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Me autem nomine appellabat: avoidance of Cicero's name in his dialogues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Eleanor Dickey
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa

Extract

Cicero's dialogue De Finibus depicts three conversations between the author and his friends. In the course of these conversations Cicero depicts himself as addressing his interlocutors directly, using the vocative case, on 45 occasions; the other characters, however, never address Cicero at all. What is the reason for this imbalance?

Type
Shorter Notes
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1997

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References

page 584 note 3 For the common ancient practice of referring to a literary work by quotation of its opening words, even when the work was also known by a title, see Nachmanson, E., Der griechische Buchtitel (Goteborg, 1941, repr. Darmstadt, 1969), pp. 3749Google Scholar, Kenney, E. J., ‘That Incomparable Poem the ‘ille ego’?’, CR NS 20 (1970), 290. Admittedly the examples there discussed are not of dramatic works, except that the opening of Ennius‘ Medea is quoted by Cicero at De Finibus 1.5 shortly after he has referred to the work by its title. But Greek dramatic hypotheses commonly quote the opening words of a play in addition to giving its title. Terence's prologues are so clearly separate from the dramatic action that it would (I think) be quite natural to regard line 53, rather than line 1 of the prologue, as the opening of the play. I have not found an example of the use either of the first line of the opening scene or of the first line of the prologue to refer to one of Terence's plays, so perhaps I have not hit on the right explanation; but that does not weaken my conviction that the line has been interpolated at this point in Cicero's work.Google Scholar

page 584 note 1 Quotations and statistics in this paper are taken from the Oxford text of Cicero's letters and the Teubner text of his philosophical works, with the exception of the De Legibus, which was only available to me in a Loeb text. References and abbreviations follow the conventions of the Oxford Latin Dictionary.

page 584 note 2 I am using ‘to address’ in its technical, linguistic sense (= ‘to use a word referring to the person to whom one is speaking’) rather than in the general sense of ‘to talk to’. For the purposes of this paper, the noun ‘address’ is synonymous with ‘vocative’ (including not only names, but also any other vocative addressed to a character in the dialogue), or what linguists refer to as ‘free forms of address’ (see Braun, F., Terms of Address: Problems and Patterns of Address Usage in Various Languages and Cultures [Berlin, 1988], pp. 1112). Cicero's dialogues often contain addresses other than those from one character to another, such as addresses to the dedicatee of the work (e.g. ‘Brute’, Fin. 1.1), or to a philosopher or other figure not actually present (e.g. ‘Epicure’, Fin. 2.21). Such addresses are not relevant to the current discussion and are not included in any statistics given in this paper.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 584 note 3 1.15,1.25, 1.27,2.16,2.18,2.20, 2.23,2.44,2.48,2.51,2.60,2.67,2.69,2.74,2.80,2.99,2.103, 2.107,2.109,2.113, 2.116, 3.8, 3.11, 3.12, 3.40,4.1,4.2,4.3,4.14,4.19,4.24,4.37,4.44,4.50,4.60, 4.62,4.65, 5.4, 5.6, 5.8, 5.75, 5.76, 5.78, 5.85, 5.95

page 585 note 4 5.3, 5.6 (bis), 5.71,5.86.

page 585 note 5 10,11,13, 14,15,18,21,22,24,26,42,74,75,91,109,119,120,123,125 (bis), 126,130,148, 149, 152, 171, 183, 184, 187, 192, 211, 212, 219, 222, 230, 231, 232, 255, 258, 266, 270, 279, 292, 297, 300, 307, 309, 317, 324 (bis), 327, 330 (bis), 331, 332.

page 585 note 6 64,66,71,79, 87,89,99,105, 111, 122,133,137 (bis), 141,144, 145(bis), 147,148.

page 585 note 7 1.10,1.11,2.8, 2.13,2.100,2.101,2.136,2.150.

page 585 note 8 1.3,1.9,1.11,1.26,1.43

page 585 note 9 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 (bis), 1.8, 1.12, 1.13, 1.17, 1.18, 1.21, 1.37, 1.53, 1.57, 1.58, 1.63, 2.7, 2.9, 2.12, 2.18, 2.24, 2.34, 2.43, 2.45, 2.58 (bis), 3.1, 3.12, 3.13, 3.17, 3.19, 3.23, 3.25, 3.26 (bis), 3.29, 3.30, 3.33 (bis), 3.39, 3.47.

page 585 note 10 1.5,1.18,1.52,1.56,2.8, 2.11,2.17,2.23,2.43,2.69, 3.12, 3.19, 3.28, 3.34.

page 585 note 11 1.1 (bis), 1.3.

page 586 note 12 E.g. Q.fr. 1. 3.1, 1.4.1,2.3.7,2.5.5

page 586 note 13 3.25, 3.26 (bis).

page 586 note 14 1.5, 1.12, 1.18, 1.57, 1.58,2.7,2.9, 2.12,2.18,2.43, 3.12, 3.17, 3.23, 3.33, 3.39

page 586 note 15 Adams, J. N., ‘Conventions of Naming in Cicero’, CQ NS 28 (1978), 145–66, at p. 162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 586 note 16 Salomies, O., Die romischen Vornamen: Studien zur romischen Namengebung (Helsinki, 1987), pp. 255256.Google Scholar

page 586 note 17 E.g. AH. 3.4, 3.9.2, 3.15.7, 6.1.20, 6.2.8, 6.6.4

page 586 note 18 Adams (n. 15), 162.

page 586 note 19 1.4, 1.5,1.37,2.34, 2.58 (bis), 3.19, 3.33.

page 586 note 20 1.1, 1.3,1.8, 1.13,1.17, 1.21, 1.53,1.63,2.24,2.45, 3.1, 3.13, 3.29, 3.30, 3.47.

page 586 note 21 See Adams (n. 15); Salomies (n. 16); Jones, F., ‘Naming in Pliny's Letters’, SO 66 (1991), 147170CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Powell, J. G. F., ‘A Note on the Use of the Praenomen’, CQ NS 34 (1984), 238239CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vidman, L., ‘Die Namengebung bei Plinius dem Jiingeren’, Klio 63 (1981), 585595.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 586 note 22 E.g. Alt. 7.1.4,7.3.5,7.7.7.

page 586 note 23 Note, however, Catil. 1.27, where Cicero quotes the personified patria as calling him ‘M. Tulli’.

page 586 note 24 Part. 1, 140, Fin. 5.6, Leg. 3.36.

page 587 note 25 The multi-person dialogues have 234 addresses over 15,987 lines of text, which works out to about 31 vocatives per 100 pages of text (using for this purpose the Loeb edition, which is more consistent in format than the Teubner). The two-person dialogues have 12 addresses over 4,840 lines, or an average of five vocatives per 100 pages of text.

page 587 note 26 1.4.5,3.4.2, 3.13.1.

page 588 note 27 Dickey, E., Greek Forms of Address: From Herodotus to Lucian (Oxford, 1996), pp. 107109.Google Scholar

page 588 note 28 3.1.34, 3.1.45, 3.4.47, 7.1.21, 7.2.38, 7.3.47, 7.7.3

page 588 note 1 Classical Papers 627 = CR 19 (1905), 123.

page 588 note 2 ‘... as shown partly by the omission of any preposition (Kraft), partly by being combined with Crannon and Larissa, partly by the word coeunt which could scarcely apply to any place larger than a town’; thus Ellis ad v.