Paideia Romana

Cicero's Tusculan Disputations

Ingo Gildenhard

• Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781913701369
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Paideia Romana: Cicero's Tusculan Disputations takes a new look at an unloved text of the western canon to reveal it as a punchy and profoundly original work, arguably Cicero's most ingenious literary response to the tyranny of Caesar. The book shows how the Tusculans' much lambasted literary design, critically isolated prefaces, and overlooked didactic plot start to cohere once we read the dialogue for what it is: not a Latin treatise on Greek philosophy, but a Roman drama on education, with a strong political subtext. The first chapter ('The form – enigmas and answers') tries to make sense of those features of the work that scholars have found baffling or disappointing, such as the nondescript characters, the uncertain genre, or the lack of setting. Chapter 2 ('The prologues – in tyrannum and cultural warfare') analyses how Cicero in his prologues to the five individual books situates his desire to create and teach a 'Latin philosophy' within wider contexts, in particular the dictatorship of Caesar and the intellectual traditions of Greece and Rome. The final chapter 3 ('The plot – teacher and student') explores the pedagogy enacted in the dialogue as a form of constructive outreach, addressed to a future generation of Roman aristocrats. With its emphasis on rhetoric, literary artistry, and historical context, the present volume breaks with earlier scholarship on the Tusculans and thereby makes a significant contribution to the on-going reassessment of Cicero's thought and authorial practice.

CHAPTER 1: THE FORM – ENIGMAS AND ANSWERS

Introduction

Scholars agree that the literary format of the Tusculans is peculiar. Three features tend to puzzle most. First, there is Cicero’s choice of the continuous lecture as his preferred mode of discourse, which has raised questions about the Tusculans’ genre. Is the work a disputatio or a schola, a senilis declamatio or a sermo (these are Cicero’s own labels, used at various places in the dialogue), or, perhaps, an offspring of that mysterious entity, the Hellenistic diatribe? Second, Cicero opted for an anonymous and inexpressive stooge as his one and only interlocutor – a seemingly improsperous and quite inexplicable decision by someone who knows how to sparkle with masterful ethopoeia. Finally, the setting. In contrast to the absorbing mises-en-scène of some of his other dialogues, that of the Tusculans appears uninspired and sketchy, to the point of being ‘pratiquement inexistante’.¹

This design, which is indeed unusual, has left critics nonplussed. Görier, for instance, candidly admits that Cicero’s ‘eigentümliche Konzeption’ leaves him ‘ein wenig ratios’.² Douglas, too, seems at a loss, stating categorically that the generic enigmas of the text are intractable. ‘It is not possible to decide why Cicero chose this particular technique’, he announces, before vaguely submitting that it may have been ‘an urge to seek some artistic variety’, a willingness to be more ‘dogmatic’ after the survey approach of the de Finibus or the attempt to search for common ground among the philosophical schools.³ Görier and Douglas are, arguably, the two scholars who have tried hardest to come to terms with the literary profile of the Tusculans. Other critics prefer to bypass the formal problems posed by the work altogether. There is a distinct tendency to ignore its aberrant idiosyncrasies or to ascribe them to some sort of authorial failure – such as excessive haste in composition, a lapse in critical judgement or a drained imagination.⁴

Yet baffling as some critics find the Tusculans, a full appreciation is still missing of just how strange they truly are – so strange, indeed, that they constitute a veritable monstrum within Cicero’s oeuvre: a portentous entity, that is, which testifies to a serious disturbance in the order of things. In the first part of this chapter (entitled ‘Enigmas’), I try to plumb the full measure of the Tusculans’ monstrosity by taking stock of what, in the dialogue, is extraordinary or abnormal: the title, the genre, the dramatis personae, the setting, the excessively long translations from Greek tragedy, and Cicero’s endorsement of Epicurus. If one keeps to the hermeneutic principle Ciceronem e Cicerone explicare, this task is not particularly difficult. A simple exercise in comparison shows that, in the Tusculans, Cicero has not just thrown to the winds techniques of composition that belong to the hallmarks of his literary imagination, but also flaunts that he has done so. On inspection, it becomes evident that he is absolutely forthright in confessing that what he does in this dialogue borders on the perverse.

Once it is evident, however, that Cicero draws ostentatious attention to the peculiarities of his text, we can no longer dismiss his literary choices as the unfortunate result of authorial inadequacy. If his breaches of convention are deliberate, then it follows that they must also be part of the message. A necessary first step towards doing Cicero hermeneutic justice is thus the realization that the ruinous aspects of the Tusculans are intentional and coherent, rather than the result of incompetence or sloppiness. In the second half of the chapter (‘Answers’) I attempt to work out the underlying logic of Cicero’s seemingly unavailing and resourceless design. The aim is to show that those features of the dialogue that have caused critical despair amount to a tactics of negativity, which in turn contributes to a larger, overarching vision. This vision constitutes a sophisticated attempt to intervene and position himself by literary means in Rome’s political field⁵ and would not have been lost on Cicero’s intended readers, his aristocratic peers.⁶ In the end, the Tusculans should emerge as a text that not only coheres from an artistic point of view, but also carries a pugnacious political punch.

