14
scipio may have said nothing about the legitimacy of Rome’s government in his own day; we do not know. Augustine, in his tendentious summary of De re publica in CD 2.21, leapt, as we have seen, from near the end of Book 3 to the preface of Book 5 in his effort to show that Cicero himself believed that Rome’s res publica was dead. I will be doing the same thing here: while Book 3 provides the large framework of natural and universal law within which any res publica must be constituted, Book 4 appears to give—with due caution owing to the very fragmentary state of the text—a more particularized account of the social and moral institutions of one society (Rome), explaining how they worked to perpetuate the values that made it a legitimate society, and how the system created individuals who both embodied and supported those institutions and values. It appears that in the second pair of books Cicero maintained the pattern of the first pair: Books 1 and 3 establish the broader framework within which Books 2 and 4 examine the particular details relevant to Rome. Book 4 had no preface and the discussion of institutions may simply not have contained the kind of broad statements about the justice or injustice of Rome as a whole that Augustine wanted to use: he may not be suppressing anything, at least nothing relevant to his own argument.
That does not mean, however, that Augustine’s argument is a faithful reflection of what Cicero himself wanted to say about Roman justice. It is hard to imagine that Scipio at the end of Book 3 did not say something about the justice of Rome’s government, past or present; and the absence of anything of the kind in Augustine in turn suggests that what Scipio did say ran counter to what Augustine would have liked him to say. Augustine’s long quotation from the preface to Book 5 also deserves close scrutiny: it is very unlikely that Cicero meant what Augustine suggests that he meant, but it is extraordinarily important in any reconstruction, however tentative, of the argument of the final two books of De re publica.
“Tenuous” might be a better word than “tentative” for what can be made of the argument of Books 5 and 6; it should be kept in mind that, throughout this chapter, we are dealing with probabilities at best. Aside from Augustine’s quotation from the preface to Book 5, two leaves of the palimpsest survive from Book 5, probably from relatively early in the book—the final scraps of the manuscript. Beyond that, there are fourteen other fragments, of which six are assigned to Book 5 only conjecturally. Of Book 6 thirteen fragments survive, all of them definitely belonging to that book; there is also one more very large fragment with surrounding commentary and introductions, the Somnium Scipionis at the end of the book. All told, that is not much to go on, and the suggestions made here about the argument of the final day’s conversation are no more than that. The printed text of what survives of Books 5 and 6 occupies some twenty-one pages in Ziegler’s edition, including generous quotations from the introduction to Macrobius’ commentary; in comparison, what survives of Book 1 alone, itself incomplete, is more than twice that length. Large portions of these two books remain blank to us.
Probable parallels with the earlier portions of the dialogue and with the comparable sections of De oratore provide some guidance. Like Books 1 and 3, Book 5 had a preface in Cicero’s own voice; that is why Augustine is able to quote Cicero’s opinion on the lost res publica rather than just Scipio’s. Apart from Augustine’s quotation, we can infer two things about this preface: one is that, as in the earlier parts of De re publica, it to some extent served to introduce the pair of books (5 and 6), and therefore that the two books shared a single theme; we know from the particular fragments to be discussed below that the topic was the role and status of the individual rector within the res publica. The other is that, as with the preface to Book 3 of De oratore, it is extremely likely that Cicero used the preface to Book 5 to describe the death of Scipio and perhaps the aftermath of De re publica in the lives of the other participants. Both these elements, moreover, help to provide a context for Augustine’s quotation. Cicero himself, he says, speaks in the beginning of Book 5, first quoting a line from Ennius and then in his own words (5.1–2):1
“The Roman state stands upon the morals and men of old” (moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque): that verse (he said), in its brevity and its truthfulness, he seems to me to have spoken as if from an oracle. For if the state had not had such morals, then the men would not have existed; nor, if such men had not been in charge, would there have been such morals as to be able to establish or preserve for so long a commonwealth so great and ruling so widely (tantam et tam fuse lateque imperantem rem publicam). And so, before our time, ancestral morality provided outstanding men, and great men preserved the morality of old and the institutions of our ancestors. But our own age, having inherited the commonwealth like a wonderful picture that had faded over time, not only failed to renew its original colors, but hasn’t even taken the trouble to preserve at least its shape and outlines. What remains of the morals of antiquity, upon which Ennius said that the Roman state stood? We see that they are so outworn in oblivion that they are not only not cherished, but are now unknown. What am I to say about the men? The morals themselves have passed away through a shortage of men; and we must not only render an account of such an evil, but in a sense we must defend ourselves like people being tried for a capital crime. It is because of our own flaws, not because of some bad luck, that we preserve the commonwealth in name alone, but have long ago lost its substance.
Augustine quotes this fragment because its last line makes his point, that even Cicero thought the res publica was long lost. But Cicero probably did not let things stand there: this paragraph is part of a preface that Heck estimates was five to eight times longer than this, and which, to judge by Cicero’s other prefaces, may have been considerably longer than that.2 Cicero did, in other places, speak of the loss of the republic; but he was in general optimistic enough not to view the loss as necessarily permanent.3 There is no need to see this as any more final than the last line of Laelius’ speech in Book 3: both passages are meant to suggest that Rome is in serious trouble and that something drastic needs to be done to bring it back to its original moral principles. Laelius’ speech, with its concluding fears about the justice of Rome’s empire, is in fact closely connected to this passage: after quoting and praising Ennius’ oracular line, Cicero observes that without the men and morals of old, Rome could not have maintained tantam et tam fuse lateque imperantem rem publicam. That, at least is what standard editions of De re publica print and what is translated above, but it is not what the manuscripts of Augustine read: the transmitted text is tam iuste lateque imperantem. Emendations are generally printed, either fuse as here, or vaste in the Teubner text of Augustine, or longe in the CSEL text of Augustine.4 But there is nothing wrong with iuste in Augustine’s text, and it makes far better sense as Cicero’s wording as well: his point is that, for a long time, the Roman empire ruled its subjects justly, but, as Laelius had feared, it had given up its right to rule just as it had given up its internal morality and lost the men who embodied it.5 This passage of Book 5 is meant to look back to the debate on justice and to assert the legitimacy of Rome’s empire at some time in the past while questioning it with respect to the present.
