Andres Matlock (Santa Clara University)
From the vantage of the Lucullus, written in early 45 BCE, the end of the Platonic Academy no less than the demise of the Republic threatens the termination of two historical traditions with which Cicero identifies strongly. As he is writing in the midst of personal desuetude and social breakdown, Cicero “cross-pollinates” these failing lineages in order to locate himself and his work in relation to the traditions of the past, and, more importantly, to develop a new genealogical mode for an uncertain future.
I focus on a well-studied, yet still controversial genealogical locus in the Lucullus (Luc. 13–18; cf. 72–76 and 142–46). Arguing from an “Old” Academic position, the eponymous speaker attacks the construction of Cicero’s “New” Academic lineage: “in citing the early physicists, what you are doing…seems to me to be exactly what seditious citizens do when they list famous men from the past, trying to represent them as populists (populares) in order to make themselves look like them (eorum ipsi similes videantur).” He goes on to juxtapose the deleterious political effect of these “seditious citizens,” such as Publius Valerius, the Gracchi, and Marius, with the philosophical provocations of Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Parmenides. Lucullus’ resistance to the skeptical Academy is expressed using the terminology of Republican conflict between populares and optimates. Yet more than differences of practice, doctrine, or ideology, Lucullus takes aim at the application of genealogical method. In opposition to the New Academy’s imitation of pre-Socratic models, Lucullus prefers to construct his favored lineages—Antiochus’ “Old” Academy and the conservative political history of Roman optimates—according to a process of evolution and paternal inheritance, an unbroken chain leading from one generation into the next (see 15; cf. Arist. Met. 983a–987a).
Although it has received significant attention from scholars (e.g., Brittain and Palmer 2001; Robb 2010; Cappello 2019: 133–142), Lucullus’ comparison has yet to be considered for what it is most immediately: an exercise in genealogy that emerges from Cicero’s deep concerns about chronology, memorialization, and the exhaustion of the past (cf., e.g., Brut. 60 or 72–73 with Culham 1989). I therefore examine the analogy between the skepticism of the New Academy and the reformism of the populares in light of Cicero’s desire to establish a new genealogical principle capable of transcending the generational crisis of his present. Unlike the evolutionary mode of relation favored by Lucullus, the affinitive imitation that functions as the criterion for inclusion in the skeptical/populares lineages (eorum ipsi similes videantur) opens a space of possibility for a future that participates in past tradition but is not determined by it (on “elective affinity” in genealogy more broadly, cf. Benjamin 2004: 297–360; Pardon 2017; Holmes 2020). In this pivot, Cicero’s thought creates a sense of future time that is not dependent on linear chronology, paternity, or teleology. Rather, this genealogical mode operates through the unrealized fidelity of political action and philosophical commitment yet-to-come.