by him.
IV CICERO WRITES THE TYRANNICIDE
This narrative is only reinforced by the sequence of letters that closes ad Fam. 15, which are addressed to two of the assassins themselves, Cassius and Trebonius. Of all the figures whom we can now identify as members of the assassination plot, these two are the only ones (apart from Brutus, whose correspondence with Cicero resides in a collection of its own) whose extant correspondence with Cicero consists of more than a single letter. Other letters to and from Cassius and Trebonius in the ad Fam. all postdate Caesar's death.Footnote 77 Moreover, although the first letter in the sequence addressed to Cassius continues Cicero's efforts to canvas support for the termination of his tenure of proconsular office, in this instance proconsular business is limited to the opening letter. The subsequent sequence, Fam.15.15–19, has nothing to do with Cicero's recall from Cilicia and postdates not only his time in office there but also the period of civil war that ensued. The letter sequence thus traces the development of a friendship with a leading tyrannicide over the space of a few years, from a state of sincere yet somewhat distant respect to one of easy familiarity. Cicero's time in Cilicia and military triumph are, in this instance, an open pretext for incorporating into ad Fam. 15 a run of letters that trace Cicero's intimate acquaintance with two of Caesar's assassins back to a period that long predates their involvement in the assassination plot. These letters thus continue the project of rewriting Cicero's allegiances to Caesar's enemies prior to his death that we have seen at work throughout ad Fam. 15.
The opening letter in this sequence contains an epistolary convention that we have found in a number of letters in this book, which invariably serves to mark the formality of Cicero's appeal to his addressee. As with every prior instance of the motif, this one is carefully tailored to the identity of Cicero's correspondent, and acts as a crux for precisely the kind of bifocal readings that we have seen it introduce on previous occasions (Fam. 15.14.6):
Extremum illud est de iis, quae proposueram, confirmatio nostrae amicitiae, de qua pluribus verbis nihil opus est: tu puer me appetisti, ego autem semper ornamento te mihi fore duxi; fuisti etiam praesidio tristissimis meis temporibus; accessit post tuum discessum familiaritas mihi cum Bruto tuo maxima. Itaque in vestro ingenio et industria mihi plurimum et suavitatis et dignitatis constitutum puto: id tu ut tuo studio confirmes, te vehementer rogo, litterasque ad me et continuo mittas et, cum Romam veneris, quam saepissime.
The last of the points I mentioned was the strengthening of our friendship. On that little need be said. As a boy you drew towards me, and on my side I always believed that I should be proud of you. You also defended me in my darkest days. After you went abroad, I formed a very close friendship with your connection Brutus. In your joint talents and energy I think I have a rich prospect of pleasure and prestige; and I earnestly ask you to confirm that opinion by your zeal. Send me a letter at once, and when you are back in Rome write as often as you can.
Cicero closes his letter to Cassius with the claim to a long-standing friendship with his addressee that we have found to be customary of such epistolary appeals for support, one that traces a particular bond back to boyhood.Footnote 78 In this case, Cicero traces their friendship back to Cassius' boyhood, and thereby inflects the trope with an emphasis on his own seniority and importance as rôle-model. On top of this, Cicero further amplifies the convention by adding the detail of Cassius' previous support during the dark days of his exile, as well as the additional fact of his current intimacy with Cassius' brother-in-law, Brutus. The emphasis on the relationship between these two eventual tyrannicides, and on the personal pleasure and even dignitas that Cicero derives from the ingenium and industria of Cassius and Brutus as a pair, asks us to see Caesar's assassination as the event that the publication of this letter presupposes. This gesture will prove to be programmatic for the ensuing sequence of letters.