The reason for both asserting and questioning Rome’s moral character is to be found, at least partially, in the probable context for Cicero’s statements here. This is a powerful passage, with strong images: the republic as a faded painting whose colors are gone and whose outlines scarcely remain; the idea of Cicero and his contemporaries as defendants in a capital trial, being held accountable for the death of the res publica; the sense of loss and oblivion that covers both men and values. It is an obituary, but it is an obituary not for the res publica directly so much as for the man who in this dialogue embodies it, Scipio, who died suddenly very soon after the dramatic date of De re publica. So too De oratore takes place just before the sudden death of Crassus, which is described and commemorated in the preface to De oratore Book 3. The preface to De re publica Book 5 must have spoken of the death of Scipio—there is no natural place for it in the prefaces to Book 1 and Book 3. Such a context makes sense of the surviving quotation: at De oratore 3.12, Cicero (in apostrophe) says that Crassus, had he lived, would have had to be a spectator at the funeral of his country. In both cases the death of the protagonist is equated to the death of Rome.6 In De oratore, in addition to describing the death of Crassus, Cicero also offers a summary of the grim fates that awaited the other participants in the dialogue. None of the speakers in De re publica seems to have been murdered, and there was certainly nothing equivalent to the outbreak of the Social War. But it would be very surprising if Cicero had not described Scipio’s funeral, with Laelius as the principal speaker and Tubero actively involved in the preparations, and it is not impossible that he looked ahead to the failure of Tubero’s career, the exile of Rutilius (described in De oratore), or the death of Scaevola.7 It is also easy to imagine that, as in De oratore, he alluded at least in passing to his own career and misfortunes, matching what he had said in the preface to Book 1.
The fragment of the preface to Book 5 has more to contribute than just the sentence Augustine needed: it offers indications about the subject of the last two books and their relationship to the previous book. Cicero’s central concern in this fragment is the relationship between men and mores: in the past, we had great men who were produced by our mores, and conversely great men who preserved the ancestral institutions, maiorum instituta retinebant. In recent times, however, we have lost the mores through a shortage of men, virorum penuria; and that in turn was caused by our vitia. Mores may be seen in either institutional or ethical terms; but the vitia that destroyed the whole system are purely ethical. The failures of Rome are caused by the moral failure of its citizens, and a good part of that moral failure lies in people’s contempt for what their ancestors knew to be right; there is no hope of restoring the institutions that created Rome’s success until there are people willing to restore them—and live by them. Those ancestral institutions—the censorship, the educational system, the broad set of sometimes unwritten rules that governed social interactions—were described in Book 4, but they have fallen into desuetude, if not worse.8 What we need now is people to set things right.
As far as we can tell from the meager fragments, that was the primary subject of Book 5: what are the functions of the rector, and how does he manage the res publica? The figure of the ideal statesman constructed in this book, and to a certain extent in Book 6 as well, is one that Cicero himself took very seriously, and more than once after the completion of De re publica he measured his own actions against those of his creation.9 Writing to Atticus in late February of 49, he contrasted his ideal model with the behavior of Pompey (Att. 8.11.1–2 = 5.8a):
I spend all my time contemplating the importance of that man whom (in your opinion at least) I portrayed quite carefully in my book. Do you have in mind that guide of the commonwealth who is the foundation of the whole system? This is what Scipio says, I think in Book 5: “As a helmsman aims at a good voyage, a doctor at saving his patient, a general at victory, so this guide of the commonwealth aims at a blessed life for his citizens, that they should be solid in their resources, rich in property, well endowed with glory, honorable in virtue. I want him to be the person to perfect this task, which is the greatest and best among mankind.” Our friend Pompey never thought about this before, and in the current circumstances does so even less.
This rector must aim solely at the good of his fellow citizens, and that good incorporates both material and moral elements: on the one hand property and money; on the other glory and virtue.
The other surviving and intelligible fragments of Book 5 show that two fundamental topics were considered: one is the training required to make someone capable of being such a rector, and the other is just how he should function in this task. Thus, according to Augustine, “he must be nourished on glory” (alendum esse gloria, CD 5.13 = 5.9a); his character must also incorporate virtue, labor, industry, and courage, and it would appear also that he was supposed to combine the opposing qualities of the great generals Marcellus and Fabius Maximus, the fierceness of the one and the caution of the other.10 We have no indication of how such virtues are to be inculcated, although the account of the necessary qualities of the rector was presumably closely related to the account of social institutions in Book 4; and like that account, this description too is likely to owe something to Stoic theories of honor, virtue, and the shaping of character.11
More important, perhaps, is what is said about the actual workings of statesmanship. As throughout the account of good government and the successful society in De re publica, there is a certain circularity: the character of the rector has to be shaped by the same process and institutions that he must himself shape. In some cases, it is not clear whether the attributes being described are those of the statesman as the shaper of institutions or the statesman as shaped by them. There was clearly some discussion of rhetoric (5.11b):
And since nothing ought to be so uncorrupted in the commonwealth as a vote or as a formal opinion, I don’t understand why someone who corrupts them by money deserves punishment while someone who does so by eloquence even gets praise. In my opinion, the person who corrupts a judge through his oratory rather than through bribery does all the more harm, because no one can corrupt a decent person with money, but he can with speech.
This striking rejection of eloquence is probably spoken by Scipio; a fragment also survives in which Mummius’ approval of what Scipio had said against eloquence is reported. It is worth observing that, apart from Scipio’s praise of Laelius as an orator, there is no other discussion at all of the importance or value of rhetoric and oratory in what remains of De re publica. In Book 5, Scipio seems to be portraying a society in which honor, honesty, and truth are more important than success: honor, not public acclaim, is the motivation of the rector.
More important than just how this ideal leader and society are constituted is the question of the role of the rector in the society. The last surviving pair of leaves from P contains what is left of a conversation between Scipio and the elderly jurist Manilius. The latter, true to his own profession, argues that the statesman ought to hear law cases as his main occupation, citing as a model the importance of a judicial role for monarchs;12 Scipio’s response is to make an analogy not between the statesman and a king, but between the statesman and the vilicus of an estate, who should know a considerable amount about the things under his supervision but should not attempt to become truly expert in everything (5.5):
So too the leader we’re talking about will have been eager to learn about justice and laws, and will have given close attention to their sources, but he will not distract himself by giving legal opinions and constant reading and writing, so that, in a way, he can serve as a manager and overseer for the commonwealth: he’ll be very learned in the fundamentals of law, without which no one can be just, and he won’t be ignorant of the civil law, but in the same way that a helmsman knows the stars and a doctor physics. Each of them uses these materials for his own art, but he doesn’t distract himself from his own function.
In the speeches of both Manilius and Scipio, and indeed elsewhere in Books 4–6, the figure of the rector or statesman is almost always singular: he is the one leader who is shaping laws and institutions in Book 4, he is the giver of laws and supervisor of all kinds of civic behavior in Book 5, and in the Somnium the prophecy about Scipio is that he should restore the res publica as dictator. In crises, Scipio makes clear, one individual may need to take control; if the res publica in its present sickly state is to be restored, then it may take the direction of a single rector to do so. But the person who takes such action, while singular himself, is one of many able to do so: in the preface to Book 1, in Scipio’s account of the fall of the monarchy in Book 2, and elsewhere, the rector of the moment can only be expected to act if he is one of a class of people ready to act. And while one person may be required to set up the institutions of society—the lawgiver, whose role is to exercise absolute power in establishing the laws, but then to retire quietly or disappear—or to act alone because of a specific crisis, those institutions are for the benefit and education of a much larger group of which all potential rectores are members.
