261J Marcus Tullius Cicero edited by Jacques-Louis Strébée( 1480-1550)
M. Tullii Ciceronis ad M. Brutum oratorJacobi Lodoici Strebaei commentariis ab authore ipso recognitis illustratus.
Parisiis : ex officina Michaëlis. Vascosani, 1540
Small Folio 8 X 6 1/2 inches . *6, A-08, P4, Q6 complete ([12], 224, [20]) .
Bound in modern carta rustic ,recently resewin on three leather cords It is bound in the
style of mid-sixteenth century, thinner cartonnage with turn-ins to stabilise the edges of 
the cover. This is a very solid and stable copy , ready to be researched with, despite the water staining.
This copy has Extensive sixteenth-century MS marginal and interlineal annotations, underlinings etc., throughout; in French and Latin . There is inter linear notes on every section of Cicero’s text but very few notes on Strébée’s commentary.
Of the 224 pages, about 150 have notes in a small and sometimes very faint sixteenth century hand.
On the Printed title there is quite a bit of pen-starts and doodles as well as faint ownership signatures . ( There is a copy in the University of Manchester Library UML copy at R229539, whisk is catalogued as having extensive notes as well.)
Before the Printed text the annotator has written an “Argumentum”
Quoted from Tore Janson (see below for citation)
Orator
We have now to deal with another important preface by Cicero, that to Orator. It begins thus:
(Orat. 1.1) Vtrum difficilius aut maius esset negare tibi saepius idem roganti an efficere id quod rogares diu multumque, Brute, dubitaui. Nam et negare ei quem unice diligerem cuique me carissimum esse sentirem, praesertim et iusta petenti et praeclara cupienti, durum admodum mihi uidebatur, et suscipere tantam rem, quantam non modo facultate consequi difficile esset sed etiam cogitatione complecti, uix arbitrabar esse eius qui uereretur reprehensionem doctorum atque prudentium.
23 P. 196: “Ainsi donc, les trois prooemia semblent bien subordonnés à une unité supérieure, grâce à un ensemble de thèmes repris sur différents plans.”
Again we have a personal preface with a dedication. There is also a request from the dedicatee, here of even greater importance than in the prefaces to Rhetorica ad Herennium and De Oratore. The entire preface is about Cicero’s reaction to Brutus’ request for a work on the accom plished orator. Cicero pretends that he has been put in a dilemma by being asked for this. For while he feels himself obliged by his friendship with Brutus to comply with his request, he also finds the task so great that he does not believe himself capable of performing it in a satis factory way.
Here the theme of a request is for the first time exploited in the way that later became so enormously popular. With this theme, the author can emphasize as much as he wants both the difficulty of the task and his dependence on the dedicatee. It is worth while considering Cicero’s reasons for giving this form to the preface of Orator.
Naturally Cicero wishes everyone to regard his subject as important. Every author does. In his case, however, there were special reasons for dwelling unusually much on the weightiness of the things he will treat. His book is a treatise on the accomplished speaker, and in it Cicero pronounces on the central problems of oratory, a sphere in which his word of course carries great weight. As has been said before, he was the uncontested master of speaking in Rome, with the most brilliant oratorical career behind him. In the year 46, when Orator was written, he was especially interested in safeguarding his position as a speaker. His political career seemed to have come to an end, and quite an inglorious end at that. In his compulsory leisure he must have felt it was by no means certain that he would be regarded by posterity as a great statesman. Consequently, he was all the more anxious to appear really great in the sphere of oratory at least. Therefore, at a time when his mode of speaking was being attacked rather sharply by the atticists Brutus and Calvus,24 he felt obliged to repel the onslaught as authorita tively as possible. Hence his insistance on the importance of his task:
(Orat. 1.2) Quid enim est maius quam, cum tanta sit inter oratores bonos dissimilitudo, iudicare quae sit optima species et quasi figura dicendi?
But Cicero is also considering the direct relation between himself and his work. The greater the task is made to seem, the more natural it is that Cicero should hesitate before undertaking it:
24 See for instance Clarke pp. 80ff.
{ibid.) Quod quoniam me saepius rogas, aggrediar non tam perficiendi spe quam experiendi uoluntate.
The author is here being modest about his own capacity, yet it is hardly likely that Cicero entertained such a fear of his subject as he pretends. As Curtius has pointed out {Eur. Lit. p. 93) we have here an evident instance of affected modesty.25 This is the first time we meet with this phenomenon, to which a great deal of attention will be paid in the following.
