Cicero's Philosophy of History (review)

Matthew Fox's ambitious new book is a reading of a selection of Cicero's philosophical works from different periods designed to make us reconsider the entire history of Ciceronian reception, strip away the reading habits imposed by it, and at least entertain a Cicero rather different from one with whom his readers are most familiar. Fox's approach is to offer a literary interpretation of those portions of treatises that engage most closely with ideas about Rome's past. Readers expecting to find an account of Cicero's views on such topics as historical time and causation will be disappointed.

The interpretive method that Fox adopts in his reading of Cicero is an unusual and often unstable combination of deconstruction and intentionalism. He astutely locates tensions and contradictions that threaten the stability of Cicero's texts, but wants to see them all as a conscious product of Cicero's thought and literary technique, which is founded on a deep commitment to Academic Skepticism. Therefore, instead of a Cicero who strives to control reader reaction, we are presented with an anti-authoritarian Cicero who questions the meaning of Roman tradition at every turn, offers no definite solutions to his audience, and is not particularly concerned with his own image as an author. While Fox sets his reading in opposition to recent work on the treatises that centers on Cicero's careful construction of his own authority (especially John Dugan, Making a New Man: Ciceronian Self-Fashioning in the Rhetorical Works [Oxford 2005] and Brian Krostenko, Cicero, Catullus, and the Language of Social Performance [Chicago 2001]), he seems to have no quarrel with the dominant way of reading Cicero's oratory. Consequently, one side effect of his approach is an unsettling disconnect between Cicero the orator and Cicero the philosopher. This is particularly surprising since Fox in other ways builds on the work of Alain Michel, whose great accomplishment was to produce a unified image of Cicero the thinker.

Fox intends the book less for Cicero specialists than for scholars working in other areas of Latin literature (14). His awareness of the difficulty of his task and the novelty of his method, however, leads him to a structural choice that may make the book difficult to approach for those less familiar with the corpus: the lengthy discussion with which he begins, encompassing the first three chapters and intended in large part to counter potential objections by laying out his assumptions, makes many general claims that can be difficult to assess without reference to specific texts. The issue of accessibility is further raised by the somewhat idiosyncratic choice of works, motivated by Fox's belief in the centrality of the historical material and the dialogic form, rather than chronology or theme.

The texts that receive more or less extensive treatment (De re publica, De oratore, De legibus, Brutus, De divinatione) are treated similarly: Cicero is intentionally producing open-ended texts that are meant to encourage the audience to question the validity of Roman tradition and his own authority as the author. Here, Fox's attention to choice of speakers and settings and the subtleties of the authorial voice are particularly productive. De divinatione, with its clear bipartite structure, lends itself most naturally to Fox's approach and yields the most convincing reading (ch. 8). The generalization of this type of reading to the other texts discussed is more difficult, especially as it seems to preclude significant changes in Cicero's views and approaches over time. The final chapter presents John Tolland's 1712 treatise Cicero Illustratus, which for Fox symbolizes a road abandoned of Ciceronian reception.

We all make our own Ciceros. Fox presents us with a fiercely anti-authoritarian, anti-traditional Cicero. This Cicero is very intriguing, but I expect that many readers will not find him entirely recognizable.