Following an interim letter, in which Cicero makes common cause with Cassius over their respective courses of action during the civil war, the subsequent run of letters, Fam. 15.16–19, produces a further act of rewriting, one that attempts to allocate a significant rôle to Cicero in the motivations behind the assassination plot. These letters are primarily taken up with banter about philosophy, and depict Cicero teasing Cassius for his recent conversion to Epicureanism, an event which remains one of the great puzzles of the narrative of Roman politics of this period. Why Cassius converted to Epicureanism, and how he came to square this new philosophical creed with his commitment to killing Caesar,Footnote 79 is a question that the editor of ad Fam. 15 is partly responsible for inspiring, insofar as the letter exchange preserved in ad Fam. 15 is our only contemporary witness to Cassius' conversion.Footnote 80 It remains to ask, therefore, what effect the editor's decision to publish these letters within Book 15 has on the narrative of political allegiances that this book of letters constructs and disseminates. The question is a loaded one, since Cassius' Epicureanism is commonly viewed as an important reason why Brutus, rather than Cassius, has received the lion's share of glory for leading the plot to kill Caesar.Footnote 81
In tone, these letters could not be more different from the letters to and from Cato at the start of the book. Yet the two groups of letters share in common the expression of a mutual commitment to philosophy, albeit to very different schools, which invites us to read them against each other. The organization of these letters seems designed to make this point. Letters 16–18 invert compositional chronology, placing first the letter written last.Footnote 82 One possible reason for this reversal is to foreground the event of Cassius' conversion, since Letter 16, although written last, contains an explicit allusion to this moment, when, towards the end of the letter, Cicero implies that Cassius' turn to Epicureanism was somehow connected to his experience of civil war.Footnote 83 In presenting the event of civil war as the pivot for Cassius' conversion, Fam. 15.16 thus casts him in stark contrast to Cato, the figure whose own quite different philosophical response to civil war (namely, Stoic persistence to the point of suicide) we saw thematized by the ‘triumph of philosophy’ trope at the start of this book.Footnote 84 How do we reconcile this divergence with the demands of accommodating both these figures to a consistent Ciceronian portrait? Since this is, as we have seen throughout, the remit of Book 15: to assimilate the identities of Caesar's most sworn enemies, in all their diversity, to Cicero's paradigm, even as it attempts to write him into theirs. Yet whereas the philosophical differences between Cicero and Cato would dissolve to some extent following the event of Cato's death, the differences between Cicero's and Cassius' respective philosophical stances are more immoveable. The following sequence of letters, along with their most prominent intertext, provides a partial answer to this question.
Fam. 15.16–19 sustains a light-hearted debate over the place that Epicureans accord virtue in their hierarchy of philosophical goals, and, in particular, over the ancillary rôle that virtue is said to play to pleasure. The insouciant tone of these letters should not distract us from the gravity of the issue at stake, since Cicero's entire philosophical project in this period might be boiled down to the promotion of virtus as an end in its own right.Footnote 85 This is, therefore, an issue liable to distance Cicero from Cassius (as much as it aligns him with Brutus), a point underscored by the fact that his exchange with Cassius replays (or anticipates) some of the most central arguments of the first two books of the de Finibus, in which the end-goals of the Epicurean system are expounded in the opening book, only to be dismantled in the next. In selecting this group of letters for inclusion within ad Fam. 15, the editor invites us to read them in concert with this dialogue. Just as Fam. 15.16 opens, for example, with Cicero teasing Cassius about the unlovely language that his new Epicurean friends deploy to render some of their more dubious ideas, so too the de Finibus begins with the question of whether Cicero's chief objection to Epicureanism is the language in which it is expressed.Footnote 86 And when Cicero proceeds, in Fam. 15.17, to tease Cassius over whether or not the widespread demonstration of benevolentia towards Pansa elicited by his departure for Spain should be treated as a proof that the good must be chosen for its own sake,Footnote 87 Cassius' winning reply offers a highly condensed version of the Epicurean position on the relationship between virtue and pleasure that would be propounded in the course of de Finibus 1.Footnote 88
The overlap between the letters and this particular book of the dialogue is made particularly interesting by the identity of the figure to whom these Epicurean arguments are attributed in de Finibus 1: Lucius Manlius Torquatus, an Epicurean who was famously killed while fighting on the Pompeian side during the civil war.Footnote 89 Cicero's decision to cast him as the Epicurean mouthpiece of this dialogue is treated by some scholars as an attempt to rewrite history in retrospect by making this (fictional) dismantling of Torquatus' Epicureanism seem to pre-empt his public-spirited conduct in the civil war.Footnote 90 An example of Cicero capitalizing on the moral and cultural capital of a contemporary, and reframing their philosophical principles in retrospect in order to make their exemplary status mesh with his own cultural paradigm (just as he — or his editor — had done in the letters to and from Cato at the start of ad Fam. 15).Footnote 91 A similar procedure may be at work in the exchange with Cassius, which the editor has included (and manipulated) to reveal Cicero challenging Cassius' Epicureanism and goading him to demonstrate that commitment to virtue that he would in fact go on to display in leading the plot to assassinate Caesar. The exchange of letters was composed some five months before the publication of de Finibus, and writes Torquatus and Cassius into the same position as one another.Footnote 92 The only difference is that in the case of the letters, Cassius is allowed to have the last word.Footnote 93 Cicero cannot quite take all the glory for the moral mettle behind the tyrannicide's achievement. Doing so would detract from the very virtues of Cassius that Cicero needs to uphold in order to be able to capitalize on his reflected glory. But the editor of ad Fam. 15 does all he can to make Cicero's letters to Cassius in this sequence seem like crucial interventions in Cassius' moral development at this time.