What, then, do these statements of Cicero really amount to? First he emphasizes as strongly as possible the importance and the difficulty of his subject. Then he expresses a modest doubt as to whether he is capable of complying with the request. This doubt must not be interpreted to mean that the author is not sure of his own importance as a writer. Cicero never questions his greatness in that respect, least of all in Orator. The real import of these sentences, therefore, is approximately this: The great Cicero has set about an unusually difficult task: Behold! According to the rules of rhetoric, the reader’s attention may be excited by laying stress on the importance of the subject. So Cicero’s pretended diffidence aims in reality at pointing out to the reader how well the author has succeeded.
The two themes of the preface hitherto dealt with, elevation of the subject and doubts about the author’s ability to treat it, are intimately connected with each other. But for logical reasons they cannot form a closed unit. For if the subject is so difficult that the author does not believe that he will accomplish it, why should he grapple with it? Even if the modesty is affected and not real, it will seem ridiculous unless the author adds something to make his action seem reasonable. Consequently these two themes have to be modified by a statement to the effect that the author is compelled to write the work. This compulsion, for Cicero as for his innumerable successors, is embodied in the request from the dedicatee. The preface ends as follows:
{Orat. 1.2) Malo enim, cum studio tuo sim obsecutus, desiderari a te pruden- tiam meam quam, si id non fecerim, beneuolentiam.
This solves the dilemma we talked about in connexion with the first words of the preface. The author declares himself willing to be guided by the wish of his friend and not by his own doubts as to the possibility of performing the task.
25 Curtius* and Norden’s term is “affektierte Bescheidenheit”.
So Cicero, like the author of Rhetorica ad Herennium, makes his friendship a reason for writing. To appreciate this theme one has to consider the importance of friendship in Roman society by this time. Over the past fifty years there has been a great deal of research into the unique social and political structure of late republican Rome. The starting point was the fundamental book by Geizer, Die Nobilität der römischen Republik (1912), especially the second part (pp.43-116), where he treated “die sozialen Voraussetzungen der Nobilitätsherr- schaft”. Later research into friendship is surveyed in a recent book by Lossman, where the friendship between Cicero and Caesar is studied in the light of research into friendship in general. Another survey, from a different point of view, is made by Neuhauser (especially pp. 9-11), who has studied the pertinent concept of patronus. Wistrand (Chapter 2) has made a most interesting exposition of the subject, unfortunately available in Swedish only. I refer to these works and their biblio graphies for detailed information. Here I can only give a short account of the Roman concept of friendship according to modern research.
Roman society, Gelzer says, was interwoven with manifold bilateral connexions between the citizens, “Nah- und Treuverhältnisse”. These connexions were of paramount importance in the life of society. Among other things, their number and their strength decided the success of every politician; for every Roman citizen was bound to one or more of the important men of the state. In the elections he voted for the men he was bound to, and also supported them in other ways as required. So the politician who had tied to him the greatest number of citizens had the greatest chance of being elected to the offices he wanted. The groups of interconnected persons tended to be very large, and their heads were the very great men, like Pompeius, Crassus and Caesar. The political battles of the late Republic were fought between such politicians backed by vast numbers of people connected to them by ties of friend ship and fidelity. Of course the great politicians might also become connected to each other by ties of the same sort, whereupon their large bands of supporters co-operated. Such an agreement, on the highest level, was the first triumvirate.
We see that these
can be established both between an inferior and a superior and between equals. In the first case the parties may be called cliens and patronus, respectively, or they case. In both cases the fundamental mechanism is the same. One of the may be styled amici, which, of course, is the normal word in the second parties receives a service or a gift from the other and thereby becomes
bound to repay this by performing such services as may be demanded from him. The prerequisite for the origination and function of this system is that there was in society a deeply rooted conception of every man’s duty to repay the services he had received, or in other words to show his gratitude through action.
It is to this fundamental concept that Cicero appeals when he pro poses his wish to show beneuolentia26 towards Brutus as a reason for writing the book. In this way he can count on every Roman accepting that he writes in spite of his scruples, as he is fulfilling the duty of repaying a friend—an obligation for every citizen. It must be pointed out that this conception of friendship differs considerably from the usual notion of friendship as an emotional tie. The latter view was cer tainly familiar to the Romans, and in particular to Cicero, but it was paralleled, if not dominated by the much more concrete and to us perhaps crass idea of services obliging to services, quite regardless of personal feelings.
