Cicero’s Letters to Cicero, ad QFr: Big Brothers Keepers

My brother lives in fearOf the hidden cries he seems to hearSomewhere ahead the King of HellSomewhere below a Kitten in a Well        “Brother’s Keeper” Pete Atkin, Smash Flops

0. INDUCTION

Cicero dearest:

The three-book collection of (Marcus) Cicero’s Letters to (Quintus) Cicero dramatizes the years of their writer’s tempora (“crisis”) between the fallout from his consulate, through his banishment, return, and shift of alignment from unease with Pompey to investment in Caesar (60–54 b.c.e.). Besides Marcus’s own spell out in the cold (58, return in 57), they are occasioned by three periods of Qfr’s absence from Italy: as praetorian proconsul of Asia (61–59, return in 58), and as legate, first to Pompey in Sardinia (56–55), then to Caesar in Gaul (54–). Their mélange of epistolarity spans the whole range from formal broadside, through mimetic bulletin, to keeping channels open. Before any documentary status that these letters may present for historians of Rome, they buzz with transferential drama, as they challenge us to join in with the imagined interpretations sponsored, provoked, and drawn from readers reading¹ with the discursive volatility that has been termed “epistoliterarity.”²

Whoever it was/they were that (successively?) put together (our version of) the collection—let’s dub them “Tiro,” Cicero’s slave then freedman “secretary,” who turns up penning a portion of text (about his penning of it, in 3.1.19), for this is a venerable tradition and there are some appealing arguments pro—the product makes for a compact three-volume set of wildly contrasting components that ostensively reward attention to the special standing of brother Quintus as imaginarily given term in the continual project of “dialogical” autoportraiture from the Latin self-stylist. What fixed Marcus as the other of his self-projection into and from the position (to be) occupied by his like was always going to be the (little) brother construct, specially locked all-too-tight into the space to be occupied by this two-horse chariot of the self.³

We have for control and contrast the (contemporary first four books of the) vast correspondence addressed to his social alter ego Atticus (which will jump to 51 for its Book 5, but carry on through 44 b.c.e.). This marvelously absent but never distant “soul brother” was wound into the family as securely as affinal relations could contrive,⁴ but even his sister’s marriage to Quintus could never make a brother-in-law a Cicero (Cappello in this volume and Henderson work in progress). Not for want of trying, and the fast friend serves, more than all the channels that a chosen social-personal ally can sustain and enhance, at least as many supposititious roles as bro’ Marcus can talk himself into prestidigitating.⁵ But, of course, before all, Romans knew well that “Romulus and Remus” signed their culture, in a sacred/accursed pledge of the subsumed status of self within society, while every day of their lives they perforce invented myriad ways round nearest and dearest to invent their selves as living legends, and for all the uncertain postulates of parentage, it was the protocols of the discourse of The Brother that avowedly bespoke the (realized, reified, repressed, denied) terms for their claims to exist (Bannon 1997, esp. 101–16, “Cicero and Quintus: A Case Study” and Mencacci 1996). For the duration.

Playing off Brutus might stage the struggle for Marcus’s uirtus, his philosopher-brave preparedness for the end (see the Letters to Brutus, in the shadow of the end, 43 b.c.e.: Whitton forthcoming), but Quintus was the necessary double through all the acts of Tully’s life. His letters sequester round the years when an elite adult male could most (over)confidently imagine an achieved ego in the traditional terms of an autarchic selfhood: when Marcus had it all, then found no one had, reflected that no one has, and went on with the techniques he’d adopted for easing or knocking reality into conformity with...