Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword (David Langslow)
- PART I THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
- PART II EARLY LATIN
- PART III CLASSICAL LATIN
- 10 Hyperbaton and register in Cicero
- 11 Notes on the language of Marcus Caelius Rufus
- 12 Syntactic colloquialism in Lucretius
- 13 Campaigning for utilitas: style, grammar and philosophy in C. Iulius Caesar
- 14 The style of the Bellum Hispaniense and the evolution of Roman historiography
- 15 Grist to the mill: the literary uses of the quotidian in Horace, Satire 1.5
- 16 Sermones deorum: divine discourse in Virgil's Aeneid
- PART IV EARLY PRINCIPATE
- PART V LATE LATIN
- Abbreviations
- References
- Subject index
- Index verborum
- Index locorum
11 - Notes on the language of Marcus Caelius Rufus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword (David Langslow)
- PART I THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
- PART II EARLY LATIN
- PART III CLASSICAL LATIN
- 10 Hyperbaton and register in Cicero
- 11 Notes on the language of Marcus Caelius Rufus
- 12 Syntactic colloquialism in Lucretius
- 13 Campaigning for utilitas: style, grammar and philosophy in C. Iulius Caesar
- 14 The style of the Bellum Hispaniense and the evolution of Roman historiography
- 15 Grist to the mill: the literary uses of the quotidian in Horace, Satire 1.5
- 16 Sermones deorum: divine discourse in Virgil's Aeneid
- PART IV EARLY PRINCIPATE
- PART V LATE LATIN
- Abbreviations
- References
- Subject index
- Index verborum
- Index locorum
Summary
Marcus Caelius Rufus (c. 88–48 bc) is the author of seventeen letters to Cicero preserved in Book 8 of Cicero's Epistulae ad familiares, totalling thirty pages in the Oxford Classical Text. We also possess nine letters of Cicero to Caelius (Fam. 2.8–16, eighteen pages OCT), three of which are reactions to preserved letters of Caelius. I will be concerned with those letters that were exchanged between the two when Cicero was proconsul in Cilicia (fifteen letters by Caelius – total number of words 5,275 – and eight by Cicero – 2,011 words), written between May 51 bc and November 50 bc. The size of the two corpora is large enough and the circumstances in which they were writing were sufficiently stable to see whether there are differences between the language of the two men.
Caelius had a good reputation as orator, as is testified by Cicero himself and by Quintilian:
† quam eius actionem † multum tamen et splendida et grandis et eadem in primis faceta et perurbana commendabat oratio. graves eius contiones aliquot fuerunt, acres accusationes tres eaeque omnes ex rei publicae contentione susceptae; defensiones, etsi illa erant in eo meliora quae dixi, non contemnendae tamen saneque tolerabiles.
(Cic. Brut. 273, my emphasis)His delivery was offset by a style brilliant and impressive, conspicuous especially for its cleverness and wit. He made some important public speeches and three merciless prosecutions, all of which arose out of political ambition and rivalry. His court speeches in defence of himself and others, although inferior to those which I have mentioned, were not negligible, indeed quite tolerable.
(trans. H. M. Hubbell, Loeb)- Type
- Chapter
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- Colloquial and Literary Latin , pp. 186 - 202Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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