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The O.C.T. de Officiis: a postscript

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Michael Winterbottom
Michael Winterbottom
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
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Extract

To my Oxford Classical Text of Cicero's De Officiis, published in 1994, I add two footnotes.

The first is an important citation of Cicero in Augustine, which I missed thanks to my own incompetence. Maurice Testard, in his Saint Augustin et Ciceron remarks in Augustine's Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum not only the passage I note at Off. 1.7, but also 4.43 ( =P.L. 45.1361). Migne's text (repunctuated) reads as follows:

Sequitur ergo ut uerecundiam deponas, ac manente amicitia cum

magistro Cynicis foedereris: quos tamen aliquorum, ut Cicero in

Officiis refert, etiam Stoicorum argumenta comitantur. Arguunt

quippe communem honestatem, ‘quod ea quae re turpia non sint, uerbo

5 flagitiosa ducamus; ilia autem quae re turpia sint, nominibus

appellemus suis. Latrocinium perpetrare, fraudem facere, adulterium

committere, re turpe est, sed dicitur non obscene: liberis operam

dare honestum est re, nomine obscenum. Pluraque in earn sententiam

ab eisdem’ inquit ‘contra uerecundiam disputantur. Nos autem

10 naturam sequamur, et omne quod abhorret ab oculorum auriumque approbatione fugiamus.’.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , May 1995 , pp. 265 - 266
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1995

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References

1 (Paris, 1958), ii.85–6. He also (pp. 53, 25) draws attention to probable echoes in Augustine of Off. 2.5 and 51.

2 As to the straightforward differences between Augustine and Cicero's tradition: a) uerbis is defended by nominibus suis below; b) the expansion of the verbs latrocinari fraudare adulterare seems wilful (Cicero does not use the verb perpetro); c) there seems no reason to prefer Augustine's order of liberis… obscenum.

3 Lindsay, W. M., Contractions in early Latin minuscule MSS. (St Andrews University Publications v, Oxford, 1908), pp. 36–7Google Scholar . I have profited from discussion of this passage with Andrew Dyck.