Preface

in the fall of 2018, Clifford Ando invited me to give a course on De oratore Book 1 at the University of Chicago, thus providing the occasion for me to revisit the text and to begin writing this book. I am most grateful to Cliff for the invitation and to the members of the Department of Classics at Chicago for their generous conversation and company, to the students in the class, particularly Huaxi Zhou, for raising questions that I had not previously encountered, and above all to Diana and Peter White for their hospitality and friendship—including the loan of Peter’s office, where I began to write this book.

My desire to write about Cicero’s dialogues goes back much further than that. In the spring of 1966 I first read De oratore at the suggestion and under the guidance of Glen Bowersock, a suggestion for which I have been indebted to him ever since. My interest in the settings of the dialogues and Cicero’s presentation of Rome’s intellectual history dates from that semester, and while I hope I have learned something more about Cicero since then, echoes of the paper I wrote in 1966 are still to be found in the present book.

De oratore and De re publica are closely linked in my life as in Cicero’s. By chance, I was able to take a course on De re publica with the late Herbert Bloch one semester after first reading De oratore. Some years later, when I suggested De oratore Book 1 to the late Ted Kenney as a suitable text for a Green and Yellow, he proposed De re publica. When I tried, as I have more than once, to write a book about De re publica, a chapter on the relationship between the two dialogues kept inserting itself and growing out of all proportion. In 2018 I gave in to the logic of the argument and began to write a book about both dialogues together.

I have been studying these texts for too long for me to thank all the friends and students whose advice and suggestions have found their way into this book, but I want to acknowledge one large debt from long ago. I met the late Elizabeth Rawson in the fall of 1975, and from then until her untimely death in 1988 she gave me much-needed encouragement and advice about Cicero. More recently, I am grateful to Catherine Steel for reading a draft of Chapter 3, to Chris van den Berg for comments on the final draft of the book, and to John Ramsey for advice on any number of questions concerning law and trials. Katharina Volk has read the entire book, parts of it more than once, and made great improvements to both its substance and its style, as she has to all aspects of my life; without her help and companionship I would not have been able to write this book. So too, without the skillful, kind, and professional ministrations of Dr. Israel Deutsch and his staff (I thank particularly Brian, Cassandra, Errol, and Flavia), I might not have been able to finish it. Bob Kaster and Catherine Steel read the entire manuscript for Oxford University Press and gave me acute and copious suggestions for improvement, almost all of which I have incorporated. Stefan Vranka of OUP has offered wise and helpful suggestions. All translations are my own; those from De re publica are taken from James E. G. Zetzel (Ed.), Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero: On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, 2nd Edition © Cambridge University Press 2017, and are used by permission. All references to De re publica use the section and fragment numbers of my translation.

Cicero dedicated De oratore and De re publica to his brother; I am dedicating this book to the memory of mine, who died while I was writing it. Like Cicero, he endured (with rather more steadfastness) exile, war, and loss; and like Cicero, he believed in the values expressed in my epigraph: devotion to family and to public service.

New York

May 27, 2021

Abbreviations

In addition to familiar abbreviations for periodicals and ancient texts, the following are used here:

Introduction: Mansuetiores musae

at the end of 54 bce, Cicero wrote a very long letter (Fam. 1.9) to P. Cornelius Lentulus Spinther. Cicero owed Lentulus a great deal: as consul in 57, Lentulus had helped organize Cicero’s restoration from exile, and the eight letters Cicero wrote to him in 56 and 55, while Lentulus was away from Rome governing Cilicia, are filled with expressions of loyalty and gratitude. But after the eighth letter, probably written in February 55, there is a gap in the correspondence until December 54. Then comes the long letter—in reality, a carefully composed essay, an apologia justifying Cicero’s way of life and his political position. It was obviously meant for a larger audience than the single man addressed.¹

The letter to Lentulus is organized as a response to questions about Cicero’s political that Cicero’s brother Quintus was in Gaul as Caesar’s legate, and thus under Caesar’s surveillance, had some effect as well. Cicero, in practical terms, had little choice but to toe the line.

