1 Some Background
In this paper I approach the topic of scholia Ciceroniana by asking whether and how these texts might bear witness to the process of literary canon formation in Antiquity. Previous work on the Vergilian tradition has encouraged me to draw two related inferences. The first is that Vergilâs use of Greek scholarship on two of his literary models, Theocritus and Homer, played a much more than utilitarian role in the allusive programs of the Eclogues and the Aeneid and in their scholarly reception.1 There is now reason to think that this is even more true of Cicero, as I will presently explain. My second inference is that Vergil, although he could hardly be certain what kind of scholarly attention his works might attract, was evidently justified in hoping that critics might react to them exactly as they did. The question I pursue here is whether this is true of Cicero, as well. The answer, I believe, illustrates some general characteristics of the role played by ancient scholarship in canon formation as well as some peculiarities about the reception of these two authors. Let me expand upon these two inferences.
In regard to my first inference, it is now clear that Vergil did not consult scholarship on Theocritus and Homer merely to avoid making the kind of âmistakesâ for which critics had previously censured this or that passage of those models.2 Indeed, he sometimes imitates these passages in a way that he presumably believed would cause his own critics to find similar âmistakesâ in his worksâas Vergilâs critics in fact did.3 Their comments concern some of the largest and most actively debated questions posed by ancient critics about Vergilâs models and about his own works, along with many other questions of a more focused sort. Significantly, among the latter category, the poet sometimes repeatsâdeliberately, to all appearancesâthe very mistakes for which his models had been censured by ancient Greek commentators, only then to be censured himself in very similar terms by his own critics.4 I infer from this that Vergilâs reaction to Greek scholarship on Theocritus and Homer was highly ambitious and extremely sophisticated in terms of the impact it had on Vergilâs own work and on the subsequent evaluation of that work by his own critics.
My second inference is that Vergil had reason to expect his critics to react as they did, which is to say, much as earlier critics had reacted to his models.5 In fact, it is not only the case that these critics comment on individual passages by using language very similar to, and possibly borrowed from what they found in Greek commentaries dealing with analogous passages in his models.6 It is also clear that at least some critics imagined themselves as the Roman equivalents of this or that Theocritean or Homeric scholar in a larger sense, in much the same way that Vergil imagined himself as the Roman Theocritus or Homer.7 On this basis, it is tempting to infer not only that Vergil imitated his Greek models as a way of claiming to be the Latin counterpart of these important authors, but that he also coveted a scholarly reception that would be recognizably similar to theirs, presumably as a component of the comparable status he hoped to obtain. But one may well ask, is Vergilâs ancient scholarly reception unusual or even unique in this respect, or is it similar to that of other authors?
The scholarly reception of Cicero is an attractive point of comparison for several reasons. First of all, three recent books have greatly illuminated what I am calling the âcanonizationâ of Cicero in ways that invite comparison to Vergil. The first of these, by Caroline Bishop, studies Ciceroâs use of Greek scholarship as part of his emulation of Greek authors in a number of genres.8 According to Bishop, Ciceroâs engagement with the critical reception of his models broadened and deepened over the course of his career, and did so to such an extent that it anticipates all of the most important features found in Vergilâs program of self-canonization. The two other books, by Thomas Keeline and Giuseppe La Bua, make excellent use of the surviving scholia and related scholarship to elucidate the reception of Ciceroâs speeches primarily in the Roman classroom.9 In effect, they continue to trace the process that Cicero set in motion, as Bishop shows, to the point of its posthumous consummation, at least in the field of oratory. I take these three studies as outlining a general process of literary canonization similar to what I, following others, have found in respect of Vergil, a process in which the authorâs ambition to be recognized as the Roman Homer or the Latin Demosthenes is fully realized not in his own oeuvre, but in the recognition of his achievement by scholars who are themselves following in the footsteps of their own Greek predecessors. Indeed, I think it would be reasonable to assume, in the light of Bishopâs research, that Ciceroâs effort at self-canonization established much of the pattern that, mutatis mutandis, Vergil would later follow.
That said, in this chapter I mean to explore the implications of that qualifying phrase, mutatis mutandis. In regard to the first inference that I discussed above, Bishopâs findings prove that very similar inferences can be drawn about the use of Greek scholarship by Cicero and Vergil. Furthermore, because Ciceroâs career predates the composition of Vergilâs entire oeuvre, it is more than reasonable to suppose that Ciceroâs project of self-canonization inspired Vergilâs fashioning of his own career. In regard to my second inference, however, and in spite of the possibilityâI would even say, the likelihoodâthat Vergil followed Cicero in this regard, the detailed treatments of Keeline and La Bua permit the corollary inference that Ciceroâs posthumous route to scholarly canonization was less immediate and less direct than that of Vergil, particularly where the genre of commentary is concerned. That is to say, in spite of the very real similarities that exist between the learned receptions of these two authors, it is quite possibleâand again I would say, likelyâthat the direction of influence among their respective critics was reversed, and that Vergilâs early reception, especially in commentaries, established a pattern that would only later be followed in the case of Cicero. That, then, is my somewhat paradoxical answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this chapter about the relevance of Vergilâs experience to that of Cicero, and in the rest of this paper I will explain what that means.
To anticipate, most of the differences between the canonization of Cicero and that of Vergil have something to do with the difference between prose and poetry. An irony here is that even if Ciceroâs effort at self-canonization both preceded and inspired Vergilâs own, it seems likely that Vergil attained laureate status via scholarly reception both sooner and more completely than Cicero did, mainly because he was a poet, and that Vergilâs experience established a pattern that Cicero could follow only approximately, mainly because he was an orator. It should go without saying that my argument has absolutely nothing to do with the relative merits or general importance of Cicero and Vergil as compared to one another or to anyone else. Rather, it has to do with the mechanisms by which ancient literary and scholarly culture operated, as well as with the particular places in ancient education and society that were held by poetry and oratory on the one hand and by grammar and rhetoric on the other.
2 Ciceroâs Aristarchus
I have alluded to the idea that the ambitions of ancient scholars might parallel those of the authors they studied. A passage from one of Ciceroâs letters to Atticus plays on this idea while straddling the boundary that distinguishes the oratorâs fortunes from those of the poet. This happens when Cicero addresses Atticus as âthe Aristarchus of my speechesâ (meis orationibus, quarum tu Aristarchus es, Att. 1.14.3). He does this somewhat playfully, and certainly without implying that Atticus himself literally aspired to be recognized as a Roman Aristarchus! Nevertheless, the passage implicitly raises some relevant issues.
