Cicero the character makes a brief but decisive appearance in Lucan's Bellum Ciuile: following murmurings of dissatisfaction from the soldiers early in the seventh book of the poem, he steps forward to channel their sentiments in a short speech (7.68–85). The speech is the final push that brings the hesitant Pompey to join battle at Pharsalus, the battle that he will lose. This Cicero, as scholars have noted, is not just out of place (he was not at the camp at Pharsalus, having stayed behind in Dyrrachium): he does not sound much like Cicero and his speech accomplishes the exact opposite of the historical Cicero's persistent attempts at peacemaking in the lead-up to the conflict.Footnote 1 Lucan's Cicero has been described as a caricature in line with attacks on Cicero familiar from the declamatory tradition.Footnote 2 Yet unlike those attacks, which target well known and well-documented weaknesses in their object's record, this portrait is peculiar in almost drawing attention to the fictionality of its stage-setting. While the episode itself, as well as the presence of Ciceronian material in other parts of the poem, has received attention from scholars, there has not been a satisfactory analysis of the reasons for Lucan's invention.Footnote 3 In this article I return to the question of Lucan's peculiar treatment of Cicero and propose a new framework for its interpretation. This framework both offers a new understanding of the short episode in which Cicero the character appears, and embraces multiple Ciceronian presences within the poem that are, in their variety, reflective of Lucan's multifaceted technique in composing a historical epic.
The interpretative framework I propose takes Virgil's handling of multiple sources in constructing intertextually complex characters in the Aeneid as the dominant model for Lucan's handling of Cicero in the poem. Given that the subject of Lucan's poem is historical events, another major model, within the larger Virgilian framework, is historiographical: Sallust's treatment of the character of Cicero the consul in the Bellum Catilinae. Finally, the declamatory practice of representing Cicero as the epitome of Roman eloquence and of Republican freedom does play an important role in Lucan's portrayal of Cicero. I begin my discussion by briefly outlining the techniques which Lucan draws on from each of these models. I then proceed to read Cicero in the Bellum Ciuile in two parts. First, I focus on Cicero the character, and especially the brief introduction with which the poet prefaces his speech in Book 7. Second, I examine other Ciceronian presences in the poem, in the characters of Pompey and Cato and in the words of the narrator.
MODELS OF TECHNIQUE
The three genres that most influence Lucan's treatment of character, and of the character of Cicero especially, are epic, historiography and declamation. It is consistent with the poem's primary generic identity as an epic poem that Virgil's intertextual technique for constructing his characters in the Aeneid serves as the primary model.Footnote 4 Virgil's method is twofold: from the point of view of individual characters within the Aeneid, looking back at Virgil's sources, Virgil combines features of characters derived from his intertexts; from the perspective of his models, as is especially clear in the case of Homer, characters are split, their various facets attaching to multiple characters in Virgil's poem. This splitting technique has the additional effect of creating intratextual links among characters within the Aeneid. For example, the integrative, or ‘many in one,’ side of this process can be seen in the multiple intertexts that make up the character of Dido:Footnote 5 a list of intertexts that contribute would include Homer's Arete, Nausicaa, Circe, Calypso, Helen, Penelope, Hector; Apollonius’ Medea; tragedy's Ajax, Antigone, Alcestis, Deianira, Medea; Catullus’ Ariadne; and historical figures, most prominently Cleopatra.Footnote 6 On the splitting, or ‘one in many,’ side, we can see features of one Homeric character, for instance Nausicaa, split among multiple Virgilian ones: the virginal princess who might marry the protagonist and serve as a way of rooting him in a new land is clearly linked to Lavinia, but the simile that compares her to Artemis in the Odyssey (6.102–5) is transferred to Dido in the Aeneid (1.498–502). The connection to Nausicaa serves in part to draw attention to Dido's paradoxical status as an available widow, but also to foreshadow the failure of her union with Aeneas, whose simile links him to Apollo, Diana's brother.Footnote 7 Within the poem, these links create a dynamic whereby Aeneas travels from the wrong Nausicaa (Dido) to one that will turn out to be right (Lavinia), yet is infected by the instability and the contestation that surrounds her unlucky predecessor. It is important to note that this splitting technique is not limited to literary intertexts, but applies to Virgil's treatment of historical characters as well: so Cleopatra appears as herself in the representation of the Battle of Actium on the Shield of Aeneas (Aen. 8.688, 8.696–7, 8.707–8), but she is also part of the makeup of the character of Dido, the queen whose influence is deflecting the proto-Roman from his mission and his identity, and of Camilla, the warrior-woman who joins battle against Aeneas.Footnote 8
