In terms of focus and approach, these two edited collections neatly complement each other: if the Cambridge Companion to Cicero places a special emphasis on the textual Cicero (without, of course, neglecting the wider historical parameters within which his sprawling oeuvre came into being), Community and Communication is primarily concerned with political context (though it remains attuned to source-critical issues, not least those to do with the way in which Cicero — often unhelpfully — dominates our available data). In each case, the line-up of contributors reads like a ‘Who's Who’ in scholarship on Cicero and the late Roman Republic, though Community and Communication, while featuring its share of usual suspects, also gives significant space to the up and coming. Both volumes are landmark publications, each in its own way.
The Companion opens with a superb introduction by the editor, who has established herself over the last decade or so as one of the most original and prolific scholars of Cicero and the political culture of Republican Rome. Here she takes a minimum of space to survey Cicero's career with maximum perspicacity. Three parts follow, respectively entitled ‘The Greco-Roman Intellectual’, ‘The Roman Politician’ and ‘Receptions of Cicero’. Cicero himself would presumably have winced at the first, with ‘intellectual’ conjuring Caesar's slur that he was essentially a Graeculus with a gift for gab, a uir non uere Romanus. And some scholars would argue that his impact as a Roman politician (and not just on the history of thought) derived anyway in large part from his special talents and training in oratory and philosophy. In the volume too, the boundaries between the two parts effectively blur, as a quick run through the titles indicates. Part I contains pieces on ‘Cicero and the intellectual milieu of the late Republic’ (A. Corbeill), ‘Cicero's rhetorical theory’ (J. Dugan), ‘Writing philosophy’ (M. Schofield), ‘Cicero's poetry’ (E. Gee), ‘The law in Cicero's writings’ (J. Harries) and ‘Cicero and Roman identity’ (E. Dench). Part II follows up with ‘The political impact of Cicero's speeches’ (A. Vasaly), ‘Cicero, oratory and public life’ (Steel), ‘Cicero, tradition and performance’ (A. Bell), ‘Political philosophy’ (J. E. G. Zetzel), ‘Writer and addressee in Cicero's letters’ (R. Morello) and ‘Cicero and political crisis’ (J. Hall). The obligatory section on reception proceeds rather more prosaically from the Imperial period (A. M. Gowing) to Late Antiquity (S. MacCormack), the Renaissance (D. Marsh), the Enlightenment (M. Fox), the nineteenth century (N. P. Cole) and the twentieth/twenty-first century (L. S. Fotheringham). Overall — with the notable exception of MacCormack's tour de force (an impressive intellectual testament of forty-two pages, posthumously published: the volume is dedicated to the memory of this extraordinary scholar) — the section on reception does not quite reach the degree of nuanced coverage and compelling insight achieved by most of the ‘classical’ contributions, with the Renaissance-Cicero, weighing in at a mere twelve pages, being particularly slim and uninspired.
Many of the authors put personal hobby-horses through their paces, which causes the occasional (yet entirely agreeable) déjà vu; outright recycling is rare and limited to specific sections. There is only one dud (Bell's inconsequential musings on tradition and performance); most of the other chapters are well worth reading by students and scholars alike; and some are truly outstanding. My personal favourite was Powell's chapter on Cicero's style, which offers an exemplary treatment of a difficult subject and displays an impressive thoughtfulness often lacking in the perfunctory scholarship that tends to characterize companion-pieces. For example: Powell always cites the available translation which best reproduces the stylistic qualities of Cicero's Latin in English. (Unsurprisingly, the name of Dominic Berry figures prominently.) Translating Cicero, it thus emerges en passant, is an art form in itself — a point that flags up a gap not only in this, but almost any of the Cambridge Companions to classical authors: a chapter devoted specifically to translations, given that translation is the medium in which most users of these volumes will, in one way or another, encounter the Greek and Latin texts. Overall, the Companion succeeds in offering a rich, sophisticated and coherent survey of Cicero's oeuvre, including its genealogy and historical context, political and philosophical thrust, and resonance down the ages.
By contrast to the well-orchestrated Companion, where virtually everyone sings from the same hymn sheet, Community and Communication features an unwieldy assemblage of (frequently discordant) voices. While almost all of the papers are worth reading in their own right, the collection, which arises from the conference ‘Oratory and Politics in the Roman Republic’ (Oxford, 2010), illustrates the principle that the intellectual punch and profile of proceedings tend to correlate with the number of delivered papers quietly shed on the way to publication. The decision to be inclusive rather than selective, coupled with a nondescript introduction, runs the danger of obfuscating several novel and important agendas afoot in the volume.