What is also apparent in the conversation between Manilius and Scipio, however, is that they do not agree on just what the singular role of the individual rector is: Manilius compares him to a king and in fact seems to understand him as being a monarchic judge, laying down the law to his subjects and presumably keeping order through wise and just rulings. Scipio’s image is very different: he compares the rector to a vilicus, who certainly has to know about law, but only instrumentally.13 He is summi iuris peritissimus in order to be just, but his knowledge of the civil law is only so much as is necessary for his task. The verbs used for his role are dispensare and vilicare: a dispensator is normally someone who manages someone’s business affairs, and a vilicus manages his lands. Thus, here the dispensator has to be literate, and the vilicus has to know naturam agri. But in either case, his job is to know enough about the occupations under his supervision to be able to judge sensibly, not to become expert on all the parts of the financial world or the farm. These terms are comparable to tutor et procurator at 2.51 but are slightly more concrete and less legalistic.14 But what all these terms have in common, and Scipio seems emphatic on the subject, is that the statesman is the agent and servant of someone else: he does not act for himself, but for the common good.
The question, however, still arises: whose agent is this tutor? In Book 2, it was fairly clear that the tutor was acting for the res publica as a whole, just as, in the description of mob rule as a form of insanity in Book 3 (3.45), the guardian was acting on behalf of the (one hopes temporarily) insane populus. That may be true here too, and it may provide one more example of Cicero’s/Scipio’s genuine belief in a form, however attenuated, of popular sovereignty. But just as the definition of iuris consensus and therefore of populus changes over the course of the dialogue, so too the role of tutor and rector may change as well. In the Somnium, we learn that all humans have been tasked by the princeps deus who rules the cosmos with the protection of the earth, qui tuerentur illum globum . . . quae terra dicitur (6.15), and that obligation is clearly more incumbent upon the statesmen: it is the rectores et conservatores of true states who depart from and return to their permanent abode in the heavens (6.13). The statesman is only in terrestrial terms the agent of the res publica, but in cosmic terms he is the agent of the princeps deus.
It is impossible to tell how important the notion of agency and of the rector as tutor was in the structure and argument of Books 5 and 6; certainly it links Scipio’s discussion with Manilius, probably early in Book 5, to the Somnium at the end of Book 6. The difficulty remains that very little survives of Books 5 and 6: to leap from Book 5 to the eschatology of the Somnium is thus speculative, but unavoidable. Almost nothing is left of the first part of Book 6, which must have been at least half the book; the few fragments show that at least some of it concerned the behavior of leading citizens in times of civil discord. What is perhaps the most interesting feature of these fragments is that several of them, unlike all but one of the fragments of Book 5, name particular Romans, and all those named are, from the point of view of the dramatic date, relatively recent: the quarreling censors of 169 (C. Claudius Pulcher and the elder Ti. Gracchus); a speech Laelius himself delivered in 145 about the issue of election to the priestly colleges; and a reference to a funeral (of men whose names are lost) which still remains in the memory of the participants in the dialogue.15 That suggests that the pattern of Books 5 and 6 followed that of the previous pairs of books, in that Book 5 seems to have been about broader patterns of civic education and responsibility, while Book 6 offered particular illustrations from recent Roman history about the behavior of the statesman in a crisis.
The last and most important part of Book 6, the Somnium Scipionis, was almost certainly the culmination of a discussion of such statesmen. The circumstances that bring Scipio to talk about his dream are told by Macrobius.16 The starting point is a question from Laelius, who asks why no statues have been erected to honor Scipio Nasica for having killed a tyrant, in interfecti tyranni remunerationem. Scipio’s response is that, along with one’s own internal sense of satisfaction for having done well, wise men (sapientibus) have a better kind of reward, more lasting and greener than “statues anchored in lead or triumphs with fading laurel leaves.” That, in turn, leads directly to Scipio’s narration of the dream which he had had twenty years before.
While the Somnium serves many functions in De re publica and brings together, as will be seen below, many of the strands of argument that run through the dialogue, its context deserves serious attention too. Laelius’ question and Scipio’s answer bring the end of the dialogue back to its opening, the political crisis of 129 and the aftermath of Ti. Gracchus’ tribunate. Laelius’ point of view—which is not rejected by Scipio, either here or in real life—is that Tiberius was aiming at tyranny (a position that Scipio had already endorsed in Book 2), and that Scipio Nasica’s action—as Pontifex Maximus leading a mob to murder a sacrosanct tribune of the plebs—was patriotic and admirable.17 Nasica was shipped out of Rome rapidly on an embassy and died abroad: according to Laelius, he deserved statues and glory, not silence and virtual exile. In so far as the Somnium responds to Laelius’ specific question, then, there can be no doubt that the ideal statesman whose afterlife is described is not Scipio Aemilianus but Scipio Nasica, and Tiberius Gracchus—the traitor, the would-be tyrant—is his opposite, someone who has harmed his country and deserves no such afterlife, and whose (unnamed) relative Gaius might be expected to murder Scipio Aemilianus.
The reasons for the prominence of Scipio Nasica here are not far to seek: the nexus of events and people surrounding the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus forms the dramatic context for De re publica itself, which begins with the omen of the two suns and Laelius’ insistent demand that their conversation provide something useful for understanding or remedying the present political crisis. The tribunate of Tiberius occasions the final, pessimistic comment at the end of Laelius’ speech on justice (3.41); the trial and problems surrounding Numantia mark the end of Philus’ speech. So too, it is the Gracchi whose presence frames De oratore. Cicero was not the only person to view Tiberius’ tribunate as the beginning of the end of the Roman republic, in antiquity or in modern times. Whether that judgment is right or wrong, it is Cicero’s, and the shadow of Tiberius darkens Cicero’s interpretation of Rome’s history—and Rome’s justice.
Cicero’s interpretation of history in De re publica and his related understanding of justice and success in the res publica are deeply moral and deeply personal, both words being used in double senses: on the one hand, it is Cicero’s argument in De re publica that the success and longevity of governments depend on the moral behavior of its leaders, and similarly that it is the behavior of individual people that acts to preserve or destroy governments. Constitutional cycles are all very well, but they are propelled by the actions of one person at a time. On the other hand, Cicero never conceals that he is interpreting the history of Rome from a genuine belief that political participation is a moral act, and that his own history is what entitles him to interpret it.
That canon of morality, a set of values that are both literally and figuratively universal, is part of what animates the Somnium: it displays a universe that is in harmony with, and corresponds to, the just order of society on earth; it offers eternal life in the company of kindred souls to all those (presumably including non-Romans, although none are mentioned) who have worked for the creation, preservation, and protection of their patriae.18 In this eschatology, it is ethics and effort that matter, not success. Neither Scipio Nasica, whose patriotic activities are the starting point of the Somnium, nor Scipio Aemilianus himself was exactly successful in his political undertakings—the Gracchan cause flourished after Tiberius’ murder, and Scipio did not live to defeat the Gracchans—but that does not affect their eternal existence as civic-minded souls. The Somnium brings to a satisfying conclusion (at least in the afterlife) the emphasis throughout De re publica on moral politics.
