Portraying Cicero in Literature, Culture, and Politics, from Ancient to Modern Times ed. by Francesca Romana Berno and Giuseppe La Bua

Abstract

Reviewed by: Portraying Cicero in Literature, Culture, and Politics, from Ancient to Modern Times ed. by Francesca Romana Berno and Giuseppe La Bua James E. G. Zetzel Portraying Cicero in Literature, Culture, and Politics, from Ancient to Modern Times. Edited by Francesca Romana Berno and Giuseppe La Bua. Berlin: De Gruyter. 2022. Pp. xxi, 486. Collective volumes based on conferences tend to unevenness, and this one, from a 2019 conference on the portrayal and reception of Cicero, is no exception. Informative and enjoyable lectures do not easily become substantive articles, and the theme of this volume is so broad that there is little coherence. The variety of portrayals is interesting but fragmented: medieval manuscript portraits of Cicero have little to do with his image in modern detective fiction, and discussions of stylistic imitation are a long way from the use of Cicero as a role model by John Adams or Robespierre. Several of the papers, moreover, are essentially anecdotal, simply providing illustrations of some aspect of Ciceronian reception without any real argument to connect them. That is true of Rita Degl'Innocenti Pierini on representations of Cicero's exile, of Giuseppe La Bua on the meanings of nobilitas, and of Andrew Sillett's random collection of apparent echoes of the opening phrase of In Catilinam 1. Kathryn Stutz's paper on Cicero in detective fiction is largely an annotated list, and her odd reference to "our modern valorization of truth and virtue in our legal heroes" (226) suggests a lack of awareness of the tradition of California noir (from Hammett to Chandler to Ross Macdonald) to which Steven Saylor's Roman Blood (which Stutz discusses) so clearly belongs. The discussion of Cicero's textual "voice" by Leanne Jansen, Christoph Pieper, and Bram van der Velden contains a useful treatment of the differences between imitations of Cicero in Latin pseudo-Ciceroniana and in Cassius Dio's Greek versions of Ciceronian speeches, but the technique of imitation that they make much of is nothing more than the age-old method of learning stylistics through prose composition. But even if the volume is rather less than the sum of its parts, many of the papers contain something worthwhile, and a few of them provide rather more than that. The volume opens with Robert Kaster's clear and precise comparison between Cicero's language while in exile about his departure from Rome and his later accounts of the same events. Alfredo Casamento uses a passage of the Brutus to examine the role of the audience in shaping the ideal orator, and Alejandro Díaz Fernández usefully compares Cicero's self-portrait as ideal governor in letters from Cilicia to his earlier advice to Quintus as governor of Asia and to his images of Scaevola Pontifex as ideal governor. Díaz Fernández ultimately shies away from saying that Cicero actually tried to embody his ideal of good provincial governance and instead settles for the tired concept of self-fashioning, but while Cicero indeed wanted to appear a good governor, he was even more concerned to be one. Among the papers dealing with later aspects of Cicero's reception, Thomas Keeline offers an intelligent and engaging analysis of a set of late antique epitaphs for Cicero found in the Symposium XII Sapientum in the Anthologia Latina. Fabio Gatti provides [End Page 381] a careful presentation of the Quaestura of Sebastiano Corradi, showing how Corradi used dialogue to refute criticisms of Cicero and to make him suitably proto-Christian to fit Counter-Reformation tastes. Cristina Martín Puente presents a lovely collection of manuscript portraits of Cicero, but her text is mostly description and has relatively little about iconography. Joanna Kenty well shows how John Adams both emulated Cicero as a public figure and saw himself to be like Cicero in experiencing the ingratitude of his country; she might also have mentioned the extraordinary letters between Adams and Jefferson comparing Cicero to Plato. The three papers in the last section of the volume make valuable contributions to intellectual history. Much more ambitious than Kenty's version of Adams is Igor...