Cicero Poeta

It is commonly noted that Cicero “never published” the De Temporibus Suis, the three book epic about his exile and return on which he was working in the mid-50s (e.g. Courtney; Knox; Volk). Proposals for what might have replaced the abandoned poem are less forthcoming. Given Cicero’s fervent desire for commemoration (Fam. 5.12), it is unlikely that he would set the work aside with nothing to take its place.

In the second book of Tusculan Disputations, Cicero adduces and translates from Greek tragedy three examples of suffering caused by pain—Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Heracles and Aeschylus’ Prometheus—only to relegate these shameful representations to literature and advocate, instead, the tolerance of pain. Nevertheless, each tragic hero resembles Cicero in his suffering. He is an exile, like Philoctetes, and a foe to tyrants, like Prometheus.

This paper reexamines Cicero’s De consulatu suo from the contemporary critical understanding that the poetic works “gave Cicero the opportunity to write and disseminate a public persona” (Steel 1995, 19) and, in turn, forever reshaped Roman epic poetry through their innovative generic qualities (Gee 2013; Volk 2013).

In this paper I argue that Cicero’s de Consulatu suo, an auto-biographical epic poem that survives now only in fragments, was inadequate as a monument to Cicero’s role in the Catilinarian conspiracy and did not allow Cicero to become part of the exemplary tradition of the conspiracy.

By any metric, Cicero wrote across an astonishing range of genres. Quickly canonized as the master of Roman prose, he did indeed master almost all its ancient facets: oratory, rhetoric, dialogues, treatises, letters. For ancient readers, trained to believe that authors were naturally disposed towards a single genre (Rep. 394e-395b; Farrell 2003), Cicero’s movement between prose genres was unusual enough, but his composition of—and pride in—works of poetry was far more unsettling.