Most significantly, the collection heralds a long-overdue broadening in scholarly focus, captured in the move from the subtitle ‘oratory and politics’, which evokes the ongoing but increasingly hackneyed debate over the rôle of the people in Roman Republican politics, to the main title: the much wider and heuristically fertile categories of ‘communication’ and ‘community’. If the first three papers in Part I: ‘Citizens, Speech, and the Roman Res Publica’ (K.-J. Hölkeskamp on addressing the Roman people and the rhetoric of inclusion, R. Morstein-Marx on the (lack of) cultural hegemony of the Roman élite, and M. Jehne on the significance of senatorial public oratory) revisit ground familiar from the debate over ‘democracy in Rome?’, with a focus on public speech and the modes of interaction between the élite and the people in the civic spaces of the city, the fourth and final paper by H. Mouritsen (‘From meeting to text: the contio in the late Republic’) signals a welcome departure into rather less well-charted territory. Mouritsen explores the shifts in audience, purpose and meaning that ensue when the focus falls on the circulation of written texts and emphasizes that factors other than open deliberation in a civic context proved important in determining the outcome of a proposal, such as oral and written propaganda, negotiations behind the scenes or the threat of tribunician veto. In the decent obscurity of footnote 73, he even dares to question ‘the key decision-making role of the contio’ in what amounts to a quasi-heretical challenge to the view of the editors (and much recent scholarship) that contiones were ‘in practice, the location of decision-making’ (2). Ultimately, he ends up playing down, at least in part, the significance of public oratory in Roman Republican politics and draws attention to the workings of power in a range of contexts and settings that complement what Cicero famously called the oratoris maxima scena.
Other contributors follow suit. A unifying factor of many papers in Parts II (‘Strategy and Tactics in Public Speech’) and IV (‘Romans and Non-Romans’) is a determined effort to look ‘beyond the contio’ — as H. Flower programmatically puts it in the title of her paper on T. Gracchus, in which she foregrounds the importance of socio-political networks. A. Russell likewise defies routine in exploring the distinct political choices of a number of tribunes, who elsewhere often lose their individuality by being turned into representatives of a popular ideology, beholden to a narrow set of political principles. J. Tan on Clodius, both within and beyond the boundaries of the contio, and W. J. Tatum on campaign rhetoric equally branch out — as do the three contributions in Part IV, which place Roman domestic politics within the wider horizon of international relations: E. T. Pagola looks at the speech of the Roman ambassador, F. Pina Polo at ‘foreign eloquence in the Roman senate’, and J. Prag at ‘Provincials, patrons, and the rhetoric of repetundae’. Prag judiciously questions Cicero's portrayal of the repetundae court as a ‘citadel of the allies’ and underscores more generally the increasing importance of provincial clientela as Rome extended its imperial reach. In all, by focusing on media of communication other than public speech and exploring modes of socio-political affiliations that operate alongside the interactions between members of the élite and the people, these papers offer a recalibration of the sources and the circulation of power in Republican Rome that puts critical pressure on, or at least complicates, current orthodoxies.
The second main agenda pursued in the volume concerns the re-assessment of non-Ciceronian oratory. S. herself here issues the keynote in the last paper of Part II (‘Pompeius, Helvius Mancia and the politics of public debate’) with a probing look at ‘one of the longer surviving passages of non-Ciceronian speech from the Republic’ (158): Mancia's abuse of Pompey as transmitted in Valerius Maximus 6.2.8. The thread continues in Part V: ‘Cicero's Rivals’, where the spotlight falls on other orators who were unable to immortalize their eloquence in the same way as Cicero: the Scribonii Curiones (C. R. López), Piso Caesonius (H. van der Blom), Marcus Junius Brutus (A. Balbo) and Mark Antony (T. Mahy). Not least, this set of papers whets the appetite for the forthcoming re-edition of the fragments of Roman Republican oratory, an ambitious, ERC-funded project currently masterminded by S. at the University of Glasgow.
In Part III: ‘Judgements and Criticisms’, which stands a bit apart from the rest, J. Wisse is in his usual stellar form in an illuminating look at the ‘bad orator’, V. Arena explores how rhetorical treatises of the time conceived of the relation between orator and audience, and J. Dugan offers a subtle reading of Cicero's Pro Marcello.
If shortcomings in design mean that the volume as a whole struggles a bit to be more than the sum of its parts, that sum is still very high indeed. This reviewer at least would not be surprised if the emphasis on different modes of community, diverse media of political communication and non-Ciceronian oratory were to prove trend-setting for future research.
