9
it is easy to exaggerate the parallelism between De re publica and De oratore: the exiguous remains of the later dialogue encourage certainty in the absence of evidence. Some parallelism there obviously is, as described in the last chapter: the similarity of scene and occasion; the articulation of the dialogue by three prefaces, which are similarly related in their discussions of the setting and speakers; and the development of the argument from a fairly simple view of the subject (rhetorical and constitutional theory, respectively) in the initial discussion to far more complex understanding as the dialogue progresses. On the other hand, even these parallels are not absolute, and the two dialogues were not written from a single template. That is at least in part because the two subjects, although closely related in fact and in Cicero’s mind, occupied very different places in Greek and Roman intellectual life. Rhetoric and oratory were familiar: every well-to-do Roman who aspired to take part in public life, through holding political office or as an advocate, had studied rhetoric and needed to be capable of speaking coherently and preferably convincingly before a public audience. What is more, in Cicero’s time the same fairly rigid syllabus of rhetorical instruction will have been imposed on almost every adolescent who studied it: the five officia of oratory; the discovery of arguments and the structuring of a case; and the rest of what is found in an ars rhetorica and both assumed and derided in De oratore.
Politics was different. As a branch of learning, it was, in the philosophical scheme of things, subordinated to ethics. Political theory was not concerned with the actual practice of politics—as performed by Cicero and his contemporaries or as described, for example, in the electioneering handbook attributed to Cicero’s brother Quintus known as Commentariolum petitionis—in the way rhetorical theory was, but concentrated on the description of the various known or possible forms of political organization and their virtues and failings: Aristotle in particular was interested in assessing the ethical value of various constitutions in terms of their ability to foster individual eudaimonia. The Hellenistic schools, at least the Stoics and Epicureans, were less interested in government itself than in whether political participation of any kind was either morally obligatory or conducive to individual happiness: it is that question, and the Epicurean negative answer to it in particular, that motivates the protreptic to political activity which is the most important element of the preface to De re publica.
In dealing with contemporary rhetoric and politics, moreover, Cicero faced two different kinds of problem: although both subjects could be traced back to Plato (and thus could be addressed in Cicero’s version of Platonic dialogue), they were, at least by Cicero’s time, very differently implicated in the philosophical world. Rhetoric had been analyzed in detail and argued over for centuries: its status as an independent discipline was contested by most of the philosophical schools, a debate that in some respects goes back to the differences between Plato and Isocrates on the subject of knowledge and education, and it was largely treated (at least by philosophers) as a very subordinate and relatively trivial form of learning. That diminished status, moreover, affected the status and importance of oratory itself. Cicero’s task in this area was to detach rhetoric from philosophy on the one hand, and on the other to subordinate technical rhetoric to the grander aspirations of public oratory in Rome. Hence the organization of De oratore, the bulk of which is a grand extension of the ars rhetorica to incorporate the range of knowledge and experience of a Roman public orator. Politics, however, needed to be detached from philosophy in a very different way: while rhetoric was always bound to the real world, politics was the field of cataloguers of constitutions like the Peripatetics or of utopians like the Stoics or Plato himself.1
Beginning with Plato, both in the Republic and in the Letters, moreover, the actual practice of political life was viewed by philosophers as something suspect and of dubious value, and very little attention was paid to the question that interests both Cicero and the speakers in De re publica: what is it that makes a real, working government succeed, prosper, and survive? What institutions strengthen or preserve it, and what moral values make it worth preserving? While in De oratore Cicero needed to revise and reshape an existing theory of rhetoric, in De re publica he needed to create a theory of government that was not utopian and not condescending—and above all, one that was relevant not to the obsolete and petty world of the Greek polis but to the genuine complexity of Rome. Put another way, to the extent that rhetorical theory really works outside the classroom, it is equally applicable in any society in which public speaking is a significant activity; but a theory of government that makes sense in a small town is not necessarily intelligible or useful in an empire. Plato had attempted to explain justice in the Republic by using an analogy between the organization of the human mind and the organization of a polis; Cicero attempts to explain Rome through a far greater set of analogies: between government and the organization of the mind, as Plato does, but also between natural reason and social order and between the governance of the world—the cosmos itself—and the government of human societies.
