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Genre and Fact in the Preface to Cicero's De Amicitia*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2015

Paul Burton
Paul Burton*
Affiliation:
The University of Tasmania
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Extract

One can prove imposture; never authenticity.

– Roland Barthes

Over 250 years ago, the Cambridge clergyman Conyers Middleton, one of the first biographers of Cicero in the English language, said of the Laelius De Amicitia, ‘this agreeable book … must needs affect us more warmly when it is found at last to be a history, or a picture drawn from the life, exhibiting the real characters and sentiments of the best and greatest men of Rome.’ Middleton thus accepted at face value Cicero's claims in the preface to his treatise on friendship that he has reproduced, in some form, an actual conversation that took place in 129 BCE between C. Laelius and his sons-in-law C. Fannius and Q. Mucius Scaevola.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antichthon , Volume 41 , 2007 , pp. 13 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Australasian Society for Classical Studies 2007

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Footnotes

*

Thanks are owed to A.M. Eckstein who read several early drafts of this paper and has never lost faith in its basic conclusions, and to David Konstan, Peter Davis, Jessica Dietrich, the members of the Pacific Rim Roman Literature Seminar, and the two anonymous referees for this journal, all of whom have made my arguments stronger through their incisive critiques. Any and all errors of fact and judgment that remain are my own.

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