The context is an account of a senate meeting early in 61 bce in which the presiding consul had asked Pompey for his opinion regarding the infamous Bona Dea affair at the end of 62. In response to the question, Pompey confined himself to saying blandly that he always agreed with the senateâs decrees, and then took a seat next to Cicero. Shackleton Bailey takes this to mean that Pompeyâs ââ¯âgeneralâ expression of support for senatorial decreesââincluding any that they had made or would make in regard to the Bona Dea affairââwas taken as covering the âultimateâ oneââi.e. the senatus consultum ultimum that the senate had passed in 63, which gave Cicero as consul the authority to take any measures that he deemed necessary to suppress the Catilinarian conspiracy.10 At this juncture, Cicero writes:
When Crassus saw that Pompey had netted some credit from the general impression that he approved of my Consulship, he got to his feet and held forth on the subject in most encomiastic terms, going so far as to say that it was to me he owed his status as a Senator and a citizen, his freedom and his very life. Whenever he saw his wife or his house or the city of his birth, he saw a gift of mine.
Then Cicero comes to the point:
In short, he worked up the whole theme which I am in the habit of embroidering in my speeches one way and another, all about fire, sword, etc. (you are their Aristarchus and know my colour-box), really most impressively. I was sitting next to Pompey and I could see he was put out, whether at Crassus gaining the credit which might have been his or to realize that my achievements are of sufficient consequence to make the Senate so willing to hear them praised.11
Now, to be clear, Ciceroâs first consideration here is his own political standing. Nevertheless, he represents Crassus not only as praising Ciceroâs res gestae, but also as imitating Ciceroâs own speeches in praise of them. That is to say, Cicero represents himself as a model for other orators to follow in general; and, more specifically, he represents his own praise of his own accomplishments as illustrating an ideal theme for other orators to celebrate as well. He obviously could not have known in 61 bce, when he wrote this letter, that in the next generation declaimers would do something very like that when they debated whether Cicero ought to have burned the Philippics to obtain clemency from Marcus Antonius, or that the elder Seneca would cite Ciceroâs preparation to deliver the Philippics as the foundational act in the history of Roman declamation; but that is in fact what happened.12 This is more than an irony of literary history, however, because we have every reason to believe that Cicero was concerned with his place in literary as well as in political history and that he regarded the previous reception of his Greek models as patterns for his own future reception.13
In view of all this, we may apply some pressure to the expression that Cicero uses when he represents Atticus as the Aristarchus of his orations. In a very general sense, of course, it means no more than that Atticus is a connoisseur of Ciceronian oratory who will immediately understand what Crassusâ speech was like when Cicero represents it as cut from the same cloth as one of his own. In this context, however, for reasons that I shall explain, it seems worth taking the metaphor a little more seriously.14
At a minimum, one should acknowledge that Aristarchus of Samothrace was famous not only as a great critic who worked on a large number of Greek authors, but as the greatest critic of the greatest author of them all. In the case of Aristarchus and Homer, the critic worked centuries after the fact to restore the authorâs work, which in the meantime had sustained numerous corruptions and interpolations, to what he believed was its perfect state. Atticus instead was not only a contemporary of Cicero but his best friend and a trusted advisor who offered constructive criticism of his speeches in advance of their delivery and supervised their subsequent publication. Atticusâ role in this process was not to restore Ciceroâs work to its former glory, but to help make it the best possible expression of the authorâs characteristic style. That said, Aristarchusâ contribution to Homer also tended to be characterized almost as if the author and the critic were collaborators, or even as if the critic were a kind of authorial alter ego.15 To that point, it is more than possible that Atticusâ advice played a significant role in the composition of Ciceroâs works, particularly in the case of speeches that were revised for publication after they were delivered. He was also involved in the posthumous editing and consolidation of Ciceroâs literary corpus, which eventually gave rise to a lively trade in what were represented as early manuscripts that allegedly preserved the most authoritative readings.16 Thus, Atticus played a role in the process whereby Ciceroâs works were subjected to the kind of critical scrutiny that Aristarchus had lavished on Homer, and even surpassed Aristarchus by advising his author on the ultimate form that the works ought to take. In many ways, then, when Cicero calls Atticus his Aristarchus, he describes his friendâs contribution to Ciceroâs own status as an author in ways that go beyond anything that Cicero could have actually foreseen. Cicero is obviously flattering Atticus in humorously hyperbolic terms by comparing him not only to perhaps the most famous of the Greek critics, but also to one who was widely credited with materially improving the text of the greatest of Greek authors, with whose consummate status Aristarchusâ own fame was intimately bound.
This observation invites the question whether Cicero also imagines himself as playing Homer to Atticusâ Aristarchus. In view of Ciceroâs undeniable literary ambitions and the fact that they were realized to an astonishing extent, even in important details, this is a question that should not be dismissed. At the same time, it goes to the heart of the difference between Ciceroâs canonization and that of Vergil, as I will next explain.
3 Dynamics of Canon Formation
Literary canons by their nature take seemingly definite forms at particular times; but when these individual canons are viewed as interim reports on a diachronic process, it becomes obvious that âtheâ canon is by its nature a dynamic concept. This is an elementary, but important observation. It should not prevent anyone from understanding that any lack of fixity is not the same thing as evidence that the idea of a canon did not exist. These points are illustrated by Quintilianâs observation that Aristophanes of Byzantium and his pupil Aristarchus did not admit Apollonius of Rhodes to their canon of Greek epic poets, which included Homer, Hesiod, Antimachus, and Panyassis, because they refused to confer this honor upon any of their contemporaries.17 In this sense, the first paragraph of Quintilianâs canon, which can too easily be taken as a definitive account, states as if with programmatic intent that the canon is a living thing. The version of Aristophanes and Aristarchus that Quintilian cites implicitly assumed that future critics would evaluate the eligibility of third-century poets like Aratus, Apollonius, and Theocritus for canonization; and that is what Quintilianâfollowing others, no doubtâdoes himself. But he then goes on to justify the procedure by analogy with the Roman epic canon, reversing the lines of influence that one instinctively adopts when thinking about the relationship between the two. Thus, the very existence of a Roman canon changes the nature of the Greek one on which it was originally modeled. I do not say that Quintilian regarded his canon as merely provisional or exempli gratia, but I would maintain that, if one reads it properly, it is full of indications that he regarded even his own canon as a contextually determined intervention in an ongoing process.