Much of what has been said in broad terms in the previous paragraph will be discussed in more detail in what follows. Here my point is fairly simple: because the backgrounds to the subjects of De oratore and De re publica are quite different and the problems that Cicero wanted to address in the two dialogues, while related, necessarily needed to be presented in rather different terms, the structures of the two dialogues, while similar, are not identical. Furthermore, while the formal structure of De re publica is very straightforward, the organization of the actual argument seems to have been rather more complex. In terms of the relationship between the two dialogues, for example, there was much less need to present basic rhetorical theory in great detail than there was to give a full analysis of constitutional theory: rhetoric was simply more familiar to Cicero’s audience. So too, while the skeleton of Books 2 and 3 of De oratore was supplied by the standard rhetorical division into five officia, there was no comparable structure for the exposition of the kind of political theory Cicero was creating in books 3–6 of De re publica. Hence his argument has an order—moving from institutions to individuals—rather than a structure (inventio, dispositio, etc.).
Before proceeding to any detailed analysis of the dialogue, however, it is worth emphasizing just how fragmentary our knowledge of De re publica is. In brief: while it is possible to make detailed comparisons between the first book of De oratore and the first two books of De re publica, that becomes less and less possible as De re publica progresses. That is frustrating: the most readable portion of the text as it now exists is the most elementary, most familiar, and least interesting portion of the dialogue. But what the rest of it said is, unfortunately, much harder to recover or interpret.
In one of his letters to Lucilius (Ep. 108), the younger Seneca reminds his friend that the enthusiasm and energy of youth are conducive to learning, but that it is important to learn the right things. As illustrations of this, in the last part of the letter he first adduces the different aspects of Virgil’s phrase fugit inreparabile tempus (G. 3.284) that a student of grammar and a student of philosophy will emphasize; to that Seneca adds his own brief homily on the same text about the importance and fleetingness of youth (108.24–29). He then presents a picture of three scholars (a philologist, a grammarian, and a philosopher) studying the text of De re publica and observing very different things, depending on their interests (30–34).2 The variety of approaches is not surprising; as Seneca memorably says between his two illustrations, “In the same meadow a cow looks for grass, a dog for a rabbit, and a stork for a lizard” (29).
Seneca’s anecdote is worth mentioning here for several reasons. In the first place, it indicates the importance of De re publica as a literary text: it is used as an illustrative parallel to Virgil, and in fact one of the points raised by Seneca’s grammarian is that Cicero preserves a quotation from Ennius that was also used by Virgil. Second, it demonstrates the range of interests that might lead someone to quote De re publica: the fragments we possess at times reflect the biases or interests of the person quoting them. And, finally, it is worth observing that while some of the passages discussed by Seneca’s three scholars are still extant, several of them are not. We are dependent for our knowledge of De re publica on the kindness of strangers.
In 1822, when Angelo Mai published his edition of De re publica including the material that he had discovered in 1819 as the lower (erased) text of a manuscript of St. Augustine, there was great excitement at the recovery of a lost and much desired work of Cicero, but enthusiasm for Mai’s discovery soon waned.3 The palimpsest preserved only about a quarter of the work, and it was rapidly recognized that the portion of the text it contained was not representative of the original work. Vaticanus Latinus 5757 (henceforth: P) is a remarkable manuscript. Originally written in the late fourth or early fifth century, P was a large and very elegant book. Each page contains a small amount of Cicero’s text in large uncial characters in a generous format: two columns of fifteen lines, each of which contains on average only ten letters, with on most pages running headers giving the title on the left-hand page and the book number on the right. A single folium of P contains roughly fifteen lines as printed in a modern edition; Ziegler estimated that the entire text of De re publica, when P was complete, would have occupied some 650 folia. All this means that the person who commissioned P was very wealthy; the manuscript belongs in the company of the great late antique codices of Virgil and Livy, the proud possession of a rich and (presumably) important figure. The very existence of such a manuscript—together with the obvious interest in De re publica shown by at least two important authors of the early fifth century, Augustine and Macrobius (see below)—gives some indication of the value, intellectual as well as monetary, placed on Cicero’s work at the time.
