T H E C L A S S I CA L R E V I E W 391

opponents in his attacks. The reader is therefore not only guided through what would other-
wise be a difficult and highly allusive passage, but also emerges with a wider understand-
ing of Ciceronian oratory.
The sheer bulk of the commentary (almost 230 pages for a speech with only 47 sec-
tions), the extensive cross-referencing and G.’s desire to include as much relevant informa-
tion as possible lead to some problems with user-friendliness. The phrase patres conscripti,
for example, receives very similar glosses at Prov. Cons. 1.1 and 3.7. Given that clausulae
and prose rhythm are discussed in the introduction with ample examples from the speech, it
is not always clear why the commentary highlights a use of one of Cicero’s preferred clau-
sulae. Some notes – such as the introduction to Clodius and the Bona Dea affair in Prov.
Cons. 24 – are so extensive that they would be better off in the introduction. The occa-
sional patch of untranslated (and untransliterated) Greek, for example at 11.1, would likely
cause some consternation among undergraduates. Nevertheless, given the relatively narrow
attention that the speech has received in the past century, it is better that the commentary
errs on the side of too much information rather than too little. Furthermore, a detailed index
orients those who are not looking to read the entire work.
The series in which G.’s book is published has long provided us with works that
advance our understanding of the literary and historical contexts of important texts
while making them accessible to undergraduates. This commentary is no exception. It
will serve those looking to read Prov. Cons. with their students well. More importantly,
however, it helps us find a new appreciation for the speech as an example of Cicero’s
post reditum rhetoric and serves as a model for how to articulate the relationship between
ancient oratorical theory and practice. This is perhaps the work’s biggest contribution: it
allows us to appreciate Prov. Cons. as just another successful example of senatorial
oratory.

University of Colorado Boulder ISABEL K. KÖSTER

isabel.koster@colorado.edu

‘CICERO’S’ PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS

A L T M A N ( W . H . F . ) The Revival of Platonism in Cicero’s Late
Philosophy. Platonis aemulus and the Invention of Cicero. Pp. xxxii +
350. Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books,
2016. Cased, £70, US$100. ISBN: 978-1-4985-2711-8.
doi:10.1017/S0009840X17000208

The late philosophy of Cicero’s dialogues of 46–44 B.C. is generally taken to be articulated
from a stance of Academic scepticism. That is the way Cicero frequently represents his
standpoint in these works, especially but not only in his authorial prefaces, including
those to De officiis, his last contribution to philosophy, not a dialogue but an extended let-
ter of advice, cast in a Stoic mould. For A. such professions are the utterances of a con-
structed persona, ‘Cicero’ (as it might better have been written in the subtitle),
concealing views of Cicero’s own as a magnus opinator, to which ‘Cicero’ alludes from
time to time but which he never discloses. The Revival of Platonism is offered as an explor-
ation of what we should suppose to be their key themes.
In an article published 50 years ago (‘Cicero als Platoniker und Skeptiker’, Gymnasium
72 [1965]), W. Burkert found it intriguing that Cicero never refers to the simile of the
Cave, constituting as it does what one might be inclined to take to be a central document

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 392 T H E C L A S S I CA L R E V I E W

