Abstract
The value of the prohoemia or ‘prefaces’ to Cicero’s later philosophical works, composed in the last years of his life, has not yet been settled. Two schools of thought have emerged somewhat more clearly in recent times: one places a greater value on the prefaces as tools for understanding Cicero’s philosophica as a whole, the other applies a more skeptical approach, using a degree of caution as to the nexus between the prefaces and the treatises to which they were affixed. The article advocates for the latter camp, however not only to temper the recent emphasis the optimists have placed on the prefaces as key interpretive elements to the dialogues, but to refocus their importance as extensions of Cicero’s personal and social networking with other Roman elites of his time. I rely on two main lines of argument: the anecdotal evidence from Cicero’s volumen prohoemiorum, “book of prefaces”, mentioned in a letter to Atticus in 44 bce, as well as a broader analysis of a deeper disconnect between Cicero’s prefatory rhetoric regarding Latin philosophical vocabulary compared with Greek and his translation practices in his treatises.
Acknowledgements
I thank the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung for their generous funding support during my postdoctoral research in Munich, during which time this article was completed. I also thank the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae for allowing me to use their wealth of resources in their Zettelarchiv and Bibliothek during my postdoctoral fellowship. An early version of this article was presented as a ‘TLL Sitzung’ talk at the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften with staff and external scholars, and I thank the attendees for their feedback. Parts of this article also formed a portion of a presentation I gave for Corpus Christi College’s Classics Seminar Series in Oxford, and I thank Professor Giuseppe Pezzini for organizing this. I also thank the feedback of the anonymous reviewers at Philologus, as well as the initial discussions and suggestions on the draft from Professor Tobias Reinhardt (University of Oxford), Dr. Kresimir Vuković (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität) and Dr. Adam Trettel (Universität Leipzig).
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