Cicero’s account of his recent life and political career in the letter matches fairly closely what he writes elsewhere: the redescription of his unceremonious departure from Rome in 58 as a deliberate choice to protect his fellow citizens from the need to defend him and to avert the violence of Clodius and friends; his sense of betrayal; his disgust with the state of politics and the lack of principle of his so-called friends; his desire for cum dignitate otium (Fam. 1.9.21), a phrase found also in Pro Sestio of early 56 (98) and the preface to De oratore (1.1).² The correspondence of these years, particularly the more candid correspondence with Atticus, shows repeated expressions of unhappiness with the political world of Rome and Cicero’s sense of his own lack of influence. Although immediately after his return from exile in 57 he had been optimistic about resuming what he felt to be his rightful leading position in public life and had spoken boldly about public affairs—and against Caesar—in the first months of 56, by the middle of the year he had been compelled by Pompey and Caesar to utter what he described as a “palinode” (probably the speech De provinciis consularibus, supporting Caesar’s continuing command in Gaul). Valeant recta, vera, honesta consilia, he wrote in June of 56 (Att. 4.5), and in describing the comparable humiliation inflicted on Domitius Ahenobarbus (denied the consulate of 55), he wrote in November (Att. 4.8a.2) that the only entity in a worse state than Domitius was the res publica itself, “in which we can’t even hope for anything better.” A letter he wrote on or about April 19 of 55 bce vividly expresses Cicero’s dilemma:³ after referring to the death of L. Cornelius Lentulus Niger, who had earlier been a candidate for the consulate of 58,⁴ Cicero notes that his grief at Lentulus’ death was tempered by the fact that he had died at the right time: “he so loved his country that his being snatched out of its conflagration seems to me a gift of the gods” (4.6.1). In contrast to Lentulus’ good fortune in meeting a timely end, Cicero describes his own unhappy condition: “If I say what I ought to about the commonwealth people will think I’m crazy; if what I have to, a slave; if I keep silent, a defeated prisoner: imagine my painful condition” (4.6.2).⁵ The gloomy representation here of Cicero’s situation and state of mind is not unusual, but this sentence shows very clearly just what Cicero thought his contribution to the res publica had been and ought to be: speech. But in the circumstances of 55, he felt that nothing that he could say in public about public affairs could possibly satisfy either himself or others. There was no good choice.

During the course of the subsequent months, however, Cicero found other ways to speak, and the letter to Lentulus shows how. Together with the practical and political (and face-saving) arguments for going along with Pompey and Caesar, Cicero, as Sean McConnell has shown, employs in the letter to Lentulus three texts of Plato to justify his position. The Laws is used to argue that the decline in the behavior of the Roman people is intimately related to the decline in the morality of leadership in the years after Cicero’s own consulate (Fam. 1.9.12).⁶ The Seventh and Fifth Letters are cited together (1.9.18), the first to show that one should treat one’s country as a parent, in other words not bring force against it, and the second to show that there was more reason for him to remain in politics, given the good that still existed in Rome, than for Plato in an Athens described as old, weak, and sick.⁷ Cicero concludes his political analysis by saying that if Lentulus were there to advise him, he would still behave the same way: it is better to contribute what he must and can than to abandon the res publica.

The letter to Lentulus offers both practical and philosophical responses to criticisms of Cicero’s political position. What may be most important about it, however, is that the letter itself, as McConnell shows, is clearly based on the Platonic letters Cicero cites. It is thus not only a discussion of politics but is itself a literary form of political action, using allusion to Plato in order to structure as well as to clarify his own position. Although Cicero uses Plato in his argument, however, he does not identify with him. Cicero is not Plato; Roman circumstances are not the same as those Plato faced in Athens; and as a result, Cicero’s decision to remain active in public life, even in ways that Lentulus and others might criticize, goes directly against the decision Plato described in the Fifth Letter. It is important to recognize too that much as Cicero admires Plato as a writer, it is his life, not his philosophy, that serves as a template to be accepted or modified. As will become clear in subsequent chapters, Cicero’s admiration for Plato’s style and imagination did not for the most part extend to Plato’s philosophy.