Cicero lived in an age when the literary canon was especially dynamic. Bishop well summarizes the intellectual climate of those times, which was informed by different principles but dominated in large part by the idea of what she calls âclassicismâ.18 Essential to this idea were not only sometimes contrasting opinions about what authors defined as the most ancient classics, but also about which of the neoteroi deserved to be admitted into that charmed circle. At stake was the evolution of the Greek canon as well as the continuing creation of a Roman one. It is certainly true that when the youthful Cicero decided to translate Aratusâ Phaenomena as his first really ambitious literary project, he was inevitably, and audaciously, presenting himself as the Roman counterpart of arguably the most widely acclaimed Greek poet of the last two centuries. Another way of putting that would be, the most widely acclaimed poet to have written since the time when Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace drew up their canon of epic poets, from which they explicitly excluded their contemporariesâincluding Aratus. This did not prevent Aratus from earning extraordinary prestige. He was extolled, sometimes openly and sometimes with exemplary understatement, by colleagues like Theocritus, Callimachus, and Apollonius. He also became the subject of learned commentary. These are forms of what Bishop calls classicizing and what I am calling canonization. So is Ciceroâs decision to become the Roman Aratus. But that is a slightly different order of canonization, where Greek poetry is concerned, than Latin poets had practiced up to that point. When Livius Andronicus translated Homerâs Odyssey, or when any of the early tragedians adapted scripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides, or Plautus, Terence, and comic playwrights made the plays of Menander and Diphilus their own, they were repeating acts of canonization that had been performed by the Hellenistic critics.19 To choose Aratus as the model of an otherwise unprecedented Latin poem, however, amounted in effect to a twofold canonization. In the first place, it identified Aratus as one of the neoteroi who was worthy of inclusion as a classical author in the epic canon. In the second place, of course, it was a self-canonizing gesture, staking Ciceroâs claim to be the Roman equivalent of an author whose addition to the Greek canon Ciceroâs Aratea not so implicitly endorsed.
In respect of scholarship, Ciceroâs project of canonizing his model as well as himself opens up an ironic perspective. On the one hand, as Bishop writes, âIf Cicero was seeking a poem that had provoked a broad response that his adaptation might hope to mirror, he could scarcely have picked a better work than the Phaenomenaâ. This is true partly because it was, âprobably as early as the second century, already supplied with more commentaries and expository materials than any Greek poetry other than the works of Homerâ.20 I would suggest, however, that the young Cicero probably did not hope for a scholarly reception of his own work that would be too similar to that of Aratus, particularly where the genre of commentary was concerned. Our perspective may be skewed by the fact that the only complete commentary on Aratus that has survivedâindeed, the only complete commentary on any author that has survived from the Hellenistic periodâis hardly typical of the genre. It is the work of Hipparchus, an important astronomer of the second century bce, whose purpose was to inform readers about all of the obsolete information conveyed in Aratusâ Phaenomena thanks to the authorâs reliance on a treatise of the same title written by the fourth-century astronomer Eudoxus of Cnidus.21 If Hipparchusâ commentary was available to Cicero, it did not save him from reproducing some of Aratusâ scientific errors and even adding to them.22 Perhaps Cicero did not trouble himself too much about this aspect, in view of Aratusâ impressive success. It is also possible that commentary was not the genre in which Cicero envisioned his scholarly canonization as taking place. Here, in one of her most important insights, Bishop discusses the kind of learned reception that Cicero not only imagined for his poem, but that he actually modeled for his own readers when, at the end of his career, he returned to the Aratea in the late treatises De natura deorum and De divinatione.23 There he offers examples of leisurely intellectual exchange in which varied interpretive possibilities arising from Ciceroâs work are raised by cultivated readers of different philosophical orientations.
Whatever the youthful Cicero may have hoped for his poem, it seems that the more experienced writer was, if anything, less concerned than he may once have been with the status conferred by utilitarian genres like commentaries. Moreover, if this is true with regard to his poetry, it can only have been even more true of his speeches. What evidence we have suggests that Greek grammarians in the Hellenistic period devoted very little attention to prose authors and almost none at all to orators.24 In fact, it is possible that Cicero himself had never seen an actual commentary on Demosthenes or any other Attic orator. In Brutus, another of his mature works, he suggests the form that learned discussion of oratory as a genre might take. Moreover, the fact that he methodically discusses the history of Roman oratory with constant reference to the Greek precedentâin art history as well as oratory itselfâshould be understood not as the fashioning of a Roman canon according to parameters laid down by an established Greek model, but as an intervention in Greek as well as Roman canon formation. In particular, Ciceroâs promotion of Demosthenes as the greatest of the Attic orators serves his implicit but unmistakable argument that he himself occupies a similar place in Latin. It is in wide-ranging discussion among connoisseurs and indeed practitioners that these ideas are developed, not in grammatical commentaries written for students and their teachers. In fact, the more one looks into what Cicero suggests about the form of learned reception for which he hoped, the smaller the place he seems to have reserved, or even allowed, for the genre of commentary specifically.25
4 Ciceroâs Reception: the First Hundred Years
Whatever forms of scholarly reception Cicero himself envisioned for his works, the existing scholia Ciceroniana prove that commentary was one of the forms that it did in fact take. Accordingly, if someone today were asked, âWho is the Aristarchus of Ciceroâs speeches?â they could do worse than point to the speechesâ most famous commentator, Asconius Pedianus. Asconiusâ commentary did not appear until a hundred years after Ciceroâs death, though, and this raises the question of whether Asconius had any predecessors. I believe the answer is that he almost certainly did not. It is impossible to be sure, but the works of both Keeline and La Bua strongly suggest that this is the case.