It is easy to read the Somnium out of context: after all, it was preserved and read out of context for more than a thousand years. But it was written as part of De re publica, and one of the more important questions to ask about it is how it relates to the rest of the work. In part, because almost everything else in Book 6 is lost, that is not always possible, but the connections that can be seen are worth exploring. In the first place, a relatively minor point: the general assumption that the end of Macrobius’ text, Scipio’s report of his awakening from the dream, was also the end of De re publica is very unlikely to be correct. Plato himself occasionally abandons the framing conversation at the end of a few dialogues, but the Republic ends not with the Myth of Er but with a concluding paragraph in which Socrates explains its significance.19 And while Plato sometimes avoids closing the frame, in no complete dialogue does Cicero fail to provide a proper closure to the dramatic scene he has created; he almost certainly did so at the end of De re publica. That does not mean that serious argument or anything lengthy is missing, but some statement from Scipio is required about the effect that the dream has had on him over the past twenty years and in facing the current political crisis, and there were very probably some farewells among the speakers as they prepared to return to the world of public life. The loss of whatever Scipio may have said after the dream about its meaning or its effect on him deprives us of what would be an important aid to our own interpretation. In what contexts are we to read the Somnium?
The thematic connections between the Somnium and the remainder of De re publica are clear and pervasive, and they have often been examined.20 Most important is the link between the exhortations of the dream-Africanus to participation in public life and the similar urging in the protreptic in Cicero’s own preface: the dream validates not only Scipio’s career, but Cicero’s as well. So too, the condemnation of those (Epicureans) whose devotion to voluptas hinders their political usefulness in this world and their attainment of blessedness in the next (6.29) looks back to the criticism of Epicureanism in the preface. But just as Africanus’ exhortations at the end of the Somnium echo Cicero’s own in the preface to Book 1, so too the astronomical and cosmological setting of the Somnium looks back to Scipio’s first speech in Book 1 about the importance of contemplation of the cosmos (1.26–29). The first part of Scipio’s first speech concerns the perspective on human affairs given by the cosmos and by the recognition that human beings have a ridiculously limited span of glory in either time or space, and that human rewards are trivial; he exalts the rewards of mental activity and the community of the wise over the trivialities of this world (1.28):
What kingdom can be grander than for someone to look down on all things human and to think of them as less important than wisdom, and to turn over in his mind nothing except what is eternal and divine?
Reading De re publica from beginning to end, one might say that Scipio’s first speech anticipates the language and the ideas of the Somnium;21 but if one follows the chronology implicit in the dramatic fiction of the dialogue it is better to say that in retrospect, Scipio had learned to speak the way he does in Book 1 and had learned to hold such beliefs because twenty years earlier he had been instructed in his dream by his grandfather Africanus about the logic and eschatology of civic life. In that first speech, Scipio both refers to his grandfather Africanus and cites an anecdote about Plato; that is no accident, although we are left to ask whether it is Cicero’s organization of his dialogue or Scipio’s own recollection that draws the two together. Both are of course true, at different levels of interpretation. Astronomical language and imagery are pervasive in De re publica, and the cosmos provides both context and analogy for the political theory Scipio develops. But we need to read backward from the Somnium in order to understand why the cosmos is so important in Scipio’s thinking.
The same kind of retrospective echo applies to the political and philosophical aspects of the cosmos in the Somnium.22 What pleases the god who runs the whole machinery of the cosmos is, quite simply, well-run res publicae (6.13):
There is nothing that can happen on earth that is more pleasing to that leading god who rules the whole world than those councils and assemblages of men associated through law (concilia coetusque hominum iure sociati) which are called states; the guides and preservers (rectores et conservatores) of these have set out from here and here they return.
Coetus iure sociati; rectores; conservatores: Scipio has learned the language of civic responsibility through having heard it from his grandfather, and he has learned from the outset the true meaning of justice and what a true statesman is. Perhaps Scipio has also learned from his grandfather’s homily a preference for seeing statesmanship as a form of ethical monarchy, the guidance of the unenlightened by those who have learned—through dreams, philosophy, experience, study of ancestral custom, or a combination of all these—what the best organization for human beings is. I have argued above (Chapter 10) that the language used by Scipio in the definition of the res publica at 1.39 is deliberately ambiguous: in context, it is very limited and pragmatic, but when seen in the light of natural law and the justice of the cosmos it is something very different. Once we read the Somnium and learn of Scipio’s twenty-year-old dream, we can recognize that, all along, Scipio has had the higher meaning in mind, but that he has gradually been nudging his audience upward to the true understanding of what justice really is.
The Somnium, in short, provides within its narrative context an explanation for the ideas of political life that Scipio has been promoting; in terms of the argument, it describes an analogy to and a justification for the ideal shape of political life in De re publica. The sun as rector et moderator of the universe is analogical to the statesman on earth; the music of the spheres provides a parallel to the harmony of justice; the cosmic system of order is, quite literally, the natural law animating the universe itself. The natural law, of course, is not an analogy, but one of the forces that bind this world to the cosmos: it is the admiration of the princeps deus for true res publicae that creates the system in which the statesman works and which he strives to lead toward justice; and it is the reward for such behavior that must compensate us for the inevitable failures that attend mortal designs.
Those failures, however, cannot be forgotten. The Somnium portrays a universe which, because it is divine, completes and perfects a cosmic political order that never quite succeeds on earth, and it is by no means clear whether Cicero intends to emphasize the effort, even if unsuccessful, or the blunt fact of failure itself. The prophecy in the dream offers two paths for Scipio at the age of fifty-six, as he is at the dramatic date of the dialogue: either he will restore the state from its crisis as dictator, dictator rem publicam constituas (6.12)—or he will meet his fate at the hands of his relatives. The reader knows that, at least in Cicero’s opinion, it was the second one that came true: Scipio died without achieving his goals in overturning the agrarian law of Tiberius Gracchus, just as Crassus in De oratore had died suddenly in the midst of the agitation over Livius Drusus’ citizenship law. The Somnium is Cicero’s provision of eternal honor to compensate for Scipio’s tragic inability to steer Rome, as a rector and tutor, back to the proper balance which he (and Cicero) believed had been lost.
So far, I have looked at the Somnium within the fiction of the conversation of De re publica and as part of Cicero’s structuring of both the conversation and the work itself. But we are not in a completely independent fiction (either in the dialogue or in the dream), but in one that has important and explicit literary connections outside De re publica itself, above all to Plato.23 That the Myth of Er in Plato’s Republic is the primary model for Scipio’s dream is obvious, but while that parallel provides an explanation of the form of Scipio’s vision, it offers very little help with its content; it almost seems that it is the huge difference between his understanding of the world and Plato’s that Cicero wanted to emphasize in the Somnium. The Myth of Er recounts the history of souls in the other world; its eschatology includes traditional elements such as the punishment of the wicked (either temporary but long term, or permanent in extreme cases) and more specifically Platonic ones, such as the transmigration of souls and the choice of lives, taking place under the supervision of Necessity, who carries a symbolic version of the solar system on her lap.24 Only if we have acquired wisdom in our (successive) lives will we have the moral knowledge to make the right choice in our next life. The Myth is filled with vivid and gaudy imagery, and takes place in a world entirely cut off from that of the dialogue which it concludes: Er the Pamphylian is not even a Greek; he has no connection at all with the characters in the dialogue; his story is given no date; and the individuals whose souls he encounters or described are legendary, mythical, or imaginary. It is entirely isolated from the world of the dialogue and from the broader world of fourth-century Athens in which it was written.
