M. Tullius Cicero: The Fragmentary Speeches (review)

Here we have a manifestation of the paradox that scholarship thrives on ignorance. Scanty evidence begets profuse speculation and reconstruction, and often the less we know about something, the more we write about it. Hence flows this elaborate presentation of Cicero’s fragmentary speeches, which complements the author’s previous book in the same vein, M. Tullius Cicero: The Lost and Unpublished Orations(Hypomnemata 80, Göttingen 1984). With great industry Crawford presents us 350 pages of intense erudition devoted to the explication of about 220 fragments (most rather short) from sixteen otherwise lost but identifiable Ciceronian orations; this second edition adds a brief appendix of another thirty-one fragmenta incertae sedis.

But Crawford’s sprawling edition of these remnants is by no means in vain. They have been unduly neglected, and deserve to be more widely appreciated. If nothing else they remind us of how much we have lost from antiquity, even of an author such as Cicero from whom so much else has survived. This rich inheritance is nevertheless only a fraction of the original legacy, and we must remember that there are many pieces missing from the puzzle, the loss of which distorts the overall picture. This new edition represents a dedicated effort to fill in some of the neglected pieces not just from along the edges, but also from the vital center, to reconstruct their original context, and thereby to sharpen the focus of the whole. The fact that most of the speeches under view in this study date to the 60s B.C., a period not fully represented in the extant Ciceronian letters, makes them all the more important as valuable evidence in the proper understanding of Cicero’s political and forensic career at its height.

The fragments here range in length from single isolated words to several lines; most average one or two lines, though there are about a dozen longer fragments between five and nine lines each. Not included in this edition are orations such as Pro Scauroand Pro Tulliowhich, though incomplete, are considered essentially extant. Some of the fragments come from minor orations about which we know very little (five speeches are represented by a single fragment), while others survive in large clusters from important speeches which were well known in antiquity and whose loss to modern readers must be regretted. There are, for example, twenty-seven fragments from Cicero’s electoral oration In Toga Candida(all preserved by Asconius), thirty-three from the invective In P. Clodium et Curionem,and twenty-five from the speech De Aere Alieno Milonis(preserved in the Bobbio scholia). But the most extensively preserved are the twin defense speeches Pro C. Cornelio,together represented by eighty fragments (well over a third from Asconius) whose discussion consumes nearly a quarter of Crawford’s book. Over all, Asconius, Quintilian, and the Bobbio scholiast provide the most numerous and significant fragments, augmented by their encasing commentary which provides valuable context and discussion. Less important are the stray words and phrases picked out by some three dozen others, mostly grammarians with narrow linguistic purposes, working as late as the sixth century a.d.

Crawford’s modus operandifor making sense of these fragments is logical and thorough. For each of the sixteen orations, arranged here in chronological order, she first gives a preliminary introduction rehearsing what we know of the historical facts about the case and summarizing the scholarship on the issues which surround it. Next come the ancient testimonia for each speech, both Latin and Greek, and then the fragments themselves (along with textual apparatus) arranged in their probable correct order. She does not offer translations. Finally, each fragment receives a comprehensive commentary addressing matters of date, prosopography, history, politics and law, rhetoric, style, and diction (including textual questions). Where the fragments are extensive enough, there is also a good attempt to reconstruct the overall structure and argument of the speech. At...