Cicero the Historian and Cicero the Antiquarian

Abstract

Cicero's views on history and historians, and his general conceptions of the past, have received a good deal of attention—some, most recently, in Rambaud's short book Cicéron et l' Histoire Romaine ; but his historical practice has had less consideration. True, practically every passage in which he refers to an event of the past has been somewhere thoroughly elucidated, and the sources to which he turned in any particular work have been investigated by a crowd of commentators. But the general accounts of Cicero's knowledge of and relation to the historiographical tradition of his time are either antiquated or disappointing, and estimates of Cicero's scholarship range from the enthusiastic admiration displayed, but hardly justified, by most recent writers, to the contempt of older ones, most extravagantly Münzer, who stigmatized the De senectute as a historical fantasy, or Zingler, who even accused Cicero of inventing his exempla . The subject is important both for Cicero's own sake, and in order to throw light on the historiographical standards and activities of his time. Advance can perhaps be made by distinguishing more carefully than has usually been done between the kinds of approach that he made to different types of historical subject at different stages in his career and in different literary genres.