Cicero’s Letters

Chris Whitten.

I teach Latin literature here at Cambridge University,

and this is the first of three little lectures on Quintus Sister and Palm Pony A.

Now, slightly paradoxically, perhaps I'm not gonna start with Quintus Cicero,

but with Marcus Cicero, his brother.

And the reason I'm gonna do that is that everything

we know about Quintus and Palm Ponyo is owed to Marcus

Marcus Cicero. Marcus Tullius Cicero

is one of the most famous of all Romans because he

has left us more writings than any other classical Romans,

at least from his period.

He was the great orator of the first century BC.

We have lots of his court speeches and his political speeches.

He was also a very prominent figure in the politics of the time he became

consul in the year 63 which is when he put down the Catalan Arian conspiracy.

And his voice was one of the really important ones as the

Roman republic fell apart in the Civil war between Caesar and Pompey.

Although Cicero was not a general, very famously not very good at that sort of thing.

He was, as it were, the general of the pen.

It was his written word,

his oratory that played such a large and important part until

his head was cut off by Marc Antony along with his hands

in December 43.

So he's famous for his oratory, of which we have quite a lot.

He's famous for his philosophy.

He wants to be the Roman Plato,

the guy who brought philosophy to Latin prose and lots

of his philosophy still survived and is still very important.

And thirdly, he was a great theoretician of oratory.

He wrote Works on The or Twitter, about how to be an orator,

which was basically how to be a Roman, because being to be educated as a Roman,

to be educated

as an orator, so hugely important cultural figure.

Now there's one other set of works that we have from him, and they are his letters

massively important, And that's what's going to concern us today.

What we have if I just show you these are his letters in Latin, you see,

it's quite a chunky collection of them.

There's to between 900

1000 in these books, mostly by Cicero,

although they include also replies from some of his correspondence

and, uh,

this represents actually only quite small selection of of his letters as

they would have been known 50 or 100 years after his death.

It's typical of classics that we only have parts of works that have survived,

but what we do have is pretty substantial. Um, they come in various collections.

There's a 16 books set in a book, by the way, is kind of like a long modern chapter,

a 16 books set called Ad Family Ras to friends or acquaintances.

And they include letters to his wife,

one of his slaves to other important politicians to personal friends, um,

and includes replies as well.

There's a set of letters to his brother, Quintus. There are three books of those.

There's a book to Marcus Brutus that is Brutus,

one of the assassins of Julius Caesar.

And finally, and most important to us, there are 16 books to his friend Atticus.

Atticus was a close personal friend of Cicero.

They've been at school together,

as it were.

They've been educated together as teenagers, and they stayed very close. Um,

and they are the source of our information about Quintus is marriage with Palm Pony,

and that's where if you're studying this topic for GCC, GCC,

that's where your texts are coming from.

They date from a period of about 20 years from 63.

The Year of Cicero sponsorship, 40 for the year before he died.

And one of the reasons they're really interesting for

us is simply that Atticus didn't live near Cicero,

which means they corresponded by letter a lot

in a pre modern world letters.

Obviously hugely important, they are your only means of communication, really,

apart from sending verbal reports

and when you want to maintain contact with

close friends or political allies or whatever,

when you're not both in Rome or wherever it might be

clearly a regular flow of letters is what you did.

And the Atticus letters are an amazing example of this you get.

You often get periods where Sister is writing a letter a day to Atticus,

and you've been writing many, many letters every day. But Atticus is a special

recipient, and because of the action of somebody after sister is death,

we have these letters preserved.

Um, as I said, Atticus spends a lot of his time away from Italy,

which is kind of handy for our purposes because it means we have these letters.

Atticus is actually his nickname. It means the attic, the Athenian.

His real name was tight as Palm Pony asse,

and he was a Roman question, which is to say, not a senator.

He never took high political office,

but he was a rich and influential and well connected man.

He spent a lot of his life in Athens and a lot

of his life in a place called Epirus or Epirus in Greek.

That's more or less modern Albania. Um,

and in all these periods he was keeping up lively contact with Cicero.

We don't have any of his letters to Cicero, but we do have Cicero's to his to him.

