A Rhetorical Figure: Cicero in the Early Empire

My dissertation investigates the reception of Cicero in the early Roman Empire, focusing on the first 250 years after his death. I show that this reception is primarily constructed by the ancient rhetorical schoolroom, where young Romans first encountered Cicero, reading his speeches and writing Ciceronian declamations. Here they were exposed to a particular version of the man, with emphases often selected for political purposes. When they grew up, that schoolroom image of Cicero continued to permeate their thought and writing. My study unpacks this complex process and lays bare the early Empire's relationship with one of its most significant late Republican predecessors.;The dissertation has five chapters. In chapter 1 I triangulate among the comments of the scholia Bobiensia, Asconius, and Quintilian on the Pro Milone to reconstruct how a Roman rhetor taught a Ciceronian speech in the classroom. Careful scrutiny of the preoccupations and interests of these teachers reveals what students in the early Empire would have learned about Cicero from their closest surviving link to the man, his speeches. In chapters two and three I look at declamations about Cicero and Ciceronian pseudepigrapha, which are also products of the rhetorical schoolroom, and compare them with the versions of Cicero composed by early imperial literary authors. I show that what we find in these authors reflects what they learned as adolescents in the rhetorical classroom. Finally, chapters 4 and 5 comprise case studies of Cicero in Pliny the Younger and Tacitus, which both pivot around the central figure of Quintilian. In chapter 4 I demonstrate that Tacitus mounts a sophisticated theoretical rejection of Quintilian's neo-Ciceronianism, particularly in the Dialogus, where the rejection is cloaked in remarkable Ciceronian intertextuality--Tacitus rejects Cicero by subverting Cicero's own words. In chapter 5 I show that Pliny, by contrast, is torn between following Quintilian's prescription to become a Cicero rediuiuus and the knowledge that neither his native ingenium nor the changed political circumstances allow him to do so. Hence his Epistulae manifest a persistently uneasy anxiety of influence and his relationship with Cicero remains an unresolved and unresolvable tension throughout his work.