Sallust's treatment of Cicero in his first-person historical account of Catiline's conspiracy is broadly similar to the splitting technique I have described for Virgil's epic, but shows—as we would expect—important differences. Sallust is writing not only in response to historical events, in which Cicero was an actor, but after those events have been textualized, above all by Cicero himself. Sallust's text, therefore, is interacting both with the events and with their representation by one of the main actors in those events, resulting in a unique treatment for Cicero the character in Sallust's text. In Cicero's corpus, his suppression of the conspiracy is his signature accomplishment, and he is the protagonist in the events he represents. Sallust's Cicero is a minor character, for several reasons.Footnote 9 One is structural: Sallust's interest in Cato and Caesar as contrasting characters and in the presentation of their conflicting ideas in the speeches the historian gives them, in line with the historian's generally antithetical style and thought patterns, leaves no room for Cicero's speeches (thus the fourth Catilinarian is written out of history) and little room for his actions.Footnote 10 The relationship between the importance of Cato and Caesar as proportional to the un-importance of Cicero is clear from Sallust's practice in using his name: in the lead-up to the speeches and the syncrisis that follows them, Sallust regularly names him, mostly as Cicero, occasionally as Marcus Tullius, and sometimes refers to him as ‘the consul’. The naming stops as soon as we enter the Senate meeting at which the speeches of Cato and Caesar are exchanged, and even references to Cicero as ‘the consul’ virtually disappear: he is mentioned a couple of times in the speeches themselves, and only once in the subsequent narrative.
Just as the voices of Cato and Caesar silence Cicero, so the historian himself takes over the role that Cicero played in the events. The discovery of the conspiracy, the identification of the conspirators, the revelation of their depravity and their goals, and the analysis of their motivations: all these actions are performed by Cicero and represented by him, at the time, in the Catilinarian orations and, later, in his self-presentation in many of the works that followed. In Sallust's Bellum Catilinae these acts are mentioned briefly by the narrator, as performed by the optumus consul,Footnote 11 to the extent which the narrative requires, but are much more extensively and effectively performed by the narrator himself for the benefit of the reader. Sallust the historian reveals the origins of depravity in Catiline's character, presents the kinds of people who joined him, and discloses the antecedents of the conspiracy. Cicero has been not so much written out as he has been overwritten by Sallust. His actions and words are still present but, in the eyes of the reader, the historian is the one to be credited with the very achievements on which Cicero based his reputation. Sallust has displaced and replaced the consul, thereby making him a minor character in what Cicero considered the most important drama of his career. Sallust's technique in treating Cicero, then, shows two separate but related processes. First, partial suppression and erasure motivated by the overriding importance of other characters to how the historian structures and presents the events. Second, splitting, analogous to what we saw in Virgil, with the crucial difference that the narrator is the one to whom some of the content that had belonged to the character, who was himself an author, is redirected. As we shall see, Lucan configures his narrator similarly in relation to Cicero the author of texts about civil war.
Finally, declamatory practice in relation to Cicero has been extensively treated in recent work, and can be briefly described here as a process of reduction and simplification, producing two contrasting portraits: one positive, one negative.Footnote 12 On the positive side, Cicero is reduced to a stand-in for Republican eloquence and his career is largely reduced to the moment of his melodramatic death, which in turn is reduced to a symbol for the death of liberty. The negative approach presents a weak, ineffectual, self-aggrandizing man pitted against the eulogistic paradigm. Whether the inflection given is positive or negative, the reduction produces several distinct and recognizable incarnations of Cicero: Cicero the embodiment of eloquence, Cicero the consul who exposed the Catilinarian conspiracy, Cicero the failed peacemaker at the start of the Civil War, Cicero the dismembered victim, and Cicero whose death is the symbol of the death of liberty.Footnote 13
With these mechanisms at work in Lucan's generic models in mind, I now turn to Ciceronian presences in his poem. Following the twofold analysis of the dominant Virgilian technique, I begin my investigation with the ‘many in one’ intertextuality and look at the introduction of Cicero the character in Book 7 of the Bellum Ciuile. Following that discussion, I turn to the ‘one in many’ side of the process and explore the diffusion of Cicero in the rest of the poem.