The precise origin and early history of P are unknown; it reached the Irish monastery of St. Columbanus at Bobbio, outside Milan, where the monks took it apart, erased it, and re-used it, probably shortly after the foundation of the monastery in 614 ce. It evidently arrived at Bobbio in fairly good condition: unlike most early Bobbio palimpsests, which consist of very scattered leaves drawn from more than one dismembered, and perhaps already damaged, manuscript, P consists entirely of palimpsested folia drawn from a single earlier manuscript.4 It now contains 151 leaves but was once almost certainly larger: the superimposed text, Augustine’s Commentary on the Psalms, is itself now incomplete, and is missing (on Mercati’s computation) some 144 folia—all of which were probably also taken from the same manuscript of De re publica—and was itself probably the last volume of a three-volume set, of which the first two are now lost; they may also have consisted, at least in part, of Ciceronian folia. That, however, is melancholy speculation: we are limited now to what still exists.
What is most striking about P is that it not only comes from a single codex, but that almost all the leaves—although their Augustinian order is completely different from their original Ciceronian order—come from the same portion of that manuscript. Aside from the loss of the first two quaternions of Book 1 of De re publica—one of the portions most likely to have been lost before the Bobbio monks got hold of it—only at one point between 1.1 and 2.51 are more than two successive leaves lost. Seven quaternions are preserved entire, and at the end of Book 1 and the opening of Book 2, there is a continuous run of thirty-four leaves, nearly a quarter of the surviving total, without a break. Comparison with the disorderly and scattered leaves of the palimpsest of Fronto’s correspondence in Vat. Lat. 5750 (a manuscript found by Mai at the same time as P) and Ambrosianus E.147 sup. (found by him a few years earlier) makes the relative clarity and structure of P all the more striking.
The existence in the palimpsest not only of page headings but of numbered gatherings (marked at the end of each quaternion, although the relevant folia do not always survive) makes reconstruction of most of the text it contains relatively straightforward, and, perhaps equally important, reveals almost always the number of leaves now lost. Book 1 originally consisted of 211 pages (not folia), of which 139 survive; Book 2 of 193 pages, of which 113 survive. Owing to the loss of most of Book 3, it is impossible to know exactly what proportion is left; almost certainly it is no more than 15%, forty pages of a minimum of 256. Only five pages, the location of which cannot definitely be determined, survive from Books 4 and 5, and not a single leaf from Book 6.
Aside from the loss of the first two quaternions of the palimpsest, Cicero’s argument in the first two books is fairly clear. The first book contained, after the preface and the introduction of the dramatic setting and characters, a preliminary discussion of the portent of two suns that had recently been observed, followed by a discussion of the best form of constitution. It concluded—and we possess both the very end of Book 1 and the opening of Book 2—with Scipio’s assertion that the ancestral constitution of Rome best embodied the ideal mixed constitution; in the second book he proceeded to demonstrate his claim by giving a historical account of the development of Roman government up to 449 bce. At that point, however, the palimpsest begins to be less coherent: the end of Scipio’s narrative (the fall of the Decemvirs and the restoration of normal government) is missing, and the discussion concluding the book is very damaged. The fragments that do survive and the extended summary of the end of Book 2 and much of Book 3 in Augustine, City of God 2.21, show that at the end of Book 2 the discussion turned from the history of constitutional change in Rome to two topics that in fact determine much of the remainder of the conversation: on the one hand the role of the individual statesman in society, and on the other the broader issue of justice in government.5 What remains of the palimpsest in Book 3 preserves a good portion of Philus’ speech against justice, but the response of Laelius in favor of justice must be reconstructed almost entirely from quotations. After this point, so little remains of the palimpsest that the scraps it preserves are scarcely more coherent than what survives in quotations.
