Ciceroniana On Line

Title Page and Summary

2024-01-17T16:40:04+01:00

Index of the issue

Introduction

2024-01-14T23:41:15+01:00

The international conference Cicero and the Environment took place on 23 and 24 January 2023 in the splendid and majestic setting of the Aula Magna of the University Library of Bologna.

Aspects of the Natural and the Supernatural in Cicero’s Political Writings

2024-01-14T23:41:16+01:00

This paper analyses the function of references to natural and supernatural elements in Cicero’s political writings by exploring a selection of case studies. The survey shows that there is usually not an intention to describe details and that these references are instead skilfully adduced to strengthen the respective argument within the discourses and value systems of the period.

Silvas publicas depopulatus erat (Cic. Mil. 26): "Violated" Nature, Politics and Invective in Ciceronian Rhetorical Strategy

2024-01-17T16:41:30+01:00

Far removed from the modern idea of ecology, Cicero’s defence of natural habitat constitutes a powerful weapon of political struggle and invective in his forensic orations. The violation of nature, the destruction of which poses a threat to the stability of the societas, is understood – and manipulated – by the political Cicero as an attack on the res publica and, at the same time, as an act of sacrilege and hybris, punished by the divinity protecting the natural order. This contribution aims to revisit the human-nature relationship as deployed in Cicero’s rhetorical-political strategy, studying the ways in which Cicero exploits the motif of violated nature as a means of undermining the moral auctoritas of the adversary.

Urban and Natural Regeneration, Calamity and Pollution in Cicero's post reditum Orations

2024-01-17T16:42:39+01:00

The article investigates the presence and role of environment and ecology in Cicero’s post reditum speeches. In this corpus, the description of the external world, as well as of the ways humans interact with it, is coherent and homogenous and is characterised by a clear dichotomy. On Cicero’s return from exile, the environment experiences a natural and urban rebirth, bearing witness to the beneficial effects Cicero has on the external world in contrast to the environmental and urban destruction wrought by Clodius and his supporters. With a focus on the speeches’ literary, stylistic, and rhetorical aspects, the analysis shows how Cicero deploys descriptions of the natural and urban world to legitimise his political agenda and to delegitimise that of his enemies. Particular attention is devoted to the metaphorical use of environment-related terms, as adopted especially within the invective.

Cicero and Political Trees

2024-01-14T23:41:22+01:00

Cicero used and represented trees for a variety of purposes, but this article focuses on Cicero’s attitudes to political usage of trees within a wider context of “botanising rulers”, triumphing trees, Roman euergetism and spectacle, and sacred trees. Starting with trees within a Roman political-military context (Lucullus, Pompey and Cicero), then within the political-religious context (including the ficus Ruminalis), and finally Cicero’s ideas of and engagement with Pompey’s triumph and theatre complex. I argue that Cicero’s arboreal attitude depended on his attitude to the notions and relationships the trees were made to symbolise, and how these related to his own notions of correct Roman elite behaviour.

Campania ridens. Proposals for an "Epistolary" Geography

2024-01-17T16:43:34+01:00

The article explores representations of Campania’s environment in Cicero’s Letters. Campania is not evoked in landscape descriptions in the traditional sense but is configured first and foremost as a geographic alter-ego of Rome (a pusilla Roma, as Cicero calls the environment of his villa in Cumae) that reproduces the same social and cultural dynamics of the Urbs. The environment of Campania is conjured primarily in digressions on “landscape entities” with a strong ideological and political bearing (this is the case of Baiae, a town that is figuratively deployed as part of Cicero’s rhetorical attack on Clodius, or an ambiguous place, linked in a double thread to Caesar and the Caesarians). The article also examines the possibility that for Cicero there was a singular Campanian “spirit”, discernible in the epistles to Campanian addressees. In particular, an analysis of Marcus Marius and Papirius Paetus will draw out certain distinctive common traits among these Campanians, such as Epicureanism and a sense of humour that, especially in the case of Paetus, is reminiscent of a bygone Roman quick-wittedness.

Cicero’s De legibus: Environment and the Symbolic Value of locus

2024-01-14T23:41:26+01:00

The prologues to the first and second books of Cicero’s De legibus uniquely represent a rural environment as the setting of the discussion. While Cicero has a Platonic model in mind, I discuss how his depiction of the rural environment in the De legibus goes beyond its Greek model. This is visible both in the way the surrounding environment provides the context for authorial remarks on the genre and dialogical style of the text but, furthermore, in the way the rural landscape bears symbolic value which links it directly to Roman ancestral values and exempla. As such it may also be read as a counterpart to the city landscape of Athens, a locus related to theoretical virtue and intellectual exempla, which is depicted in De finibus 5. The symbolic investment of rural environment aims at underlining the “practicability” and superiority of Rome’s traditional constitution but also Cicero’s own role as a defender of the res publica.

The Role of the Natural World in Cicero’s De re publica and De legibus

2024-01-14T23:41:29+01:00

The present paper argues that, in both De re publica and De legibus, Cicero employs descriptions and images of the natural world to support and supplement the philosophical arguments of the two treatises. These descriptions and images variously provide visible or tangible analogies to Cicero’s more theoretical arguments, as well as positive exempla drawn from the lives of successful political leaders of the past; in some cases, they appeal to readers’ emotional attachment to their ancestral homes, their families and all that they hold dear, to engender support for Cicero’s defence of the Roman res publica, on which all these things depended. Resort to such devices is all the more necessary because, despite the range of the arguments that are advanced in the two treatises in support of Cicero’s favoured political model, it is unlikely that Cicero’s readers would have found the treatises’ philosophical arguments entirely persuasive on their own. I conclude that the close relationship between the ways in which these devices are used and explained in the two treatises confirms that both treatises form part of a single project, in which Cicero employs both formal philosophical and political argument and a range of other literary and rhetorical devices.