So Cicero appeals to one of the fundamental moral concepts of the Romans, the duty of showing gratia to and doing officia for an amicus. At the same time, however, his relationship to Brutus, his dedicatee, was in fact a friendship also in the more emotional sense. Cicero was very capable of making real friends, and his friendship with Brutus was no doubt the most profound one of his later years.27 The ties between them were such that Brutus might well have had enough influence on Cicero to induce him to write a book, especially as he was writing all the time anyhow. So there was in this case not only the general reasons for talking about a friend’s demand, but also really sincere friendship between author and dedicatee.
Finally the subject matter of the book is such that it was natural that Brutus should be interested in getting Cicero to treat it. For the friends had quite different opinions about what constituted the accomplished speaker. Unlike Cicero, Brutus stood for a severe atticism, and there was a great dispute on this matter between, primarily, Brutus and Calvus on one side and Cicero on the other. Orator was a contribution to this discussion. In spite of these controversies it is mainly the friend Brutus who is addressed in the book, whereas the opponent Brutus is attacked
26 Beneuolentia was the word used by Cicero to denote the affection for an amicus. Cf. Lossman p. 102 n. 1, and p. 106.
27 On this see, apart from the extant letters, the still very readable chapter on Brutus in Boissier, Ciceron et ses amis.
only cautiously and indirectly; for by this time Cicero had the strongest reasons, both political and emotional, for keeping Brutus as a friend.
The preface to Orator enables the author to stress how great and difficult his subject is, how he has hesitated to tackle it, and how amicably disposed and ready to render service he is. Cicero, as we have seen, had special reasons for emphasizing all this. On the other hand, practically every author presenting himself in a personal preface wishes to lay stress upon the same things. Consequently it is not astonishing that the line of thought in this preface has been repeated, with small changes, in so many later works.
Several important elements in the preface to Orator are the same as in the prefaces studied above, to Rhetorica ad Herennium and De Ora tore, namely the request from a dedicatee, the praise of the subject, and the emphasis on friendship with the dedicatee. In Orator, Cicero has on the whole used the same skeleton of content as in De Oratore, though with changes to suit his aims and his situation. On the one hand there is nothing about predecessors, and the value of his own work is not emphasized in the same way as before. On the other, he clearly expresses his unwillingness to treat the subject, and in this connexion mentions the dilemma in which he is put through the request. These modifications result in the preface of Orator being more logically coherent than the introductions of the earlier works. Even if this preface is adapted to the actual situation of the author, it also seems to me to have more of a fixed scheme in it than have its predecessors.
Tore Janson ACTAUNIVERSITATIS STOCKHOLMIENSIS Studia Latina Stockholmiensia
XIII LATIN PROSE PREFACES Studies in Literary Conventions By TORE JANSON ALMQVIST &WIKSELL STOCKHOLM GÖTEBORG UPPSALA (INAUGURALDISSERTATION by due permission of the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Stockholm to be publicly discussed in lecture room С on Friday, May 22, 1964, at 10 a.m. for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy)
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Notes, Annotations more notes translations …
261J Marcus Tullius Cicero edited by Jacques-Louis Strébée( 1480-1550)
M. Tullii Ciceronis ad M. Brutum oratorJacobi Lodoici Strebaei commentariis ab authore ipso recognitis illustratus.
Parisiis : ex officina Michaëlis. Vascosani, 1540
Small Folio 8 X 6 1/2 inches . *6, A-08, P4, Q6 complete ([12], 224, [20]) .
Bound in modern carta rustic ,recently resewin on three leather cords It is bound in the
This copy has Extensive sixteenth-century MS marginal and interlineal annotations, underlinings etc., throughout; in French and Latin . There is inter linear notes on every section of Cicero’s text but very few notes on Strébée’s commentary.
Of the 224 pages, about 150 have notes in a small and sometimes very faint sixteenth century hand.
On the Printed title there is quite a bit of pen-starts and doodles as well as faint ownership signatures . ( There is a copy in the University of Manchester Library UML copy at R229539, whisk is catalogued as having extensive notes as well.)
Before the Printed text the annotator has written an “Argumentum”
Quoted from Tore Janson (see below for citation)
Orator
We have now to deal with another important preface by Cicero, that to Orator. It begins thus:
(Orat. 1.1) Vtrum difficilius aut maius esset negare tibi saepius idem roganti an efficere id quod rogares diu multumque, Brute, dubitaui. Nam et negare ei quem unice diligerem cuique me carissimum esse sentirem, praesertim et iusta petenti et praeclara cupienti, durum admodum mihi uidebatur, et suscipere tantam rem, quantam non modo facultate consequi difficile esset sed etiam cogitatione complecti, uix arbitrabar esse eius qui uereretur reprehensionem doctorum atque prudentium.