What the palimpsest preserves is the bulk of what is left of De re publica. Its drawback as a source is that what it preserves, coming almost exclusively from the first two books of the dialogue, is not representative of the whole work; its advantage is that, as a source, it is totally unbiased: what survives is not the choice of authors making possibly tendentious quotations from a text but the result of chance and the lack of interest of the monks of Bobbio: it approaches, as nearly as possible, a value-free selection of Cicero’s work, something that cannot be said of most of the other sources from which knowledge of De re publica is to be gained. What follows is not a complete analysis of the fragments, but a brief consideration of the four authors who provide, among them, the greatest amount of relevant material.6 The single largest number of quotations comes from the fourth-century antiquarian lexicographer Nonius Marcellus; the next most important sources are the ecclesiastical writers Lactantius and Augustine, of the early fourth and fifth centuries, respectively; and the single largest piece of the text preserved outside the palimpsest is the Somnium Scipionis, the object of a commentary by the Neoplatonist Macrobius in the early fifth century, in the manuscripts of which the Somnium itself is preserved. These writers understand and use De re publica in very different ways, and it is useful to bear in mind how differently it appears in their citations.
Of our major sources (including P) the earliest is Lactantius, writing at the beginning of the fourth century. He clearly knew the whole text: his citations and allusions range from the preface of Book 1 to the Somnium, and derive from every book except Book 5. And while some of his references to De re publica are either doxographical or make use of Cicero for the earlier texts which Cicero himself had quoted, his most significant uses of it are intended to show either that a pagan philosopher could approach Christian truth or, from the other direction, that Cicero’s arguments reveal the inadequacy of non-Christian morality and beliefs. Thus, in the opening chapter of De opificio Dei (1.11–14), he uses the apparent superficiality of Cicero’s accounts of the relationship of body and soul (not only in De re publica Book 4 but also in De natura deorum 2.133–53) to justify his own Christian explanation of the subject. He also quotes Cicero against himself, citing Cicero’s statement at De legibus 1.27 that what he had said in De re publica Book 4 about body and soul dealt with the subject adequately. From Lactantius’ point of view, Cicero’s account was inadequate, but to judge both from the fragments and from the parallel account in De legibus—which Lactantius carefully does not quote—Cicero’s treatment in De re publica Book 4 was, from a Stoic point of view, and from the point of view of a political theorist, quite sufficient. Lactantius’ goal was to show that without Christian beliefs, no such analysis could do justice to the work of the Christian god; his dismissive treatment demonstrates clearly that his version of what Cicero said is untrustworthy and thus that we have no adequate explanation of what Cicero in fact said.7
More important and far more extensive is Lactantius’ use of the debate on justice in Book 3, for which (aside from P) he is our most important source.8 Here Lactantius’ version is entirely distorted: from his point of view, Philus’ argument is reasonable, because it fits his own view that true justice comes not from men, but from Christ. He excerpts Philus’ speech in such a way as to strengthen it and simplify its structure; he claims (DI 5.12.7) that Philus speaks as if he knew prophetically (divinaret) the evils that would afflict Christians because of their justice (in Christian terms, of course). He similarly distorts Laelius’ speech in response to Philus to make it seem as though Laelius was unable to respond to Philus’ case (DI 5.13): his goal is to show that not even Cicero could argue convincingly in favor of human justice, because only the true religion can provide true justice. When Lactantius actually quotes Cicero verbatim, he apparently quotes him correctly; but the contexts in which he embeds his quotations, paraphrases, and summaries of Cicero are often misleading or simply false. He aims to demonstrate the truth of Christianity, not to be truthful himself.
