An gravius aliquid scribam: Roman seniores write to iuvenes

I used to wonder when reading horace sermo 2.1 the fictive dialogue with the real-life jurisconsult, C. Trebatius Testa, why this expert advises the poet to oil up and swim the Tiber whenever the satirical impulse keeps him from sleep.¹ Although the exercise is certainly appropriate to young jocks of Augustan Rome, it seems like a frivolous antidote to the literary obsessions of a man almost 40. Unexpectedly the answer popped out at me from a letter that Cicero had written to a much younger Testa in December 54 while Trebatius was serving as a member of Caesar's camp in Gaul. Not Horace's athletic proclivities are in question, but those of Testa. More cautious in military than in judicial affairs, as Cicero styles him, Testa is a studiossissimus homo natandi, who has nonetheless balked at a swim in the ocean.² Undoubtedly, Cicero is referring to Caesar's first British expedition from which Testa had somehow managed to excuse himself. Either from him, or more likely from his brother Quintus, who was a member of the invading company,³ Cicero had heard of the soldiers' difficult landing. As Caesar reports, the soldiers of the tenth legion, unable to beach their ships, had obeyed the exhortation of their eagle bearer to jump overboard and charge ashore (Caes. Gal. 4.24–25). My notion that the passion for swimming derives from Cicero's letter to Trebatius is backed up by Horace's use within the satire of other terms and images found in this correspondence, as when Trebatius gives Horace a political warning, exaggerating his youth, "Puer," he says, "I fear for your life that someone of your mighty friends may zap you with a freeze."⁴ A "freeze" is a standard Roman metaphor for an unreceptive political climate, and one that Cicero generally seems to consider witty, but in the Trebatius letters, where he employs it three times with reference to Trebatius's interaction with Caesar, he takes particular delight in its extra dimension of applicability to the young Roman's discomfiture amid inhospitable Gaulish weather (7.10.2; 7.11.3; 7.18.2).

Recreational as Cicero's witticisms may seem, his teasing is interlaced with exhortations and reproof, since the young lawyer was not a happy camper in the Gallic tents. Consequently, Cicero's side of the correspondence reflects complaints he was receiving of neglect, boredom, and Trebatius's craving to be back in Rome, to which he responded with repeated admonitions to respect the multiple responsibilities and concerns of his most considerate commander and bide his time.⁵ A similar item figures in Horace's satiric dialogue. When his fictionalized Trebatius advises him to stroke Caesar's ego by imitating Lucilius's praise of Scipio, the poet responds how difficult it is to find the right time for securing favorable attention.⁶ Thus, what Horace has effected in his satire—a joke that Trebatius must greatly have enjoyed—is a reversal of roles. Where the young Trebatius had once been subjected to Cicero's advice on how to make it with Julius Caesar, Horace has let the mature lawyer, who by this date has made it with not one but two Caesars, advise him on the politics of adaptation to the current Caesar-oriented regime. Conceivably, Trebatius valued his packet of Cicero's letters not only for the prestige of their writer, but also their canny characterization of himself, so I think it most likely that he shared them with Horace and also that it might have been he who delivered them over for inclusion in the collected ad Familiares as we have it.⁷

Indeed it was the element of personal representation that brought me to Cicero's letters from a career that began with Roman poetry. The turn was one that my younger self would never have envisioned, given that the most difficult course that ever I took at my beloved undergraduate institution was T.R.S. Broughton's class in Cicero's letters, an initiation, that is to say, into methods of...