DE FINIBVS 5.80
dixerit hoc idem Epicurus, semper beatum esse sapientem … quem quidem, cum summis doloribus conficiatur, ait dicturum: ‘quam suaue est! quam nihil curo!’ non pugnem cum homine, cur tantum †habeat† in natura boni …
This text, containing Cicero's oft-repeated canard,Footnote 1 is deeply problematic. Both Reynolds and Moreschini resort to daggers here.Footnote 2 Madvig's abeat for habeat has failed to convince, since Cicero appears to use abeo metaphorically without specifying the place of origin or destination of movement within a narrowly circumscribed semantic field which does not encompass our passage.Footnote 3 C.F.W. Müller, on the other hand, offered aberret, which can appear without such specification in the sense ‘be deceived’ or the like.Footnote 4 Editors evidently hesitate, however, because of the difficulty of explaining the corruption. Perhaps one might rather consider the merits of haereat. haereo can mean ‘be stuck in difficulties’,Footnote 5 but the usage is uncommon enough that it could easily have been a stumbling block for an inattentive scribe. Moreover, in some scripts where r is written with somewhat elongated hasta and an arc curving down, it can be easily confused with b; and once haebeat appeared, the ‘correction’ to habeat was all but inevitable.
TVSCVLANAE DISPVTATIONES 4.32
inter acutos autem et inter hebetes interest quod … illi in morbum et incidunt tardius et recreantur ocius, hebetes non item. nec uero in omnem morbum ac perturbationem animus ingeniosi cadit; †non enim multa ecferata et immania; quaedam autem humanitatis quoque habent primam speciem ut misericordia aegritudo metus.
Pohlenz's text.Footnote 6 To the Stoic definitions and classifications of passions Cicero appends comments on the susceptibility of different character-types to different passions. Here he is painting with broad strokes the distinction between acuti and hebetes. The passage is a locus conclamatus that has elicited many conjectures, none of them convincing; details can be found in Giusta's apparatus.Footnote 7 His own conjecture notat for non is likewise unsatisfying: if the clever man stigmatizes many savage and monstrous things, why not all of them?
I suspect that what Cicero wrote was non enim multa <ei placent, nedum> ecferata et immania, ‘not many things please him, let alone savage and monstrous ones’.Footnote 8 We can thus leave in place every word of the transmitted text and merely assume a saltation error from the e of ei to that of ecferata.
TVSCVLANAE DISPVTATIONES 4.40
aegre tulisse P. Rupilium fratris repulsam consulatus scriptum apud Fannium est. sed tamen transisse uidetur modum, quippe qui ob eam causam a uita recesserit; moderatius igitur ferre debuit. quid si cum id ferret modice, mors liberorum accessisset? ‘nata esset aegritudo noua, sed ea modica.’ magna tamen facta esset accessio.
Cicero is polemicizing against the Peripatetic doctrine that one may entertain emotions, but in moderation. He cites the example of P. Rutilius, said by Fannius (FRH 5 = 6 Peter) to have committed suicide upon learning of the defeat of his brother Lucius in consular elections.Footnote 9 Conceding that the suicide was an excessive reaction, Cicero proceeds by a sorites-style enquiry to determine when such action would be appropriate: what if the death of his children came on top of that event? The answer of the hypothetical Peripatetic is that that would be a new source of depression (aegritudo), but a moderate one (modica). In Cicero's response, tamen concedes his opponent's point per se, but he argues that the loss of the children would be made great ‘by addition’ (accessio<ne>), not that ‘a great addition (accessio) would have been made’, i.e. Cicero is arguing for the cumulative impact of the several events, not for the scale of one individual event. It would be all too easy for a scribe not attending closely to the argument to take accessio (rather than aegritudo) as the subject and drop the -ne.