The letter to Lentulus does not end when Cicero has finished making his anti-Platonic case for his political choices; instead, he turns to more particular matters of politics or business, constantly assuring Lentulus of his good will and respect. The first and most important of these paragraphs deserves attention here: after talking about his political position in Platonic terms, he responds to Lentulus’ apparent request for copies of whatever Cicero had been writing (1.9.23):

You ask me to send you what I’ve written since your departure. There are several orations which I’ll give to Menocritus; don’t worry, there aren’t very many. Since I’ve pretty much divorced myself from oratory and have gone back to the gentler Muses (ad mansuetiores Musas), who have given me great pleasure, as they have since I was very young, I have also written in the manner of Aristotle (at least that was my intention) three books of dialogue De oratore; I imagine they would be useful to your son. They depart from standard kinds of instruction and instead embrace the whole subject of oratory as discussed by the ancients and by Aristotle and Isocrates. I have also written three books in verse De temporibus meis; I would have sent them to you before if I had thought they should be made public. They are, and will be forever, witnesses of your good deeds to me and of my gratitude. But because I was afraid, not of those who might think themselves wounded (even though I did so both rarely and gently), but of those who treated me well but whom it would take forever to name. . . . But I will have these books sent to you if I can find someone I can entrust them to. That whole part of my way of life is all yours: whatever I can accomplish in writing and study, our sources of pleasure from long ago, I will happily offer to your judgment, a man who has always loved these things.

Cicero passes rapidly over the orations he has written, concentrating instead on two recently composed works: one is the three-book epic on his exile and return, De temporibus suis, which was apparently completed but, as this letter implies, never circulated; the other is the dialogue De oratore. What is notable in this description is the frame within which he puts these two works. Cicero has turned from oratory to something different, ad mansuetiores Musas. At the end, in flattering Lentulus once more, he talks about quantum litteris, quantum studiis . . . consequi poterimus. And in both sentences he notes that these literary activities have always been important to him: sicut iam a prima adulescentia delectarunt; istam . . . partem vitae consuetudinisque nostrae.

In its context in the letter to Lentulus, this paragraph appears to move away from the preceding political exposition: Cicero starts by turning to what seems to be a different request from Lentulus (Quod rogas . . .) and becomes more personal, describing De oratore as suitable for Lentulus’ son to read as part of his rhetorical training. In fact, however, Cicero is still reflecting on his own place in the contemporary scene—and the paragraph does not altogether harmonize with his earlier argument that, however unhappily, he should remain involved in public life. Here, he indicates a turn away from politics toward the gentler arts; and just as he emphasized the consistency of his public behavior in the main portion of the letter, so here he emphasizes the consistency of his private, literary activities.

In describing his recent writings to Lentulus, Cicero begins from the most obvious category, his orations, and as a joke remarks that Lentulus need not worry, that there are not many of them. This may be self-disparaging humor, but we do not in fact know of that many speeches given by Cicero between the middle of 56 and his departure for Cilicia in the spring of 51; it appears that very few of those speeches were circulated, and in fact very few of them survive. The contrast with the first part of 56 is striking: before Lucca, he delivered the extant Pro Sestio (together with In Vatinium) and Pro Caelio, in addition to participating in at least two other trials and taking an active part in the senate; in the second part of the year, however, after the uncomfortable De provinciis consularibus, the only significant speech was his defense of Pompey’s friend Cornelius Balbus.⁸ Only one major speech from 55 is known, In Pisonem, delivered in September;⁹ in 54 Cicero was more active in the courts (perhaps ten forensic speeches, including the extant Pro Scauro, Pro Plancio, and Pro Rabirio Postumo), but not happily so, being forced to defend Vatinius and Gabinius. And after that, only one speech (De aere alieno Milonis) is known from 53, only one important one (Pro Milone; there are four other cases) from 52, and one from the early months of 51. Cicero’s surviving correspondence is unfortunately also very sparse: thirty-one letters written in 54 survive, but only eight from 55, seventeen from 53, and two from 52 (contrast 51 letters from Cicero in both 51 and 50, and more than 90 in 49). We are thus lacking our major evidence for his activities; even so, nothing we know suggests that he spoke frequently in major cases in the courts or in the senate on matters of major political importance.¹⁰

