Arethusa

Negotiating the present involved a constant and continuous monitoring of the past, amnesty’s necessity to remember to forget, and not to forget to keep the memory trained to the expedient.¹

De haber nacido, habernacido en otra España;sobre todo,la España de mañana.²

While governor in Further Spain, Asinius Pollio wrote three letters to Cicero (Fam. 10. 31–33) in the late Spring/early Summer of 43. Although we know from extant letters to Atticus that Cicero received at least one earlier letter from Pollio (in May 45), and we may presume (but cannot be sure) that Cicero replied to all or some of the letters Pollio sent from in Spain in 43, none of Cicero’s side of the correspondence is included in our [End Page 549] Epistulae ad Familiares collection.³ This then leads us, with Peter White, to ask of the editorial decision-making process behind the collection: “Why leave out Cicero’s letters to Pollio, but include Pollio’s to him?” (White 2010.170). Given Pollio’s significance in the events of 43, surely Cicero’s part of the exchange would be worth hearing? We have Cicero’s side of the correspondence with comparable figures, governors and army leaders (Plancus, Decimus Brutus, Cassius, Cornificius, Trebonius, and Lepidus: White 2010.137), so why not for Pollio?

This paper suggests a possible answer to White’s question by arguing that Pollio’s letters were included without Cicero’s replies for a specific reason, one that is intimately bound up with Cicero’s reception—both in the last years of his life and after his death—as the author of philosophical dialogues. On the one hand, these letters offer unique testimony as to the impact of Ciceronian dialogue on the pre-Histories Pollio—not in terms of their ostensible message, but in terms of the crossover literary features that they share with Ciceronian dialogue. Specifically, Pollio’s three letters owe their coherence and focus as a group to a general coming together of their addressee (Cicero), setting (Spain), and characterization (the quaestor Balbus) also at work in Ciceronian dialogue. At the same time, as a prequel to Pollio’s Histories and its portrait of Cicero, these letters attempt to separate the dialogic literary features from the politically expedient aim of targeting Cicero’s (and the senate’s) indecisiveness in light of Pollio’s steadfast resolve. Pollio’s letters, therefore, highlight the tension between Cicero’s political inconstantia (the “lack of consistency” exemplified in his letters to others in 43) and those claims to philosophical constantia (“steadfastness”) paraded in his dialogues. This tension reaches its peak when dialogue and letter meld together in de Officiis and the Stoicizing claims to constantia reach a fever pitch.

Yet this double-edged aspect of Pollio’s letters prompts a question: why include such an ambivalent portrait of Cicero and Ciceronian dialogue in the collection at all, especially without a riposte? The answer, I claim, lies in a vital shift in Cicero’s approach to writing philosophical dialogues before de Officiis. The way that Cicero describes Pollio in several letters to Atticus before Pollio’s appointment in Spain can be understood in [End Page 550] terms of a change in his approach to setting and characterization explored in his philosophical dialogues of the same period (the lost two-book de Gloria, Cato de senectute, and Laelius de amicitia). While we cannot be sure of Cicero’s strategy in de Gloria, in both the Cato and Laelius, he shifted away from scripting the debates among his contemporaries (an approach initiated in the group of works following Tullia’s death in 45) and set them in an earlier period in the Roman republic, returning to a strategy he had used in his earlier dialogue de Re Publica. While Pollio’s characterization of the younger Balbus involved an explicit comparison with Caesar’s character and actions, for Cicero, as we shall see, Pollio’s appointment by Caesar recalled that of Gaius Annius by Sulla and, as such, marked a cycle of...