MANY IN ONE: CICERO AT PHARSALUS
Book 7 of Lucan's Bellum Ciuile brings the reader to the decisive battle of the war, Pharsalus. As the day of the battle dawns, the poet recounts the soldiers’ desire to fight and their dissatisfaction with Pompey's hesitation (7.45–61). Cicero is introduced immediately following this sketch of the popular mood. The function of his character in the narrative is as an effective mouthpiece for the soldiers’ sentiment, and his speech (7.68–85) is what forces Pompey into action. My focus in this section will be on Lucan's introduction of the orator (7.62–7):
As I noted above, Cicero here is displaced: he was not at Pharsalus. But he is not simply out of place: this is also a ‘reduced’ Cicero, having undergone the same process of distillation and simplification that is typical of declamation, apparent here especially in the framing of the introduction by references to his eloquence as the defining trait.Footnote 14 Cicero's eloquence is at the core of the positive portrait of the reduced-declamatory Cicero, but here it receives negative colouring. In the last line Lucan explicitly evokes the tradition of viewing eloquence, and rhetoric more generally, as a dangerous weapon when wielded irresponsibly, the force for making the weak argument (inualida causa) appear strong.Footnote 15 His Cicero enjoys eloquence for its own sake and misses having opportunities to speak,Footnote 16 so when he does speak his eloquence is eloquence misused. But here displacement is again at work: the weak cause the orator advocates is one that he not only did not plead but also consistently and publicly resisted; the correspondence, both before and after the advent of the Civil War, shows that Cicero advocated for peace.Footnote 17 At first glance, then, Lucan's Cicero is indeed a simplified caricature: out of place in a military setting, unable to endure the lack of opportunities to show off his oratory, giving voice to the desire of the turba, of the cuncti; being led by the crowd, instead of trying to lead it.
Yet even this apparently straightforward reference to Cicero's eloquence is not as simple as it first appears to be. The opening line labels him as Romani maximus auctor Tullius eloquii, and the closing line returns to his rhetorical skill but with a different term, facundia.Footnote 18 This framing points to different intertexts with which Lucan is working as he constructs his Cicero. First, eloquium. This noun, a partial synonym for the unmetrical eloquentia, is first used by Virgil, coined by analogy with colloquium and adloquium. It appears once in the Aeneid, used by Turnus in his angry response to a provocation by the resident Latin orator, Drances.Footnote 19 Turnus stresses Drances’ identity as a speaker rather than as a warrior, and challenges his right to give advice in war (Aen. 11.383–6):
The emphasis on the orator's lack of military experience and the self-interest of his speech is not limited to his target, Turnus, but is shared by the narrator, and is apparent especially in the poet's introduction to Drances’ speech (Aen. 11.336–42):
The similarity of the unwarlike orator to Cicero was first noticed in the Renaissance.Footnote 20 In the scholarship on the Aeneid there is disagreement on this point, and scholars who argue against the connection point to the importance of wealth and of the status difference between Drances’ parents to the way in which the character is presented. Yet it would be surprising to find that Virgil based the character on Cicero alone, given his general practice of combining references. Regardless of what we think of Drances in the Aeneid, however, Lucan's deployment of Virgil's description of him as a model in introducing his Cicero indicates that Lucan read Drances as a Cicero-like character. That is, he redirected the partial allusion to a historical figure within the makeup of a Virgilian character to that historical figure's appearance in his own poem. This pattern is not unique to Virgil's Drances and Lucan's Cicero: the same basic mechanism can be seen in Lucan's account of Pompey's death, in which he incorporates Virgil's allusion to Pompey's death in the concluding lines of the description of the death of Priam in the Aeneid.Footnote 21 In Lucan's introduction of Cicero, the use of eloquium is a strongly marked allusion, similar to truncus in the case of Pompey. But beyond verbal correspondences, the two appearances are similarly structured: as we saw, in Virgil Drances is first identified by the combination of his eloquence and his lack of military ability; he then gives problematic advice with disastrous consequences, and after the speech, like Cicero in Lucan, he disappears from the poem. The Virgilian intertext, then, points to the unscrupulous and self-interested character of Ciceronian eloquence and its destructive potential for those who receive his advice.