Keeline and La Bua demonstrate in complementary ways that Cicero enjoyed a significant posthumous reception practically from the moment of his death and throughout the Triumviral and Julio-Claudian periods. Both also acknowledge that certain prominent voices are missing from the chorus of those who might have praised Cicero, or at least said something about him. Nevertheless, it is clear that Cicero lived on, not just in the halls of declamation as they were recalled decades after the fact by the elder Seneca, and in the closely related pages of Velleiusâ universal history and Valerius Maximusâ encyclopedia of exemplary deeds and saying.26 They lived even in the works of the younger Seneca, whose evident familiarity with Cicero must in part reflect his fatherâs preferences as well as the forces that took the son in an entirely different direction.27 At the same time, it would be difficult to say that the record attests a substantial growth in Ciceroâs posthumous reputation. To a very large extent, the orator who, according to old Seneca, inaugurated Roman declamation was himself reduced to a declamation topic; the writer whose command of historical knowledge makes him a virtual encyclopedia of exempla was himself reduced almost to a single exemplum, specifically that of his death; the philosopher whom young Seneca confessed to be the greatest that Rome had produced thus far earned that much praise but no more from the man who far surpassed him, as he threatened to surpass him in every other dimension. In the first century of his Nachleben Cicero was remembered less as a man or even as an author than as a symbol.28
When viewed against this background, the sudden appearance of Asconiusâ commentary might seem all the more to prove that he, if anyone, is the Aristarchus of Ciceroâs orations. It would be easier to grant Asconius this honor, however, if we had all of his commentary on the speeches and especially if it turned out to look more like the commentary of Ps.-Asconius. In fact, the two works look quite different. The genuine Asconius is focused almost entirely on history, whereas Ps.-Asconius is typical of the general-purpose exegetical commentaries produced by grammatici like Aristarchus.29 It is also, in the form that has come down to us, much later than Asconius. James Zetzel follows Madvig in regarding the Ps.-Asconius commentary as âpost-Servianâ.30 It goes without saying that a commentary of this period will have been almost entirely tralaticious, but this brings up a very important point.
The truth is, we have almost no idea what earlier commentaries Ps.-Asconius may be drawing on. The subtitle of Keelineâs book, âThe Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legendâ, rightly makes rhetorical education the focus of his study. Accordingly, he begins by distinguishing the concerns of the grammaticus, who supervised the lower, more elementary form of education, from those of the rhetor.31 This is pretty much the last thing Keeline has to say about the grammatical classroom. La Bua has more to say about it when he discusses Quintilianâs promotion of Cicero as a grammatical model specifically in the rhetorical schoolroom.32 As La Bua makes clear, Quintilian recommends that students who are new to the rhetorical schools read Cicero as an easy and agreeable first author who is also an impeccable model of Latinity. Strictly speaking, of course, Latinity is the province of the grammaticus. The grammar teacher must have been familiar with prose authors as well as poets, and indeed surviving grammatical commentaries on poets frequently cite prose authors as exemplars of Latin usage. All of this said, as La Bua admits, âWhether Ciceroâs orations were also read and expounded at the school of the grammaticus remains a controversial matter. Ancient evidence does not bear out the perception of Cicero as a standard author in the grammatical school.â33
The inference that I draw from this lack of evidence is that Asconiusâ commentary amounts to something of a departure from the previous reception of Ciceroâs orations and also from what had been the usual practice in previous commentaries on Latin authors. To show what I mean, I turn now to materials written for the Roman grammatical schoolroom.
5 Early Scholarship on Vergil and Other Roman Poets
Whereas Cicero evidently had to wait a hundred years before Asconius wrote what was apparently the first commentary on any of his works, Vergil became the subject of exegetical lectures either during his own lifetime or very shortly thereafter. Suetonius tells us that sometime after 27 bce the grammaticus Q. Caecilius Epirotaâa freedman of Atticus, no lessâbecame the first teacher to hold discussions in Latin and to lecture on Vergil and other ânew poetsâ.34 As Robert Kaster explains, âthe terms poetae novi/
To call such a period dynamic in respect of canon formation is an understatement. The fact that some authors, among whom Vergil is obviously the most outstanding example, succeeded brilliantly while others, such as Cinna, apparently failed to make the cut should be understood as illustrating the meaning of such dynamism in actual practice. It may be significant that Catullus, Cinnaâs close friend, never managed to gain canonical status either, at least as far as the grammarians were concerned. Indeed, Catullusâ poetry would not have survived any more than Cinnaâs if it had not been a matter of local pride in Catullusâ home town of Verona to keep a single copy of it there. For all that we number both Catullus and Cinna among the leaders of the ânew poetsâ of the first century bce, they were creatures of the Republic, and entries into the Roman canon that developed during the Augustan principate tended to be contemporary poets, not those of the previous generation. Indeed, it is not surprising that most of the grammarians I have just been discussing are tied by Suetoniusâ account to Augustus, either directly or through one of his close associates.42 In view of all this, while we lack the information we would need to describe the process in detail, it appears very likely that its net effect is not altogether different from the one that Ronald Syme describes in his influential chapter on âThe Organization of Opinionâ in The Roman Revolution, inflected perhaps by Richard Thomasâs arguments in his study of Virgil and the Augustan Reception.43 That is, Augustus and his allies not only promoted the reputation of certain contemporary poets who wrote about issues that were of interest to the regime, but also supported grammarians who themselves promoted these poets by canonizing them as authors worthy of serious study.
In such a climate, one can understand why the reception of Ciceroâs speeches failed to move along a similar trajectory, even if from a certain perspective such a thing seems as though it might have been possible. Like Catullus and Cinna, Cicero was a man of the late Republic. He was of course in so many ways a much more consequential figure; but I have already observed that the Triumviral, Augustan, and Julio-Claudian periods, even in celebrating Cicero, tended to reduce him to a cultural memeâa symbol of the death of eloquenceâinstead of treating him as a fully rounded historical figure. Where commentary is concerned, it is telling that the Augustan-era Greek grammarian Didymus Chalcenterus, not very long after Ciceroâs death, produced what became the most authoritative ancient commentary on Demosthenes.44 This might have served as a model for an ambitious Roman grammarian to write on Cicero during the same years when Caecilius Epirota and Julius Hyginus were lecturing and writing on Vergil. Indeed, it would have made sense if Caecilius himself, as a freedman of Atticus, had been drawn to this opportunity, with or without Didymusâ example. On the other hand, it may be that writing about Cicero was not seen as a shrewd career move in those years. Nor, as I have suggested, was it necessarily the precise form of scholarly reception that Cicero himself hoped to provoke, not least because there would have been nothing typical or expected about it. A grammarian who decided to write an exegetical commentary on any prose author in the time of Augustus would have been doing something unprecedented in Roman scholarship.
