BOOKS.
CICERO'S CORRESPONDENCE.*
OF late, some good work has been done by English scholars for Cicero's Letters. The thing was much needed. These Letters are of the highest political interest, and at the same time they claim the careful study of the pure scholar, their style and diction giving us an admirable notion of the way in which a cultivated Roman was wont to chat with his familiar friends. In fact, they abound in what are called colloquialisms. They are often., for obvious reasons, exceedingly difficult, and hard-hearted examiners delight in nothing more than in the torture and the humiliation which may be inflicted even on well-read scholars by a cruel and malignant selection of some of their most terrible cruxes. The Greek words and phrases which continually confront us are often utterly baffling to an ordinary student. The delicate innuendos, too, in which some incident or some scandal of the day is glanced at, add much to his perplexity. A number of Punch is apt to be a puzzle to one who is not quite an courant with the various shifting scenes of political and social life, and so too many of these letters are hopelessly unintelligible unless we have some acquaintance with what we may call the subtler aspects of the history of the period. They have been a fine field for the ingenuity of the great scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both as to emendation and interpretation. And it is truly wonderful to see how much has been accomplished. But till of late, there was a grievous want of good, serviceable English editions, such, we mean as would enable a fairly equipped scholar to master these letters without further help. To some extent, this want has now been supplied by Mr. Watson's Selection, and by Mr. Pretor's edition of the First Book of the Letters to Atticus, both of which ought to be in the hands of all students of Cicero. Any selection from these letters is, perhaps, as Mr. Tyrrell says, unsatisfactory ; but for all that, we cannot but think that Mr. Watson's book, containing, as it does, most of the letters of great historical interest, has been welcomed by a good many of our more advanced students. Indeed, if any work admits of selections, it seems to us that letters or correspondence admit of them. Still, of course, we are heartily glad to find that a scholar of Mr. Tyrrell's attainments is working at a complete edition of Cicero's Letters, and we congratulate him on the successful beginning he has made in his first volume. It was usual, as every one knows, to divide Cicero's corre- spondence into his letters to his friends generally (Ad Famgiares), and his Letters to Atticus. Mr. Tyrrell has adopted a chronological arrangement. We have in this volume the let- ters of a period of eleven years, from B.C. 68 to 57, a period coinciding with Cicero's life from his thirty-ninth to his fiftieth year. They are classed in three divisions, the first part being made up of Cicero's correspondence previous to his famous con- sulship, in the year B.C. 63, with Caius Antonins as his col- league ; the second, of his correspondence from its resumption after his consulship to his exile ; and the third, of his letters written during his exile. The last part is by far the most ex- tensive, and we have but a fragment of it in the volume before us. In all we have eighty-six of the letters, most of them to Atticus, and among them is the long letter to his brother Qnintus in Asia, on the duties of a provincial governor. Mr. Tyrrell has thought fit to include in his volume the Liber de Petitione Consulatus, which he feels certain was the production of Quintus Cicero, and intended by him to be a series of practical hints for his brother's guidance in standing for the consulship. This, indeed, has long been the general verdict of scholars. Mr. Tyrrell discusses the matter very fully in his Introduction, and he fortifies his reason- ing by noting that, so far from its being unlikely that Quintus would have proffered advice to his brother at a critical time, Cicero tells us plainly that he had often sought his counsels. The essay or letter in question is a brochure on electioneering tactics, and explains how a skilful and energetic canvass might be carried on without any infringement of the law. It is * The Correspondence of Cicero, with a Revision of the Tart, a Commentary, and Introductory Essays. By H. Y. Tyrrell, M.A. Vol. I. Dublin : Hodges, Foster, and-Co. London Longman'. MI. possible that it may have been revised by Cicero. It.must, at any rate, always have a considerable interest, being, in fact, a sort of manual for the direction of a candidate for the highest office at Rome. For the first time it now appears, in what Mr. Tyrrell regards as its only proper place, in the correspondence of Cicero.
