Before I discuss the next two authors, let me say a few words about the periodization I have implied. The writings discussed in the previous section seem to date to what is conventionally thought of as the late republic (say, 133-44 bce), and Sulla’s memoirs seem to have appeared in the early adulthood of M. Tullius Cicero (106-43; cos. 63) and C. Julius Caesar (100-44; cos. 59). Nonetheless, there are grounds for a distinction. Three of the earlier writers were born within about a decade of each other during the so-called middle republic, and all four within twenty-four years. It is then another thirty-two years until Cicero’s birth, and with only six more until Caesar’s. Substantively, the earlier set of writers seems to produce something that is openly ‘‘autobiographical,’’ while the latter pair, as we will see below, try a variety of strategies to avoid that appearance. Still, especially given the fragmentary nature of much of our evidence, the line should not be drawn too dogmatically.
We learn from a letter of Cicero to his friend Atticus (Att. 1.20.6) that he had recently written a set of notes ( commentarius), in Greek, on his consulate of three years earlier (i. e., 63). He had already sent a copy to the Greek polymath Posidonius so that the latter might use it as a source for a true (i. e., literary) history, though Posidonius seems to have declined. Cicero is sending it to Atticus for correction, then to be forwarded to ‘‘Athens and the other cities of Greece.’’ At the same time he was also planning with Atticus the collection and publication of most of his consular speeches. Another, contemporary letter (Att. 2.1.1-2) tells us that Cicero was planning a parallel set of Latin notes and a poem on the same topic. In 55 he tried again to get his life written up by a noted historian, this time L. Lucceius, and in that context promises that he will complete Latin notes for Lucceius if he will take up the task. Cicero seems not to have finished that record in the intervening years; in fact, we have no evidence that he ever did so. Nor do we have direct traces of the Greek text we know to have circulated in his own times.
I suggested above that Cicero used strategies to avoid the potential ethical difficulties involved in writing autobiography. Most prominently, he tried at least twice to get a front man to tell the story according to his specifications. Since both Posidonius and Lucceius had independent status (juridically and intellectually), they could legitimately ‘‘launder’’ Cicero’s own account. Cicero also took some care as to where his texts would circulate. The sense of verecundia is, as noted above, status-dependent and it is also one primarily of face-to-face relationships. ‘‘Face-to-face’’ here takes on a somewhat special meaning. On the one hand, the society in question is not the Roman citizenry in general (which is far too large), but just (roughly) the senatorial aristocracy. On the other hand, the set of interactions among that group is expanded by use of letter. Correspondence among elites shows the same kind of deferential behavior as seems to exist in direct conversations. (This, incidentally, could be an interesting index for the importance of written texts in Roman society.) Cicero’s Greek commentary gains on both scores. Its notional audience is provincial and so they cannot overtly reject Cicero’s claims to their attention. It is also a far-away and diffuse group, so its actual attention is entirely optional. The reliability issue still remains (hence the request to Posidonius), but the mere circulation of Cicero’s own text would not harm him.
Caesar’s autobiographical writings comprised sets of notes ( commentarii) on his own military campaigns in Gaul and then during the civil war. Each book of the Gallic War recounted a year of the fighting from 58 to 52 (not counting the eighth book, written by Caesar’s lieutenant Aulus Hirtius, which covered 51 and 50). There is considerable scholarly debate (and virtually no evidence) whether these were annual dispatches or were published together after the fact. A parallel text narrated the Civil War from 49 to 48. These were not published until after Caesar’s death, and there is much uncertainty whether this represented a literary or political decision (or both).
Cicero’s approaches to avoiding the dangers of autobiography had to do with macro - (Greek language) and meta - (foreign distribution and re-authoring) features of the text. Caesar operates much differently. In his case, a series of micro-features do similar work. Also his strategies are not entirely consistent with each other but are designed to accommodate two different stances that his readers might adopt. One strategy is to deny that his life is actually the subject of the work. The phrase ‘‘Gallic War’’ was almost certainly in the original title, but personalizing terms like ‘‘life’’ or ‘‘deeds’’ or ‘‘proconsulship’’ apparently were not. The narrative includes activities for which Caesar was not present, but excludes his activities (personal or official) which were not connected to the war. The first person is used to refer to the narrator, but the general is always in the third person. Even the famously plain style of the text was not characteristically Caesar’s own. The other strategy was to suggest that he was himself the audience of the text. Commentarii were more often than not private documents - not necessarily secret, but internal to, say, a family or governmental body. The aggressively plain style of Caesar’s (and apparently Cicero’s) notes reinforces this sense. I do not suggest that the Roman audience imagined these texts were genuinely leaked, but the very form gives the author ‘‘plausible deniability.’’ This is important to the face management discussed above. The form also suggests what might be called ‘‘authentic subjectivity.’’ The author and audience for internal records are, if we ignore the effects of time, the same person. The author cannot (and would have no reason to) simulate or dissimulate before this audience. It is easy to forget, in fact, that there is still an act of representation intervening between the author and any ‘‘eavesdropping’’ reader. Thus the form of the commentarius addresses both the arrogance problem and the authority problem.
Having raised the issue of publication, I should conclude with a few words on two common understandings of the commentarius that relate to its public or private character. Both Cicero and Hirtius remarked that Caesar’s commentarii were so well written that they would discourage right-minded historians from trying to turn them into proper (i. e., literary) history. Posidonius apparently said something similar to Cicero about his own commentary while begging off using it as a source in his own work. It is frequently inferred that a primary function of the commentarius was to serve as a source for history; if so, it would lose much of the rhetorical force Caesar seems to have expected, whether or not it was technically an internal document. But there are only three ‘‘examples’’ of this use of the commentarius - these two and a prescription by the Greek writer Lucian. In this last case, moreover, the notes are the author’s own. Those would be no different from the outline that the composer of any long work employs; for instance, Cicero prepared such notes for his speeches. The commentarius would be a natural enough form for Cicero to have offered Lucceius and Posidonius as he did, but the reverse inference does not hold. The notion of commentarius itself hardly suggested reworking. It has been suggested alternatively that the commentarius was itself a standard form for (political) autobiography. This practice was adopted, it is argued, from that of several known Hellenistic Greek figures who wrote up their lives as so-called hupomnemata. These terms share roughly the same application and a root that means ‘‘memory.’’ None of these works is ever actually called a commentarius in Latin, though. The works discussed in section 3 are also often cited in this connection, but none of them is ever called commentarius in our sources either. As we have seen above, both Cicero’s and Caesar’s commentarii were framed to minimize their role as public autobiography. Hence, there is no reason to think that the very idea of the commentarius suggested political pamphleteering either.
FURTHER READING
Because of the marginality of the genre and the highly fragmentary state of most of the texts surviving today, there is relatively little modern discussion of these ‘‘autobiographical’’ texts. What does exist is often distorted by looking ahead to Caesar’s commentarii. There are general overviews in Misch 1950 and Mellor 1999. Sulla’s memoirs are treated by Lewis 1991a and Scholz 2003. Caesar’s works naturally have drawn the most attention; I discuss them at much greater length (and with reference to much of the earlier literature) in Riggsby 2006: ch. 5.
World History
