Classical World

The “Companions” industry is alive and well and has spawned, after the Brill Companion to Cicero: Oratory and Rhetoric of 2002, the present volume. This is probably, on the whole, a good thing, since it provides a readily identifiable locus for finding current opinions and bibliography on a given author or topic. The downside is that “Companions” tend to enshrine past approaches rather than point ahead to the future. Since space constraints compel selectivity, the focus here will be on the new or unexpected.

The obvious difference is that this volume casts a wider net than its predecessor and includes genres and topics previously excluded. Particularly welcome, because of the neglect of Cicero’s poetry, is the chapter devoted to this genre by Gee. By careful study of ideas and phrasing in select passages, she is able to show that both Lucretius and Vergil (in the Aeneid) were close readers of Cicero’s verse. Gee also offers an intriguing interpretation of Catullus 46, whereby Cicero is meant to be substituted for Catullus as the pessimus poeta, just as Volusius is in poem 36. One wishes she had also been able to explore reactions to the Aratea in the Georgics.

Cicero lived at a time when Italians’ sense of identity was shifting, with the expansion of Roman citizenship entailing a gradual effacement of local identities and cultures. Cicero himself was a part of this process, and felt, as he shows in the opening chapters of De legibus 2, the competing claims of his native Arpinum and of Rome (though in most of his writings he tends to downplay the former and emphasize the latter). A chapter by Dench helpfully explores Cicero’s construction of his identity from this angle and also his self-fashioning as a “new man” in Roman politics. Cicero the epistolographer has come into his own in recent years, with important books by Hutchinson, Hall, and White. Morello’s insightful chapter in this volume furthers the trend by showing that in his letters, too, Cicero is a master of persuasion. Thus Morello contrasts Cicero’s subtle entry into his interlocutor’s thought-world as he seeks to woo support for a triumph for his exploits in Cilicia with Cato’s rather wooden reply (Fam. 15.4 and 5; for a more sympathetic reading of Cato’s letter, see R. Fehrle, Cato Uticensis [Darmstadt 1983] 229–31, not cited by Morello).

“Receptions of Cicero” (part 3) represents another (much needed) widening of perspective. Gowing is predictably good on the early imperial period, showing the at first tentative and gingerly engagement of later authors with Cicero, since he did not fit neatly into any set category of exempla and the Romans had no concept corresponding to “culture hero” until Quintilian argued for Cicero’s importance as an exemplum in literature and life. But perhaps the best chapter in the book is MacCormack’s discussion of “Cicero in Late Antiquity” (she died during production, and the volume is dedicated to her memory). MacCormack finds influence in some unlikely places, such as that of Cicero’s philosophy of law on Tertullian; particularly rich are the pages on Augustine’s lifelong engagement with Cicero. It is a pity, however, that no one followed up with a treatment of the Middle Ages, the time when Cicero’s legacy was shaped for the future. One also looks in vain for an in-depth discussion of Cicero’s influence on the theorists of the French Revolution and the founding fathers of the United States, material that falls in the gap between the chapters [End Page 140] on the Enlightenment and on the nineteenth century. What is offered from the Renaissance onwards is, it must be said, rather lightweight. Thus under the Enlightenment one would have liked to see a delineation of Cicero’s influence on skepticism and deism. Mommsen’s History represents an important watershed for Cicero’s image, but Cole’s chapter on the nineteenth century...