Cicero and the Early Latin Poets by Hannah Čulík-Baird

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cicero and the Early Latin Poets by Hannah Čulík-Baird Jesse Hill Cicero and the Early Latin Poets. By Hannah Čulík-Baird. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2022. Pp. 306. Cicero has long been pillaged for his quotations of early Latin poetry, with editors from Stephanus to Skutsch digging precious scraps of republican verse out from the orator's prose, setting the former in big print in their editions of Ennius and relegating [End Page 378] the latter to their footnotes and back-of-the-book commentaries. But Latinists of recent years have begun to feel a bit uneasy with this practice of frosty excerption (for a fragment of Ennius embedded in Cicero can only dangerously be discussed without thought of Cicero). As a result this century has seen an uptick in scholarship that emphasizes the reception and transmission of fragmentary Latin and stresses the importance of the context in which our fragments are preserved.1 Hannah Čulίk-Baird's new book emerges from this trend. Though far from the first scholarly work on Cicero the citer of early Latin poetry (indeed, its title almost translates that of Wilhelm Zillinger's classic Cicero und die altrömischen Dichter [Würzburg 1911]),2 Cicero and the Early Latin Poets distinguishes itself as the first comprehensive monograph to focus squarely on how citation works within the orator's corpus. That is, Čulίk-Baird, unlike Zillinger, is adamantly not interested in trying to dig out "new" fragments of early Latin verse; she rather stays with Cicero in the first century b.c.e., analysing, in admirably accessible prose, the various uses to which he puts republican poetry across his speeches, letters, philosophica, and rhetorica. The result is an ambitious, sensitive, and convincing book, which will be useful both to specialists of republican Latin (though perhaps few of its conclusions will really surprise them) and to anyone generally interested in literary quotation and fragmentation, whether within the discipline of Classics or without. The reasons why Cicero embedded snippets of Latin poetry into his texts are many and various. Rightly, then, Čulik-Baird does not advance one central thesis, but rather offers a discursive and wide-ranging study that allows Ciceronian practice its full, unwieldy complexity. To impose some order on this chaos, she has divided her book into an introduction, five chapters (the last three focus on different poetic genres; the first two are more meandering), a brief envoi, and three appendices that, building on the work of Zillinger, catalogue all of the perceptible moments of poetic citation in Cicero's prose corpus. As is the case with some other recent monographs in the field of fragmentary Latin,3 these appendices are themselves almost worth the price of admission. The Introduction, "All Minds Quote," nicely prepares a reader for what is to follow. Drawing on an eclectic range of thinkers, from Petrarch to Emerson to Butler, Čulίk-Baird here set outs her theoretical position on citation and fragmentation. Prominently, amidst the theorizing of this Introduction, the author conceptualizes Cicero's act of embedding republican poetry in his writings "as a kind of textual embrace rather than an act of shattering" (11). This is a compelling shift in metaphor, inviting us, as it does, to focus on the positive new meaning that the citation of a now-fragmentary author generates instead of the loss that such citation might evoke. Of course, as suggested above, and as Čulίk-Baird's meticulous footnotes themselves make clear, Latinists who work on fragments already are broadly interested in focusing on the meaning generated by reception and transmission, and so the theorizing of her introduction is less a call to arms than it is a defense of what is already being done in the discipline. But it is [End Page 379] an elegant, clear, and powerful defense, which will be useful to many readers; indeed, I suspect this opening section of the book would work well in a seminar on practically any fragmentary author or genre. With Chapter One, "Cicero and the Poets," Čulίk-Baird turns from her own theoretical position to Cicero's, exploring...