In the decades that immediately followed Vergilâs death, then, it seems clear that the well-established procedures of the grammaticus, both as a schoolteacher and as a scholar and writer, facilitated Vergilâs rise to a position of undisputed eminence in the Augustan and post-Augustan canon. Schools of declamation and celebration of Cicero as exemplifying the death of oratory offered no such easy route to similar acknowledgement. Eventually, however, commentaries on Cicero did begin to be written. Grammarians did come to regard him as defining the ultimate standard of Latinity. Later grammars and commentaries on all Latin authors reflect these facts, as does the existence of a diverse corpus of scholia Ciceroniana. What was it that caused ancient scholars to go beyond the typical Julio-Claudian reception of Cicero as a symbol of eloquence, and especially of the death of eloquence, so that he eventually came to define Latinity itself?
6 Some Vergilian Moments in the Julio-Claudian Reception of Cicero
The notion that Cicero, as the greatest orator in the Roman canon, defines Latinity itself, while Vergil, author of the ânational epicâ, is the greatest Roman poet, needs no illustration. Apocryphal anecdotes that circulated in later Antiquity represent this pairing of the two authors as always already true, apparent even from the beginning.45 In fact, of course, it took time for the notion to coalesce; and, as I have been suggesting, even if Cicero laid down a path to canonical status that Vergil was to follow, it was Vergilâs success in following it, abetted by official promotion under Augustusâ regime, that created conditions in which Cicero, in spite of numerous obstacles that lay in his way, ascended to a position of primacy. It is obviously impossible to prove this in detail, but I believe this perspective contains more verisimilitude than any other. In this section I consider the circumstantial evidence in its favor.
If Cicero ever seriously hoped that his speeches would find their Aristarchusâthat is, an editor and commentator of sufficient talent and ambition to establish himself as the Roman counterpart to the Greek prototype, and his subject as a Roman Homerâthen he was disappointed. As I have explained, the educational structures devoted to grammar and rhetoric, respectively, were themselves obstacles to Ciceroâs obtaining such a scholarly reception.46 By the same token, Vergilâs success in emulating Homer greatly improved his chances for achieving that kind of recognition. Nevertheless, even he did not find his Aristarchus. But he did find something almost as good, and possibly even better.
I have referred several times to Vergilâs ready acceptance of adverse criticism. It is a good thing that he had this attitude, because he seems to have got plenty of negative reviews, especially in the early period when his reputation as a canonical author was rapidly taking shape.47 Anecdotal evidence of heckling at an early recitation of the Eclogues suggests that he faced mockery right from the beginning. Learned judgment deplored his torturing of the language, his cacozelia in stretching the conventional meanings of ordinary words. These criticisms, by the way, go directly to the issue of Vergilâs Latinity. Even if not all of Vergilâs detractors were professional grammarians, it was above all the way he handled the language, in their opinion, that was at issue. That was not all, of course. A critic named Herennius collected Vergilâs âfaultsâ, a Perellius Faustus his âtheftsâ from other poets, and one Q. Octavius Avitus an eight-volume work of his âsimilaritiesâ, evidently documenting verses that Vergil had appropriated from other poets. Catalogues of parallel passages in books 5 and 6 of Macrobiusâ Saturnalia that descend from such dossiers prove that Vergil âstoleâ even-handedly from Latin as well as Greek poets. Since we do not have the words of any of these critics to explain precisely the charges on which they wished to indict Vergil, beyond a general lack of originality, we cannot say very much about that. Still, it seems impossible not to conclude that Vergilâs sheer presumption in attempting to rival not only Theocritus and then Hesiod, but even Homer himself, incurred the wrath of these literary prosecutors.
Of course, as I have noted, Vergil seems not only to have tolerated, but even to have actively provoked such criticism, especially if it reproduced adverse criticism of his Greek models for doing exactly the same thing. Suetonius recognizes the net effect when he writes, âVergil never wanted for detractors. And why not? Neither did Homerâ (obtrectatores Vergilio numquam defuerunt, nec mirum; nam nec Homero quidem, VSD 43). That is to say, by the end of the first century ce it was clear that any given element that linked Vergil to Homer corroborated his status as Homerâs Roman counterpart. I would not want to argue that the obtrectatores undertook their work with this purpose in mind, but I do think we can say that Vergil effectively laid a trap for them that worked beautifully for his own purposes, if not for theirs. Indeed, it worked so well that one of these detractors, a certain Carvilius Pictor, gave his work the titleâand thus in effect gave himself the nom de plume, or perhaps I should say nom de guerreâAeneidomastix, which he adapted from Homeromastix, âScourge of Homerâ, the sobriquet of Antiquityâs most vigorous critic of the Iliad and Odyssey, the fourth-century bce grammarian and Cynic philosopher Zoilus of Amphipolis. Thus, we can say that even if Vergil himself did not find his Aristarchus, at least he found his Zoilus; and that, perhaps, was an even greater sign of his success at becoming the Roman Homer.
Here let me advert to a comment that Bishop makes in reviewing the parallel experiences of Cicero and Vergil in ancient scholarly reception. She writes, âCiceroâs exegetical tradition among later Romans was the only one that came close to Vergilâs in its complexity and in its mimicry of the Greek exegetical traditionâ. I agree with this, having already suggested that Ciceroâs exegetical tradition is the more complex, though this may be simply a matter of how one looks at it. Bishop continues: âIn fact, only three authors acquired âscourgesâ with the suffix -mastix in antiquity, and those three were Homer, Vergil, and Cicero.â48 Now, there is nothing very surprising in the fact that Vergilâs Homeric ambitions helped him obtain a Zoilus of his own. But Cicero, to state the obvious, even if he does call Atticus the Aristarchus of his speeches, did not really aspire to a specifically Homeric form of recognition. How, then, did he come to be afflicted with a quasi-Homeric Ciceromastix?