Even if he spoke less in public, however, Cicero did not keep silent. The two other works mentioned in the letter to Lentulus at the end of 54, De oratore and the epic De temporibus suis, reflect large-scale literary activity beginning in 55 and possibly even earlier. The same letter to Atticus of April 55 in which Cicero expressed his sense that there was no possibility of public speech that was both ethical and effective offers the earliest clue to a new direction in his writing. At the end of the letter, he first discusses a suggestion from Atticus and then refers to one of his own recent compositions (Att. 4.6.3–4):

As to your advice to write something concerning Hortensius, I’ve found something else to do. I haven’t forgotten your instructions, but once I began I shrank from it: I don’t want somehow to seem to have been stupid in [not]¹¹ putting up with my so-called friend’s rudeness and then being equally stupid in making his insult public if I write something. At the same time, I don’t want my restraint to be less apparent in my writing than it was in the event; that would make my response seem frivolous. But we’ll see. You should write something to me as often as you can. You should get from Lucceius the letter I wrote asking him to write about my history; it’s very clever. You should urge him to hurry and thank him for having written back to me that he would do it.

The reference in the second part of this note is to Cicero’s letter to Lucceius (Fam. 5.12, probably written shortly before the letter to Atticus quoted here), a well-known and very clever attempt to get the historian to write a monograph on Cicero’s dramatic career, from his defeat of Catiline through his exile to his (in his own mind) triumphant return in 57; the request failed, despite Lucceius’ promise to write what Cicero wanted.¹² This was, in fact, the second coming of Cicero’s desire for commemoration by himself and others: in the years immediately after his consulate, he had written several versions of autobiography, including the epic poem De consulatu suo, and had attempted without success to have his victory over Catiline immortalized in Greek poetry by Archias, whose claim to Roman citizenship he defended in 62, and in Greek prose by the historian and philosopher Posidonius.¹³ In the mid-50s he renewed the attempt and expanded the scope of the desired narrative of his vicissitudes, both through his request to Lucceius and through the epic De temporibus suis (a sequel to De consulatu suo) that he mentioned to Lentulus.¹⁴ In both periods, Cicero was unsuccessful in his requests to others, but his desire to have himself commemorated was very real.

The reference to Hortensiana that precedes Cicero’s mention of the letter to Lucceius in Att. 4.6 is less transparent. Atticus seems to have urged Cicero to write something about (or to) Q. Hortensius Hortalus, with whom Cicero was then for some reason not on good terms.¹⁵ In the letter, Cicero says that he made several attempts to do so but then, he says, in alia incidi. We do not know for certain what the alia were, but a few days later (Att. 4.10.1) Cicero tells Atticus that he is working in the library of Faustus Sulla, and the linked reference to Hortensius may suggest that he was thinking of De oratore, in which Hortensius is praised in the very last paragraph.¹⁶ By the middle of November 55, at any rate, Cicero included a laconic statement near the end of a letter to Atticus (Att. 4.13.2): “I’ve worked hard on the books about oratory, and they were in my hands for a long time. You can copy them.” A year later, when Cicero wrote his long letter to Lentulus, not only was De oratore in circulation, but Cicero had already begun another work, the dialogue that was to become De re publica; his correspondence shows that he had made considerable progress on it by the summer of 54.

