The current (albeit dated) introduction to the Loeb edition (H.M. Hubbell, 1939) of Cicero’s Brutus is uncharitable. It claims that the text “bears many marks of hasty composition and of lack of revision,” and “conveys the impression of rapid dictation” (p. 10). The author imagines that some “circumstance” forced Cicero to defend his oratorical standing, “and that under stress of emotion and some resentment he threw off quickly an apologia.” Why then bother with the Brutus? These “defects of symmetry and careful plan” give the work a “reality and vivacity” missing in Cicero’s other, more thoughtfully assembled works. How generous! This particular straw man is over 80 years old and therefore an unfair target, but scholarship has continually struggled with how to approach the Brutus. The perceived crudeness of the work has contributed to its unique reception history within the Ciceronian corpus, with scholarly interest in the text frequently focusing on one of a few familiar veins (e.g. prosopography, reception, Atticism vs. Asianism, analogy vs. anomaly, Cicero’s judgement of Caesar).[1] These studies mine the text for evidence while eschewing the kind of intra-textual close reading Cicero’s other oratorical, philosophical, and technical works receive. Against this backdrop comes The Politics and Poetics of Cicero’s ‘Brutus’. The most fundamental goal of van den Berg’s new book is to give Brutus consideration as a “piece of literature worthy of complex analysis … to read the Brutus as we might an extended poem or a work of drama, with attention both to the specifics of language … and to the recurrence of key ideas and motifs” (p. 13). It is a goal that van den Berg achieves, and in doing so he opens the Brutus to several new and exciting approaches.
Discussion of Q. Hortensius Hortalus forms a ring in the Brutus; Cicero expresses his grief upon hearing of his death at the opening of the work (§1–10) and compares himself to Hortensius at its end (§301–329). In service of his interest in elucidating intratextual readings within the Brutus, van den Berg’s first chapter (“Ciceropaideia”) begins at the end. He describes the conclusion of the Brutus as a “diptych” that positions the training and careers of Hortensius and Cicero as foils to one another, showing how the decline of the former gave way to the rise of the latter. This synkrisis is the culmination of one of the major projects of the Brutus: highlighting Cicero’s rejection of stylistic dogma and his call for adaptability and flexibility in public speaking. Hortensius’ decline was a result of stagnation, Cicero’s rise a product of his ability continually to transform. Cicero reinforces this theme geographically, van den Berg shows, through his emphasis on his training as a young man at Rhodes (“Rhodianism”), middle point geographically between Athens and Asia and metaphorically between the Atticist and Asiatic styles.
The next two chapters, broadly speaking, address the context of the Brutus, a task that has hitherto proven difficult. “The Intellectual Genealogy of the Brutus” grapples with two problems that have discouraged scholars from engaging with the work: the loss of texts with which Cicero’s treatise was in dialogue and the unique nature of the text within the Ciceronian catalogue (not a speech, nor a philosophical or technical work, nor a history). Ultimately, by reading the Brutus against other Ciceronian dialogues (Orator, De oratore, and De re publica) van den Berg argues that this ambiguity is both intentional and a strength of the text, which weaves together history, literature, and oratory in a way that attempts to “open a new entrance onto the intellectual and political stage” (p. 73) for Cicero after Pharsalus.
Consideration of the political goals of the Brutus appear throughout the work, but chapter 3, (“Caesar and the Political Crisis”) is the portion most focused upon them. The Brutus ostensibly abnegates engagement with current events in its preface (§11); Atticus says that he and Brutus came to talk with Cicero in order to avoid topics de re publica and instead listen to him. Where some have taken this avoidance of current events as indulgent or nostalgic, van den Berg shows how Cicero subtly crafted the Brutus as an intervention in the political scene of 46. Cicero’s use of martial imagery in metaphor undermines the primary source of Caesar’s political power, military achievement, while extoling (§7) the arma of prudence (consilium), ability (ingenium), and authority (auctoritas). Further, van den Berg argues that the ways in which the Brutus uses M. Claudius Marcellus (§ 249–251) resonate with the strategies in his Pro Marcello (given on behalf of the same man and published in the same year). Like the speech, the Brutus offers the ascendant Caesar an opportunity to “restore”—on Cicero’s terms—the Republic and the role of oratory within it.
Chapter 4 (“Truthmaking and the Past”) is an important one for several of the work’s more fundamental arguments. The inaccuracies of the Brutus have been the source of much of the derision for the work. Van den Berg, however, contends that in focusing on individual points of historical inaccuracy we miss the forest for the trees. The Brutus is, of course, concerned with historical accuracy, but is also unafraid to exercise some license in service of its more pressing goal: charting the development of oratory at Rome. Van den Berg makes this point by focusing on puzzling moments in the text, ostensibly clumsy synkriseis and the chronological importance given to the deaths of poets like Naevius and Plautus, to show that Cicero takes liberty with the facts to intertwine more closely oratory and literature. These moments are meant to help the reader distance himself from traditional historiography and embrace a new literary history. This is a point that, although it is not mentioned, can be read together fruitfully with Cicero’s illuminating (an infamous) letter to Lucceius on historiography (Fam. 5.12 [=SB 22]).