Cicero and the 'Insatiable Variety' of Nature in Book II of De natura deorum

2024-01-17T16:44:55+01:00

The article studies the exaltation of the manifold variety of terrestrial landscapes by the Stoic Balbus in the second book of De natura deorum (98-99). Cicero delivers a highly elaborate and formal description of the insatiabilis varietas of nature, in which natural, even wild, landscapes coexist with “cultural” landscapes, i.e. with evident traces of human intervention. The article examines the probable philosophical ancestry, expressive and poetic components of these landscapes, as well as their Nachleben (particularly in Seneca and Apuleius).

Nature in Verse in Cicero the Philosopher

2024-01-17T16:45:37+01:00

This contribution studies poetic citations in Cicero’s philosophical corpus, specifically those in which elements related to the natural environment appear. The analysis focuses on environmental aspects present in select quotations related to the theme of pain, where nature reflects the condition of physical and psychic suffering of the heroes, Philoctetes and Prometheus. The argument takes in verses from Accius’s Philoctetes, quoted in De finibus and Tusculanae disputationes, and Cicero’s translation from Aeschylus’s Prometheus Unbound (fr. 33 Bl.²), quoted in Tusc. 2, 23-25. The environment emerges as a hostile space that embraces the heroes’ cry of pain. At the same time, Cicero conjures a desolate and lonely landscape in his translation of a passage from Homer’s Iliad (6, 201-202 in Tusc. 3, 63; fr. 24 Bl.²), as the setting in which Bellerophon seeks consolation to his pain, condemning himself to silence and voluntary exile. Cicero does the same, after the death of his daughter Tullia (Att. 12, 15), in a literary gesture that brings together philosophy and autobiography through the theme of pain and loneliness.

Quae natura caduca est: Cicero and Lucretius on Ecological Change

2024-01-14T23:41:36+01:00

Although starting from a common metaphor of vegetal descent (caducus), Lucretius and Cicero offer distinct perspectives on ecological change – that is, how species, particularly plants and humans, develop and relate to each other over time. Especially in the final two books of De rerum natura, Lucretius sketches a narrative of dwindling terrestrial fertility that closes off future reproduction via intraspecies lineages. By contrast, Cicero’s eco-writing in De senectute as well as the last book of De finibus, leaves open the possibility of interspecies fertility – what I call “feralization” – that can overcome the shared fallenness of plants and humans. To draw a conclusion out of this divergence, I propose an analogy between these ancient perspectives on the future and the horizons of the texts themselves by considering their reception history from our own crisis of eco-fertility.

Sprouts for the Future: an Initial Review of Cicero and the Environment

2024-01-14T23:41:38+01:00

The corpus of Cicero's works, in its variety and vastness, lends itself to further research, but we are confident that the series of contributions presented at the Bologna conference and collected in this volume of the journal can trace some lines and fit fully into the contemporary debate.

Review of CICERO, Opera omnia, Ed. Andreas Cratander, Basel 1528, With an introductory essay by C. SCHEIDEGGER LÄMMLE & G. MANUWALD

2024-01-14T23:41:39+01:00

Cicero, Opera omnia, Ed. Andreas Cratander, Basel 1528, Reproduction of the copy of the University Library in Basel. With an introductory essay by / Reproduktion des Exemplars der Basler Universitätsbibliothek. Mit einer Einführung von Cédric Scheidegger Lämmle und Gesine Manuwald, Schwabe, Basel 2022 (3 Bände), ISBN 978-3-7965-4343-2.

Review of Cicerone, La vecchiaia, a cura di Stefano Costa

2024-01-14T23:41:41+01:00

Marco Tullio Cicerone, La vecchiaia, a cura di Stefano Costa, testo latino a fronte, La Vita Felice, Milano 2023, 135 pp., ISBN 978-88-9346-697-4.

Review of Lex Paulson, Cicero and the People’s Will: Philosophy and Power at the End of the Roman Republic

2024-01-14T23:41:42+01:00

Lex Paulson, Cicero and the People’s Will: Philosophy and Power at the End of the Roman Republic, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (et al.) 2023.

Review of Guido Milanese (a cura di), L’Epicuro di Bignone cent’anni dopo

2024-01-14T23:41:43+01:00

Guido Milanese (a cura di), L’Epicuro di Bignone cent’anni dopo, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 2023, 141 pp., ISBN 978-88-343-5147-5.

Review of Angelika Fricke, Manuel Reith (hrsg.), Latein und Griechisch im 21. Jahrhundert,

2024-01-14T23:41:43+01:00

Angelika Fricke, Manuel Reith (hrsg.), unter Mitwirkung von Gregor Vogt-Spira, Latein und Griechisch im 21. Jahrhundert, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2021, 286 pp., ISBN 978-3-534-27474-1.

Review of Alice Borgna, Tutte storie di maschi bianchi morti…

2024-01-14T23:41:44+01:00

Alice Borgna, Tutte storie di maschi bianchi morti…, «Fact Checking: la Storia alla prova dei fatti», Laterza, Bari-Roma 2022, 166 pp., ISBN 978-88-581-4839-6

Bibliographical Bulletin

2024-01-14T23:41:45+01:00

The Bulletin presents in alphabetical order all titles reported during the previous semester by the SIAC's free online Newsletter, which is sent to subscribers every four weeks.

Colophon

2024-01-14T23:41:46+01:00

Abstracts and Keywords