The letter to Lentulus itself, then, can be seen not just in the context of Cicero’s political anxieties and self-justifications in the period after Lucca: it is also part of Cicero’s literary self-transformation as a writer. As has been emphasized above, the letter is a very artful composition: it cites not only Plato but Terence, and it assumes that its readers will understand the relevance of the works cited to Cicero’s own argument.¹⁷ And indeed it alludes not just to other authors, but to Cicero’s own current projects—not merely through the explicit mention of De temporibus suis and De oratore, but also more obliquely: the reference to cum dignitate otium might refer to Pro Sestio, but it is far more likely to be an allusion to the opening sentences of De oratore; and when Cicero speaks of his return to the literary aspirations of his youth, quae me maxime sicut iam a prima adulescentia delectarunt, he echoes a phrase of the same preface (1.2), eas artis quibus a pueris dediti fuimus. The letter to Lentulus is thus itself an effective example of Cicero’s return to the mansuetiores Musae.

Several elements of the literary construction of the letter are relevant to the dialogues that Cicero was writing in just the same years. One is clearly the use of Plato as a model. Another is the letter’s self-conscious literariness: Cicero not only draws on earlier literature, he also draws the reader’s attention to it and expects the reader’s active engagement with his use of quotations. A third is a much broader feature, implicit in the letter but quite emphatic in the dialogues: the links and contrasts between Greek and Roman life, between Plato and himself, between the philosophic life and the active life of a politician. These three points entail a fourth: a preoccupation with the role of leisure and letters in the intellectual formation and public behavior of a Roman senator. The letter is both self-contradictory and self-reflexive: while the bulk of it stresses Cicero’s engagement and preoccupation with the public world, the paragraph about the mansuetiores Musae suggests that he is much less engaged with politics than with writing. It is also clear that it is those Musae themselves who allow him to express clearly (in the letter itself) his views about the public world. Precisely the same tension exists in the preface to De oratore: while the turbulence of the public world has denied Cicero the opportunity for reflection, writing, and otium cum dignitate, he is still able to write about the public world in which he is simultaneously a participant and an observer.

What Cicero says about De oratore in the letter to Lentulus is disingenuous: he describes it as a new and improved version of rhetorical education based on Aristotle and Isocrates, but says not a word about its elaborately constructed historical setting and his emulation of Plato in constructing it, nor does he mention his complex account in the dialogue of the relationship between philosophy, rhetoric, and oratory in both Greece and Rome. But in fact part of the elaborate politeness of this letter—and of Cicero’s letters in general—involves self-deprecation of a kind that his readers would recognize as not altogether sincere.¹⁸ He disparages his speeches; he says that he will not circulate De temporibus suis; and he makes De oratore appear to be a work of rhetorical instruction designed for students.

De oratore does have quite a lot to say about rhetoric, a subject that was central to Roman education; to a certain extent the dialogue is also about its importance in Roman education. But Cicero’s next project was definitely outside the standard syllabus. De re publica was probably begun early in 54, but it was not circulated, and therefore presumably not completed to Cicero’s satisfaction, until just before he left Rome to govern Cilicia in May of 51—more than three years later, far more time than Cicero devoted to anything else he ever wrote. A third dialogue is frequently grouped with these two: the amount of time that elapsed between the first mention of De re publica and its circulation has made it seem likely to many scholars that Cicero was at the same time also working on De legibus as a companion to De re publica. While that is certainly possible, there is no positive evidence for it, as well as fairly strong evidence that if De legibus was ever completed, it was certainly not made public before the summer of 44.¹⁹ De legibus is often used to supplement the fragmentary De re publica, particularly for the sections in the two works concerning natural law, but there is no indication that they were conceived as a pair. De legibus is clearly the latest of the three Platonic dialogues: there are links back from it to each of the others, but nothing in De oratore or De re publica looks ahead to De legibus.²⁰