In his commentary on Drances’ appearance and speech, Nicholas Horsfall draws attention to the scene's tone as recalling Late Republican political conflicts and, especially, its Sallustian quality.Footnote 22 There is a Sallustian residue, then, in Lucan's allusion to Cicero as Virgil's Drances, but Sallust's presence in the passage is made stronger by Lucan's use of facundia.Footnote 23 Like eloquium, this noun does not appear in Cicero's own corpus. In fact, its only attestation before Sallust is in the prologue to Terence's Heauton Timorumenos (13) where it refers to the actor's ability to deliver with facility the playwright's defence of his plot.Footnote 24 It is likely, then, that when Sallust uses the word (six times in the surviving corpus) it appears archaic.Footnote 25 In Sallust's usage, the quality of speaking that facundia designates is attributed three times to Greeks, once to Memmius and once to Sulla.Footnote 26 One last instance, in a fragment of the Histories, has been taken by some scholars to refer to Cicero: if that were the case, that would add further weight to Lucan's intertextual building of Cicero the character, but I do not believe that there is evidence to support such a claim.Footnote 27 Regardless, the word has a Sallustian tinge to it, and a further Ciceronian association, this time a certain one, deriving from a fragment from a poem by Cornelius Severus.
The fragment, the most substantial to survive from this contemporary of Ovid's, is a eulogy of Cicero preserved in a declamatory context, in the concluding section of Seneca the Elder's sixth suasoria devoted to the subject of Cicero's death (6.26).Footnote 28 I will return to this fragment in the next section, but for now I want to highlight Severus’ use of facundia to designate eloquence associated with Cicero (10–11):Footnote 29
facundia, then, when used to describe Cicero, on the one hand, evokes the eulogistic tradition associated with declamation and especially its incarnation in a historical poem by Cornelius Severus.Footnote 30 On the other hand, the word has strong Sallustian associations, and Sallust gave no room to Cicero's actual eloquence within his account of the Catilinarian conspiracy. The overall context of the line makes the problematic quality of Cicero's eloquence explicit, linking it to his advocacy of a bad cause, a weak argument. Together with the opening use of eloquium and its baggage of Drances’ unscrupulous oratory, Lucan's language both evokes the declamatory topos of eloquence as central to Cicero's legacy and undercuts the positive valuation of that legacy through a dense web of allusions to texts that displace or denigrate his speech, establishing a tradition for his own figuring of Ciceronian eloquence as unscrupulous and self-serving. The use of eloquium in the opening phrase Romani maximus auctor eloquii adds to this tradition in two further ways. First, Cicero is an auctor of words, and words only, in contrast to his self-designation as the author of peace (in Phil. 7.8 pacis semper laudator, semper auctor; and in a letter to M. Marius, Fam. 7.3.2 pacem cuius fueram semper auctor); and second, the phrase Romani maximus recalls Catullus’ mocking praise of the orator in poem 49, dissertissime Romuli nepotum.Footnote 31
But as central as eloquence is to Lucan's depiction of Cicero in this episode, it is not the exclusive focus. eloquium and facundia frame Cicero's major political achievement, his suppression of Catiline, as underlying his advice to Pompey: cuius sub iure togaque | pacificas saeuos tremuit Catilina securis ‘under whose civic command | savage Catiline trembled at the peacemaking axes’. The first part of this clause draws on the famous line from Cicero's own poetic account of his glorious accomplishment, cedant arma togae ‘let arms yield to the toga’, his claim to have suppressed the conspiracy peacefully, without resorting to violenceFootnote 32 (and, even more closely, on its incorporation into the already mentioned obituary of Cicero in Cornelius Severus, where the orator is remembered as ‘the protector [uindex] of justice and the toga’ [iurisque togaeque], 14). Cicero's emphasis on the peaceful nature of his actions is further highlighted by Lucan's use of pacificas in contrast to saeuus, which describes Catiline. The textual tradition on Cicero's role in the conspiracy's demise, then, includes his own self-glorification, in poetry and prose, but also the sidelining of his character in Sallust. The choice of portraying Catiline as trembling brings into play another intertext: Virgil's vignette of Catiline in the Underworld, depicted on the Shield of Aeneas in Book 8 (Aen. 8.666–70):
By singling out Catiline in this scene Virgil identifies his conspiracy as one of the greatest transgressions against the Republic. Yet the man who suppressed the conspiracy is absent. Instead, through juxtaposition, Catiline as the arch-enemy of the Republic is opposed not to Cicero but to Cato as an ideal Republican figure.Footnote 33 The dynamic is reminiscent of the displacement of Cicero in Sallust's narrative, here seen in miniature.Footnote 34 While the trembling Catiline recalls this moment of displacement, the combination of saeuus and securis alludes to another prominent historical moment in Virgil's poem. This is a passage in the Parade of Heroes that describes a moment at the foundation of the Republic that combines peacemaking with problematic and tragic violence: Lucius Junius Brutus’ execution of his sons for supporting the exiled King Tarquin (6.817–23):
This allusion undermines the claim of peaceful suppression, conveyed through pacificas, and by analogy calls to mind not only the violent end suffered by Catiline and his troops on the battlefield but especially Cicero's controversial and unprecedented execution of the arrested conspirators in Rome without trial.Footnote 35 In combining these two Virgilian references, the trembling of Catiline in the Underworld in tremuit from the Shield in Book 8 and the ambiguous axes, saeuasque securis, of Brutus from the Parade of Heroes, then, Lucan in effect allows the epithet saeuus, which has been transferred to Catiline, to linger behind and undermine the claims underlying pacificas.
