Summary of the Chapters

Abstract

This volume brings together papers dealing with the reception of the last 21 months of Cicero’s life. When on 15 March 44 bce Julius Caesar was murdered in Rome, Cicero, after a period of indetermination, finally returned to active politics. One last time, he cast himself in the role of defender of the Republican constitution and its corresponding virtues of liberty, freedom of expression and respect for the traditions of the forefathers. Famously, his fight was unsuccessful and led to his definitive fall from grace and to his death in the course of the proscriptions of the Second Triumvirate. These final months of his life seem to enlarge themes that had been relevant for Cicero during his career up to that point; in a certain sense they could be described as a distillation of it. It is no wonder that they have also shaped his later reception in a considerable way. The contributions gathered here analyse important steps of this reception. Ancient sources and modern scholars alike seem to agree that Cicero was killed on Mark Antony’s orders. The Philippics, it is alleged, were what caused Antony’s intense hatred. In Chapter One of this volume, however, Thomas Keeline alleges that this long-standing and convenient story is unlikely to be true, or at least unlikely to be the whole truth.Whatever Antony knew of Cicero’s Philippics, it was not the canonical corpus that we read today. Moreover, Keeline asserts, the rhetoric of the Philippics was insufficient to motivate Cicero’s murder, and Antony and Cicero could have patched up any breach in amicitia—people often changed sides in the late Republic, not least Cicero. Finally and most importantly, the young Octavian must have played an important role in Cicero’s proscription, a role which he was later at pains to cover up. The commonly accepted story of Cicero’s death has more to do with early imperial propaganda and two millennia of reception than with historical reality. In Chapter Two, Caroline Bishop examines the ancient reception of Cicero’s Philippics alongside the reception of Demosthenes’ ‘Philippic’ speeches. Cicero and Demosthenes alike were remembered as allegories for the failure of democratic free speech at the hands of autocracy, and each also represented both the pinnacle and the end of a classical period. Bishop argues that the published collection of Cicero’s Philippics plants the seeds for this sort of reception by imitating one of the most salient features of Demosthenes’ speeches: their valorization of failure as a necessary price to pay when a society’s attempt to maintain its classical glory exceeded its ability. By invoking the potential for a similarly noble defeat against Antony, Cicero’s collection of Philippics was meant to secure a Demosthenic reputation for himself should he also fail—a reputation with which his ancient readers obliged him.