Within De legibus, Cicero sets up a parallel between his Republic and Laws and the corresponding pair of Platonic dialogues: the Laws in each case provides a legal code for the society described in the Republic and while each Republic is set in the past, the dialogues about law are in the present, with the author as the principal character in his own dialogue.²¹ In Plato’s case, the Laws was in fact written long after the Republic, but we cannot assume the same for Cicero’s dialogues; whenever De legibus was written, it was designed to look back to De re publica as a written text which is cited by the participants in the dialogue in the same way that Cicero’s later De divinatione looks back to De natura deorum as a written text that had been read by the participants in the later dialogue. The result is that while it is important to read De legibus against De re publica, the reverse is not true. Cicero certainly may have begun to think about De legibus or even to write parts of it in the late 50s along with De re publica, but we have no way to know whether he actually did so, or that he was satisfied with what he may have written; nor do we know for certain whether or not he ever returned to the text after the civil war.

No matter what one thinks of De legibus, and no matter how useful comparison of De legibus and De re publica might be, the relationship between those two dialogues is fundamentally different from the relationship between De oratore and De re publica. These two dialogues, as will be argued below, are parallel as well as sequential works, and they are also programmatic statements: both individually and as a pair, they are self-conscious representations and examinations of the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of Roman public life. Each one not only describes and defines the values inherent in an aspect of Roman civic behavior, but also, through the use of the dialogue form and the choice of setting, illustrates the performance of those values. And while each of them starts from a Platonic model and premise, Cicero’s intention in De oratore in particular is to demonstrate the independence of Roman practice from Greek theory and to trace the history of Roman thought both internally—exemplified by the development of Roman law—and through engagement with Greece. In so doing he offers a vision of the history of Greek thought through a Roman lens: he defines those areas of Roman intellectual life that owe something to the Greeks and those which are indigenous. De re publica is similar in its understanding of the conduct of civic and political life, although it is much harder at present to follow Cicero’s argument: the text is very fragmentary, and only about one third of it survives. In that respect, the parallels between De oratore and De re publica are of great value for reconstructing the argument of the latter.

These are broad claims and deliberately so; I hope that the following chapters will clarify and justify them. Much of what has been written about these dialogues, and about De re publica in particular, seeks to find a narrow and immediate purpose for them, in some cases self-justification and in others advocacy of a particular political position.²² But while it is clear that Cicero’s choice to write works of this kind was conditioned by his immediate situation—as he says in the letter to Lentulus—it is equally clear that his intentions in writing them go far beyond momentary concerns: these texts are, and were meant to be, κτήματα ἐς ἀεί, not works of ephemeral relevance.

In the same spirit, much has been written about De oratore and De re publica on the assumption that Cicero was attempting the narrow goal of making accessible and useful in Rome ideas about rhetoric and government that he took wholesale from the Greeks; but the fact that Cicero knew Greek philosophical and technical literature very well does not mean that he meant to reproduce it: much that he says has precedents in Greek thought, but very little of it is simply derivative. In general, as will be argued below, Cicero writes as a Roman senator, not a Greek professor, and he has no intention of constructing an argument about either rhetorical or political theory that would satisfy a Hellenistic philosopher or a modern academic. De oratore and De re publica are large and complex works of imagination that use as their starting point questions about rhetoric, philosophy, and government that had been addressed by Greek scholars, but Cicero enlarges them well beyond the narrow confines of technical writing to offer brilliant portraits of the place of such intellectual matters in the lives and conversations of the Roman élite.²³

De oratore and De re publica, in short, need to be read and understood in much the same way as other contemporary literary works; they cannot be reduced to a single argument or a simple summary and cannot be approached from one single perspective. Their very literariness is central to their interpretation: Cicero deliberately shaped these dialogues not only as explorations of the values of Roman public life, but as compelling fictions in which the organization, characterization, and style all contribute to and reflect the argument itself. Both dialogues have multiple voices speaking from different perspectives, and the differences among these voices are not always resolved—except that they start from the shared assumption (which many modern critics have not shared) that textbook learning and Greek intellectualism are of limited value in late republican Rome.