Nothing could be further from that than the Somnium, in terms of its setting, its content, or its eschatology. It is closely tied to the world of De re publica, and the dream of Cicero’s protagonist includes references to real Romans, but to nothing legendary, mythological, or Greek. Its cosmology is not exotic like Plato’s but involves descriptions of the universe, the music of the spheres, and the earth itself that are based on Hellenistic cosmography, geography, and musical theory, and while these passages are poetic, they are not at all fanciful.25 There is no punishment for the wicked imagined other than a delay in returning to the final home of souls, the Milky Way; there is no transmigration of souls: the soul which was once Africanus will always be the soul of Africanus;26 and the order of good behavior that merits a swift return to the souls’ cosmic home is not the cultivation of personal integrity and internal justice (although that is obviously not irrelevant), but proper behavior as a citizen and leader of a civitas, while musicians who imitate the music of the spheres form an additional (small) group. Plato’s souls are striving in successive lives to improve their wisdom and virtue as individual souls in order to escape from the cycle of metempsychosis. Cicero’s souls achieve their reward through moral political participation in the life of their society. This is a social and political heaven, in which service to others in this world is honored in the next.27
Plato presents his Myth as a supplement: he has, at least to the satisfaction of his Socrates, proven that the just person is 729 times happier than the unjust one within this life; the journey through the afterlife is just the eschatological gilt on the mortal gingerbread.28 But that is not so clear in De re publica: the eternal rewards for moral statesmanship, notably in the case of Scipio Nasica which introduces the Somnium, compensate for the humiliation that often accompanies statesmanship in Rome. Perhaps we serve our country because it is the right thing to do, not because of the eternal rewards, but the lack of reward in the here and now is not exactly an encouragement to public service. In terms of one’s worldly activities, the Somnium is exalting because of its profound respect and admiration for civic participation, but it is also tragic in its recognition of the frequent failure that attends public service in this world. Either reading is possible; the loss of whatever final comment Scipio made leaves the interpretation open. But perhaps the greatest difference between the Myth of Er in the Republic and the Somnium Scipionis in De re publica is that the latter is, emphatically, Scipio’s dream: nobody else could have dreamt it, while the Myth of Er is universal and independent of the dreamer. And along with that difference comes one other aspect of the Somnium that complicates its interpretation: it is not just Cicero who is aware of the differences between the Somnium and the Myth of Er. Scipio is too.
What is most striking about the narration of the Somnium and its relationship to the Myth of Er is that Scipio not only reports the dream as a genuine first-person experience of long ago but is also completely aware that his dream corresponds to the Myth of Er, is meant to be compared to it, and is, consequently, to be seen at least potentially as a fiction. The commentator Favonius Eulogius, in introducing the Somnium, reminds his readers that the Somnium is an imitation of the Myth of Er, but he does so in such a way as to show that both Cicero and Scipio knew it (Favonius 13.1W = 6.3):
Cicero, writing about the commonwealth in imitation of Plato, made use also of the passage concerning the return to life of Er the Pamphylian, who, as he says, “came to life again after being placed on the pyre, and reported many secrets about the underworld”; but he did not contrive it with a storyteller’s fiction, as Plato had done, but composed it using the reasonable vision of an intelligent dream, thus cleverly pointing out that “the things which are reported about the immortality of the soul and about heaven are neither the fictions of dreaming philosophers nor the incredible tales the Epicureans laugh at, but are the speculations of men of judgment.”
Favonius’ work is a strange text on numerology lightly tethered to the Somnium, and many scholars have hesitated about how to interpret his words here: is this a paraphrase, a loose introduction, or actual quotations from the introduction to the Somnium? It is printed by Ziegler as if what is printed within quotation marks here were actual quotations from Cicero, and that is how the passage reads in my own translation and that of Nenci; Heck eliminates it, following Harder; Powell prints it among the testimonia; Büchner rejects it; and Bréguet improbably moves it, and the whole collection of testimonia, to the preface of Book 5.29
The basic reason for eliminating this fragment is that it seems to show that Scipio—for it is he, not Cicero, who introduces the Somnium—discussed criticisms of Plato and the Myth of Er, and to many readers that is unacceptable: Cicero might say something like that, but for Scipio to discuss the literary model of his own dream violates the fiction of the dialogue. On the other hand, it in fact matches what is said by the far more reliable Macrobius, who indeed reports that Cicero expressed regret at mockery of the Myth of Er by indocti (Macrob, Comm. 1.1.8 = 6.6):
Even though Cicero, who knew the truth, was sorry that this story had been laughed at by the ignorant, he wanted to avoid this precedent of foolish criticism and chose to have his narrator be awakened rather than brought back to life.
Macrobius goes on to describe the criticisms leveled at the Myth by the Epicurean Colotes on the grounds that it was implausible; Cicero, he says, avoids that trap, but both the Myth and the Somnium are open to the criticism, also made by Colotes, of having used fiction rather than argument, and thus of having polluted the quest for truth. Macrobius, of course, does not agree with that opinion (Comm. 1.2.1–5). It is not clear how well Favonius knew the full text of De re publica, but Macrobius certainly did, and in one of his other works cites a passage from Book 1. And it is clear from the passage quoted, particularly the verbs doleat and vitans . . . maluit, that something was said explicitly within De re publica about the criticisms of the Myth. The only place that Cicero himself could have done so in his own voice is the preface to Book 5, but it is not likely that he so anticipated the Somnium as to discuss its literary models a full two books before he got there.30 And that means that these words were not said by Cicero, but by Scipio in introducing the Somnium itself. It is not unusual for sources quoting from the dialogue to ascribe words that were obviously spoken by the characters to Cicero himself, particularly as Scipio is often seen as Cicero’s mouthpiece. That, presumably, is what happened here.
What, then, did Scipio say? He certainly did not offer a detailed critique of Colotes: Macrobius’ language makes it clear that he is not drawing on Cicero for that. But he must have pointed out the contrast between the dream he is about to report and Plato’s Myth of Er, drawing (at least Cicero was drawing) on Colotes’ criticism of the Myth as an unconvincing fiction: one may quite reasonably have some doubts about the veracity of a corpse who returns to life twelve days after death. The greater difficulty in determining what Scipio said comes with the two apparent verbatim quotations given by Favonius: even though he says qui ait and one expects a direct quotation, the tenses and moods of the two quotations show that they have been transposed into indirect discourse. On the other hand, that they are sentences from Scipio’s introduction that have been so transposed seems to me extremely likely: where would Favonius have found them otherwise, and what point would there be in quoting them if they were not, or if he did not believe they were, from Cicero?
