Lydia Spielberg, University of California, Los Angeles
In this paper I use the reception of Cato the Elder’s In Galbam to illuminate the effect on readers of Cato’s self-quotation of his own speeches in the Origines.
Cato’s historiographical voice was a continuation of his censorial public persona (Pina Polo; Gotter), which Cato doubled by publishing his speeches within the Origines (Habinek; Sciarrino). In Galbam, aimed at a praetor who had massacred and enslaved surrendered Lusitanians, was both Cato’s last speech and the last episode of the Origines (Nep. Cato 3.4, Cic. Brut. 89). Galba escaped conviction, but Cato included his own speech in the Origines as a permanent denunciation (Austin 112-3).
Although later readers such as Cicero and Fronto treat In Galbam as the 'real' speech given by Cato, however, the most memorable thing about the episode seems to have been Cato’s harsh criticism of Galba’s strategy of parading his young children before the people to win sympathy–something that must have belonged to the Origines’ narrative of the trial, but which our sources frequently attribute to the speech itself (Cic. Brut. 90, De Or. 1.228; Quint. Inst. 2.15.8; Val. Max. 8.1, 8.7; Fronto Ad M. Caes. 3.20.4 [vdH 1988]). Scholars have proposed various solutions to reconstruct the speech (Scivoletto; Cugusi: 340-2), but I take the confusion between Cato’s In Galbam and his account of Galba’s quasi-trial in the Origines to be productive evidence of the effect that the end of Cato’s Origines had on readers. Whether Cato extended his speech to include Galba’s evasion of justice when he included it in the Origines or denounced that evasion as the historiographical narrator, these two personae of orator and historian blurred. Comparing the impressions from Cicero and Fronto with passages attributed to In Galbam, I suggest that the embedded speech took on a meta-discursive function as the historian’s commentary on his history and its moral orientation, just as the historical narrative continued the goals of the speech. Moreover, the contrast between Cato's "own words" and Galba's theatrics may have conditioned the reception of Galba as a speaker whose oratorical virtues failed to carry over to the page (Cic. Brut. 86-90).
Livy’s treatment of the episode, finally, illustrates skepticism about Cato’s totalizing narrative. According to the periochae, whose compiler paid particular attention to the speeches in the 5th decade (Chaplin), Livy noted Cato’s speech in the Origines (per. 49.18, cf. Liv. 38.54.11) but also cited the counter-speech of Fulvius Nobilior and three extant speeches by Galba (per. 49.20). In one of these speeches, moreover, Galba apparently justified a massacre with reasons strikingly similar to ones Cato supposedly used against Carthage (per. 48.1; Plut. Cat.Mai. 26.3; Kennedy 72-73; Flower 2020). In addition to restoring polyvocality to the Galba episode, then, Livy may have hinted at a disjunction between Cato’s final acts as presented in his Origines and his equally famous, but less self-commemorated, instigation of the third Punic War.