My interest, then, is in interpreting these dialogues in their own time, as masterpieces of Cicero’s literary art, an approach that entails certain limits. On the one hand, these dialogues have sometimes been used as vehicles for the understanding or improvement of modern public life. That is often interesting but rarely fruitful, and I cite scholarship of that kind here only when I think it offers something of value for understanding Cicero himself; my intention is to try to understand him in his own context, not in terms of the value his works may still have in a very different world. Here, I am starting from the assumption that their primary importance is as works of imaginative literature. On the other hand, just as I do not think it particularly useful to read Cicero in a rearview mirror, so too I believe that while questions about sources (which have historically dominated discussion of Cicero’s theoretical writings) are important for scholars interested in recovering those sources, they are largely unimportant for the interpretation of Cicero himself. It does not matter any more in assessing what Cicero has written if what he says about Plato or Aristotle is based on a lost treatise of Philo of Larisa on rhetoric or on a lost Peripatetic work on constitutional theory than does a modern scholar’s use of his or her predecessors: even if—and I do not believe he did so more than very rarely—Cicero is in fact translating from a lost Greek source (the assumption of much Quellenforschung), he made a conscious, informed, and deliberate choice of what to excerpt, and any such borrowing is therefore part of his own philosophy as well as that of any putative source. Cicero’s relationship to his Greek sources and models (and he certainly had them) is not one of dependence but one of intertextuality: he feels free to adapt, distort, echo, or combine the books that he read, and in that fashion he offers interpretations of those books that contribute to his own argument. Cicero was a writer of astonishing brilliance and originality and deserves to be read with the attention more often given to poetry: he knew what he wanted to say and he knew how to say it, and I assume throughout that in every aspect of these texts he meant what he wrote.

The two works discussed here are closely related, but they pose very different problems of interpretation. The first part of this book deals with De oratore on its own, both because it is the earlier work and because it is complete, beginning with a discussion of the form of Ciceronian dialogue and Cicero’s choice of setting and characters, then examining the major elements of the argument: Cicero’s theory of rhetoric; the relationship between oratory and philosophy; and the complex relationships between Greek theory and Roman practice and between law and philosophy. The second part focuses on De re publica, and because of its fragmentary condition I have paid much more attention to reconstructing what Cicero in fact said; in this, the relationship between De oratore and De re publica is a useful guide to the interpretation of the latter’s structure and argument. My goal is to locate these works in three different contexts, all of which were of some importance in the years before the civil war in Rome, and all of which I believe Cicero had in mind when writing: the place of Greek philosophy in Roman life; the literary developments of the late Republic; and the loss of that Republic itself.

1. On the letter to Lentulus, see above all McConnell 2014: 35–44; also Büchner 1969 and Schneider 1998: 238–318. For background on Cicero’s place within the Roman politics of the period, see, for instance, Rawson 1975: 122–45, Mitchell 1991: 144–203.

2. The exact meaning of cum dignitate otium has been much discussed; for a good summary of the problems, focusing on Pro Sestio, see Kaster 2006: 31–37 with a lengthy bibliography at 31 n. 70. On the preface to De oratore, see below, Chapter 2.

3. Att. 4.6 (SB 83). Note that in the heading of the Latin text at Shackleton Bailey 1965–70: 2.94 the date is given as March rather than April; the English translation has it correctly. On the chronology of the letters in this period, see Shackleton Bailey 1965–70: 2.233–35.

4. On this Lentulus, see Shackleton Bailey on Att 2.24.2; his defeat in the elections of 59 is recorded in Vat. 25.

5. On this letter, see also Fantham 2004: 12–13.

6. Cicero names Plato, but his wording is very close to a passage of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia: on the problem, see McConnell 2014: 36n.

7. These are (so McConnell 2014: 36–40) the first extant allusions to the Platonic letters; Cicero cites them elsewhere as well and is particularly fond of Letter 9.

8. There are other speeches—according to Marinone and Malaspina 2004, nine before Lucca and six or seven after—but only one other forensic speech in the second part of the year, his sixth defense of Calpurnius Bestia. For the chronology of Cicero’s speeches and letters, I rely on Marinone and Malaspina 2004.