Similar distortions also appear in the citations made by the other great Christian reader of Cicero, St. Augustine. Augustine quotes De re publica fairly frequently and in a variety of works; in many cases (such as in connection with the facts of early Roman history, the deification of Romulus and Hercules, or Cicero’s views on the afterlife) his use of it is straightforward and, where we can tell because his citations overlap with otherwise attested parts of the text, not particularly tendentious. At times his language inevitably reflects his own time rather than Cicero’s; thus, when he cites a phrase concerning the need for the future princeps or moderator to be “nourished with glory” (CD 5.13 = Rep. 5.9), he describes the passage as ubi loquitur de instituendo principe civitatis. His use of the singular princeps (not to mention the addition of civitatis) reflects the world of the Empire, not the Ciceronian commonwealth, and Augustine’s phrase has contributed to the long and fruitless debate about the role of this figure in De re publica—something that interested Augustine not in the least.9
More important is that Augustine, as a good rhetorician, often shapes a citation to fit his own needs rather than adhering to Cicero’s argument. In discussing the evils of the theater as reflecting the immorality of the pagan divinities (demons, from his point of view) in City of God 2.7–14, he cites, apparently correctly, several passages from Cicero’s discussion of the differences between Greek and Roman comedy, in which Cicero had both criticized the Athenians for permitting people to be criticized (or praised) by name from the stage and contrasted that custom with the strict Roman rule against such attacks.10 The argument for which Augustine uses these citations, however, is almost the opposite of Cicero’s: Augustine’s point is that the Athenians were at least consistent, since slanders against people and blasphemous depictions of the gods were both allowed, whereas the Romans allowed such depictions of the gods while prohibiting slanders against people. In order to make his case clearer, moreover, he links (particularly in Ep. 91.4 to Nectarius, but also in CD 2.7–9) the account of drama in De re publica to the scene in Terence’s Eunuchus (584–91) in which a young man is encouraged in adultery by viewing a painting of Jupiter and Danae. He does so in order to make the contrast between depictions of gods and of men in Roman comedy, but, although it has misled students of De re publica from John of Salisbury to the present, Cicero almost certainly did not cite Terence here, and the point being made is Augustine’s, not Cicero’s.
Within the argument of City of God, however, De re publica not only provides material for Augustine’s particular concerns but also plays a major role in defining the difference between the Roman and the Christian commonwealths. In the central portion of Book 2 of City of God, after having demonstrated the depravity of Roman religion, Augustine argues that the Roman gods had not prevented the moral decline of the Roman republic. His primary source for the decline of Rome is Sallust, in the prefaces to the Bellum Catilinae and Histories; but he uses De re publica in 2.21 in a complex argument to show that even Cicero believed that the Republic had not only declined but had ceased to exist. Augustine infers that Cicero really knew that there had been no Republic even in the great days of old. That is not the end of this argument, however. At the conclusion of 2.21, Augustine promises to return to a discussion of Scipio’s definition of res publica, to prove that the Roman res publica had never in fact existed. He does so at 19.21, arguing that if the existence of a state depends on justice, and if justice consists in giving to each his due, then a state which does not give Christ his due is by definition unjust, and is therefore not a res publica. Only the Christian civitas Dei incorporates (true, Christian) justice, and therefore only it is a legitimate and just state.
Like Lactantius, Augustine is scarcely trying to produce an argument that is truly logical: they both start by assuming that the Christian revelation is true and use Cicero to produce arguments proving the truth of that assumption. This method can convince only those who already believe its premises. Setting that aside, however, it is important to recognize how badly Augustine distorts what Cicero is saying—even if, owing to the state of the text, we can never be entirely certain of the genuine development of Cicero’s argument. Although Augustine seems at City of God 2.21 to be giving a summary of the argument of a substantial part of De re publica, his description of the work is very partial. The only topic that interests him here is the relationship of justice to the definition of the state: he not only omits the general discussion of constitutions in Book 1 and the historical analysis of Book 2, but he gives extremely short shrift to the two speeches of Philus and Laelius on justice that constitute the bulk of Book 3. In his citation of Cicero’s eloquent and pessimistic description of the decline of Roman government from the preface of Book 5, he omits any context; and, although we have virtually nothing else surviving from that preface, it is almost certain both that Augustine omitted the positive statements that Cicero must have made there about the education of statesmen and that he paid no attention to the reason for Cicero’s pessimism at this point—almost certainly voiced in connection with a discussion of the sudden and (in Cicero’s view) violent death of Scipio shortly after the dramatic date of the dialogue.11 Nowhere in his account of Cicero’s ideas does he allude to the moral and educational program which Cicero must have described and that had for so long managed to ward off the decline which he so vividly evoked. Cicero is not Sallust; but from Augustine’s description of their views, he might have been. Nor, of course, in his summary of the views of justice and states in De re publica, does Augustine for a moment admit that Laelius’ argument in favor of justice might play an important role in Cicero’s analysis of the crisis. He wants to associate Cicero with the (to him) evil and vicious religion of the Romans—not with the Stoic metaphysics that was much more important in Cicero’s account.