Every scholar knows that the Letters teem with difficulties, and require much and careful elucidation. It is a question with us whether in his foot-notes Mr. Tyrrell has given us enough. What he does give us is generally good and sound. It would have been as well, we think, to have headed each letter with a summary in English of its substance and contents. The meagre little Latin summaries are not of much service to the student. On the question of the pedarii senatores (the senators who, according to the usual theory, could vote, but not speak), we find that Mr. Tyrrell, in a note on Letter 25, takes Mr. Mtufro's view, which Mr. Pretor, too, has adopted in his edition. They were, he thinks, the inferior senators, as opposed to the consolers, senators, in fact, who had not yet risen to the highest offices. The privilege of speaking would come first to the con- solers or ex-consuls, but the inferior senators would, as time and opportunity allowed, have the right to speak. In his notes on this same letter, the author points out an undoubted blunder of Mr. Pretor's, in making Cicero describe the great Lucullus as Lucullus of Panhormus. The passage is, "Non dicam quod tibi, ut opinor, Panhormi Lucullus de suis historiis dixerat," and it should be rendered, "I shall not say what Lucullus said to you, at Panhormus, I think it was." Panhormus was a very respectable town on the north coast of Sicily, and was of Greek origin ; but Lucullus, as Mr. Tyrrell says, would have thought it odd to be addressed as Lucullus of Panhormus. We wonder at such a grotesque slip in Mr. Pretor, and recall " dormitat Homerus." It is a mistake, too, into which a scholar never ought to have fallen, as' had he been turning English into Latin, he could hardly have rendered "Solon of Athens" by Solon Athenarum. In a difficult and probably corrupt passage in Letter 10 (Letters to AU icus, book i., ep. 2), Mr. Tyrrell ventures on an emendation which we do not think will generally approve itself. At the close of the letter, Cicero tells his friend that he is greatly charmed with a statue (Hermathena, half Hermes, half Athene) which he has received from him, and which is so happily placed that his whole house (gymnasium, properly, college buildings) looks like "din &utilize.," such being the reading of the Medi- cean manuscript. For this ipdou cimciOnlAcc has been conjec- tured, also" ejus dpcithpa," which last Mr. Pretor adopts, render- ing it, "You would fancy my school to be a votive offering at its feet." It is hard to believe that Cicero could have written this, and Mr. Tyrrell seems right in condemning it as pointless and absurd. He would himself read ixiou gyamAtz, "a blaze of sunlight," and he takes Cicero's meaning to be that the statue is so well placed that the whole gymnasium seems to have got new life and light. 'Ayet466, he observes, was a common word in the Stoic philosophy, with which Cicero was very familiar, and light and brilliancy were what the Romans most valued in a house. No doubt, Cicero's humour often has some pedantry about it ; but here, as it strikes us, we should have both pedantry and obscurity. The reading ilxioa einignlice is not very intelligible, and Mr. Tyrrell thinks it cannot mean "a shrine of the Sun," as it is commonly explained ; but we have our doubts whether Cicero would have described a light and cheerful house as an ;A1011 gm/Alta.
Our author has not implicitly followed Baiter's text, though, of course, he admits it to be based on a thoroughly accurate col- lation of manuscrpts and on high critical acumen. He takes for granted whatever Baiter reports as the results of his recension of manuscripts, and then ventures from time to time to draw his own inferences. Orelli's edition was regarded as almost a final settlement of the text, till it was found out by Haupt, in the year 1855, that some codices known as those of Bosius, on which he had relied, were pure fabrications. The incident is a singular and amusing one, in the history of Classical criticism. Bosius, or Simon du Bos, was a great French scholar of the sixteenth century, and not satisfied with making brilliant emen- dations, be must needs pretend that they were derived from actually existing manuscripts. He spoke of two codices, the Decurtatus and the Crnsellinus ; the first he said he got from a soldier, in the sack of a monastery in which it had been depo- sited; the second he described very vaguely as having be- longed to one Peter Crusellus, an eminent French physician, —this he professed to have seen and consulted at Lyons. Formore than •three hundred years the imposition was undetected. Haupt's disbelief was conclusively proved to be well founded, when Mommsen discovered a manuscript in Paris with the rough draft of Bosins's notes for the last seven books of the Letters to Atticus, and perceived, on a comparison of these notes with his published commentary, that he had fre- quently ascribed one reading to the manuscripts in his rough draft and a different reading in the commentary. In fact, it was his practice to bolster up his conjectures, which were often ex- tremely happy, by the authority of imaginary manuscripts. Curiously enough, another very eminent French scholar of the same period, Henri Estienne, known commonly as Stephanus, did the same in dealing with Euripides. Bosius came to a bad end,. and Baiter, with amusing ferocity, quite in the spirit of the old scholars, says that "he soon paid the penalty of his wickedness, by perishing at the hand of robbers" (" cito scelns Baum morte luisse, a latronibus trucidatum ").
We are glad to find that Mr. Tyrrell takes, on the whole, a favourable view of Cicero, both in his public and private life. He discusses the subject at some length, and gives his reasons. for dissenting from the harsh verdict of Professor Beesly and of Mommsen. The notion that Cicero deliberately " cooked " his letters, and has given us a set of "simulated reflections," will hardly commend itself to any one who has not a theory to maintain. He may have taken what we can see to have been the wrong side in politics, but it cannot, we think, be shown that he was prompted by corrupt motives. In his private life it cannot be denied that there would seem to have been much that was truly amiable and attractive. It is certainly a piece of great good-fortune for us that his correspondence has been pre- served, unfolding, as it does, "a series of pictures by a master- hand," and enabling us to see how such men as Pompeius and Lucullus appeared to their intimate friends. The style, too, of the Letters is admirable. On this Mr. Tyrrell has much that is in- teresting to say. While the Letters are thoroughly colloquial, they are never careless or slipshod. They are models of composition. Cicero, it appears, was an admirer of both Terence and Plautus, and Mr. Tyrrell notices the resemblance of his diction to that of the comic drama in such phrases as mains venit ("not a bit of him came "), "quid mi anctor es," where " auctor esse " is, in fact, a verb, and in several other turns of expression. He gives us a very useful list of many of the Greek words which. Cicero naturalised, and to which he resorted just as we resort to French. Occasionally these Greek words answer to some of our slang phrases, as dm gallOUTOY is like our "on the cards.' These peculiarities in the style of the Letters receive careful at- tention from Mr. Tyrrell, and are often very happily illustrated from modern life. His book well deserves to be in the hands of all students of Cicero.
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