My reading of Lucan's opening characterization of Cicero suggests that it goes beyond the ‘reduced’ Cicero model of declamation and beyond simple caricature resulting from anti-Ciceronian bias. Cicero the character is constructed by combining features of different textual versions of Cicero available to Lucan as well as Ciceronian absences and presences in Virgil and Sallust. Lucan's text presents an intertextually complex critique of Cicero's willingness to use violence in his suppression of Catiline's conspiracy, which manifests in part in an ahistorical transfer of Ciceronian violence to a moment in which Cicero was in fact on the side of peace, a role that Lucan denies his character.Footnote 36 Lucan's limited presentation leaves out other facets important in Ciceronian reception up to this time. There is no room in the Bellum Ciuile not only for Cicero's peacemaking but also for his prescient horror at the prospect of civil war. Lucan also makes no allusion to the orator's tragic death and dismemberment, and to the symbolic meaning given to his death in the tradition. But these parts of the Ciceronian tradition are not absent from the poem. Instead, they have been redirected to other characters within the text. This splitting is the subject of the next section.
ONE IN MANY: CICERONIAN PRESENCES IN THE BELLVM CIVILE
Ciceronian material outside his character's appearance in Book 7 has not gone unnoticed: scholars have studied Lucan's use of his speeches and especially of his correspondence as one among the sources that make up the Civil War fabric of the poem. The framework that I propose here reconfigures these moments of receptions in terms of epic and specifically the Virgilian technique of splitting the unified historical and textual figure of Cicero in the preceding tradition among multiple entities within Lucan's poem, and allows us to see the pattern into which these Ciceronian presences fall. Unlike the declamatory model of reducing and simplifying, which involves leaving out those facets of Cicero that do not fit the declaimers’ streamlined picture, this model allows us to see that in Lucan the aspects of Cicero that do not appear in the episode in Book 7 are not left out of the poem, but are instead distributed to other characters.
Some of the reasons for this distribution are structural and analogous to what we saw in Sallust's Bellum Catilinae, where the historian's focus on the central opposition between Cato and Caesar had the effect of making Cicero into a minor character.Footnote 37 In Lucan's poem a similar dynamic is at play: two of the prominent facets of Ciceronian reception, Cicero the decapitated victim and Cicero the martyr whose death stands for the death of the Republic, cannot be actualized within the poem because those roles are played by more prominent characters, Pompey and Cato respectively. Yet the rhetorical and emotional energy that is associated with those facets of Cicero in the tradition is not lost, but is instead transferred to these other characters. Lucan privileges the death of Cato, to whose elevation to the role of the Republican martyr Cicero himself contributed shortly after his death,Footnote 38 over the death of Cicero. In doing so he can be said to be following a tradition of sorts, since both of his major models, Sallust and Virgil, have, as we saw, similarly suppressed Cicero in favour of Cato. But two other movements have a more significant influence on the fabric of Lucan's poem: the transfer of the language associated with Cicero and his death to Pompey and the reassignment both of the language derived from Cicero's peacemaking efforts and of his horror of civil war to the poem's narrator.
The transfer of the pathos associated with the tradition of Cicero's death is constructed along two main paths: through language from Cicero's own works and from Cornelius Severus’ obituary of Cicero. As we saw in the previous section, Lucan's introduction of Cicero alludes both to Cicero's poem on his own consulship and to Cornelius Severus’ death notice, but it frames them so as to critique Cicero's self-presentation and undermine Cornelius’ eulogy. With that negative residue left with Cicero the character, both texts reappear, now positively inflected, applied to Pompey.