23 P. 196: “Ainsi donc, les trois prooemia semblent bien subordonnés à une unité supérieure, grâce à un ensemble de thèmes repris sur différents plans.”
Again we have a personal preface with a dedication. There is also a request from the dedicatee, here of even greater importance than in the prefaces to Rhetorica ad Herennium and De Oratore. The entire preface is about Cicero’s reaction to Brutus’ request for a work on the accom plished orator. Cicero pretends that he has been put in a dilemma by being asked for this. For while he feels himself obliged by his friendship with Brutus to comply with his request, he also finds the task so great that he does not believe himself capable of performing it in a satis factory way.
Here the theme of a request is for the first time exploited in the way that later became so enormously popular. With this theme, the author can emphasize as much as he wants both the difficulty of the task and his dependence on the dedicatee. It is worth while considering Cicero’s reasons for giving this form to the preface of Orator.
(Orat. 1.2) Quid enim est maius quam, cum tanta sit inter oratores bonos dissimilitudo, iudicare quae sit optima species et quasi figura dicendi?
But Cicero is also considering the direct relation between himself and his work. The greater the task is made to seem, the more natural it is that Cicero should hesitate before undertaking it:
24 See for instance Clarke pp. 80ff.
{ibid.) Quod quoniam me saepius rogas, aggrediar non tam perficiendi spe quam experiendi uoluntate.
The author is here being modest about his own capacity, yet it is hardly likely that Cicero entertained such a fear of his subject as he pretends. As Curtius has pointed out {Eur. Lit. p. 93) we have here an evident instance of affected modesty.25 This is the first time we meet with this phenomenon, to which a great deal of attention will be paid in the following.
What, then, do these statements of Cicero really amount to? First he emphasizes as strongly as possible the importance and the difficulty of his subject. Then he expresses a modest doubt as to whether he is capable of complying with the request. This doubt must not be interpreted to mean that the author is not sure of his own importance as a writer. Cicero never questions his greatness in that respect, least of all in Orator. The real import of these sentences, therefore, is approximately this: The great Cicero has set about an unusually difficult task: Behold! According to the rules of rhetoric, the reader’s attention may be excited by laying stress on the importance of the subject. So Cicero’s pretended diffidence aims in reality at pointing out to the reader how well the author has succeeded.
The two themes of the preface hitherto dealt with, elevation of the subject and doubts about the author’s ability to treat it, are intimately connected with each other. But for logical reasons they cannot form a closed unit. For if the subject is so difficult that the author does not believe that he will accomplish it, why should he grapple with it? Even if the modesty is affected and not real, it will seem ridiculous unless the author adds something to make his action seem reasonable. Consequently these two themes have to be modified by a statement to the effect that the author is compelled to write the work. This compulsion, for Cicero as for his innumerable successors, is embodied in the request from the dedicatee. The preface ends as follows:
{Orat. 1.2) Malo enim, cum studio tuo sim obsecutus, desiderari a te pruden- tiam meam quam, si id non fecerim, beneuolentiam.
This solves the dilemma we talked about in connexion with the first words of the preface. The author declares himself willing to be guided by the wish of his friend and not by his own doubts as to the possibility of performing the task.
25 Curtius* and Norden’s term is “affektierte Bescheidenheit”.
So Cicero, like the author of Rhetorica ad Herennium, makes his friendship a reason for writing. To appreciate this theme one has to consider the importance of friendship in Roman society by this time. Over the past fifty years there has been a great deal of research into the unique social and political structure of late republican Rome. The starting point was the fundamental book by Geizer, Die Nobilität der römischen Republik (1912), especially the second part (pp.43-116), where he treated “die sozialen Voraussetzungen der Nobilitätsherr- schaft”. Later research into friendship is surveyed in a recent book by Lossman, where the friendship between Cicero and Caesar is studied in the light of research into friendship in general. Another survey, from a different point of view, is made by Neuhauser (especially pp. 9-11), who has studied the pertinent concept of patronus. Wistrand (Chapter 2) has made a most interesting exposition of the subject, unfortunately available in Swedish only. I refer to these works and their biblio graphies for detailed information. Here I can only give a short account of the Roman concept of friendship according to modern research.
