Cicero’s Letters

we thought a little bit about Sister, his oratory and particularly first, very.

And now I want to think about sisters letters,

which is such an important source for the study of the late Republic.

He got more than 900 letters surviving from him.

They cover, I mean first letters from the sixties BC.

They go down almost to his death, certainly well into 43.

There are hugely valuable source,

but they can be quite difficult to get to grips with.

So what I want to do in this, um,

slices to give a brief overview of the correspondence,

the things that Israel is trying to do with his letters and the kinds of ways in which,

classical antiquity more generally thinks and uses

letters and then in the next two,

to think about the specific letters within the prescription for this course.

So letters are

obviously

a really important medium of communication in antiquity.

They are the only way to communicate

effectively when people are geographically separated.

Obviously no electronic communication. So what do you write? Somebody? A letter.

And for Cicero, he seems to have been an absolutely indefatigable correspondent.

Networks mattered.

Social networks mattered How do you keep your social network going?

If you're not in the same place as somebody, you write them a letter,

you respond to their letters, you engage with them.

You create an epistolary relationship to supplement the relationship you

can have face to face when your paths do cross.

And, of course, the members of the Roman elite.

It's a pretty geographically distributed life that you might lead

after your after you felt apprenticeship or consul ship.

You may well go off to some part of the Roman Empire

to exercise Imperium for a year or longer.

There are diplomatic missions, and in addition,

Roman aristocrats own property across Italy,

and they like to go and visit their properties.

And there are various points in the year when they decamp.

And then, if they need to keep in touch with Rome, it's letters going back and forth.

So we should expect a man like Cicero to be writing letters.

We should expect all these members of the elite to be writing letters,

and I'm sure they were.

But in Cicero's case, of course, the letters survive.

So the first question is how,

Um and they survive because Cicero's household had archives,

and then subsequently, after his death,

those archives were published.

And we need We need to distinguish between the different letter collections. Um,

there's a whole series of letters to one particular correspondent. Atticus.

16 books of those letters.

Atticus was a friend of Cicero's from childhood or certainly from adolescence.

They'd shared education in Rome. They've got to know each other.

Then they were very close friends. Cicero's brother married Atticus. Sister

Atticus wasn't a politician.

Atticus, in fact, is a nickname. The attic. The Athenian,

Um, and as a young man he spent much of his time in Greece. In Athens.

He was a cultured man, educated but not politically engaged,

not very politically engaged, not a not an office holder.

He didn't enter the Senate,

and a lot of the correspondence between Cicero and

Atticus is voluminous because Atticus is not in Rome,

particularly earlier in the period from which the letters survive.

So that's one important collection,

and it's very distinctive because Cicerone Atticus are close.

Their intimate

Cicero speaks very freely to Atticus doesn't always imply he can be confident.

Atticus won't share some of the contents of the letters with other people.

But these are these the letters in which this seems to be speaking to us,

very frankly, very openly.

There's also a big collection, 16 books of letters to Friends and Familiarise,

which covers a whole range of different types of correspondent and

includes quite a lot of letters from other people to Cicero.

So who are these correspondents? Well, there his peers.

So we have letters from Cicero to other

Magistrates or other senior members of the Senate.

We have letters from Cicero to junior proteges,

people whose careers he's looking after and promoting.

That's the advice, and we'll see some of those in this In this big,

there's a whole book of letters of recommendation.

So Cicero writes to a governor of province saying so and so it's terribly good.

Chap, please help him or, you know,

if he wants assistance, please help them.

Whatever it might be, Um, there are letters to his wife,

their letters to one of his slaves,

tyro um so a whole range of different kinds of correspondents

and the way that they are collected in the book is a really interesting questions.

Sometimes it's by type of addressee. Sometimes it's by chronological period.

It does look as if the editor of the ad FAM Collection

really was conscious of his job as an editor.

Um, he wanted to make the individual books have a shape, a format.

He does seem to have missed out certain letters.

We know that the collection has been edited because

there are references to correspondence that we don't have.

Whereas the Atticus letters, um, things may have been missed out of them.

But there's much less of a sense of shaping of the collection

because they're basically arranged chronologically and

where they're not arranged chronologically.

It's probably because the editor

kind of got slightly confused about about the order events,

which is entirely understandable if you read all the letters.

One go,

um, so that so that so they're quite different collections.

There is also, though I don't think any other in in this particular specification,

possibly one blessed to Brutus.

A collection of Esther Brutus is one of the assassins of Caesar,

which take very much towards the end of Cicero's

life and also some letters to his brother,

Quintus.

None of those is set for this specification,

but they're really interesting because in a sense his brother, Quintus, was was,

if you like almost the only person you can completely trust,

ought to have been able to complete trust.

Actually, they fell out during the Civil War and were never probably reconciled.

But in the fifties, Cicero is writing some really

frank letters, and one of the things that marks him out, I think,

is different from the static.

Asse is he goes into the nitty gritty of

senatorial procedure because Quintus was also a senator,

and that kind of you know,

they're talking the language because they are both members of this group.

We know there are other collections that haven't survived.

There seems to have been a collection of letters to Octavian.

For example, wouldn't it be great if we had had? But we don't?

Sister himself toyed with the idea of editing a collection

of his letters towards the end of his life.

But that doesn't seem to have come to fruition.

And clearly what we have is based on a much more comprehensive approach to

the material that the editor or editors the fan collection,

The Atticus Collection may well have come out quite

a rather different times within Cicero's own household.

Okay, so that's my way of the letter collections.

If you want to pursue this further,

I can really strongly recommend a book by Peter White called Cicero in letters

published a few years ago now, but still, I think,

uh, 2010, but still absolutely the best introduction to the collections.

Okay, so

we're looking more detail and specification at the moment,

but those are some of the points we need to bear in mind.

Who is the addressee?

Okay, there is no one format of letters.

We really need to think carefully about whose sister is writing to who else?

Apart from the address, he might have read this letter.

How private is it?

And what is Sister are trying to do?

What aspect of the relationship between him and the address Is he trying to

manage, deal with strengthen address issues? Or are these in fact,

the kind of letters you write to a

really close friend when you're perhaps very unconstrained?