The first extract given by Favonius is both less important and less clearly taken directly from Cicero. “Er the Pamphylian, who, as he says, ‘came to life again after being placed on the pyre, and reported many secrets about the underworld’ ” is in Favonius ascribed to Cicero, but it has been suggested that Favonius was being sloppy and the sentence was meant to be ascribed to Plato, named just before.31 The argument against that is that it is not close enough to Plato’s actual words (Resp. 10.614b) to be meant as a (translated) direct quotation and thus must be a paraphrase; and if it is a paraphrase, then it is probably Cicero’s, not Plato’s. The second quotation is more significant: “The things which are reported about the immortality of the soul and about heaven are neither the fictions of dreaming philosophers nor the incredible tales the Epicureans laugh at, but are the speculations of men of judgment.” In context, this must be seen as Scipio defending the veracity of the dream he is about to report. The first description, “the fictions of dreaming philosophers” is a fairly standard insult—so, for instance, Cicero himself, in the voice of the Epicurean Velleius in De natura deorum (1.42) speaks of other philosophers’ ideas about the gods as the dreams of madmen, non philosophorum iudicia sed delirantium somnia, and someone in Varro’s satire Eumenides (155 Cèbe = 122 Astbury) says that “No sick man dreams anything so unspeakable that some philosopher wouldn’t say it.”32 The second phrase, “the incredible tales the Epicureans laugh at,” is a response specifically to Colotes’ attack on the Myth of Er: what Scipio is about to say is not a fantastic story like the one Socrates tells in the Republic.33
At the very least, then, Scipio explicitly referred to the Myth of Er; whether one believes that he also made an explicit comparison between his dream and other visions of the afterlife depends on one’s interpretation of the passage from Favonius. It will be clear that I believe that it is a genuine fragment, in part because I see no other possible source for a sentence that is written in quite Ciceronian language. At a bare minimum, however, Scipio drew attention in his introduction to the Somnium to the parallel between his dream and Plato’s Myth of Er. He is, in short, aware that he is a literary fiction within a work imitating Plato’s Republic, and he extols the greater plausibility and verisimilitude of his own (or Cicero’s) version of the afterlife.
The Somnium is a fiction embedded in a fictional dialogue; but is it Cicero’s fiction, or Scipio’s as well? If it is only Cicero’s fiction, then in the context of the overall fiction of De re publica we should understand it as a true report of a genuine dream from twenty years in the past that has animated Scipio’s behavior and his ideas as reported in the rest of De re publica. But given the fact that Scipio is aware of the relationship between his dream and the Myth of Er, it is just as plausible to imagine Scipio inventing the dream more or less on the spot, as an echo of Plato and a retrospective framing of and authentication for what he has said: not a true dream, but, like the Myth of Er in Plato, a useful fiction matching the beliefs Scipio has already set out.34
It is not merely Scipio’s introductory comments connecting the Somnium to the Myth that support such an interpretation but at least one incident within the dream itself. After Scipio reports his grandfather’s portentous and ominous prophecy about his (Scipio’s) fate, that having completed a mystical number of years of life (56) he will be the savior of Rome “if you escape the impious hands of those close to you” (6.12), there immediately follows a protesting groan from his audience; Scipio responds by commanding them to keep quiet so as not to wake him up. That breach of the fourth wall, in this case the barrier between the narrator as narrator and the narrator as character in his own story, encourages a certain hesitation in the reader (and the internal audience, too) as to the veracity of the story, and it certainly emphasizes its artificiality by creating a false simultaneity between the narration in 129 and the dream in 149.35
There is another violation of the fiction of the dream, which is less obtrusive but even more revealing about the self-conscious artificiality of Scipio’s (or Cicero’s) creation. At the very end of the Somnium, the immortal soul of the elder Africanus feels obliged to provide Scipio with a proof of the immortality of his own soul. That is something that should, within the dream at least, be self-evident both to Africanus’ soul and to Scipio Aemilianus; the audience for this proof is not Scipio but the listening audience within De re publica or, more distantly, Cicero’s own readers. That in itself undercuts the verisimilitude of the Somnium, but even more remarkable than the fact of giving such a proof is its source: it is an unacknowledged translation of the proof of the soul’s immortality given by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus. This is perhaps the most peculiar illustration of the complex relationship between the afterlife as (possibly) experienced and the afterlife as a written text, between the Somnium as an eschatological revelation and the Somnium as a highly artificial literary creation. And it is profoundly implausible: Africanus is imagined not only as a character in a dream modeled on Plato, but he is imagined as someone who has read Plato and who uses philosophical argument to prove his own existence.36 The real Africanus was probably not quite so bookish.
Why does Cicero end the Somnium and indeed the entire De re publica with such a strange incident? Why does he undercut—if that is what is happening—the solemn and sublime portrayal of the immortality and in fact the divinity of the human soul that precedes the quotation from the Phaedrus? That quotation is quite unnecessary: one could imagine Cicero (or Africanus) moving straight from the image of the divine soul directing the mortal body at the end of 6.26 to the command to participate in civic affairs at the beginning of 6.29, eliminating entirely the version of the Phaedrus that occupies 6.27–28. One needs to ask why Cicero (or Scipio) put it there, in the very last paragraph of the Somnium.
The first question that arises about Cicero’s use of the Phaedrus here is why he chose to use the proof of the immortality of the soul from the Phaedrus rather than the one in Book 10 of the Republic (10.608c–611b). One answer may simply be that Cicero preferred, or found more convincing, the argument from the unmoved mover in the Phaedrus, which he repeated from the Somnium again in Tusculan Disputations 1.53–54, to the argument from the soul’s lack of a sumphuton kakon; it probably did not hurt that the Phaedrus argument is considerably shorter than the one in Republic 10. A second, and more significant, reason for the use of the Phaedrus here is that it marks the close connection between De re publica and De oratore: the latter dialogue both begins and ends with citations from the Phaedrus, and the last is both unacknowledged and from the very end of the dialogue, as is also true of Africanus’ borrowing in the Somnium. It is a literary self-allusion, tying these paired dialogues more closely together. But the most significant aspect of the proof of the immortality of the soul, however, is not the question of Cicero’s source but the simple fact that he put such a proof inside the dream rather than outside it. Plato’s proof of the immortality of the soul is not a part of the Myth of Er; why does Cicero/Scipio make the dream-Africanus deliver such a proof himself, and do so using an unacknowledged quotation from Plato?