Roman society, Gelzer says, was interwoven with manifold bilateral connexions between the citizens, “Nah- und Treuverhältnisse”. These connexions were of paramount importance in the life of society. Among other things, their number and their strength decided the success of every politician; for every Roman citizen was bound to one or more of the important men of the state. In the elections he voted for the men he was bound to, and also supported them in other ways as required. So the politician who had tied to him the greatest number of citizens had the greatest chance of being elected to the offices he wanted. The groups of interconnected persons tended to be very large, and their heads were the very great men, like Pompeius, Crassus and Caesar. The political battles of the late Republic were fought between such politicians backed by vast numbers of people connected to them by ties of friend ship and fidelity. Of course the great politicians might also become connected to each other by ties of the same sort, whereupon their large bands of supporters co-operated. Such an agreement, on the highest level, was the first triumvirate.
We see that these
can be established both between an inferior and a superior and between equals. In the first case the parties may be called cliens and patronus, respectively, or they case. In both cases the fundamental mechanism is the same. One of the may be styled amici, which, of course, is the normal word in the second parties receives a service or a gift from the other and thereby becomes
bound to repay this by performing such services as may be demanded from him. The prerequisite for the origination and function of this system is that there was in society a deeply rooted conception of every man’s duty to repay the services he had received, or in other words to show his gratitude through action.
So Cicero appeals to one of the fundamental moral concepts of the Romans, the duty of showing gratia to and doing officia for an amicus. At the same time, however, his relationship to Brutus, his dedicatee, was in fact a friendship also in the more emotional sense. Cicero was very capable of making real friends, and his friendship with Brutus was no doubt the most profound one of his later years.27 The ties between them were such that Brutus might well have had enough influence on Cicero to induce him to write a book, especially as he was writing all the time anyhow. So there was in this case not only the general reasons for talking about a friend’s demand, but also really sincere friendship between author and dedicatee.
Finally the subject matter of the book is such that it was natural that Brutus should be interested in getting Cicero to treat it. For the friends had quite different opinions about what constituted the accomplished speaker. Unlike Cicero, Brutus stood for a severe atticism, and there was a great dispute on this matter between, primarily, Brutus and Calvus on one side and Cicero on the other. Orator was a contribution to this discussion. In spite of these controversies it is mainly the friend Brutus who is addressed in the book, whereas the opponent Brutus is attacked
26 Beneuolentia was the word used by Cicero to denote the affection for an amicus. Cf. Lossman p. 102 n. 1, and p. 106.
27 On this see, apart from the extant letters, the still very readable chapter on Brutus in Boissier, Ciceron et ses amis.
only cautiously and indirectly; for by this time Cicero had the strongest reasons, both political and emotional, for keeping Brutus as a friend.
The preface to Orator enables the author to stress how great and difficult his subject is, how he has hesitated to tackle it, and how amicably disposed and ready to render service he is. Cicero, as we have seen, had special reasons for emphasizing all this. On the other hand, practically every author presenting himself in a personal preface wishes to lay stress upon the same things. Consequently it is not astonishing that the line of thought in this preface has been repeated, with small changes, in so many later works.
Several important elements in the preface to Orator are the same as in the prefaces studied above, to Rhetorica ad Herennium and De Ora tore, namely the request from a dedicatee, the praise of the subject, and the emphasis on friendship with the dedicatee. In Orator, Cicero has on the whole used the same skeleton of content as in De Oratore, though with changes to suit his aims and his situation. On the one hand there is nothing about predecessors, and the value of his own work is not emphasized in the same way as before. On the other, he clearly expresses his unwillingness to treat the subject, and in this connexion mentions the dilemma in which he is put through the request. These modifications result in the preface of Orator being more logically coherent than the introductions of the earlier works. Even if this preface is adapted to the actual situation of the author, it also seems to me to have more of a fixed scheme in it than have its predecessors.
Tore Janson ACTAUNIVERSITATIS STOCKHOLMIENSIS Studia Latina Stockholmiensia
XIII LATIN PROSE PREFACES Studies in Literary Conventions By TORE JANSON ALMQVIST &WIKSELL STOCKHOLM GÖTEBORG UPPSALA (INAUGURALDISSERTATION by due permission of the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Stockholm to be publicly discussed in lecture room С on Friday, May 22, 1964, at 10 a.m. for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy)
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ANNOTATED BOOK, Cicero, commentary, glossed text, Jacques-Louis Strébée