By Amanda Wilcox
Amanda Wilcox bargains an leading edge method of significant collections of Roman letters—Cicero’s Ad Familiares and Seneca’s Moral Epistles—informed through smooth cross-cultural theories of gift-giving.
by means of viewing letters and the perform of correspondence as a species of present trade, Wilcox presents a nuanced research of missed and misunderstood elements of Roman epistolary rhetoric and the social dynamics of friendship in Cicero’s correspondence. Turning to Seneca, she indicates that he either inherited and reacted opposed to Cicero’s euphemistic rhetoric and social practices, and she or he analyzes how Seneca reworked the rhetoric of his personal letters from an software of social negotiation into an idiom for moral philosophy and self-reflection. even though Cicero and Seneca are frequently seen as a research in contrasts, Wilcox broadly compares their letters, underscoring Cicero’s major impression on Seneca as a prose stylist, thinker, and public figure.
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Additional resources for The Gift of Correspondence in Classical Rome: Friendship in Cicero’s Ad Familiares and Seneca’s Moral Epistles
Example text
The letter opens, “You have Messala” (Messalam habes, Ad Brut. 1 [23]). Messala has brought Cicero’s letter to Brutus and, with it, an oral message about the situation at Rome that Cicero deems too sensitive or too subtly complex to write down. ” (Quem cum a me dimittens graviter ferrem, hoc levabar uno, quod ad te tamquam ad alterum me proficiscens, Ad Brut. 2). If Brutus is the writer’s alter ego, then Cicero can console himself for the loss of Messala by thinking that when Messala reaches Brutus, Cicero more or less has Messala back again.
You Are Another Me (Fa m . 7. ” (Vide quam mihi persuaserim te me esse alterum, non modo in iis rebus quae ad me ipsum sed etiam in iis quae ad meos pertinent, Fam. ) Cicero goes on to explain that he had intended to promote Trebatius’s interests directly, by putting him on his own staff when he accompanied Pompey to Spain. Since Pompey has indefinitely delayed his b euphemism and its limits 31 departure from Rome, Cicero has sent Trebatius to Caesar. 1). 10 When Cicero reiterates his request at the opening of section three, he addresses Caesar as “mi Caesar,” and when he specifies—by refusing to specify—what he has in mind for Caesar to do for Trebatius, he goes to some trouble to avoid sounding insistent, importunate, or at all precise: “I do not seek for him a tribunate or prefecture or any other specific benefit.
In all these letters, Cicero extends kinship relations metaphorically as a euphemizing tactic that veils self-interest by representing the exchanges in which he engages with these correspondents as though they were direct exchanges between members of a single household. For an example of how the alterum me expression also euphemizes mediated exchanges, we can look to a letter from Cicero to Brutus. The letter opens, “You have Messala” (Messalam habes, Ad Brut. 1 [23]). Messala has brought Cicero’s letter to Brutus and, with it, an oral message about the situation at Rome that Cicero deems too sensitive or too subtly complex to write down.