Cicero’s fragmentary speeches have now joined the texts available through the Loeb Classical Library, and done so in excellent style: Jane Crawford and Andrew Dyck have taken Crawford’s edition of the fragmentary speeches from 1994 and adapted it for the parameters of the LCL.[1] Cicero’s fragmentary speeches give us Cicero’s public career before his consulship trapped him in one specific and arguably rather extreme version of the res publica. This was the man who defended Cornelius on a charge of maiestas, and prepared a defence of Manilius; the man, also, who attacked Rome’s greed and imperial ambitions, as well as standing up to Crassus, when he argued against Crassus’ proposal for an invasion of Egypt. And these speeches also offer important glimpses of the post-Sullan republic as it was evolving during the 70s and 60s, not least in relation to the rights of the tribunes and the scope of popular power. Crawford-Dyck will do a great deal to make this material more visible, and, one hopes, thereby to integrate it fully into our histories of late Republican politics.
The corpus of fragmentary speeches included in the volume is largely the same as Crawford 1994. (The volume is, understandably, interested only in those speeches which Cicero (or another) disseminated as a text in his name and for which, therefore, a text existed: the many speeches that Cicero delivered and did not disseminate are not here. For that material, reference must still be made to Crawford’s earlier volume.[2]) One speech has gone: the editors are persuaded by Michael Winterbottom’s deletion of Ciceronis at Quint. 6.3.48 and therefore In P. Seruilium Isauricum disappears from the Ciceronian corpus. (The editors suggest that the speaker of the fragment may be M. Caelius, connecting the insult to the fracas, involving a curule chair, between Caelius and Servilius in 48 which Quintilian recalls earlier in this same chapter). And one is added: the speech pro Milone which was said to have been taken down, excepta (Asconius), at the trial itself. The fragmentary speeches are still ordered chronologically, but there are some changes to the order reflecting new thinking on dating. A number of the unplaced fragments in Crawford 1994 have been removed.
The rationale for these changes is set out in the Introduction, which also offers a brief survey of the fragmentary corpus in relation to Cicero’s career and discusses why these speeches failed to survive intact. The editors note that the fragmentary speeches occur to a disproportionate extent early in Cicero’s career, when he had strong incentives to publish, and later readers less interest in his activities; and that some of the losses are political speeches, which may not have had the same importance to posterity as models of rhetoric as his forensic speeches evidently did. The Introduction also includes an extraordinarily helpful discussion of the texts in which these fragments survive, which offers in less than ten pages (xviii-xxvii) a beautifully concise guide to who was reading and quoting Cicero between the first and fifth centuries CE.
Each speech is presented in the same way. A brief introduction sketches the context and offers a summary of the speech, with key bibliography; then testimonia are given in chronological order by quoting author; and then the fragments, ordered as the editors think they occurred in the speech. (For ease of use, some of the fragment texts include the framing of the quotation within the quoting author). There is a selective apparatus and there is also an appendix in which the editors set out an overview of the structure of the first pro Cornelio and relate it to the surviving fragments; alas, this is the only speech for which such an exercise is really feasible. Readers should note that the editors have taken full advantage of the opportunity to reorder testimonia and fragments in comparison with Crawford 1994.
The editors summarise their approach to the translation as an attempt ‘to capture the sense of the Latin in idiomatic English that can be read as an independent text but remains in recognizable contact with the Latin version on the facing page for readers who wish to compare’ (xxxv). It seemed to me that in practice the emphasis is firmly on the latter point: within the bounds of comprehensibility the editors have produced a translation which helps the reader to understand the Latin and Greek. Given the very fragmentary nature of what survives, this is surely the most helpful approach. The notes are a remarkable exercise in concision and their quality may well have the unfortunate effect of leading users not also to consult Crawford 1994. There are full concordances with the editions of Crawford, Schoell and Puccioni, an index of sources, a selective general index, and an ample and current bibliography.
Notes
[1] Crawford, Jane W., M. Tullius Cicero, The Fragmentary Speeches: An edition with commentary, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 2nd ed. 1994.
[2] Crawford, Jane W., M. Tullius Cicero: The Lost and Unpublished Orations, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 1984.