Everything You Wanted to Know About Atticus (But Were Afraid to Ask Cicero): Looking for Atticus in Cicero’s ad Atticum

Ce qu’il faut dire, c’est que le je de ce choix naît ailleurs que là où le discours s’énonce, précisément chez celui qui l’écoute.

Jacques Lacan La métaphore du sujet (1992.363)

INTRODUCTION

Cornelius Nepos’s Life of Atticus has long foreclosed the possibility of reading Cicero’s sixteen-volume collection of the Letters to Atticus as (auto) biography. In Atticus 16.2–4, preoccupied with Atticus’s humanitas (a broad concept in Latin, here best translated with Horsfall 1989a.24 as “humanity”), Nepos situates the collection alongside the treatises in which Cicero mentions Atticus and identifies the letters as an indicium of Cicero’s more than fraternal love for Atticus. Beyond confirming Atticus’s amiability and close relationship with different generations of Roman leaders (cf. Att. 16.1), the letters sent to Atticus represent a continuous (contextam) and prophetic (cecinit ut vates) political history of the late republic between Cicero’s consulship and execution, and beyond.¹ According to Nepos, in fact, the one-sided corpus offers a detailed insight into the psychology of Rome’s leaders, a careful account of their faults, and a narrative of the republic’s collapse (Att. 16.4). Yet against the background of Nepos’s own project, the letters stand out as a work of history, not of biography.²

For those who consider the Life as the primary reference work on Atticus, Nepos’s literary self-positioning has set up Cicero’s letters as, by contrast, a historical resource for any political and psychological biographies of their author (Shackleton Bailey 1971, Rawson 1975, Mitchell 1979 and 1991). Indeed, until recently, scholarship has respected the hierarchy of sources outlined in Nepos’s digression on Atticus’s humanitas, labouring to explain those elements that are pre-eminent in the biography—key among which are Atticus’s political neutrality and financial activity—and interrogating the letters only insofar as they lend chronological precision to the portrait and reveal the “private” dimension of their subject (Narducci 2004.162).

While the renaissance of Nepos studies has breathed new life into Atticus’s biography, Cicero’s ad Atticum remains on the margins. In particular, the literary and rhetorical facets of the correspondence, as well as the cultural and ideological aspects of the language of friendship, have yet to play a central role in figuring Atticus’s persona. Moreover, this letter collection still awaits a critical recuperation of the kind that has rejuvenated studies of the ad Familiares and promoted readings of these letters as rhetorical texts and complex communicative acts (inter alia: Beard 2002, Garcea 2003 and 2005, Gunderson 2007, and Bernard 2013). As a counterweight to those studies of the ad Atticum which attempt to reconstruct either the narrative of Atticus’s relationship with Cicero (Shackleton Bailey 1965–70 vol. 1) or an account of his political and financial activity (Perlwitz 1992), I will dig deeply into the epistolary logic of representation that underlies Cicero’s Atticus by offering a diachronic analysis of select thematic and tropological aspects of the letters. We will examine how Atticus is named, Cicero’s concern with determining his correspondent’s location, observations on Atticus’s letters as material and literary objects, and reflections on Atticus’s life course and his participation in civic life.

Informing this analysis are studies of discrete epistolary interactions in the ad Familiares (Dettenhoffer 1990, Leach 1999, and Bernard 2013), along with works on the language of friendship and the specular rhetoric of the so called alter idem dynamic (Citroni Marchetti 2000 and 2009, Williams 2012). Above all (as my title indicates), my reading of the correspondence follows Lacan’s observations on the dialectical process of subject-formation—especially as he tackled the process in the early part of his career.³ Lacan’s analysis of discursive interaction, based on the position of speakers within the coded systems of culture and language (the “Symbolic”), suggests ways in which certain epistolary tropes and habits that are often taken for granted, like...