Ryan Warwick (Johns Hopkins University)
Admonitores non nimis verecundi: Personification and Personhood in Cicero’s Letters
In a letter from July of 45 BCE, Cicero sends a copy of his philosophical dialogue the Academica to Varro, its dedicatee. In presenting his work, Cicero quips that its four volumes will act as admonitores “reminders.” This is a pun on monitor, “minder,” an enslaved worker who performed a number of tasks, from farm overseer, to teacher, to literary assistant. Cicero says his books, as admonitores, will “demand, (though [he] instruct[s] them only to ask)” Varro for a dedicated work in return (Ad Fam. 9.8.1). Recent studies of Cicero’s correspondence (White, 2010; Wilcox 2012) emphasize the role that the material form of his letters played in the relationships they facilitated. These books that talk—and talk too much—literalize the complex forms that agency could take in the literary culture of the period. The message conveyed by Cicero in a given letter was triangulated through several intermediaries such as scribes, clients, or even, as here, the page itself. Reading these intermediaries as agents, co-authors who leave some mark on the text of the letters, opens up possibilities for interpreting Cicero’s letters as an archive cataloging the boundaries of ancient personhood.
For classicists, who often deal with works attributed to an individual author, the categories of personhood that delineate the voices on the page might seem unproblematic. However, some scholars have begun to question what defines a person in the ancient world (Gill 2006; Graham 2009; cf. Fowler 2004, Raunig 2016). In particular, Sean Gurd shows that, for literati of the Roman Republic, the text that seems to spring from the mind of a single author was the product of multiple collaborators, who used literature, as well as its revision and performance, to negotiate their collective identity (Gurd, 2011). Each literary work, in Gurd’s view, is an open forum in a written republic. This talk applies his conclusions drawn from literary texts to Cicero’s letters. These letters, which have frequently been read as a record of Cicero’s identity as an individual, allow me to interrogate the possibilities and limits of the extensible self in the Roman world beyond the realm of elite literary competition.
As Cicero’s letter to Varro makes clear, in the written republic, texts could be people too, endowed with a kind of agency all their own. By drawing on the language of Roman slavery for his personification, however, Cicero hints that the agency of objects allows him to gloss over a much less egalitarian collective than the one that Gurd describes: the groups of enslaved workers that assisted in its production. Roman personhood was extensible, encompassing collaborators and even objects, but what are we to make of individuals who might not have wanted to be part of Cicero’s extensible self? In Ad Familiares 13.77, Cicero writes complaining that one of his enslaved library workers escaped with a good portion of his library in tow. This flight is a rare glimpse at the alternative to inclusion within extensible personhood, an alternative that amounts to escape from Rome itself.