We know a bit more about the author of this work than we do about any of Vergilâs obtrectatores. Licinus Larcius was the âfirst orator to seek fame in the centumviral courtâ. Later in his career, as iuridicus of Hispania Tarraconensis in 73/74 ce, he âunsuccessfully offered the elder Pliny, then procurator, 400,000 sesterces for his notebooksâ.49 These few moments in the spotlight of ancient history suggest that Larcius was something of a buffoonish opportunist, and a not very original thinker. It seems unlikely that it was he who got the idea of appointing himself as a Roman Zoilus so that he could excoriate Cicero, and much more likely that he was following the lead of Vergilâs detractors. Since Larcius died while holding this office, we have a terminus ante quem for the writing of Ciceromastix. If Jerome is correct, Asconius died in 76 and thus outlived Larcius by just two years, having lost his eyesight in 64.50 On this dating, Asconius was born in about 9 bce, and since it is very unlikely that Larcius was in his eighties while serving in Spain, Asconius was probably much older than he. I mention these details about Asconius because it seems likely that his most famous and influential work, apart from his commentary on Cicero, bore the title Against Vergilâs Detractors (Contra obtrectatores Vergili).51 Although it was lost, traces of it survive in passages of Serviusâ commentary that defend Vergil against hostile critics. Again, it seems unlikely that Carvilius Pictor wrote after Asconiusâ successful rebuttal of Vergilâs detractors and much more likely that he was one of Asconiusâ targets. A fortiori, it seems unlikely that it was Larcius who inspired the unknown author of Aeneidomastix to fashion himself as a second Roman Zoilus, and much more likely that the converse is true. It also stretches credulity to assume that Larcius flaunted his obtrectatio of Cicero after Asconius had rebuked the Vergilian prototypes.
It is certainly suggestive that Asconius made such important contributions to both Vergilian and Ciceronian scholarship during this period. I do not have space to pursue this matter other than to sound a note of caution. As I noted earlier, Asconiusâ commentary on Cicero looks nothing like almost any ancient Vergilian commentary that we know.52 It is not a grammatical or more generally exegetical commentary, but is focused almost entirely on history and rhetoric.53 I am not aware of any specific element that Asconius might owe to previous Vergilian commentators; but there may be one general consideration. As I have noted, Asconius is the first commentator on Cicero of whom we know. Is it possible that he was inspired by the wealth of scholarly activity being devoted to Vergil to adapt some of the characteristic forms to promote Ciceroâs standing in the canon of Latin literature, which was still characterized by dynamism, but in a way that threatened to leave Cicero behind? If so, then his commentary, different as it is from what we think of as the standard grammatical and exegetical type, may deserve more consideration than it usually receives simply as the first Latin commentary, and one of the few produced in Antiquity, on any Latin prose author.
7 Kinds of Commentaries on Different Literary Genres
Here perhaps a broader focus will be helpful. James Zetzel, in his bibliographic guide to ancient scholarship in Latin, organizes his presentation by scholarly genre, beginning with dictionaries and encyclopedias and moving on to commentaries and then grammars. Among commentaries he confines himself to those that actually survive in whatever form, whether more or less intact, like Asconius and Servius, or as scholia in medieval manuscripts. The canonical authors in question, besides Cicero and Vergil, include Terence, Horace, Ovid, Germanicus, Persius, Lucan, Statius, and Juvenal: all but Cicero are poets. Cicero is the only prose author. Even so, it is worth noting that commentaries on poets are not confined to grammatical and exegetical works. Ovid is a case in point.54 Germanicus is another exception.55 Horace is particularly interesting, in a number of ways.
I have saved Horace for last because he is a useful comparandum to Asconius. Above all, the peculiarity of Horaceâs poetic corpus called for a very different sort of commentary than those written on Vergil in particular. Especially pertinent here is that Horace addresses or mentions a very significant number of historical individuals. This is simply not as important a factor in Vergil. Horace commentaries must explain these references, and that of Porphyrio twice (in Serm. 1.3.21 and 90â91) refers to scholars of Horatian prosopography (qui de personis Horatianis scripserunt). As Zetzel notes, âWe cannot date those writers (if the plural is not simply exaggeration), but they are probably also [i.e. like the aforementioned contemporaries of Martial] relatively early: it does not take long (witness Asconius on Cicero) for knowledge of historical facts and persons to fade, particularly in the minds of schoolchildrenâ.56
Zetzelâs mention of Asconius in this context strikes me as apt both in the specific way that I believe Zetzel intends and also as an illustration of a point similar to one he makes about the substantial amount of overlap one finds between works devoted to grammar and those devoted to rhetoric. I will return to this point immediately below. By the same token, we see here that there is an overlap between grammar and what we may call history. Horace was a poet and he was taught in grammar schools, even if not to anything like the extent that Vergil and Terence were. Commentaries on his poetry, which abound in the names of historical personages, look a good deal more like Asconiusâ commentary on Cicero than any Vergil commentary does. Furthermore, as Zetzel notes, even if Horace did not occupy the central position in the curriculum that Vergil enjoyed, âhe was obviously read and studied with considerable care, and the interpretive tradition, if we cannot trace it back to Horaceâs lifetime as we can in the case of Virgil, certainly begins no later than the middle of the first century ceââabout the same time when Asconius writes his commentary on Cicero.57
8 Some Conclusions
I began this paper by recalling two inferences that I had drawn from previous research on Vergilâs use of Greek scholarship and the influence of that same scholarship in Vergilian commentaries. In regard to the first instance, that Vergilâs own use of Greek scholarship played a much more than utilitarian role in his adopting the personae of Theocritus and Homer, I remarked that Bishopâs work on Cicero had convinced me all the more that this inference is correct and also that Ciceroâs example probably had a direct influence on Vergilâs program of authorial self-fashioning. My second inference was that Vergilâs own use of Greek scholarship provoked his critics to comment on his poetry in much the same way as Greek critics had commented on Homer and Theocritus, even to the point of using language that looks as if it had been drawn from a commentary on those authors. With regard to that inference, I asked whether something similar could be true of Cicero and his commentators. I have not considered the very real positive indications that this is true, because these are considered elsewhere in this volume.58 Instead, I have focused on the considerable differences between the early reception of Cicero and that of Vergil, which seem to me to indicate that Vergil, even if he followed Cicero in his use of Greek scholarship on his literary models, was more immediately successful in calling into being an exegetical tradition like theirs that was devoted to his own works. Eventually, Cicero also succeeded in this; but, surprisingly perhaps, there appear to be some indications that the direction of influence that seems likely in the careers of these two authors became reversed during their Julio-Claudian reception, so that Ciceronian scholarship mimicked Vergilian scholarship in certain ways. Whether this mimicry extends to the production of the first commentary on Cicero, written by a scholar who had defended Vergil against his detractors, is an open question, but one that seems at least worth asking.
