Beyond (Dis)belief: Rhetorical Form and Religious Symbol in Cicero's de Divinatione

Abstract

Beyond (Dis)belief:Rhetorical Form and Religious Symbol in Cicero's de Divination* Brian A. Krostenko Introduction In Cicero's de Divinatione, Marcus and his brother Quintus present cases against and for the idea that divination is possible.1 The work has received mixed and sometimes conflicting interpretations. Older commentators, subscribing in various degrees to the view that Roman religion was progressively declining, or that it had become a mere tool in the hands of corrupt politicians,2 have seen the case made by the skeptical M. as a genuine refutation of the possibility of divination, with the pietistic Q. as the straw man.3 More recent commentators [End Page 353] have detected subtler political motivations4 and even denied that Cicero means one side to win at all.5 This article, which draws especially upon Linderski (1982) and Schofield, aims to expound an interpretation that joins the idea, developed in more recent work, that the second book is not an unproblematic account of Cicero's own views on divination, to the conviction, commoner to older scholarship, that the contemporary state of the politico-religious system was important to the work's conception. I will suggest that de Divinatione is not quite, or not merely, a discussion of the question of divination, but is an indirect and dialectical attempt to construct a normative definition for religious symbols in Roman culture, among which divinatory practices, in the form of augury and extispicine, were especially prominent. De Divinatione illustrates the inadequacies, for the purposes of Roman social practice, of both the fideistic and the skeptical approach to such symbols; but, having illustrated these inadequacies, the text also points dialectically in the direction of a tertium quid that avoids the pitfalls of both positions. Cicero's method of illustrating the shortcomings of fideism and skepticism is unusual: it is broadly speaking, rhetorical, even poetic, rather than philosophical. The failings of the two positions are brought to the fore by aspects of what may be called, loosely, the rhetorical form of the argument: how Cicero arranges and fits out the speech of each debater—the distributio and ornatus of each book, to use the technical language of rhetoric. In writing de Divinatione Cicero obviously drew on various philosophical source materials, from the Stoics for arguments in favor and from the Academics for arguments against.6 In adapting these philosophical positions, Cicero, as an oratorical craftsman, naturally structured them for rhetorical effectiveness and added [End Page 354] rhetorical flourishes—figures of speech, details of presentation, illustrative quotations from poetry, and the like. That is one of the strengths of the orator, as against philosophers, who in Crassus' formulation, use a "thin and bloodless idiom" (tenui quodam exsanguique sermone), whereas only a proper orator can expound on the same topics "pleasantly and impressively" (cum omni iucunditate et grauitate, de Orat. 1.56-57). The sorts of structures Cicero uses and the flourishes he adds are not, however, empty, mechanical, or indiscriminate additions, but distinctly and consistently different for each half of the dialogue. These details, I will suggest, were sensitively selected by Cicero, with his highly refined sense for who should speak in what way—in short, his decorum—in order to produce certain ideological polarities between M. and Q. These polarities, in turn, emphasize that both fideism and skepticism fail to provide an adequate account of the Roman practice of divination. De Divinatione also presents a dialectical solution to these inadequacies, in two ways. There is first M.'s occasional insistence that Roman ritual practice be maintained, which, far from mere pragmatism, is, as I will argue below, precisely the resolution to which the text's opposing tensions point. However, the most interesting part of the dialectical solution is, like the inadequacies themselves, also indicated in a "rhetorical" rather than a "logical" way. The de Divinatione contains substantial quotations from Cicero's previously independent poetry; in this article I will be especially concerned with the quotations from the Marius and the de Consulatu suo. Notably all the quotations appear in Q.'s half of the argument: that is, Q. uses his own brother's poetry against him; M. the character in effect argues against Cicero...