Arethusa

In May 54, Cicero wrote to his younger friend Trebatius Testa, then serving as legal tribune under Caesar in Gaul, with a sharply critical exhortation (7.6.1): “tu modo ineptias istas et desideria urbis et urbanitatis depone et, quo consilio profectus es, id adsiduitate et virtute consequere” (“Just you lay aside these bumblings and cravings for the city and citification, and follow up with manliness and persistence that resolution in which you set forth”). Given that Cicero had recommended Trebatius highly for the appointment and had a great personal stake in its diplomatic value, he was indignant at Trebatius’s complaints. Did he not see the paradox, five years later, when he himself wrote from Cilicia to Caelius Rufus in similar words but with the situation reversed (2.11.1): “mirum me desiderium tenet urbis” (“A wondrous craving for the city has hold of me”)?

Cicero’s reluctance to go to Cilicia, his many expressions of discontent, and his persistent protests against prorogation are well known. For these attitudes, letters are the primary source.² But as Michèle Lowrie [End Page 503] recently proposed, the interlude may not seem so negative in the larger trajectory of Cicero’s career as a transition between writing about government and returning to the practice of it.³ After all, this separation from Rome took him not into exile but into an alternative space for duty and service. Its distance offered a kind of freedom for exercising his wonted persona. Distance is a condition of letters, but distances, both spatial and temporal, offer many-angled conditions for viewing, or, in the case of these letters, many-angled conditions within which a correspondent both sees and is seen.

Within a one-year span, Cicero wrote a large number of letters: among his frequent correspondents are Atticus (32), and Caelius Rufus (8), with thirteen to Appius Claudius Pulcher, his predecessor in the governorship (the longest of all his letter sequences in the ad Fam.). Additionally, the singular fifteenth book includes two letters to the Roman senate, three to Cato, and six consular letters to the Claudii Marcelli father, son, and cousin, and Claudius’s consular colleague Aemilius Paulus. Single letters of importance go to Caelius Caldus, the incoming quaestor, and to Papirius Paetus, the jocular Campanian friend who will later receive half the correspondence in Book 9.

In considering the composition of the letter books, Peter White argues convincingly for an editorial selection process, a persona shaping the persona, which shows Cicero as having corresponded with individuals of importance.⁴ The selection of dignitaries included in Book 15 bears witness to this point. Visibly tailored to the perceived identities of their recipients, the overall spectrum of the Cilician letters details a developing sequence of events in which the reluctant proconsul comes face-to-face with the shortcomings of his predecessor, shortcomings that allow him, in turn, to articulate his own administrative successes. Two kinds of space are engaged by the letters: the immediate geographical spaces of Cicilia and the space of his removal from Rome. Letters to and about Appius chart Cilician geographical spaces on two maps overlaid: Cicero’s own travel itinerary and the counter-itinerary of Appius by which Cicero perceives [End Page 504] his predecessor as avoiding him. As successive bids for face-to-face meetings are baffled, amicitia seems to fail, turning exchange into altercation. As a field of contestation for auctoritas, Cilicia has changed the Appius that Cicero knew in Rome.

In letters to Atticus, the same Cicilian map measures journeys by indications of time and arrivals and departures, but marks locations by discoveries of Appius’s unpopularity, alongside the enthusiastic reception that greets Cicero’s own progress. Here and in the comparably comfortable correspondence with Caelius, frequent references to delays in letters being received highlight the distance from Rome—a distance that Cicero strives to lessen through confidentiality. But distance enables creative possibilities, the potential for taking charge of a perceived self. Military successes foster a self-confidence whose diverse configurations G. O. Hutchinson illuminates (1998.90–100) in observing the differences in narrative style in the...