A final point on the relationship between grammar and rhetoric also seems worth making. The focus of my work on the Vergilian tradition has been grammatical commentary, and especially on the sources, including the earliest and most distant ones, that fed into Serviusâ commentary. As I have noted, this sort of commentary looks very little like that of Asconius on Cicero, so that the two traditions appear to be quite incompatible. Comparison between the two would be much easier if instead of Servius and his predecessors had produced works more like that of Tiberius Claudius Donatus.59 Exploitation of the material offered by Donatus would involve another project, which I am convinced would be worthwhile. By way of closing, however, I would like to make just a few points to follow up on those I have made so far.
First, if the grammatical tradition acted upon the rhetorical tradition in the case of Cicero, then after Quintilianâs intervention it appears that the converse started to be true of Vergil. Not that this was Quintilianâs goal, or at least, not all of it. I think one can assume that he wanted to promote Cicero as the standard of Latinity in all forms of writing, but I donât believe that he wanted all poets to write as if they were orators.60 But it would not be long before Vergil too came to be evaluated as an orator, just as much as or even more than as a poet. The process may have begun long before Quintilian. Certainly, there is an abundance of rhetorical exegesis in Serviusâ commentary, although little of it takes into account the sort of thing one finds in the Bobbio scholia or those of Gronovius among the scholia Ciceroniana. It was apparently not too long after Quintilianâs time that the work of the mysterious Florus came to light, but Michiel Verweij has emphasized the novelistic elements of this work,61 so that there is no reason that it should have been composed soon after its dramatic date in the time of Domitian. Moreover, since Vergilâs name, after the title, does not appear in what we have of this work, we canât say anything about how it answered the question, Vergilius, orator an poeta? But I think we should assume that this became a perennial question. In their useful anthology of Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter emphasize this aspect of Donatusâ work, writing as follows:
It is Tib. Claudius Donatusâ thesis that the whole poem [i.e. the Aeneid] has one purpose, the praise of Aeneas, and through him of Augustus. From this perspective, the poem belongs to the genus laudativum [a category, obviously, of epideictic rhetoric] and hence Tib. Claudius Donatus defends the claim that the interpretation of Virgil belongs to the domain of the rhetorician rather than the grammarian. In this way the Aeneid becomes part of a much larger and longer tradition of competition between the language disciplines, with participants registering anxieties about the boundaries and legitimate domain of each. This instance of such competition is of particular interest for the history of literary theory, in that what is at stake is who gets to speak authoritatively about the literary domain.62
This seems to me a fitting point on which to conclude. If I were to describe the general purpose of my investigations, I could do no better than to borrow the words of Copeland and Sluiter to call it an investigation of the âanxieties about the boundaries and legitimate domainâ of grammar and rhetoric in Antiquity, and also of our own understanding of the two disciplines, the relationship between them, and what kind of authority they exercised over those authoritiesâthe authors themselvesâin whom the authority of language itself was in some sense enshrined. It was obviously a circular relationship, with authors and critics depending on one another for their own reputations, and grammarians and rhetoricians sometimes borrowing from one another, sometimes arguing with one another. It is a bit fanciful to characterize the relationship between Cicero and Vergil in this way as well, as one in which one author inspires the other, who then challenges him for supremacy in the pantheon of Latin auctores, until eventually each defines his own place in the canon in such a way that they can be seen from the perspective of later ages as being in a complementary or a competitive relationship, perhaps for all time. But perhaps there is some truth in that, after all.
See Farrell 2008 and 2016. I do not investigate the Georgics from this angle beyond a few observations in Farrell 1991. A preliminary investigation of the scholia to Apolloniusâ Argonautica (Farrell 2017) yielded some promising results which I hope to develop at some point.âAll translations in this chapter are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
This is the principal concern of Schlunk 1974; further developments in Schmit-Neuerburg 1999.
Casali 2004.
Casali 2004; Farrell 2016 and 2021, 66â74.
It is possible that Vergilâs earlier works had become the subject of lectures while he was at work on the Aeneid: see below on Q. Caecilius Epirota. If this is so, then criticism of the earlier works may have helped him understand how to provoke specific reactions from critics of the epic.
Fraenkel 1949; Mühmelt 1965.
See below on Zoilus of Amphipolis and his Roman imitators. On the relationship between Serviusâ comment on arma at Aen. 1.1 and the Iliad scholia see Farrell 2008, 119â120 and 2021, 42â43.
Bishop 2019.
Keeline 2018; La Bua 2019.
Shackleton Bailey 1965, 308 ad loc. The phrase senatus consultum ultimum was later coined by Caesar (Civ. 1.5.3) with immediate reference to the decree passed against him on January 7, 49 bce, while also characterizing it as the latest in a series of extreme measures passed by the senate, beginning with one authorizing the consul L. Opimius to take whatever measures he deemed necessary against the followers of C. Gracchus in 121. On the history of the senatus consultum ultimum with particular reference to Cicero see Drummond 1995.
Att. 1.14.3: Crassus, postea quam vidit illum excepisse laudem ex eo quod [hi] suspicarentur homines ei consulatum meum placere, surrexit ornatissimeque de meo consulatu locutus est, ut ita diceret, se quod esset senator, quod civis, quod liber, quod viveret, mihi acceptum referre; quotiens coniugem, quotiens domum, quotiens patriam videret, totiens se beneficium meum videre. quid multa? totum hunc locum, quem ego varie meis orationibus, quarum tu Aristarchus es, soleo pingere, de flamma, de ferro (nosti illas
Sen. Suas. 7 with Feddern 2013 ad loc.; see Kaster 1998; DeglâInnocenti Pierini 2003; Keeline 2018.
This is the main point of Brutus above all; see Bishop 2019, 197â206.
Cicero seems to have had more than a passing interest in Aristarchus, whom he mentions in three additional passages (Pis. 73; Fam. 3.11.5, 9.10.1).
On the mutual implication of Aristarchusâ prestige with that of Homer see Schironi 2018, 30.
Phillips 1986.
