In honor of Tully’s birthday today, here are a few (entirely affectionate) minor fact-checks and misc. sources for some of this information:
(First of all, I love this post, and given op’s tone, I assume they’re saying “Rome’s biggest loser” with the same intention behind how I say it, i.e. mocking in a loving way, finding humor in the wild amount of emotional expression Cicero allowed himself, most of it politically ill-advised at best but still somehow moving two millennia later. We all agree that seeing children as gifts and loving one’s friends and crying a lot is endearing yes? Anyway Atticus/Cicero is REAL and all I have to say, moving on!)
wrote a poem called “the sea god glaucus” at 14 = “And a little poem which he wrote when a boy is still extant [not anymore :( this was in Plutarch’s day], called Pontius Glaucus, and composed in tetrameter verse.” (Plutarch’s Life of Cicero 2.3, trans. Bernadotte Perrin – καί τι καί ποιημάτιον ἔτι παιδὸς αὐτοῦ διασῴζεται, Πόντιος Γλαῦκος, ἐν τετραμέτρῳ πεποιημένον.)
believed that children were a gift from the gods = “The immortal gods gave me children.” (Cicero’s To the Citizens after his Return 2, trans. C.D. Yonge – di immortales mihi liberos dederunt.)
cried. a lot. especially during his exile. and probably every time he saw his daughter = cf. Butler 2018 (“Cicero’s Grief”) TL;DR – yes, yes he did.
was too witty for his own good = “His indiscriminate attacks for the sake of raising a laugh made many people hate Cicero.” (Plutarch’s Life of Cicero 27.1, trans. Bernadotte Perrin – τὸ δ᾽ οἷς ἔτυχε προσκρούειν ἕνεκα τοῦ γελοίου πολὺ συνῆγε μῖσος αὐτῷ.) Also, Cicero’s secretary and former slave Tiro compiled multiple books of Cicero’s jokes, though, tragically, none of those survive completely. See also Corbeill 1996 and Beard 2015.
outlasted pompey [d. 49 BCE], caesar [d. 44 BCE], crassus [d. 53 BCE] and clodius [d. 52 BCE], as well as his own daughter [Tullia, d. 45 BCE], brother and nephew [Quintus and Quintus Minor, both d. 43 BCE, executed in Cicero’s name only weeks before Cicero and we should talk about it more oh god. The only male Cicero across two generations who may have died of natural causes was Cicero’s son, Marcus Minor.]
his final surviving letter to atticus ends with ‘adsum igitur’; it means ‘i am present’ – Yeah and I’m no okay about it. A different translation of this phrase might be “I’m on my way,” which captures the odd future sense of the verb. Cicero is always reaching, never arriving. (Cicero’s Epistulae ad Atticum 16.15.6.9)
Wrote a lot of doofy-ass letters to his secretary Tiro – I’d contend that the letters to Tiro are actually quite lovely. You can read them here. The “allegedly execrable Greek love poetry” may possibly be an invention of Pliny the Younger (Epistulae 7.4), to be completely frank, because nothing that survives of what Cicero wrote to Tiro is nearly as romantic as what Cicero’s brother wrote to Tiro: “If I meet you as I come in the forum itself, I shall cover you [literally “your eyes”] with kisses.” (Cicero’s Epistulae ad Familiares 16.27.2 – videbo tuosque oculos, etiam si te veniens in medio foro videro, dissaviabor.)
Accused an opponent’s financial backer of incest – It’s one of his best jokes, and I mean that with no sarcasm whatsoever. “Oh, well, if I hadn’t had a bit of a quarrel with that woman’s husband – oh, sorry, I did mean to say her brother, I’m always mixing those up.” (Cicero’s Pro Caelio 13.32 – nisi intercederent mihi inimicitiae cum istius mulieris viro — fratrem volui dicere; semper hic erro.) The woman in question and her brother (Clodia & Clodius) were rather more than the financial backers of one of Cicero’s opponents; they’d gotten him exiled and then indicted his intern on some trumped-up murder & treason charges.
Allowed his daughter Tullia to marry a politician – The fact that Cicero stepped back and allowed Tullia to choose her third husband (however poorly it ultimately turned out) is really interesting, historically speaking. As above (cf. Butler 2018), he did basically fall apart after her death, writing to his friend Atticus “I have lost the one thing that bound me to life.” (Cicero’s Epistulae ad Atticum 12.23.1 – quam unum quo tenebamur amisimus.)
Wrote an epic poem about his own consulship – Cicero definitely very much did do that. And the line quoted is accurate (and well-translated; it reminds me of one of the two different translations by Mary Beard) but I do want to observe that most scholars don’t believe that “O fortunatum natum me consule Romam” was the opening line (cf. Courtney 2003, The Fragmentary Latin Poets, pg. 159) and, in fact, it was probably part of an internal speech, so it’s difficult to know how it would have sounded in context. Furthermore, there are a wide range of other surviving fragments of this poem, Consulatus Suus or De Consulatu Suo (Courtney 2003, pgs. 149-178.) Also, recent attempts to treat the poem as a serious literary work have been quite fruitful (cf. Volk 2013, “The Genre of Cicero’s De consulatu suo”) and, furthermore, fragments of other poems of Cicero’s survive, including a frankly lovely translation of the Greek astronomical poem, Aratus’s Phaenomena, also known as the Aratea (cf. Čulík-Baird 2018, “Stoicism in the Stars: Cicero’s Aratea in the De Natura Deorum.”) I also love making fun of Cicero for his poetry but there’s some more complexity to his verses than I think people give him credit for.
The poet Catullus – HELL YEAH let’s talk about the scholarly back-stabbing surrounding how we ought to understand Catullus 49. The fact that the Cicero biographer Antony Everitt says Catullus “respected [Cicero] enough to write him a charming poem,” despite the fact that this would mean Cicero was on “good terms with people whose behavior he found morally objectionable” (???) I will never get over how stunning that is. Catullus’s poem seems SO sarcastic to me. But that’s the problem of Cicero reception, isn’t it? Latin carries so little tone into English unless pressed; Cicero’s (and sometimes Catullus’s) Latin perhaps most of all.
Happy birthday to the Most-eloquent Grandson of Romulus, and thanks so much for enduring my pedantic insistence upon sourcing and opining on these points of interest!!