Although both Augustine and Lactantius have considerable justification for making Cicero seem pessimistic about Rome’s government and destiny, they abstract from the dialogue what they find useful and suppress any arguments that might weaken their own. Both of them concentrate heavily on Book 3, the discussion of justice, and both give very little room to the detailed historical arguments which surround it: they are interested in divorcing Cicero from his genuine context and his analysis of Roman government and instead prefer to see him purely in the context of Christian ethics and politics. The two of them, however, treat Book 3 very differently: Lactantius concentrates on the debate between Philus and Laelius, desiring to show the cogency of Philus’ arguments and suppressing Laelius’ response. Augustine, on the other hand, omits any details about the debate and emphasizes only the relationship of justice to the true res publica in Scipio’s final argument. What emerges from either of them separately, and indeed from the two of them taken together, is a polemical caricature of a complex discussion. Cicero is indeed pessimistic; but while Augustine wants to make Cicero suggest that no justice is possible in a pagan world, that is the last thing Cicero himself wanted to propose. If Lactantius creates a very narrow view of De re publica which cannot provide an argument for justice in the world, Augustine imagines a text that is an unabashed and uncomplicated demonstration of the failure of Rome. Neither one pays much attention to the positive elements in Cicero’s account; and as both of them are promoting a version of society in which Christ is the only savior, they suppress Cicero’s emphasis, throughout the work, on the potential for humans to manage or improve their own society. In the City of God, Christ is the only rector.
But one does not need to be a father of the church to distort a text. Early in the fifth century, the Neoplatonist Macrobius wrote an extensive commentary on the Somnium Scipionis, the vision that concludes De re publica in imitation of the Myth of Er at the end of Plato’s Republic. In doing so, he quoted roughly three quarters of the Somnium itself, generally in the order of the original; in that sense, his employment of Cicero is far less tendentious than that of Lactantius and Augustine, who quote selectively and by no means always in the proper order. Furthermore, whether it was Macrobius’ intention or not, the entire Somnium was at a very early stage appended to the text of the Commentary, thus ensuring its preservation.
But although as a commentator Macrobius kept fairly close to the text and his quotations are accurate, the sense that the Commentary gives of Cicero’s work is far from the spirit of the original. For the most part, Macrobius views the Somnium as a peg on which to hang a vast range of material, generally Neoplatonic lore, with a great deal of numerology and astrology included. It is, as Stahl describes it, “an encyclopedia of general information and an exposition of the basic doctrines of Neoplatonism.”12 The effect of the commentary as a whole is to allegorize Cicero into a Neoplatonist; when what Cicero says does not coincide with Macrobius’ beliefs, contorted explanations make him fit the pattern.13 Furthermore, aside from his introduction explaining the context of the Somnium in De re publica Book 6, he assiduously avoids any of the historical contexts that Cicero/Scipio gives: Masinissa and the occasion of the dream are not mentioned; in commenting on the prophecy of Scipio’s dictatorship and his precarious future, Macrobius discourses at great length on the mystical properties of the numbers 7 and 8 but says nothing about Scipio’s career or his danger, other than a single sentence paraphrasing Cicero (1.6.83). Cicero did indeed mean the Somnium to provide an explanation of the afterlife, the immortality of the soul, and the organization of the universe, but by removing the Somnium from its context and by emptying it of its political argument, Macrobius, just as much as Lactantius and Augustine, distorts and trivializes Cicero’s train of thought, although probably without so much intent to do so. Once again, an argument about government and the statesman becomes a generalized philosophical discourse. Where the Christian writers are eager to prove Cicero wrong and Rome corrupt, Macrobius intends to show that Cicero was always right; but his commentary is no less a distortion of the whole.