The editor's efforts to produce this implication are manifested by a telling show of editorial interference in this sequence, when Cicero's and Cassius' exchange about Pansa in Fam. 15.17 and Fam. 15.19 is interrupted by a letter that arises out of chronological order: this is Letter 18, the earliest composed in the sequence Fam. 15.16–19 that runs from late 46 into January 45. Here Cicero offers a sterner view of the political consequences of their philosophical variance. Complaining to Cassius of the dangers entailed in speaking about anything of consequence either in jest or in seriousness at this time, he goes on to explain why they cannot fill their letters with talk of philosophy either (Fam. 15.18.1):Footnote 94
ridere igitur, inquis, possumus. non mehercule facillime; verumtamen aliam aberrationem a molestiis nullam habemus. ‘Ubi igitur,’ inquies, ‘philosophia?’ Tua quidem in culina, mea in molesta est; pudet enim servire: itaque facio me alias res agere, ne convicium Platonis audiam.
Is joking possible then, you will ask. Well it certainly isn't very easy, but we have no other means of diversion from our troubles. Where then is philosophy? Yours is in the kitchen, mine is a scold — to be a slave makes me ashamed of myself. So I make believe to be otherwise occupied, so as not to have Plato's reproaches in my ears.
The interposition of this letter between Cicero and Cassius' exchange about Pansa in Fam. 15.17 and Fam. 15.19 radically alters the tone of Cassius' reply, inflecting his arguments with a further seriousness of purpose that comes from its new status as a reply to Cicero's charge in Fam. 15.18 that Epicureanism is a philosophy in culina, too focused on personal pleasure to engage with politics. Cassius' Epicurean ideals are given a political edge, and Cicero is at the same time shown to be the one holding him to account. When, at the end of the letter, Cassius claims that he wishes he could read Cicero's mind, as its state would tell him how he ought to behave,Footnote 95 he appears to be casting Cicero as his better conscience, in a gesture that resonates well beyond its immediate context,Footnote 96 and speaks to the duty that he will later perform for the Roman state (with Cicero still in mind, the editor seems to imply) in killing Caesar.
V THE TYRANNICIDE WRITES CICERO
The final pair of letters in ad Fam. 15, addressed to Trebonius, another tyrannicide, enshrines Cicero's place in the tightest bonds of affection with yet another of Caesar's eventual enemies. These letters also thematize the process of memorialization through which Cicero honours this group of addressees at the same time as he seeks to be memorialized as their trusted confidant and inspiration. Fam. 15.20–21 contrast sharply in tone with the formality of the letters addressed to the Senate and to Cato at the start of the book, being perhaps the most intimately affectionate of any of the letters in the ad Fam., with the sole exception of some of those addressed to Tiro in ad Fam. 16. The letters seem to have been written in close succession between the end of 46 and the start of 45 b.c.e., when Trebonius was on the point of leaving/had just left Rome to fight for Caesar in Spain. But their order in the book reverses chronology, placing first the letter written second, in a switch that comments eloquently on the reversal of history that these letters mark: Trebonius might have been off to fight for Caesar at this time, but his rôle in the organization of Caesar's assassination is also traced to precisely this period, and the editor of ad Fam. 15 has done his best to make his activities in this vein the subtext to these letters. Thus Fam. 15.20, the letter written last but placed first, contains a number of details that indicate his eventual identity as one of the tyrannicides: firstly, Cicero draws pointed attention to Caesar's rôle as tyrant at this time, when, in the course of trying to solicit letters from Trebonius while the latter was away, he suggests that Trebonius is especially beholden to write to him from Spain, since that is where the republic (i.e. Julius Caesar) currently resides. The equation of Caesar with the res publica appears to be offered lightly, yet it is a hallmark elsewhere of Cicero's bitterest complaints about tyranny.Footnote 97 Second, Cicero's urgent request in this letter is for news of Brutus, whom Trebonius is said to have met on his way to Spain. As with the sequence of letters addressed to Cassius, this one opens with a reference to the figure who would become the most famous tyrannicide, and seems expressly designed to place Trebonius in his company.
The following letter (which was written first) is almost entirely consumed with expressions of affection and prospective longing for Trebonius following his imminent departure for Spain. Coming after Fam. 15.20, Cicero's intense affection for Trebonius is made to seem consequential to the emphases of its immediate precedent, which, as we noted, does its best to cast Trebonius as the tyranncide that he may not yet have known he was to become. But there is an additional cause for Cicero's pronounced affection in this letter, one that makes it an especially fitting finale to the book as a whole. Having listed the numerous proofs from his past life and career of Trebonius' love and devotion towards him, Cicero adds the most recent example, which is, it seems, one of the main catalysts for writing this letter (Fam. 15.21.2):
ut haec igitur omittam, quae mihi tanti aestimanda sunt, quanti vitam aestimo et salutem meam, liber iste, quem mihi misisti, quantam habet declarationem amoris tui! primum, quod tibi facetum videtur, quidquid ego dixi, quod aliis fortasse non item; deinde, quod illa, sive faceta sunt sive secus, fiunt narrante te venustissima.