9. The only other speech listed by Marinone and Malaspina 2004 is a speech in defense of L. Caninius Gallus, although one or two undatable (and not extant) speeches may also belong in 55.

10. Like many of us, Cicero stresses how busy he is or is not as circumstances require, and his references to his lack of otium must be taken with a grain of salt; so too his reference in 44 (Div. 2.3) to his having had major public responsibilities in the late 50s. Compared to his complete lack of any influence under Caesar’s dictatorship, that is true; compared to his earlier genuine importance, it is not. Such passages are often taken too literally. It also seems unlikely that he really appeared in court nearly every day in 52 under the new rules of the lex Pompeia (Br. 324).

11. Shackleton Bailey 1965–70 deletes non; I think the change is unnecessary but have left it in brackets.

12. On the letter to Lucceius, see particularly Hall 1998.

13. On Cicero’s attempts at commemoration by himself and others in the 60s, see Steel 2005: 49–63; on De consulatu suo, see Gildenhard 2011: 292–98 and particularly Volk 2013; on the (reconstructed) exchange with Posidonius, see Hall 1996: 112–14.

14. Cicero seems to have completed the three-book poem but seems not to have circulated it: no-one in antiquity other than Cicero himself ever refers to it. See Harrison 1990.

15. On Cicero’s relationship to Hortensius, see Dyck 2008; on this passage and the conclusion to De oratore, see Dyck 2008: 163. Hortensius (consul 69) was the leading orator in Rome until Cicero’s appearance; they were on different occasions opponents (as in the case of Verres in 70) and advocates on the same side (as in the trial of Murena in 63). The fullest account of his oratory is in Cicero’s Brutus, which begins with a commemoration of Hortensius’ death and concludes with a comparison of his and Cicero’s careers; see now van den Berg 2021.

16. So Taylor 1949: 219–20; see also Shackleton Bailey 1965–70: 2.193. Faustus Sulla’s library included the library of Apellicon, which contained a major collection of Aristotelian-Peripatetic texts; on its history and its importance for the study of philosophy in Rome, see Barnes 1997 and Tutrone 2013: 160–66.

17. See Goldberg 2005: 87–89 on this passage.

18. On politeness in the letters, see Hall 2009.

19. Schmidt 1969 offers strong arguments to show that it is possible that all that survives of De legibus was written in the 50s, but he offers no evidence that it was actually written then. His arguments can easily be reversed: it is just as possible that the work was written after the civil war. There is simply no hard evidence, except for the significant absence of any mention of De legibus in the thorough catalogue of Cicero’s works (completed and in progress) in De divinatione Book 2, written in March/April of 44. The problem needs thorough re-examination.

20. The few references to laws in De re publica, particularly at 2.65, constitute the one possible anticipation of De legibus; on this, see below, Chapter 12. On the relationship between De legibus and the other two dialogues, see also Zetzel forthcoming.

21. Whether or not the Athenian Stranger of Plato’s Laws is really to be identified with Plato himself is not important: Cicero believed that he was, and he also apparently believed that Plato’s Laws contained a code for the society shaped in the Republic. See, for instance, Atkins 2013: 3 and elsewhere.

22. Some recent scholarship on Cicero’s rhetorical works has emphasized the importance of self-fashioning, self-advancement, and Cicero’s need to defend his style and approach to oratory as well as his character, sexuality, and social position. The best such discussion is Dugan 2005: 75–171, which provides some excellent interpretations, but the larger argument, like the narrowly political readings of earlier scholarship, seems to me to ignore the civic and literary goals which I emphasize here. See also Zetzel 2006.

23. My approach to these dialogues is perhaps closest to that of Fox 2007, who rightly emphasizes their non-dogmatic nature and the complexity of the interaction between philosophical and historical approaches, and of Gildenhard 2013a and 2013b, who explores the complex relationships between Cicero and Plato and between history and fiction in the dialogues. Both treatments are broader and more theoretical than mine, and while we share similar concerns, our arguments are generally very different.