This description of the methods of excerpting and interpretation of Lactantius, Augustine, and Macrobius should not be surprising: all selection inevitably distorts, just as the act of commenting or interpreting entails emphases that are not necessarily those of the author. Nevertheless, although all interpretation distorts, these interpretations have had a greater effect than most, because it is only through their eyes that we can read some portions of the Ciceronian text at all. The uses made of De re publica by these three writers provide, other than the palimpsest itself, the most significant remains of Cicero’s work. Taken as a whole, and comparing their citations to what we otherwise know about De re publica, what is striking is their shared emphasis on the abstract, the metaphysical, and the unworldly: on justice and the soul, not on government and Rome. Almost nothing is taken by any of them from the discussion of constitutions in Book 1 or the account of Roman history in Book 2. All that interests Lactantius or Augustine in the discussion of Roman institutions in Book 4 is the account of the relationship of mind and body with which it began—and which Lactantius calls inadequate—and the discussion of Roman comedy compared to Greek. Even more striking is that while all three writers know and use the Somnium, none of them provides anything else of any significance from the last two books of De re publica, which consisted largely of an exploration of the education, goals, and actions of the true statesman. At a distance of four or five centuries from Cicero it is not, perhaps, surprising that there should be more interest in universals than in particulars and in ethics and eschatology rather than history: in the time of Lactantius or of Macrobius and Augustine, the Roman Republic was indeed long gone, and—except for Augustine’s desire to demonstrate the immorality and corruption of even Rome’s greatest days—the individuals, problems, and institutions of early Rome were completely foreign. These late antique concerns have thus effectively filtered out many of the details that are of interest to the student of Cicero’s work: the fact that it was not important to a Lactantius or a Macrobius does not mean that it is not important in interpreting De re publica.
Luckily, however, Lactantius, Macrobius, and Augustine are by no means the only later writers to quote from Cicero. Heck’s assemblage of the ancient quotations from and testimonia to De re publica includes (other than Cicero himself and these three) some twenty-seven different authors, some of whom quote Cicero frequently. Of these, by far the most important is Nonius Marcellus, the fourth-century lexicographer, who provides more than ninety quotations from De re publica, all of them unfortunately very brief. Like the other readers, Nonius has his own bias; but in his case it is not doctrinal but linguistic. What he cites are sentences with odd or unfamiliar usages or rare words, and thus the picture of Cicero’s style that emerges is at best peculiar. On the other hand, he has no interest in shaping his readers’ perception of Cicero’s argument, and hence his quotations, scrappy though they are, are of extraordinary value; and they are all the more useful because he is far less selective in choosing his quotations than authors interested in content. Thus, where Lactantius and Augustine concentrate on Books 3 and 4, Nonius cites from Book 1 twenty-one times, ranging from the beginning to the end; from Book 2 eleven times, from Book 3 nineteen times, from Book 4 twenty-three times, from Book 5 seven times, and from Book 6 thirteen times. It is unfortunate, but striking, that Book 5 is the least cited portion of the text; and while it is not unusual for citations to diminish over the course of a text (Aeneid 1 is cited by Nonius 141 times, but Aeneid 12 only 44 times), the distribution would suggest that perhaps Book 5 of De re publica was relatively short; it is also possible that the unusually large number of citations from Book 4 is related to its content, concerning early Roman customs, which inevitably involved the use of archaic words. Be that as it may, it is paradoxically the case that the quotations from authors who are interested in words rather than ideas may give a better idea of the content of the work as a whole than those supplied by authors who genuinely understood—and deliberately distorted—Cicero’s argument.