Scipio’s dream of Africanus’ soul explaining its own afterlife is not unique: in its peculiarity, it closely resembles the dream that Ennius reported in Book 1 of his Annales, in which the soul of Homer appeared to Ennius and explained the transmigration of souls. Of course, what Ennius saw in his dream was only a simulacrum of Homer, not his actual soul; the soul, as Homer tells Ennius, had already been relocated to Ennius himself. Again, we have someone who has died appearing in a dream, explaining the eschatological system of which he is a part, and using philosophical argument (in Ennius’ case, Pythagorean metempsychosis, in Scipio’s, Platonic proof) to, quite literally, justify his own existence. It is thus no accident that Cicero has Scipio refer to Ennius’ dream in the introduction to the Somnium itself.
The text as we have it—and it now lacks whatever larger context it might have had before Macrobius excerpted it—begins with a very precise historical setting, Scipio’s visit to the Numidian king Massinissa at the outset of the Third Punic War in 149 bce, twenty years before the dramatic date of De re publica. According to Scipio’s account, he and Massinissa stayed up late, talking about Scipio’s grandfather Africanus; and Scipio then offers as an explanation of why he dreamt about Africanus the fact that he had Africanus in his thoughts after his conversation with Massinissa, in the same way, he says, as Ennius had dreamt about Homer because he thought about him so often: “Our thoughts and words often bring forth in sleep something like Ennius’ report of Homer, about whom he obviously used to think and speak a great deal when he was awake” (6.10).
Ennius’ dream was famous, and the reference to it in the introduction to the Somnium offers several different approaches to the interpretation of the dream. In the first place, Scipio’s suggestion that it was Massinissa’s conversation that prompted him to dream about Africanus inevitably undercuts the verisimilitude of the Somnium itself as a true vision: if Africanus’ appearance (and thus his eschatological lecture) was the result of Massinissa’s talking about him, then it is the product of Scipio’s mind, not a vision coming from the Milky Way. The Somnium, moreover, is not the only dream in Cicero that was produced in this way: in De divinatione, Cicero and his brother twice discuss a dream that Cicero himself had had when he was on his way into exile in 58. In this dream, the great Marius had appeared to Cicero, told him not to be distressed by his circumstances, and promised his return to Rome. Quintus, the believer in divination, views this as a genuinely prophetic dream (Div. 1.59); but Cicero himself is more skeptical and views the dream as the product of his waking thoughts: “. . . as at that time Marius was much in my thoughts as I recalled how nobly and steadily he bore his disastrous situation. I think that was the reason I dreamt of him” (Div. 2.140). De divinatione was written nearly a decade after the Somnium, but Cicero’s dream of Marius (and there is no reason not to think it a genuine dream, whatever its source) took place a few years before Cicero wrote the Somnium: there is a good possibility that Cicero’s own dream influenced Scipio’s dream, and the rationalistic explanation leaves it open to the audience to decide whether the dream was prophetic or merely a product of Scipio’s conversation with Massinissa.37
Even before Scipio starts to describe the content of his dream, then, he has himself raised the possibility that it was not an inspired vision; but his reference to Ennius’ dream of Homer places the Somnium in yet another context. Ennius’ dream certainly involved, as does the Somnium, a discussion of the nature of the soul, but at heart it was a dream of literary inspiration, the earliest Roman manifestation of a pattern that drew directly on the proem of Callimachus’ Aetia, in which the poet describes his long-ago dream of having been carried to Mt. Helicon and conversed with the Muses; and through Callimachus, Ennius placed himself as a learned poet in a long tradition of scenes of inspiration that went back to Hesiod’s Theogony.38 Ennius’ dream was famous, and Cicero/Scipio was not the first person to allude to it: it plays an important role in Book 1 of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, and if Scipio refers only to Ennius, Cicero is unquestionably referring to Lucretius as well. When Lucretius alludes to Ennius’ dream, he combines genuine praise for Ennius’ poetry with criticism of his belief in the transmigration of souls. Ennius claimed that in his dream, Homer had appeared to him and explained (making use of the Pythagorean theory of transmigration of souls) that Ennius was himself a reincarnation of Homer, and hence had a claim to be a truly inspired poet. Lucretius, the Epicurean materialist, transformed this metempsychotic dream into Epicurean terms: what Ennius’ saw was a simulacrum or species of Homer, and what Homer told Ennius concerned natura rerum—Lucretius’ subject, not Homer’s or Ennius’.39 Cicero takes Lucretius’ oblique philosophical polemic about inspiration and the nature of the soul one step further: while the Somnium rejects the transmigration of souls, it even more emphatically rejects the mortality of the soul. Scipio’s dream is a critique of Lucretian materialism, just as its final sentences condemn Epicureans, as slaves to pleasure, to a long celestial wandering of the soul before joining Africanus and his civic-minded peers on the Milky Way. And when Scipio in the dream says that he recognized his grandfather from his imago, he (or rather Cicero) may also be alluding to, and mocking, the Epicurean theory of simulacra.40
Scipio’s dream, in short, is a very complex and learned creation, and it is one that combines both literary and political inspiration—the political inspiration that animates not only Scipio within the dialogue but also its author, and the literary inspiration that pertains to Cicero alone. The Somnium was not the first time that Cicero combined political and literary motives so closely: in his three-book epic on his own consulate, it is clear even from the meager fragments that survive that he used the Callimachean encounter with the Muses to provide celestial (and astronomical) justification for his political actions.41 The Somnium too owes much not only to Ennius’ dream but to Callimachus’: it is an account of a scene of inspiration that took place when the speaker was young, recounted from the perspective of a much older man. But Scipio’s dream comes at the end of the work, not at the beginning, and in some sense, it is an instruction to turn back to the beginning after reading the Somnium and to recognize that everything Scipio has said and believes derives from his dream of inspiration. At the same time, however, we are not permitted to forget that the dream is a noble fiction, jointly composed by Scipio and his author. We do not need to think that it is true in order to believe it.
1. The significance of Ennius’ line (Ann. 156 Skutsch = 500 Vahlen) is problematic. It is generally taken to be a line from Manlius Torquatus’ speech before executing his own son (so Skutsch, followed, e.g., by Zetzel 2007: 6 and Elliott 2007: 41–44), an event that met with shock and loathing. But in the Ciceronian context it would undermine a serious argument that is central to De re publica if it were seen to come from a context in which a brutal atrocity is labeled as part of antiqui mores. Better, with Vahlen, to recognize that we know neither the context nor who said it, whether Ennius himself or one of his characters.
2. Cf. Heck 1966: 123–24.
3. For res publica amissa, see, for example, Att. 1.18.6, 9.5.2, QFr. 1.2.15.
4. Teubner: Dombart and Kalb 1928; CSEL: Hoffmann 1899–1900.
5. The most recent major edition of Cicero I know that prints the transmitted text is that of Orelli in 1828. It is defended and printed by Heck 1966: 122–23 and defended by Büchner 1984 ad loc. Heck goes further and suggests reading iuste legitimeque for iuste lateque, although some indication of the breadth of Rome’s rule as well as its justice would be desirable. I can find in ThLL no parallel for late imperare; fuse lateque as a unit is used twice elsewhere by Cicero (and by no one else) at Or. 113 and TD 4.57 applied to wide-ranging speech rather than power. Cicero does, however, have iuste et legitime imperanti at Off. 1.13, and perhaps most relevant for linking this passage with the debate on justice is Philus’ comment at 3.28 (wrongly given in ThLL as 2.38) nulla est tam stulta civitas quae non iniuste imperare malit quam servire iuste. See also Augustine CD 18.3 (2.260.29–30): quod late iusteque imperaverit.