The lines describing Cicero's suppression of Catiline, cuius sub iure togaque | pacificas saeuos tremuit Catilina securis (7.63–4), allude, as we saw, to the famous line from the De Consulatu Suo, cedant arma togae, but combine the allusion with Virgilian intertexts in such a way as to undercut the orator's central claim and implicate him in illegitimate use of violence, leaving no room for his peacemaking efforts in the context of civil war. The line resurfaces in the narrator's outburst following the report of Pompey's humble burial (8.813–14): dic semper ab armis | ciuilem repetisse togam ‘say that always he turned back to the toga after war’, and in Cato's eulogy of Pompey in Book 9 (9.199): praetulit arma togae, sed pacem armatus amauit ‘he preferred arms to the toga, but, though armed, loved peace’. In alluding to this line in his portrait of Cicero, Lucan privileged the role of the axes, securis, the equivalent of arma, emerging after the consul's toga, suggesting that the apparent commitment to peace was covering the underlying violence. In these passages, both the narrator and Cato recognize that Pompey is first and foremost a military man, yet emphasize peace as his primary motivation, once again suggesting that, unlike Cicero's claim to prefer civic means and peace, Pompey's is the true commitment.Footnote 39 The transfer is particularly pointed since it seems that Cicero's line could be taken, following the poem's circulation, as offensive to Pompey the general specifically.Footnote 40 The splitting of the allusion reconfigures the positive claims that Cicero had made in the poem for his own achievements and redirects their affective weight toward Pompey.
A similar dynamic, but at a higher level of complexity and detail, is at work in Lucan's appropriation of the Cornelius Severus passage that we know from Seneca's suasoria, a text that expresses sentiments familiar from declamation, but generically belongs in the tradition of historical epic about which we know too little.Footnote 41 As we saw in the previous section, Severus marked Cicero's passing as having silenced the eloquence of the Latin tongue, Latinae facundia linguae, with grief, and Lucan's use of facundia in the closing line of his introduction of Cicero partly recalls this central moment of Severus’ obituary. The rest of the obituary, on the one hand, focusses on the horror of the physical violence done to Cicero and, on the other, praises his political achievements, with a particular focus on the suppression of Catiline. Both the description of the violence and the general presentation of Cicero's role as statesman and leader beloved by the people are redirected by Lucan to the character of Pompey.Footnote 42 The passage as Seneca quotes it runs as follows (Sen. Suas. 6.26 = Cornelius Severus, fr. 13):
Lucan appropriates Severus’ graphic description of Cicero's mangled face and grey hair for his Pompey, but not at the moment of his decapitation. Instead, it appears at the moment when Cornelia sees the defeated Pompey arriving on Lesbos (8.55–7):
Cornelia's first glimpse of her husband is derived from Severus’ poem (informes uoltus in Severus, deformem and uoltus in Lucan, both next to canitiem).Footnote 43 The intertextual presence of Cicero's severed head gives additional meaning to this moment, which foreshadows Pompey's death and decapitation, which she will not be able to see close up. But it also takes away from Cicero the horror and pathos that Severus’ poem gives to him as a victim and assigns it to Pompey, with an increased emotional force since the vision is here focalized through the distraught wife.Footnote 44 The same process is at work in Lucan's treatment of Severus’ description of Cicero as statesman. Severus’ distinctive use of uindex senatus to describe Cicero's role is redirected to Pompey by the narrator in his indignant address to Ptolemy as Pompey's boat nears the Egyptian shore and his death (8.554).Footnote 45 Both moments are highly charged and foreshadow the general's gruesome death.
Severus also marks his Cicero as particularly favoured by the people, fauor et coetus, and as the orator who expresses the popular will, publica uox. This characterization, too, is split: Lucan's Cicero is presented as expressing the will of the dissatisfied soldiers, cunctorum uoces, but the favour of the people belongs to Lucan's Pompey, if only in the past: it is at the centre of Pompey's dream the night before Pharsalus, which opens the seventh book (populi facies clamorque fauentis, 7.13).
