Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

THE PEN IN POLITICS
wider audience on topics less specialist in character or of more ambitious appeal
than the technical. The subject of potentially greatest interest and widest appeal
was Roman history and contemporary politics: the whole cast of Roman
thought, the character of the constitution, and the kaleidoscopic nature of the
history of the past century precluded for the generation of the Gracchi the neat
separation of the study of the past and the present into distinct genres. Even by
the end of the century, the various strands which make up the rope of Roman
historiography were still only strands. While certain themes can be seen to have
been shared by writers as different as Ennius and Cato, Fabius and Coelius
Antipater, for example an emphasis on the individual and his proper relation
through uirtus to the extended family which was the res publica, fundamental
questions of approach, emphasis, and presentation remained open at the end of
the second century B.C. Thus, in discussing ' History' (pp. 149—52), we shall in
fact be dealing with strands; and in order that we should appreciate their texture,
it will be necessary first to discuss some kinds of writing which are best described
as political manifestos or memoirs.
In the Greek world it had long been the custom of authors to address poems,
histories, and technical works to a patron or friend, so that the work might take
on the appearance of a private letter of didactic character. In the later second
century we find the same in Latin literature. Lucilius addressed several of his
poems to friends as verse-epistles; Accius' Didascalica was nominally addressed
to one Baebius, Coelius Antipater's History of the Second Punic War was
addressed to Aelius Stilo. Written during the last decades of the second century,
this was the first prose-history in which the author sought to sweeten his
instruction with the charms of rhetorical presentation. He seems to have
followed the example of the worse sort of Hellenistic historian, and his style
involved the disruption of the natural order of words in order to achieve
rhythmical effects later, and rightly, condemned (cf. Auct. ad Her. 4.12.18 has
res ad te scnptas Luci misimus Aeli, with a hexameter-movement, cf. Cic. Orat.
229). Clearly Coelius had a wider audience in mind, and his dedication to Aelius
Stilo is only a literary device. In other works, however, the use of the letterform
or dedication was not so simply a convention. As we have seen, several of
Cato's shorter works were addressed to Cato Licinianus, among them ' letters'
on rhetoric (see p. 143), on medicine (Pliny, N.H. 29.14), and even several
books on agriculture (Serv. ad Virg. Geo. 2.412). A century later the Commentariolum
petitionis attributed rightly or wrongly to Marcus' brother Quintus
Cicero is in the form of a private letter giving Marcus Cicero advice on the
occasion of his standing for the consulship of 63 B.C. From the 12.0s B.C. there are
excerpts of a similarly political letter written by Cornelia to her son Gaius
Gracchus dissuading him from his plan to stand for the Tribunate in 123 B.C.
The authenticity of the document has been much disputed, for no good reason
MS
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008