6. The same can be said of the description of the death of Hortensius in the Brutus: the death of the orator is the death of free speech. See Gowing 2000.
7. On Tubero’s role in (stingily) organizing Scipio’s funeral, see Cicero, Pro Murena 75–76.
8. That Book 4 (like Book 2) emphasized the past rather than the present, and the creation of good institutions at least as much as their maintenance, is shown by the tenses of auxit and perfecit in the description of the rector early in Book 4 (5.6); see above, Chapter 13.
9. See particularly Att. 7.3.2, 8.11.1 and on the whole subject Zarecki 2014 and Volk 2021: 74–93.
10. These characteristics are named in three fragments (5.9c, d, 5.10a) cited by Nonius from Book 5.
11. See Graver forthcoming, and above, Chapter 13. Scipio need not be imagined as having Stoicism in mind; Cicero did.
12. regale quam explanationem aequitatis (5.3) and the corollary that various societies, in order to remove distractions from the king, reserved and cultivated land for him. Cicero (or Manilius?) may have in mind the story of Deioces in Herodotus (1.95–102), who became king through his reputation for fairness as a judge; the only precedent cited in the surviving text is that of Numa.
13. On this passage and on Cicero’s use of the metaphor of the vilicus, see also Nelsestuen 2014.
14. Cicero does not seem to use dispensare or dispensator in this sense elsewhere; at Planc. 62 (delivered in 54) he calls elected magistrates quasi rei publicae vilicos. A remarkable passage of Pliny (NH 18.38) seems to reverse this: when the impoverished and frugal generals of the early republic went home to run their farms when a vilicus died, the res publica took over the farming for them, exercitusque ducebant senatu illis vilicante.
15. Fragments 6.2a, 2f, and 2d, respectively.
16. Macrobius, Comm. 1.4.2–3 = 6.8.
17. On the justification of Scipio Nasica’s actions as illustrating the maxim (2.46) that no one is a private citizen when it comes to saving the res publica, see above, Chapter 12 n. 10 with Gaillard 1975: 522–27. As parallel, note particularly Tusc. Disp. 4.51, where Nasica’s actions are said to illustrate a Stoic maxim, numquam privatum esse sapientem.
18. Manilius, Astr. 1.758–804, listing souls on the Milky Way in an eschatology based on the Somnium, gives fifteen lines to Greek heroes starting from the Trojan war before providing twenty-five lines of Romans, quorum iam maxima turba est (1.777).
19. Framing narratives are not completed in Protagoras, Symposium, and Theaetetus; see most recently Finkelberg 2019: 79.
20. Much has been written about the Somnium. Of older studies, Harder 1960: 354–95 (originally published 1929) and Boyancé 1936 are the most valuable; recent treatments I have found useful include Görgemanns 1968 and Lévi 2014: 59–186.
21. See Schofield 2021: 105–8. The closeness of Scipio’s first speech to the Somnium should not be exaggerated, however; see Perelli 1971: 392–93.
22. For a somewhat different approach to the relationship between the Somnium and the political world, see McConnell 2017.
23. On Cicero’s skeptical use of Plato and the way in which the setting of the Somnium diminishes its eschatological significance, see above all Görgemanns 1968.
24. It will be clear that I am drastically oversimplifying the Myth of Er and emphasizing only the ways in which its differences from the Somnium are significant for the interpretation of the latter.
25. For Cicero’s use in the Somnium of Hellenistic sources including Eratosthenes and Alexander of Ephesus, see Zetzel 1995: 235–37 (on Rep. 6.17).
26. There is a certain inconsistency in Cicero’s account of the soul; at 6.15 he says that human souls come from, and return to, the stars (taken from Plato, Tim. 41d–42b, but not in the Myth of Er) but the souls of Africanus and Aemilius Paullus at least have retained their human form rather than reverting to astral status.
27. On the divinity of the statesman as presented in the Somnium, see Cole 2013: 96–102. The story told by the Somnium may be related to the cave of Republic 7, but the connection is tenuous: the philosopher returns to the cave knowing the difference between Platonic reality and the common understanding of the world, but the souls of the Somnium are simply born (once) and have no metaphysical knowledge of the cosmic world—just as Scipio himself had none until his dream. On the problem of the statesman’s knowledge, see also McConnell 2017.
28. 729 times happier: Resp. 9.587b–e.
29. Cf. Nenci 2008: 550; Heck 1966: 64; Harder 1960: 391 n. 125; Büchner 1984: 439.
30. Although that is Bréguet’s solution; see above.
31. Cf. Heck 1966: 64.
32. Postremo nemo aegrotus quicquam somniat / tam infandum, quod non aliquis dicat philosophus; so too, combining various slanders, the centurion in Persius (3.83–84) describes philosophers as aegroti veteris meditantes somnia, gigni / de nihilo nihilum, in nihilum nil posse reverti. For a collection of dreaming philosophers, cf. Pease on ND 1.39.
33. This is also supported by a fragment in Augustine, CD 22.28, 6.4, in which he reports that Cicero spoke about the Myth of Er ut eum lusisse potius quam quod id verum esset adfirmet dicere voluisse (“in such a way as to assert that he was playing a game rather than wanting to speak the truth”). See also Görgemanns 1968: 47–54.
34. That is supported by Schmidt’s observation (2017:136–37) that the shape of the prophecy about Scipio’s life (precise up to the dramatic date, ambiguous thereafter) is a product of 129, not 149. On the chronological complexity, see also Lévi 2014: 159–60.
35. On the false simultaneity, see Görgemanns 1968: 61–63; he does not consider the effect of the interruption on the veracity of the dream.
36. As Sharples 1985: 66 notes, “It might be rather implausible for the elder Africanus to appear as a reader of Plato.” On the tension between reason and revelation caused by the use of Plato here, see also Lévi 2014: 97–99.
37. See Görgemanns 1968: 55–61.
38. Callimachus, Aetia frr. 2–2j Harder, with commentary at Harder 2012: 2.93–117; Ennius, Annales frr. 2–11 Skutsch, with commentary at Skutsch 1985: 147–67.
39. On Lucretius’ retrospective transformation of Ennius, see Volk 2002: 105–7; on Cicero’s use of the Lucretian version of Ennius, see Zetzel 1998.
40. It is worth noting that in the discussion of Cicero’s dream of Marius in De divinatione (2.139), the character Cicero introduces his rationalistic interpretation by debunking the Epicurean theory of simulacra as the source of dreams.
41. On De consulatu suo, see Volk 2013.