The Ciceronian language from Severus reappears after Pompey is killed. Severus draws attention to both the head and the hands of Cicero, notoriously placed on the rostra, and applies the epithet sacrae to the hands in particular, as responsible for Cicero's actions. The epithet focalizes the narrator's horror at the murderers’ outrage.Footnote 46 Lucan transfers the epithet from Cicero's hands to Pompey's head, using it twice in the passage that graphically describes the decapitation (8.667–78):
While Severus focusses, in an emotionally powerful way, on the distinctive feature of Cicero's demise—the importance of his hands, cut off and nailed to the rostra together with his head—Lucan reassigns the charged epithet to Pompey's head, and thereby diverts the emotional force from Cicero's death to the earlier and, in Lucan's text, more important crime, the murder of Pompey. The phrase spirantia ora, which opens the Severus passage, refers there to multiple victims, but can refer to Cicero only metaphorically, since his head had been transported to Rome. In Lucan it has been made literal, since Pompey is in fact still breathing.Footnote 47
The intertextual presence of Cornelius Severus’ Cicero in Lucan's text, then, works alongside the more limited allusion to Cicero's own historical poem to transfer to Pompey the praise given to Cicero's political achievements and the sorrow over his tragic death.Footnote 48 This validation of Pompey at the expense of Cicero is also accomplished by using Cicero's own words. By calling him rector, alluding to the title rector rei publicae which Cicero gives his ideal statesman in De republica, Lucan marks Pompey as an ideal Ciceronian statesman.Footnote 49 The significance of this designation, used of Pompey twice, is clear from its placement. The first time it directly follows Cicero's speech urging him to enter battle in Book 7 (7.85–6):
The use of rector here points to Cicero's failure by invoking his political ideal at the moment when he pushes the man who, it is implied, most closely embodies that ideal into a disastrous battle against his better judgement.Footnote 50 rector is used for a second time in a way that is reminiscent of the phrase uindex senatus in Cato's eulogy of Pompey (9.194–5):Footnote 51
Cato's formulation points to the possible monarchical interpretation of Cicero's rector, and rejects it in the case of Pompey.
In addition to these intertextual transfers, it is plausible that Lucan's text borrows a structural element from the narrative of Cicero's death: the agent of his burial.Footnote 52 According to Plutarch, it was Pompey's freedman Philippus who buried the decapitated body of the general (Pomp. 80). In Lucan's text, instead, it is an otherwise virtually unattested quaestor named Cordus, most likely an invented character.Footnote 53 This scene of Pompey's burial, with its emphasis on pietas,Footnote 54 is likely derived from the story that Cicero's decapitated body was buried by his friend Lamia, known to us from a late source, the Latin Anthology.Footnote 55 If, as Susan Treggiari suggests, the source for this account is Livy,Footnote 56 then Lucan could be following, in this respect, too, the tradition surrounding Cicero's death and transferring the humble burial motivated by pietas to his decapitated victim of choice.Footnote 57
Another positive aspect of Cicero's legacy, the positive efforts that Cicero made toward peace in the lead-up to the Civil War, undergoes an analogous process of reassignment. Scholars have long noticed the presence of language from Cicero's letters in the poem. Recently, Daniela Galli has synthesized the previously collected echoes, thematic and verbal, and added new material.Footnote 58 For my argument the most important of them is the appropriation of the voice of Cicero the peacemaker in the narrator's attempts to protest the impending disaster of the Civil War: within the framework of splitting Cicero, then, this facet has been transferred to the narrator. A good example of this transfer is a passage in Book 1, in which the narrator evokes the first triumvirate as the beginning of the disastrous conflict (1.87–99):Footnote 59
The sentiments that underlie the poetic expressions of concordia discors, here and elsewhere in the poem, are derived from Cicero's repeated discussion, found especially in his letters to Atticus, of the instability of agreements between the powerful generals and the inevitability of the clash between Pompey and Caesar given both men's desire for control, which Cicero characterizes in the language of absolute power, regnum and dominatio.Footnote 60 Galli rightly cites a passage from Att. 8.11.2 (SB 161), which presents in condensed form these accusations directed against both men: dominatio quaesita ab utroque est; … uterque regnare uult ‘each man is looking for absolute power; … each wants to reign’. But we can get a better understanding of how these Ciceronian sentiments are deployed in Lucan's poem if we do not limit ourselves to specific correspondences, but look at the letter as a whole.