All this is intended to emphasize something that ought to be fairly obvious: that our sources for De re publica are incomplete and unreliable. One needs to try to fill in the huge gap (almost the entire second half of the work) left by the absence of the palimpsest by means of quotations from sources that are dishonest or highly selective, most of which display a bias in favor of the general and the philosophical rather than the particular and the historical. We know a reasonable amount about the debate on justice in Book 3; with the help largely of Nonius Marcellus we can get some idea of the discussion of Roman social and educational institutions in Book 4; but for the last two books, the discussion of the training and role of the statesman, for the most part we know little more than what the subject was, and we have very few details. It is for that reason that the parallel, to the extent that it is a parallel, of De oratore is so important: De oratore is about rhetoric and oratory, but while it includes a great deal about the theory of rhetoric, the work’s subject is oratory’s place in Rome, and it relies on the details of speeches and trials and the events of Roman history to make its argument. So too, although the sources for many of the fragments of the last four books of De re publica emphasize the general over the particular and philosophy (or theology) over history, other fragments show that, as in De oratore, details of Roman history and institutions played a large part in the argument, and the tension and balance between history and theory were essential to the organization and structure of the dialogue. De re publica was neither exclusively political nor purely theoretical: like De oratore it is at least in part about the place of theory in Rome itself, and that is true from the opening of the conversation in Scipio’s villa to its conclusion in Scipio’s dream.
1. On Laelius’ comment to that effect at 2.21–22, see below, Chapter 11. I am oversimplifying Hellenistic political theory, but it is remarkable how little there is, or apparently was: in Long and Sedley 1987, the broader rubric “Society” in the section on Epicureanism has nineteen quotations, and the rubric “Politics” in the section on Stoicism has twenty-five. Cicero studied the early Peripatetics Dicaearchus and Theophrastus, whose work he knew well; there is little sign of any other specific source that might be characterized as political philosophy other than Polybius. For fuller and perhaps more sympathetic treatments, see Schofield 1999 (beginning with the defensive statement that “Hellenistic political philosophy has had a bad press.”) and Moles 2000, Schofield 2000, and Hahm 2000 (all in Rowe and Schofield 2000). The best single study of the subject is Schofield 1991; on the fate of Aristotelian politics and its simplification into mere ethics, see Annas 1995.
2. On this anecdote, see also Zetzel 2014: 48.
3. On the circumstances of the discovery and early reactions to it, see Zetzel 2011. An excellent set of digitized images can be found at https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.5757.
4. The fundamental description of P is Mercati 1934: 175–222; I have discussed some problems of reconstruction in Zetzel 2017b and 2017c. Mai’s reconstruction (made presumably with B. G. Niebuhr’s advice) is generally still valid; the recent attempt of Powell 2008 to rearrange some folia is not convincing. Helpful diagrams of which pages survive and in what order are given by Ziegler 1969 and Bréguet 2000 in their prefaces.
5. On Augustine’s summary and its misleading aspects, see below, Chapter 13.
6. On the fragments, see above all Heck 1966; for more recent bibliography on Nonius and Macrobius, see Zetzel 2018.
7. On Cicero’s treatment of body and mind in Book 4, see particularly Graver forthcoming.
8. I have discussed Lactantius’ treatment of the debate on justice in detail in Zetzel 2017c.
9. Heck 1966: 111–53 provides an invaluable analysis of every citation of De re publica by Augustine. Hagendahl 1967: 2.540–53 gives a good short discussion of Augustine’s use of De re publica in addition to his collection of testimonia and broader discussion of Augustine’s use of Cicero.
10. Note, however, that his citation of Book 4 at CD 2.14 (4.9a) almost certainly belongs earlier, in Scipio’s discussion of the mind and encouragement to good (or bad) behavior at the beginning of Book 4; see Graver forthcoming and below, Chapter 12.
11. On the context in the preface to Book 5, see also Heck 1966: 123–24 and below, Chapter 14.
12. Stahl 1952: 13.
13. So Stahl 1952: 12: “Cicero would have been highly amused at Macrobius’ ingenuity in twisting his plain and simple meaning to fit some precise Neoplatonic doctrine.”