Leaving all this aside (and I must needs value it as highly as I value my existence as a man and a citizen), this book you have sent me, what a declaration of your affection! To begin with, you find wit in every saying of mine — another perhaps would not; and then, these things, whether witty or not, become irresistible when you're the raconteur.
On the one hand, this reference to Trebonius' compilation of a book of Cicero's bons mots offers the crowning witness to the esteem in which he was held by one of the tyrannicides. If we had wondered whether this idea were simply the effect of the editor's artistry, this letter tells us in no uncertain terms that it is not. The process of literary commemoration, by which Cicero (or his editor) honours the deeds of Caesar's enemies with this book of letters, is shown to be reciprocal, as at least one of Caesar's enemies reveals his inclination to commemorate Cicero in words. Even if those words belong, in fact, to Cicero, and the only record of this tribute to him is found in this, a letter penned by him.
Cicero's description of Trebonius' tribute to him also comments on the process of rewriting that we find at work in ad Fam. 15. In particular, the idea that his dicta have become venustissima through the very fact of Trebonius' telling them applies in an extended sense to all the letters that we encounter in this book. Once collected into a book, these letters all become quotations, and might well be said to have been burnished through the process of being retold by others, insofar as they are given illustrious new meanings by the changing historical resonance and significance of the deeds of their addressees. All the named addressees in ad Fam. 15 share in common the fact that they were each to play a leading rôle in the struggle against Caesar. While their resistance to Caesar (or, at least, the extent of that resistance) may not be demonstrable at the time of the letters' writing, it is certainly a premise for their inclusion within this book and thus a premise for our reading them in this published context. Their conflict with Caesar and eventual success in eliminating him infuse these letters with a retrospective significance (and/or proleptic irony) that is only produced by subsequent history. When published alongside one another, the letters are inevitably retold from this perspective, and thus provide an excellent example of how Cicero's words might be made more dazzling through their retelling. A fitting note on which to end a book that has showcased the editor's art of rewriting at every turn.
CONCLUSION
Ad Fam. 15 brings together Cicero's correspondence with Caesar's most sworn opponents. It organizes the phases of their enmity into chronological sequence, with a focus on two particular crises involving Julius Caesar: civil war, and his assassination five years later, events which might seem extraneous to the letters themselves (insofar as they postdate them), yet which provide the pertinent hermeneutic premises for their interpretation in this particular collocation. The editor thus exploits the gap that stands between the letters' composition and subsequent history in order to invest them with a set of meanings that they could not have held at the time of writing. In this instance, the effect is to rehabilitate Cicero, whose own relationship with Caesar throughout this period was, as we know from letters found in other collections, a far more complex one that spanned a broad spectrum of different sentiments. In ad Fam. 15, however, he is planted firmly in the company of Caesar's most punishing enemies, and appears in this book of letters as the missing link between them all. The nominal theme of the supplicatio, which seemed at first sight to provide the most obvious unifying thread between most of the letters within this book, takes a secondary rôle when we look more carefully at the whole book, and invites us to consider its meaning as metaphorical. In a remarkable display of his own power to revise textual and historical meaning, the editor has transformed the premise for Cicero's vote of thanksgiving from his military victory over the enemy in Cilicia to his rôle in galvanizing Caesar's enemies into action. This narrative is the editor's last word on Cicero the statesman, and arguably provides a more fitting finale to the ad Fam. (prior to the paratext of ad Fam. 16) than the letters' immediate concern: Cicero's bid for a supplicatio over a questionable military success, that was never destined to materialize into a triumph.
This act of rewriting does more than simply demonstrate the strategic positioning of books within the collection. It also tells us something important about the organization of the letter collections (plural) as an interactive collectivity, and, beyond this, about the aspiration of these letter collections to be incorporated into Cicero's larger oeuvre. An obvious omission from this book of letters is any letter addressed to Brutus, that other tyrannicide whom we might expect to find addressed alongside Cassius and Trebonius, but whose correspondence with Cicero is preserved in a separate collection. The strategies employed in drawing up the ad Fam. thus presuppose the existence, whether already formed or in the process of formation, of other letter collections (such as the ad Brutum), and invite us to read this collection against and alongside them. Publication context, for any letter of Cicero's, is therefore not limited to book or even collection, but is an ever-expanding category that must be extended to the collectivity of letter collections published under his name. More than this, though, the letters ask to be read in concert with the rest of Cicero's oeuvre, and draw on the processes of rewriting that the texts of his oeuvre undergo as a consequence of historical developments that took place since their publication, as we saw in the case of Fam. 15.7–12 and the Pro Marcello. This demonstrates not only the revisionist artistry of the editors who oversaw the project of compiling the ad Fam., as individual books as well as a collection, but also the extent of their ambition to see this letter collection become integrated into Cicero's larger oeuvre.