Quint. Inst. 10.1.46â54. But does Quintilianâs comment on Panyassis explain why he is to be included in the canon or excluded from it? Panyassis (10.1.53) is followed by Apollonius, Aratus, Theocritus, Pisander, and Euphorion (10.1.54â56), all of whom except Pisander (sixth century bce) were active in the third century bce but before Aristophanes and Aristarchus. Whether Quintilianâs reference to Apollonius as sui temporis with reference to the two grammarians is a close rendering of their stated policy or a reflection of Quintilianâs approximate understanding of the chronology is unclear. See Stachon 2017.
Bishop 2019, 7â16.
Here one might ask about Greek authors who are not known to have been canonized but whose work was adapted by Roman poets. Does this practice suggest that the Romans were not too concerned with canonical status, that the Greek canon was evolving even as the Romans used it as the basis of their own, or even that Roman adaptation was an attempt to intervene in the process of Greek as well as Roman canon formation?
Bishop 2019, 42.
Ibid., 61â64.
Ibid., 70â71 n. 96.
Ibid., 259â310, especially 275â298.
Schironi 2018, 30.
At Brut. 57â61, where Cicero quotes Enniusâ Annals to prove that that the Romans recognized oratorical excellence at the time of the Second Punic War, he takes pains to avoid sounding too much like a professional scholar (e.g. est igitur sic apud illum in nono, ut opinor, annali, 58); shortly thereafter, in developing the key point that in oratory as in poetry a writer or speaker is to be judged by the standards of his own time, and not in comparison to later, more refined ages, he turns from discussing Enniusâ disparagement of Naeviusâ Bellum Poenicum to apostrophizing Ennius and chastising him for such an attitude (âscripsereâ inquit âalii rem vorsibusâ; et luculente quidem scripserunt, etiam si minus quam tu polite. nec vero tibi aliter videri debet, qui a Naevio vel sumpsisti multa, si fateris, vel, si negas, surripuisti, 76). By the same token, although the main ideas in Brutus are presented almost entirely in Ciceroâs voice, note the important interpellation at 292, where Atticus notes that he has been restraining himself from interrupting for a long time, and opens up the possibility that Ciceroâs entire discourse is to be taken as ironic. Elements like these suggest that cultivated discussion among notional equals, even if one of them surpasses the others in his command of the subject at hand, seems to be Ciceroâs preferred form of âcommentaryâ.
See DeglâInnocenti Pierini 2003.
Keeline 2018, 196â222.
Quint. Inst. 10.1.112: Cicero iam non hominis nomen sed eloquentiae (âCicero is now the name not of a person but of eloquenceâ); again see Kaster 1998.
Zetzel 2018, 259 characterizes Ps.-Asconius as âlargely exegetical and grammaticalâ. On Asconiusâ working methods, see Keeline in this volume.
Zetzel 2018, 259; he also notes that âGessnerâs more specific suggestion that Ps.-Asconius was a pupil of Serviusââpresumably because the commentary is constructed on lines broadly similar to that of Serviusââis unnecessaryâ; see also Zetzel 2018, 144.
Keeline 2018, 13â14.
La Bua 2019, 131â132.
Ibid., 131, citing Pugliarello 2009 and De Paolis 2013 for the full list of auctores taught in grammar schools.
Suet. Gram. 16.
Kaster 1995, 187â188.
Kaster (see the preceding note) cautions that one should not read too much into Caeciliusâ curricular innovations, and he is right of course. Caecilius had no locus standi outside of his own classroom, and he presumably had no influence at all over Augustan policy, particularly in the wake of his antics with Pomponia and his friendship with Cornelius Gallus as described by Suetonius at Gram. 16.1â2.
Meliadò 2015.
Keeline 2009.
Suet. Gram. 20.
Kaster 1995, 200.
See Schwameis in this volume on Ps.-Asconiusâ self-fashioning.
Section 21 concerns C. Melissus, whom Maecenas introduced to Augustus, who placed him in charge of the libraries in the Porticus Octaviae; section 22 concerns M. Pomponius Porcellus and 23 Q. Remmius Palaemon, both of whom seem to have been closely connected to Tiberius.
Syme 1939, 459â475; Thomas 2001.
See Gibson 2002, 51â75, and Bishop in this volume.
See the (totally anachronistic) story told in the Vita Donati aucti 41 in which Cicero reacted to a recitation of the Eclogues by hailing Vergil âthe second hope of great Romeâ (magnae spes altera Romae).
Another way of looking at the situation, as Christoph Pieper suggests to me, is that Cicero effectively became his own Aristarchus, for instance in the case of Pro Milone, âwhere he âcorrectsâ the bad speech with the publication of an ideal oneâ.
For what follows see chapters 43â46 of the Vita Vergili Donatiana (VSD), which is generally regarded as deriving almost verbatim from Suetonius; see also Barchiesi 2004.
Bishop 2019, 309.
Holford-Strevens s.v. Larcius Licinius in OCD3, with further bibliography. For the title Ciceromastix see Gel. 17.1.1.
Hier. Chron. 76; but see Keeline in this volume, pp. 43â44, on the limits of Jeromeâs reliability on biographical information.
VSD 43.
See however below on Ti. Claudius Donatus.
See Keeline in this volume on his working methods.
Zetzel 2018, 268: âHe is rarely quoted by grammarians before the sixth century, and the extant commentaries themselves very definitely do not belong in an educational contextâ.
Ibid., 269: ââ¯âScholia to Germanicusâ is the customary name for several related astronomical texts that are in fact not commentaries on Germanicusâ translation of Aratusâ Phaenomena, but discussions of the constellations, derived (at some remove) from the Catasterismoi ascribed to the Alexandrian scholar Eratosthenes and possibly derived (again, at some remove) from a text actually by Eratosthenesâ.
Ibid., 150â151.
Ibid., 149.
See in particular Bishop in this volume.
I am grateful to Dennis Pausch and Bram van der Velden for discussion of this point.
In his comments about Latin epic poetry, for instance, he even writes, âLucan [is] ardent, passionate, particularly distinguished for his sententiae, and (if I may say what I think) more to be imitated by orators than by poetsâ (Lucanus ardens et concitatus et sententiis clarissimus et, ut dicam quod sentio, magis oratoribus quam poetis imitandus, Inst. 10.1.90).
Cf. Verweij 2015.
Copeland and Sluiter 2009, 141.
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