Cicero's De fato 35 forms part of Cicero's argument against the Stoic doctrine of causality. There is, however, no consensus as to how the passage should be interpreted or, if necessary, emended. It may therefore be worth renewed examination. In Ax's edition it reads as follows:
ex hoc genere illud est Enni,
utinam ne in nemore Pelio securibus
caesae accidissent abiegnae ad terram trabes!
licuit uel altius, ‘utinam ne in Pelio nata ulla umquam esset arbor!’, etiam supra, ‘utinam ne esset mons ullus Pelius!’ similiterque superiora repetentem regredi infinite licet,
neue inde nauis inchoandi exordium
cepisset.
quorsum haec praeterita? quia sequitur illud,
nam numquam era errans mea domo ecferret pedem
Medea, animo aegro, amore saeuo saucia,
non ut eae res causam adferrent amoris.Footnote 1
In the final lines the train of thought remains unclear in spite of various attempts at explanation and/or emendation, of which I will discuss the ones that seem most notable.
Cicero holds (after Carneades) that there are two types of causes, antecedent and efficient causes, and that the causal chain posited by the Stoa that results in all-controlling fate consists of antecedent but not efficient causes. To illustrate the distinction, he cites and dilates on verses from the Nurse's opening monologue in Ennius’ Medea exul (lines 208–11, 215–16 Jocelyn = FRL 2 and TRF 89.1–4, 89.8–9). The introductory words ex hoc genere connect the speech of the Nurse with examples just cited of causes that preceded but were not the efficient causes of certain events, including Hecuba's giving birth to Alexandros/Paris in relation to the deaths of Trojans (§34). The problem lies in determining the relation of the question quorsum haec praeterita [sc. pertinent or the like]? to the following quia sequitur illud … non ut eae res causam adferrent amoris. Lambin posited a lacuna before non ut eae res …,Footnote 2 but one should exhaust all other possibilities before resorting to such a remedy.
Retaining the transmitted text, Stüve proposed that sequitur be taken to refer to temporal sequence. According to him, Cicero claims that the description of Medea's state in the following verses was simply after the events previously mentioned and that they were not adduced as a cause.Footnote 3 But this mistakes the formula that Cicero uses when he is citing several items in sequence.Footnote 4 sequitur means ‘follows’ but in the sense ‘follows in the text of Ennius’. One might also wonder why the Nurse wished that those events had never occurred if she did not see them as in some sense a cause for the present predicament.Footnote 5
Weidemann also retains the transmitted text: taking quia sequitur illud … as the answer to the question quorsum haec praeterita? he translates: ‘Worauf zielen (die Verse, in denen er auf) diese vergangenen Ereignisse zurückgreift? (Er hat sie) mit Rücksicht darauf (geschrieben), daß (auf sie) die Verse folgen: “Denn nie wäre irrend meine Herrin durchgebrannt …”, nicht etwa in der Absicht, daß die (in ihnen) erwähnten Ereignisse die Ursache für die Liebe (der Medea) angeben sollten.’Footnote 6 But this is to create a blatant contradiction, since Ennius’ verses themselves say that without the prior named events Medea would not be in her present state of lovesickness.
On the other hand, Schäublin sees sequitur illud … and ut eae res causam adferrent amoris as alternative possibilities for answering the question quorsum haec praeterita? and proposes accordingly to replace non with an and punctuate with a query after amoris. Footnote 7 But this perhaps misconceives the relation of ideas: Medea's current state of mind as described in the quoted verses (animo aegro, amore saeuo saucia) is not an alternative to the preceding factors having caused her love.Footnote 8
Perhaps the needed clarification can be provided by attaching -ne to non (ne can easily have dropped out between n and u) and adding a query after amoris:
quorsum haec praeterita? quia sequitur illud,
nam numquam era errans mea domo ecferret pedem
Medea, animo aegro, amore saeuo saucia,
non<ne> ut eae res causam adferrent amoris?
The thought will thus be: ‘To what end (are) these past events (cited)? In view of the following “for my wandering mistress Medea would never have set foot out of the house, sick at heart, smitten by cruel love”, is it not so that those factors would bring on the cause of love?’,Footnote 9 that is, the Nurse wishes the named events had not happened, since she views them as the cause of Medea's present lovesickness. For Cicero, however, this is an example of antecedent events that were not efficient causes (and hence, in his view, not causes in the true sense), merely necessary conditions. The Stoics’ causes, then, are subtly undercut as the kinds of causes that the Nurse cites, just as in De diuinatione Book 2 the Stoics are repeatedly criticized for the kind of superstitious thinking that the speaker associates with old women.Footnote 10 Hence in the sequel he draws this conclusion: nulla igitur earum est causa, quoniam nulla eam rem sua ui efficit cuius causa dicitur (Fat. 36).Footnote 11
Careful consideration of Cicero's practices in citation as well as of the relation of the Ennian quotations to the tenor of Cicero's overall argument shows that a plausible sense can be achieved by a relatively modest intervention in the transmitted text of Fat. 35.