Cicero begins this letter, written on 27 February 49, by responding to Atticus’ concern about his emotional state: his friend had felt that Cicero was greatly disturbed (me magno animi motu perturbatum). Cicero acknowledges his general state of worry, cura, and proceeds to qualify it by saying that worrying does no good, and that he has tried to direct his energies to contemplating his portrait of rector rei publicae in De republica, quoting Scipio in Book 5 (the term used is moderator rather than rector).Footnote 61 Immediately following the quotation, Cicero attacks Pompey by name: hoc Gnaeus noster cum antea numquam tum in hac causa minime cogitauit ‘this [the task of the ideal statesman] our Gnaeus has never considered before, and least of all in this current matter’. It is in the context of this bitter disappointment in Pompey that the accusations of dominatio and regnum directed at both Pompey and Caesar come. Cicero is unsurprised by Caesar; equating the two is a jab at Pompey. This broader context brings the intertextual dynamic for Lucan's narrator's adoption of the Ciceronian tone more sharply into focus. The narrator has taken on the basic emotional tenor of apprehension, but amplifies it. In the same letter, Cicero rejects unrestrained lament as unproductive (8.11.1): lamentari autem licet illud quidem totos dies ‘one could, however, lament the situations all day long’. Lucan's narrator embraces it. He also shares some of Cicero's disappointment in Pompey, seen in the double address like the one quoted above, but Caesar is his main target: he recovers for his Pompey the claim to come closest to being the rector rei publicae, denied to him explicitly by Cicero in this letter.
Cicero's correspondence shows how aware he was of the catastrophic potential consequences of the conflict, how wary of both sides and their leaders, and how desperate to stop it. In a certain sense, Cicero's foresight here is the exact opposite of his decision to execute the conspirators, the decision that has been treated as contributing, as a precedent, to the gradual dismantling of legal constraints that culminated in the very civil conflict he then tried to prevent.Footnote 62 When Cicero was forced to choose sides, he chose Pompey, but half-heartedly, seeing him as the better of the two alternatives, but very aware of his limitations and of dangers that would follow should he win. Within the world of Lucan's poem there is no character who occupies this position, the position of a peacemaker who reluctantly and half-heartedly chooses a side. Cicero himself, as a character, is in fact assigned the exact opposite role, giving the hesitant Pompey the final push to join battle. Some of his hesitations and his suspicions of Pompey, should he win, are given to Cato, who voices them in his speech to Brutus (2.286–323).Footnote 63 But the spirit of the Ciceronian reaction to the prospect of civil war, in an amplified form, is what animates much of what we hear from the poem's narrator: with the benefit of hindsight, the narrator expresses his horror at the conflict and rhetorically gestures toward his efforts to avert the conflict by repeatedly turning away and refusing to narrate its progression.Footnote 64 Even the narrator's complex (and contested) attitude to the character of Pompey is, as we saw, a modified version of Cicero's reluctant preference. Just as Sallust the historian had taken over the role of Cicero the consul who discovered and stopped the conspiracy, Lucan the narrator, then, has displaced and replaced Cicero: he made him into an irresponsible warmonger, while taking onto himself the role of the peacemaker horrified at the inevitable damage to the res publica.
CONCLUSION
Cicero's presence in Lucan's poem is not limited to the distorted picture in Book 7 and to the borrowing of language from Cicero's letters. In creating the apparent caricature in Book 7, Lucan in fact presents an intertextually complex critique of Cicero's willingness to use violence in his suppression of Catiline's conspiracy. This emphasis contributes to the denial to Cicero of any credit for his later peacemaking efforts and prescient horror at the prospect of civil war, which is instead transferred to the narrator. The negative slant also denies any place for the foreshadowing of Cicero's tragic death and dismemberment, and the rhetorical force associated with the representation of his death is granted instead to Lucan's preferred decapitated victim, Pompey, while some of the energy associated with the symbolic quality of his death may be redirected to Cato's suicide. In the context of a poem obsessed with dismembered bodies,Footnote 65 this intertextual procedure itself becomes an act of dismemberment,Footnote 66 with Lucan performing Cicero's dismemberment and death anew by denying him any of the declamatory pathos. In doing so he also, following Sallust, overwrites Cicero, with the poem's narrator appropriating his role as the peacemaker. Lucan's dismemberment of Cicero is an act of textual violence. Yet inevitably, in taking on Cicero's goals and his horror of the conflict, he also takes on the despairing affect that accompanied his efforts. And he knowingly takes on Cicero's failure.
