Cicero’s Ad Familiares Book Four and the Hermeneutics of the Pro Marcello

Abstract

Regarding Cicero’s “sincerity” in the Pro Marcello (46 BCE), interpretative ore resides in Ad familiares 4.4, an artfully composed letter to Servius Sulpicius from fall 46, preserved in a posthumously edited letter-book (Ad familiares Book 4) about civil war and its aftermath. In these minor-key renditions of the dramatic senate scene, Caesar’s pardon of Marcellus, and Cicero’s subsequent speech of thanks, darker themes evoke dissonant, despondent voicings, and Cicero’s response to Caesar’s act rings less sincere than ironic. Read in this vein, Fam. 4.4 reveals the different roles Cicero performs in speech and letter—wise counselor, despairing dissident—and the issue becomes Cicero’s performance of sincerity in context, as well as the editor’s framing of Cicero’s report of his performance. Indeed, these three texts—speech, letter, letter in letter-book—constitute diverse configurations of a single historical event, and the variance among them yields a richer find in the sediments of Roman history.