of Platonic philosophy. In A.’s view the Cave – more particularly the philosopher’s descent
to the Cave – is no less central in Cicero’s own Platonist philosophy. Indeed, because
Cicero was prepared to descend to a degree that Plato was not, he surpasses Plato as a phil-
osopher: his own practice of the philosophical life was conducted through political engage-
ment in Rome, except when silenced by Caesar’s dictatorship. Furthermore, Plato for
Cicero was master of speaking as well as of understanding. But A.’s Cicero knows that,
to be effective in the Cave, he must be as he became a greater orator than Plato. And
inspired by the memory of his daughter Tullia’s example, he knows too that a society
needs not just masculine virtus but a more ‘womanly’ humanitas, too: ‘altruism’s maternal
matrix’, its identification being ‘his greatest contribution to Platonism’ (p. xxiv).
Nonetheless (A. argues) it was understandable that Cicero should choose in his later
philosophical writings to present himself as a mere Academic. He was following the prac-
tice of inconclusive discussion characteristic of Plato’s own dialogues – what in the Orator
he called the mode of multiplicium variorumque sermonum (Orat. 12; rendered by A. as
‘many-leveled and conflicting dialogues’, p. 95). However – A. thinks – we should not be
deceived. ‘Cicero’ in the Academica is made to indicate the self-contradiction at the core of
Academic philosophising: he ‘uncritically endorses’ the self-contradiction of Socrates’
scire se nihil se scire (p. 92). In subsequent dialogues, which in effect constitute a critique
of Stoic ethics, Cicero indicates the unattainability of a definition of the human end (Fin.)
and that prime need for womanly humanitas (Tusc.: although on A.’s own showing most
references to women or the womanly there are distinctly unflattering). Likewise the trilogy
of dialogues initiated by De natura deorum target principally the inadequacies of Stoicism,
while De senectute and De amicitia exhibit philosophy as the Socratic practice of death. In
De officiis – whose real addressee is Octavian – there can be a return to a timely political
philosophy Platonically conceived. The book closes with chapters on Brutus, interpreted as
a Platonic funeral oration for Hortensius and the Roman Republic, and Orator, construed
as a sort of apologia pro vita sua. Here the ideal orator is portrayed, A. suggests, as a syn-
thesis of Demosthenes and Plato: the key to Cicero’s self-understanding.
This is a book fizzing with energy, and full of learning of many sorts, from which any
discriminating reader stands to gain. As will already be evident, it is also highly and often
idiosyncratically opinionated, and of course designed to upset plenty of scholarly apple
carts. Among leading contemporary writers on Stoicism, the sceptical Academy and
Cicero’s philosophica with whom the author takes vigorous issue are Burnyeat, Frede
and Bobzien, not to mention the serried ranks of ‘Owenites, the scholars of Tübingen,
and the school of Leo Strauss’ (p. xxix). On the other hand appreciation is expressed
for the labours of many others, including R. Woolf, your reviewer and especially C. Lévy.
The difference in perspective that A. brings I found on the larger scale refreshing if not
convincing. Overall – leaving aside detail – there seems to me a considerable strength but
also one particularly damaging weakness in his approach to Cicero. The weakness is meth-
odological. A. speaks at one juncture of the bifurcation of Cicero’s authorial voice (p. 159).
He has in mind a passage such as Tusc. 5.11, where Cicero describes himself as endeavour-
ing in Socratic style to conceal his own sententia, relieve others from error and search out
quid esset simillimum veri. For A. the sententia is Cicero’s own (for which he would have
claimed a Platonic certainty), but the project of concealing that and debating the similli-
mum veri that of the constructed character ‘Cicero’, or rather in Tusc. ‘M’, oddly described
as a Stoic (p. 139). But claiming Platonic certainty would not be Socratic in the least. In the
Academica (2.66) Cicero has already told us why he holds philosophical opinions: he is not
a sapiens (with an assured grasp of truth), and hence he is inevitably liable to entertain
possibly false opinions – which is presumably one reason for enquirers to attach no author-
ity to them (ND 1.10), but (as at Tusc. 5.11) to knuckle down to arguing out pros and cons.

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 T H E C L A S S I CA L R E V I E W 393
In other words, it is one and the same Cicero who has the sententia he conceals and
who thinks it better and certainly more helpful to others to practice Academic scepticism.
It is not that making a distinction between Cicero and ‘Cicero’ is never an apposite move
for the dialogues’ readers, but (as A. himself observes somewhere) it is tricky to handle.
Thus ‘M’ is obviously a Ciceronian construction, but equally ‘A’ is made to construe
him as at once the author and the principal speaker of the anti-Stoic Book 4 of De finibus
(Tusc. 5.32), an identification from which ‘M’ does not demur (ibid. 33).
Quintilian’s expression Platonis aemulus (Inst. 10.1.123), however, which
A. reproduces in his subtitle, indicates something salutary in his treatment of the writings
of 46–44 B.C. There is no question that in the dialogues of the earlier sequence, composed
in the later 50s B.C., Cicero was not only intent on imitating and rivalling Plato’s writing,
but intensely preoccupied with the philosopher himself, as the correspondence from the
period further confirms (see S. McConnell, Philosophical Life in Cicero’s Letters
[2014]). Platonic strains and moments in the later sequence are more occasional and mostly
less emphatic. But A. rightly stresses that in his account of his philosophical œuvre in Div.
2 Cicero includes works from both sequences cheek by jowl, all as contributions to the
same enterprise: philosophy. The Revival of Platonism prompts us to consider the possibil-
ity that a single overarching conception of philosophy is in play throughout and that it is in
some sense a Platonic conception. After all, between the thoroughly Academic Nat. D. and
Div. came De senectute, a dialogue that like the subsequent De amicitia situates itself in the
same ambience as De republica. How radically abrupt is the shift in philosophical outlook
from its immediate predecessor and successor that its composition represents? Asking such
questions need not commit us to A.’s kind of answer. But it might prevent us prematurely
putting the two sequences of Ciceronian writings into two mutually insulated
compartments.
It remains to add that the book is generously indexed, with coverage of verba and loci
as well as names and topics. There is a rich bibliography.

St John’s College, Cambridge MALCOLM SCHOFIELD

ms10001@cam.ac.uk

THE TEXT OF CAESAR

D A M O N ( C . ) (ed.) C. Iuli Caesaris Commentariorum Libri III De Bello
Civili recognovit brevique adnotatione critica instruxit. Pp. cx + 227.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Cased, £40, US$75. ISBN:
978-0-19-965974-6.
D A M O N ( C . ) Studies on the Text of Caesar’s Bellum civile. Pp. vi +
329. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Cased, £70, US$115.
ISBN: 978-0-19-872406-3.
doi:10.1017/S0009840X17000452

Cynthia Damon’s already substantial contribution to our understanding of Latin texts con-
cerned with civil war increases still further with this new edition of Caesar’s De bello ciuili
and companion volume of studies. Since I regard the edition as a striking success, I shall
get my most significant complaint out of the way at the outset: having commissioned a
volume that contains only this work and not also its three anonymous continuations,

The Classical Review 67.2 393–398 © The Classical Association (2017)

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