A. Enigmas

I. The title

The peculiarities of the Tusculanae Disputationes begin with their title. Douglas renders it with ‘Discussions at my country-house in Tusculum’, adding: ‘It is small wonder that few now penetrate beyond covers bearing so forbidding a title into the text of the least demanding of Cicero’s larger philosophical writings.’⁷ Forbidding as the title may be, we know for certain that it is Cicero’s own, despite the fact that, within his oeuvre, it is one of a kind.⁸ In most of his other titles, Cicero announces his subject matter; a few consist in the name of a leading speaker or interlocutor; and two are composite, in combining the name of the protagonist with the topic of his discourse.⁹ With ‘Disputations at Tusculum’, in contrast, Cicero has, for once, decided to foreground neither subject matter nor character, but genre (disputatio) and location (his villa in Tusculum). The title, then, is strikingly uncharacteristic.¹⁰

Possibly, Cicero followed Greek precedents. Commentators routinely cite the Corinthian and Lesbian dialogues of Dicaearchus as potential models, primarily because Cicero mentions them in the work.¹¹ Per se, though, these references do not amount to compelling evidence for deliberate imitation, even if any ‘Greek’ connotation of the title would fit well with other aspects of Cicero’s self-fashioning in the Tusculans. More important, at any rate, than Cicero’s sources is the fact that he breaks with his usual habit. The title instantly announces that he is up to something out of the ordinary. The cover-page prominence Cicero gives to the dialogue’s form and setting, precisely those features, that is, which modern scholars consider to be among the work’s least satisfactory, should put readers on the alert that, despite appearances, the generic affiliations and the location of the Tusculans are of paramount importance.

II. Genre

Generic expectations play a crucial role in literary communication. From the point of view of reception, a text is subject to radical shifts in meaning depending on the generic assumptions that the audience brings to bear on it. It follows that the proper decoding of the generic information provided by the author is a necessary (if by no means sufficient) prerequisite for understanding his intended meaning and message. ‘Getting the genre right’ therefore matters, yet it is often easier said than done. The Tusculans are a case in point. Many commentators are content with the tautological repetition of the labels that Cicero uses himself (as if they were self-explanatory).¹² And if discussion of the dialogue’s generic features takes place at all, it tends towards the scholastic, with little bearing upon larger problems of interpretation. Thus the most lively debate that the genre of the Tusculans has so far stirred up has revolved around the somewhat idle question of whether or not Cicero might have written in the tradition of the Hellenistic diatribe.¹³

More often, formal aspects of the work are set aside altogether, as scholars zoom in on the philosophical contents of Cicero’s lengthy expositions. Bringmann, for instance, limits his discussion of generic artistry to the observation that ‘in essence’ the dialogue consists in five internally coherent lectures, ‘von “dialektischen” Eingangs- und Zwischenpartien abgesehen’.¹⁴ This is a reasonably accurate description of the work’s overall outlook. But it reduces form to a formality. One need not recall Derrida’s logic of the supplement to suspect that excepting the dialectic passages from consideration may unduly flatten out the intricacies of Cicero’s rhetorical design and hence of his message as well.

The best point of departure for a fresh look at the genre of the Tusculans is therefore Douglas’s insight that in this work ‘Cicero uses a method different from that of all his other dialogues’.¹⁵ As with the title, we are faced with the challenge to explicate uniqueness – and a uniqueness, at that, which does not seem to make any sense. Significant problems surface irrespective of whether we investigate (a crucial distinction) the genre of the dialogue or the genres mentioned or practised within it. Most of Cicero’s generic labels as well as the genres of philosophical discourse he pursues in the work are in flagrant violation of social conventions that he observes elsewhere in his oeuvre.

1. Cicero’s generic labels

As already mentioned, Cicero refers to the doings he depicts in the Tusculans with four different generic markers: disputatio (or the verb disputare);¹⁶ the Greek term schola;¹⁷ senilis declamatio;¹⁸ and sermo.¹⁹ Of the lot, only sermo is unambiguously positive. The three others, while in many ways distinct, share one surprising characteristic: they are all laden with (more or less) pejorative connotations. In other words, at key moments in his text Cicero sees fit to express disdain for his current activity. Prima facie, such a policy of negative advertisement is oddly self-defeating and perhaps for that reason has tended to elude modem readers – although they frequently express (heuristically valuable) bafflement over Cicero’s lexical choices.²⁰ But a detailed look at his generic markers, at what they mean and imply, should render the conundrum ineluctable.

a. disputatio

The most innocuous of the three terms is disputatio.²¹ In the majority of cases, Cicero’s use of disputatio and the verb disputare is primarily descriptive. It is what people do when they talk philosophy. He frequently uses it, both on its own and in conjunction with sermo, to render the Greek δiάλoγoc. As a technical term, its me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: the form – enigmas and answers
• Chapter 2: The prologues – in tyrannum and cultural warfare
• Chapter 3: the plot – teacher and student
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: The date of the Tusculans
• Appendix B: Genre matters
• Editions cited
• Bibliography
• Extended table of contents
• Index of passages
• Index of names and themes
• Back Cover