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Home , Somnium Scipionis

DREAMING THE OF SCIPIO

Leonard Michael Koff

Although murdered in 43 b.c., Marcus Tullius “refused to die.” Throughout his life, he consciously wrote himself into history in ways that would, he hoped, bring him lasting praise. And cultural history has con- firmed his wish to live on as a source of civic and moral authority, as a model of philosophical grasp and comfort, and as a master of literary style.1 Indeed, a great many people refused to let Cicero die—wherever he is, he must be happy, although in living on through those parts of his literary body that haven’t been lost, Cicero has been folded, spindled, and mutilated. He’s probably happy about that, too: being “manhandled” means he mattered. Cicero’s cultural transformation is not, of course, simply a medieval phenomenon, though that is the topic of this essay: Chaucer’s use in the fourteenth century of Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, a work that was the

1 See, for example, Discussions at Tusculum in Cicero: On the Good Life, trans. Michael Grant (New York, 1971), pp. 95–96, on Cicero’s sense of himself as moral philosopher whose arguments for self-sufficiency are meant to comfort and sustain: “This is the sort of person a truly wise man has to be. He will never do anything he might regret—or anything he does not want to do. Every action he performs will always be dignified, consistent, serious, upright. He will not succumb to the belief that this or that future event is predestined to happen; and no event, therefore, will cause him surprise, or strike him as unexpected or strange. Whatever comes up, he will continue to apply his own standards; and when he has made a decision, he will abide by it. A happier condition than that I am unable to con- ceive.” For the text, see Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, 1945), 5, 28, 81. On the use of oratory, see On Duties in Grant, Cicero: On the Good Life, p. 157. For Cicero, oratory should be put in the service of civic or noble pur- pose: “For eloquence is specifically adapted to winning the admiration of one’s hearers; it awakens new hope in the destitute, and earns profound gratitude from the men whose causes [one has] pleaded. This is why our forefathers ranked oratory as the highest among all civilian professions.” For the Latin text, see Cicero, , Loeb Classical Library, 2, 19, 66. On Cicero, “the name,” as Quintilian puts it, “not of a man, but of eloquence itself,” see Elizabeth Rawson, Cicero: A Portrait (Ithaca, 1975), pp. 299–308. I am not altogether sure how Cicero himself would have responded to praise of his style alone. Its modulations must have seemed to him the aesthetic correlative of the self-mastery that was the subject of his civic and philosophic discourses. See On Duties in Grant, Cicero, p. 139: “It is only when men become capable of displaying high-minded detachment and disregarding such outward circumstances, whether good or bad—when they get totally absorbed and immersed in some noble, honourable purpose—that we cannot help admiring their splendid and imposing qualities.” For the Latin text, see De officiis 2.10.37. 66 leonard michael koff concluding section of part VI of Cicero’s , itself lost to the except for the Somnium which survived in—literally in— ’ early medieval commentary on it.2 In a cultural sense, we probably should talk about Cicero-Macrobius hyphenated, as if Cicero and Macrobius were one author, even though Macrobius’ Commentary on the Somnium Scipionis so transforms Cicero’s Somnium that it becomes virtually something else. That virtually is, of course, Cicero’s happy con- tinuous presence. His vision in the Somnium of the rewards in heaven for those engaged in the “common profit” of the Roman state becomes in Macrobius the ground and the springboard—the authorizing and con- firming text—for a that has no practical political end. The rewards in heaven for Macrobius are the rewards of those who are morally virtuous here below because they are metaphysically wise. In rewriting Cicero—the Cicero he knew through Macrobius’ com- mentary—Chaucer transforms both authors. Transformation in the sense I mean implies citation, often extended citation in contexts that amplify and redirect original intention. The past is accessible to Chaucer, as well as Macrobius, in texts that are seen as implicitly pointing “to the future,” that is, to being used as part of a continuing revelation of meaning. My allusion here to historical unfolding is meant quite intentionally because I want to suggest that for Chaucer, as well as for Macrobius, the past is not, as it is, for example, for Petrarch, in whom we see the beginning of mod- ern ideas of periodization, an alien place. Rather the past continues to speak openly to the present because it is transparently connected to it.3

2 On the history of the survival and transmission of the Somnium into the Middle Ages, see Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl, Records of Civilization, Sources and Studies 48 (New York, 1952). For a Latin text of the Somnium Scipionis, see Cicero: Laelius on Friendship & The Dream of Scipio, trans. J.G.F. Powell (Warminster, UK, 1990). Citations of Cicero in my text are from Grant, Cicero: On the Good Life. For a Latin text of Macrobius, see Macrobio, Commento al Somnium Scipionis, Introduzione, testo, traduzione e commento a cura di Mario Regali, Biblioteca di Studi Antichi 38 and 58 (Pisa, 1983 and 1990). Citations of Macrobius in my text are from Stahl. Citations of Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, (3rd ed., Boston, 1987). 3 On Petrarch as tourist in , see his letter (VI, 2) to Giovanni Colonna de San Vito in Francesco Petrarch, Rerum familiarium libri I-VIII, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Albany, 1975), pp. 290–95. As Thomas M. Greene explains, Petrarch’s hermeneutic, which he calls “arche- ological,” would dig up the past in order to resurrect it. That hermeneutic presupposes not the confident bridging of time, but a disturbing chasm between present and past, the symptom of which is the past’s mysterious withholding of an all-divulging key. For Petrarch, an “interplay of historical entities … resists total description.” See Greene, “Petrarch and the Humanist Hermeneutic,” in The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, 1982), pp. 94–95.