Cicero Lives! Essay One--reading some of his Epistles

My route to this series of essays on Cicero during a few of the last troubled years of his life (ca 49-46 BCE) was an unexpected one. It began at the gym a few weeks ago when a friend, who teaches at Willamette University, mentioned to me that Latin enrollments were up at the university, exceeding even those of Reed College. I taught at Reed in the 1980s, and I know the passion that resides in that college for classical learning, and so I was immediately impressed by my friend's words. I told her that the true test of a possible "revival" in Latin/Classical studies at Willamette, much less other schools, was how many students take 3rd and not 1st year Latin.

Then, while this was on my mind I made my annual trek to Western KS to visit friends and do some consulting. While there, one of my octogenarian friends showed me a copy of a Latin "reader" that her aunt had used in the 1920s. I eagerly asked her if I could borrow the book, almost not giving her a chance to say "Yes," since I am convinced that one of the things that will lie at the root of the coming "Latin revival" in America (I think it will hit about 2020, really) will be the recovery of these old school texts published from about 1880-1920 in America. The one my KS friend let me borrow was Fifty Letters of Cicero, in a 1901 edition by Prof. J. H. Dillard of Tulane. I knew immediately that I would spend the time on the plane from Denver to Portland reading these letters. I was surprised at how rusty my "advanced" or "epistolary" Latin was; it will take me a while to resurrect it, I am afraid...

Looking At Cicero--from a 1960s Perspective

The mere opening of the short school book, which was 118 pages in length, which included the dictionary and notes to the text, flooded my mind with memories. No, I hadn't used these readers, since they had been replaced in the 1950s and 1960s by large Latin readers, usually with inane stories about a putative Roman household or a conversation between two children in Latin about how they liked to play with marbles. Well, those were the first-year readers. By the time you got to second year Latin you might read some Cornelius Nepos or Julius Caesar (the Gallic Wars), while you didn't reach Cicero until the third year and finally, if you really stuck it out, you got the "reward" by studying epic Latin--the Aeneid--in your senior year.

But even when you read Cicero, at least in the 1960s, you didn't read his epistles. You normally read his speeches, whether in defense of Sextus Roscius or, usually, against Cataline. But what was striking to me upon reflecting on my HS Latin is that no one much cared, or was much able, to give what you might call the "full literary and historical context" of what we were reading. In short, we just read the text, learned a few more vocabulary words, made sure that we mastered the ablative absolute and assured ourselves that Caesar was still mowing people down in Gaul. All must be well in the world if Caesar was still winning one for Rome.

What filled my mind with memories upon picking up this slim volume is that I had bought dozens of books like this in garage sales in the East Coast during my graduate school days. I realized that they actually were superb ways to teach the language to students, because they began very slowly (high school kids read them, remember), they were amply annotated with references to then-existing grammars, and they resolved remaining difficulties by giving you literal translations of difficult phrases. Though I knew that more "modern" approaches to the language would use much catchier methods of proceeding, I think this rigorous and patient method of learning Latin appeals to many people.

Returning to Cicero--2007

So as I returned to Cicero after a 40 year hiatus (well, I had studied his philosophical, rhetorical and some of his political work in the meantime, though without doing too much reading in the Latin), I realized that my interests and needs were quite different in 2007 than in 1967. When I read excerpts from the first epistle, I was filled with questions. It was from the collection known as Ad Familiares (Letters to Friends), and this one was addressed specifically to his wife Terentia. It didn't say much (I will go into the various letters beginning in the next essay), but immediately I began asking questions like--When was it written? The text and notes don't tell us--leaving us to assume that it was a sort of timeless letter, handing from some celestial spindle, dangling in front of us with its eternal verities. I later learned that the collection of letters in the reader came from about 48-46 BCE, years just after the entry of Julius Caesar into Italy and the battle of Pharsalus (August 48 BCE), where Caesar defeated Pompey.

But then my questions shifted. I wanted to know what was going on in Cicero's life at this time. While there was a great victory for Caesar, all wasn't well for Cicero. After all, he had sided with the "wrong side" in the Caesar-Pompey fight. Then, it gradually began to dawn on me. These letters were written when all of Cicero's world was either falling apart for him or when great uncertainty stalked him. The uncertainty came from the realization that Caesar might reject him, persecute him, confiscate his villas, etc.

Conclusion

So when I began to dig more deeply into the letters, and the life of Cicero that stood behind them, I saw them as bearing witness to a slice of Cicero's life which I had been fully ignorant of in all my studies of the classical world. When I realized that this little book was going to be the instrument for opening up that world again to me, and for leading me into its depths now as a mature thinker, I clutched it greedily to my breast and thanked it profusely. For, I began to realize, that in order really to do "justice" to the 50 letters in the reader, I needed to reconstruct in fairly intimate detail the years from 49-46 BCE in the Roman Republic. Fortunately, this period is fairly well-documented, and now I am in the situation of getting a window into this world. Within 15 years I think we will be having quiz shows in America which will test people on the difference between 51 BCE and 47 BCE in the Roman Republic (well, maybe I will just have to "dream on..."); now I have the privilege of gathering all that knowledge to myself, to use in (re)building my Latin and in understanding with precision that most fateful time of human history for all of us who consider ourselves to be "Western" people.

The next essay gives the more precise historical context for understanding the epistles, and shows how to understand some Latin epistolary conventions. Join me, please...

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