Chapters 5 and 6 (“Beginning (and) Literary History” and “Perfecting Literary History”) offer a thorough meditation on the genre of Brutus. As in Chapter 4, van den Berg interprets instances of questionable judgement in the Brutus—deemed sloppy, duplicitous, and/or self-aggrandizing by others— as signals left by Cicero to program the reader to recognize the arbitrary nature of his project and to scrutinize his narrative closely. Cicero was not unaware, for example, that “beginning” his account of Roman oratory with M. Cornelius Cethegus would be controversial; rather, he chose a controversial starting point to foster a kind of debate with the reader. Recognition of this debate helps the reader to grasp the novelty of Cicero’s undertaking. Like literary criticism, the Brutus concerns itself with the present, but as a literary history it must also consider the past and the importance and value of literary production within its context. Doing the former relies principally on “absolutist” criteria, while the later allows for relativist evaluation. This portion of the book is of special value in our own present context, in which we are actively questioning the construction of literary canons and how to craft, for example, literary curricula in a way that accounts for both our present values and literary-historical relativism.
In Chapter 7 (“Cicero’s Attici”), van den Berg pivots to discussion of the conflict between Roman adherents to the so-called “Attic” and “Asiatic” oratorical styles. He reminds us that “Asiatic” is a term used only polemically in our sources; no first-century BCE speaker classified themselves as such. Conversely, he shows how Cicero attacked the Atticists in the Brutus by exploiting the nebulous meaning of the designation, highlighting the diversity of style among Classical Athenian speakers to deny the possibility of a consistent “Attic” emulation. Further, like the geographical argument van den Berg has already identified—a “Rhodianism” that existed between the extremes of the other two styles—Cicero again uses digressions about models like Lysias, Thucydides, and Cato the Elder to argue for a “middle ground” that allows the adoption of some desirable “Attic” attributes while eschewing total “allegiance” to a restrictive sense of style.
Van den Berg is frank about the nature of his last chapter (“Minerva, Venus, and Cicero’s Judgements on Caesar’s Style”), calling it the book’s “most speculative” (p. 220) argument. It is also one of its most satisfying. Cicero’s description of Caesar’s style (§ 262) is perhaps the most famous passage of the Brutus. Van den Berg argues that the visual metaphor deployed by Cicero, in which he compares Caesar’s style to a statue “nude, upright, pleasing, all ornamenta of oratory removed, like a discarded garment,” (§ 262), has a specific example in mind: Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos. This effort serves a powerful rhetorical purpose. While connecting Caesar with Venus, Cicero—through careful mention of Phidias throughout the Brutus and his well-known dedication to Minerva—aligns himself with the Athena Parthenos. In doing so, Cicero takes on Minerva’s role as “defender of the city” (a familiar trope from Classical Athens and a repeated trope deployed by Cicero during the Catilinarian conspiracy and his subsequent exile/restoration) while undermining Caesar’s position and achievements. This is a well-argued and insightful reading of a passage that already boasts a wealth of scholarly attention.
The Politics and Poetics of Cicero’s ‘Brutus’ offers a variety of compelling new approaches to its subject. In the place of a poorly assembled, self-hagiographical piece, as it has sometimes been characterized, van den Berg presents the Brutus as a carefully crafted, innovative work that deserves the same kind of intra-textual critical attention given to Cicero’s other writings. Yet no work is perfect, and my reading left me with a few minor critiques. The first is a matter of style. The chapters themselves are structured around the liberal use of subsections, which themselves frequently represent a significant shift in topic and/or approach. Many of these can be quite short (often a page to a page and a half, in one instance, p. 110, less than 200 words), and I found that this undermined the ability of some chapters to make a larger point coherently.
More substantively, at least one of the text’s lofty goals goes unsatisfied. In the Introduction (p. 2) van den Berg writes that an “aiding” concern of the work is the “extent to which Cicero invented what we now think of as literary history.” While he certainly makes a strong case for approaching the Brutus as a literary history, he gives less consideration to Cicero’s “invention” of it. Like many of the themes van den Berg discusses, doing so would mean looking both “back” to the past and forward to the present; yet the work does little to contextualize the Brutus within the tradition of literary history in either direction. While there is some effort to position the Brutus with those (now mostly lost) contemporary works with which it was in dialogue, there is little space given to any earlier influences, and even less to the reception and influence of the Brutus on “what we now call literary history.” In execution, this does little harm to van den Berg’s argument; in fact, I would argue that one of the work’s strengths is its acute sense of place: the Civil War period. Nevertheless, given the repeated characterization of Cicero as the “inventor” of literary history—a claim to which van den Berg returns forcefully, if briefly, in the conclusion—one comes away unsure of exactly what that means and whether it is true.
Quibbles aside, van den Berg’s book is an ambitious, well-argued, and timely work that offers a wealth of approaches to a challenging text with a complex reception history. Like the Brutus itself, it deftly straddles the often-siloed disciplines of history and literary criticism to provide valuable insight into the confluence of art and politics at a critical point in the story of Rome.
Notes
[1] p. 13 n.30 provides a useful bibliography of the most prominent engagements with the Brutus.