#ciceropositivity

[locutus-sum]

Calling all Cicero stans

I haven’t posted in a while so I thought I’d just just write a little something to fulfil the purpose of this blog, that is, to spread some #ciceropositivity.

Reblog and add a reason why you love Marcus Tullius Cicero.

I’ll start: his playfulness with language. His love for puns and neologisms brought him criticism from traditionalists when he couldn’t resist adding a note of humour into his speeches. Cicero was a man whose very human love of humour was stronger even than his desperation to boost his dignitas, despite facing the derision of patricians who already criticised him for being a ‘novus homo’.

(Was Cicero perfect? No. Is he still my problematic fave? Yes. Am I desperate to be an unabashed Cicero apologist despite my appreciation of the need for a balanced historical view? Hell yeah.)

Come on, let’s stan Cicero like we’re all Quintilian.

#ciceropositivity #tagamemnon #marcus tullius cicero #teamcicero #lingua latina #ancient rome #cicero my beloved

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Reason one billion and five to love Cicero: he made up the verb ‘to Sulla’.

If they made my name into a verb I don’t like to thing what it would mean. Probably ‘to make a total mess of literally everything one touches’.

#Marcus Tullius Cicero #lingua latina #verbing #sulla #neologisms #ciceropositivity #tagamemnon

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The charge of vanity commonly made against [Cicero] is not exactly correct; for he was sometimes able to laugh at himself

Elizabeth Rawson, Cicero: A Portrait (1975)

Further details under the cut

As a shameless Cicero apologist, I really do love this book, because Elizabeth Rawson offers convincing arguments to support what I had always thought about Cicero. We must excuse him to some extent for several reasons, she says:

 “his self-criticism was as excessive as was his self-satisfaction”

dignitas was a result of one’s individual deeds but also those of one’s ancestors. Cicero, as a new man, had nobody’s deeds to extol but his own.

He was always afraid that his execution of the Catilinarian conspirators would come back to haunt him - staunch optimates were already kicking up a fuss in 61BC - and so a bit of self-promotion is not an unreasonable reaction

Rawson cites several examples of this ‘being able to laugh at himself’: one, when he received a huffy note from Metellus Celer, Cicero did indeed write back admitting his desire for recognition and that he realised people were laughing because of it; secondly, he makes many jokes to Atticus referring to the phrase, previously used to mock him, ‘I have been informed’.

Rawson, of course, does stress that Cicero is not entirely blame-free, and that he was overly fond of congratulations even for a man whose culture valued honour like the Romans’ did. I agree, he is flawed. But I really don’t think Cicero deserves all the backlash he gets for his vanity - at least he has the decency to be frank about it, and we mustn’t let his flaws obscure the fact that, actually, he was a really great guy.

Let’s keep up the #ciceropositivity on this site and rehabilitate the memory of a very real, human man, and a gift to classical scholarship.

Wow that got a bit more serious that I expected. I’m tired and emotional and I just love Cicero OK?! 

#tagamemnon #marcus tullius cicero #ciceropositivity #ancient rome