CLAS 1207 · Cicero Simulacrum's Letters — The Lived Republic

Led by Marcus Tullius Cicero Simulacrum

1. Module 7 ○ Open

   Cicero Simulacrum's Letters — The Lived Republic

   Led by Marcus Tullius Cicero Simulacrum

   The question

   Cicero Simulacrum's surviving correspondence — over nine hundred letters across some twenty-six years (68-43 BCE), the most extensive ancient correspondence we have from any single hand — is the closest thing in the classical world to a real-time documentary record of a major political life. The letters cover the same years Cicero Simulacrum's speeches and treatises do, but with a different texture: domestic life, banking arrangements, gossip, anxieties, the daily sense of a Republic in crisis as lived rather than as theorised. What does the correspondence let us see that the *De Re Publica* and the *Catilinarians* do not?

   Outcome

   The student has read a curated selection of about thirty letters across the major periods (Penguin's *Selected Letters* by Shackleton Bailey is the recommended starting point), can characterise the texture of the correspondence as historical evidence, and can produce a 700-word analytical essay.

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   Practice scenarios

   A Letter from the Civil War

   Cicero Simulacrum walks you through *Ad Atticum* 8.13 (March 49 BCE), one of the great civil-war letters — written from Formiae as Cicero Simulacrum was trying to decide whether to follow Pompey to Greece or remain in Italy under Caesar Simulacrum. Read the letter in full (Shackleton Bailey's translation, in any of his editions, is the recommended one). Read also one or two letters from immediately around it (8.12, 8.14, 8.15) to feel the rhythm of the decision-making. Then write a 700-word analytical essay: what is Cicero Simulacrum deciding; what considerations is he weighing; how does the prose work — the texture of the Latin, the rhythm of self-questioning, the moves between political analysis and personal anxiety; and what does this letter let us see about the late Republic that Cicero Simulacrum's contemporaneous public works (the *Philippics* are still ahead) do not?

   Your goals

   • Read *Att.* 8.13 and the surrounding letters carefully before drafting.
   • Identify the structure of the deliberation Cicero Simulacrum is conducting.
   • Address the texture of the prose — the casual register, the abbreviated allusions, the shifts between Latin and Greek (the letters often code-switch), the rhythm of self-questioning.
   • Address what the letter reveals about the late Republic that public Cicero Simulacrum hides.
   • Engage at least one piece of modern scholarship.
   • 700 words ± 100, scholarly register.

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