Um, and from that you get both what sister wants to talk about,

but also he'll sort of mention something Atticus has said so we

can reconstruct a certain amount of both sides of the relationship.

And already, um, as I say, Sister, I didn't publish these, not Atticus,

but they were published and they were known to people, um, soon after their deaths.

There's a man called Cornelius Nepo who you might come across.

He wrote lives of great generals. He was a friend of Atticus and a friend of Cicero,

and he after Atticus died,

no Post wrote a biography of him, The Life of Atticus, which we still have,

and in it he mentions these letters from Cicero,

and he said something quite striking about them.

He says

anyone who reads these letters would not feel much need for a written out,

a connected history of our time.

In other words,

there so thorough that they basically tell you all of Roman history for 20 years.

Now that's a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one.

And there is no accident that these letters

of Cicero are hugely prized by historians because

that gives access to something that we don't often get in the ancient world.

And that is the relatively unfiltered private thoughts of somebody. So he's not.

This is very different from public oratory,

where he's presenting himself on the public stage.

It's not literally his own thoughts,

because none of us ever literally writes down our own thoughts,

totally unfiltered, perhaps most to a private journal to yourself.

He's still writing for someone, Atticus, but it is still pretty intimate,

A pretty private so here.

You see, Sister,

are being very frank and honest and telling you a very different

side of events from the one hell sometimes put forward in public,

admitting his doubts and fears,

his uncertainties about some of his political allies and so on.

It's

a good instance, therefore, of how we can get kind of behind the scenes.

That's by the way, true also of the letters to his brother, Quintus.

And to give you a concrete example of that. If you are also studying

the bit about Julius Caesar in Gaul from DiBella Gallico five.

You'll know that's all about Quintus Cicero.

Well, if you read the third book of Sisters Letters to Quintus

that comes at exactly the same time Autumn of 54 BC,

and it shows you a totally different world.

Instead of seeing Quintus as a soldier in the field,

Assist represents a Caesar presents him.

What you see in Cicero is Quintus has clearly

been complaining about being stuck out in gold.

It's a bit of a pain being there.

He doesn't like Camp Life, and he's actually only in it because he

is either for the money or for the prestige of keeping him with Cesar.

So you see a very different side of the story,

and you also see something that Cesar doesn't mention at all

in Double a Calico five of huge importance,

which is the death of Caesar's own daughter, Julia.

So there's a good instance of how you see a much more

private world against the kind of public world have published literature.

Um, now letters. As I've said, we're a big part of life.

Um, someone like Sister might easily have spent several hours a day writing them,

which is impressive, although it has to be said,

there are many people myself included,

who can easily let several hours a day slip by writing emails these days.

So it's not completely different, but I think it was.

There were slightly more sustained than modern emails,

and it was a common idea in antiquity that a letter was like half a conversation.

Someone actually says that an ancient theorist

and they come close to showing your soul as it were.

So this is a very interesting way into a part of Roman life,

and the Quintus Palm Ponyo thing that I'll talk about in

the next lecture is just one small fragment of that.

Finally, these represent an interesting grey area between

real life and literature.

As I said, Cicero didn't intend his letters for publication.

That's not always true.

There are people who write letters for publication in antiquity.

So please letters, for instance,

and there are people who write what we call epistolary.

Novels like Dangerous Liaisons is a famous one from the 18th century and French,

where it's actually a novel arranged as a series of letters.

Now Cicero's letters are real letters.

He did write them, and he did not edit them for publication.

But someone did.

Someone gathered them.

It's not clear they actually chop chop them around very much, but they ordered them.

So the Atticus letters are basically in chronological order.

The other letters are arranged like the letters and

familiarise are arranged by things like theme or correspondent

and chronology, too. So they're not completely unfiltered.

But they are both a private genre and a public genre.

After sister's death, ancient readers like us read them as an insight into his life.

So a really interesting example of how the ephemeral the every

day can become the eternal literature that's designed to last forever,

and I strongly recommend you browse around in them.

Anyway, In the next lecture,

we're going to focus more tightly on the letters about Quintus and Pomponio.