Andrew Lintott, Cicero as Evidence
Cicero "was lying" [history-shaping events of bias and misrepresentation, downright fantasy]..
In his book Cicero as Evidence: A Historian’s Companion, published in 2008, Andrew Lintott wrote:
Chapter 1
Reading Events
TEXTS AS EVENTS
One of the first things that students of late-Republican Roman history have to learn is that they cannot treat Ciceronian texts as authentic records of history. They must realize not only that the statements about his own lifetime, especially in his speeches, contain bias and misrepresentation, if not at times downright fantasy, but that most accounts of past history in his works have a persuasive element that tends to overshadow his devotion to the truth as he knows it.
Cicero knew the ‘laws of history’, that one should neither venture to say anything false nor fail to venture to say anything true. However, that did not apply to the stories told in speeches: in his dialogue dedicated to Brutus, he puts in Atticus’ mouth the comment that orators had a licence to lie in order to make a point more emphatically.
This last point should not surprise us. In the courts of the Roman Republic an orator’s duty was to his client, not the court, and Cicero stressed the importance of adapting the narratio, the account of the ‘facts of the case’, to the later argument. The same is true of the historical exempla he introduces.
Cicero is not a detached and impartial narrator of either the world in which he himself moved or the past history of Rome.
Some of what follows in this work will be an elaboration of this theme in relation to specific texts and problems. However, there is another complementary aspect of Cicero’s writings that is less often stressed: they were themselves events in history with causes and effects. …
Chapter 3
Truth and Fiction in the Speeches
In the speech for Sestius of March 56 Cicero’s own allegation about Caesar is attributed to Clodius. According to Cicero, Clodius was openly stating in his speeches to the people that he had Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar behind him, ‘of whom one had a very large army in Italy and the two, who were then private citizens, could and would raise armies, if they wanted’. Apart from the exaggeration about Caesar (one could even question whether Caesar’s Cisalpine province was part of ‘Italia’ at this time), the allegation runs counter to what we know of Pompey’s behaviour and that of Crassus since Sulla’s dictatorship. They had not in fact raised armies without public authorization and were most unlikely to have wanted it stated that they would.
Did Clodius really state this without encountering a denial? Or did Clodius merely claim that he has the support of the three, the remarks about the armies being a Ciceronian gloss?
Two months later in De Haruspicum Responso, with some results of the compact between Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus at Luca already visible, the claim about Clodius has been watered down. Clodius would never have been able to harry Cicero and the res publica so viciously,
[Quote] had he not been threatening to send Caesar’s army with standards at the ready into the senate-house (he was lying about this, but no one tried to refute him), had he not been screaming that he was doing this with the aid of Cn. Pompeius and the authority of M. Crassus, had he not been giving assurances that the consuls had joined their cause with his—the one point on which he was not mendacious. [end quote]
In the end Cicero was compelled, in face of the force majeure of the gang of three, to suppress any reference to Crassus and Pompey’s armies and to argue that Clodius’ alleged claim about Caesar’s army was false. But the reason for his change of tactic does not make his own original insinuations about the three any more true. The danger for the historian in using statements in Ciceronian speeches out of context is apparent. However, the varying forms of argument and the rhetorical techniques used are themselves important data for history and for Cicero’s biography. …
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The Source has been:
Andrew Lintott, Cicero as Evidence: A Historian’s Companion, Oxford University Press 2008
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