“FOR I HADDE RED OF AFFRYCAN BYFORN:” CICERO’S SOMNIUM SCIPIONIS AND CHAUCER’S EARLY DREAM VISIONS

Timothy A. Shonk

When Marcus Tullius Cicero began his contemplative work on the perfect state, De re publica, he confronted two questions, one public and one per- sonal, that must have consumed his psychic energies: how to remain influential in the growth of the Roman state after his year of exile in Greece, and how to ensure that his words and concomitant reputation for rhetorical power endured. To answer the first question, Cicero, removed from the office of Consul and the hall of the Senate, had little choice in continuing to work to meld the classes into an ideal functioning govern- ment but to “do so from his study.”1 To this end, he developed an imagined conversation, closely modeled on Plato’s Republic, featuring personages who loomed large in Rome’s recent history: among them, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus the Younger, Manius Manillus, Publius Rutilus Rufus, and Quintus Mucius Scaevola. The primary speaker, Scipio the Younger, following an opening discussion of the possible explanations of the recent phenomenon of two suns in one day, begins the theme that dominates the work: the three types of government—dictatorship, aristo- cratic rule, and pure democracy of rule by the people—outlining the mer- its and demerits of each system before settling on the view that Rome comes closest to perfection in balancing the three types as best as can be imagined. The second question consuming Cicero had to be his future and his name. Out of the power of government and away from the eyes of the crowds, his rhetorical skills were of limited benefit. Whereas his powerful speeches had in earlier days made his name, those opportunities in the larger arena of public debate in the largest city must have seemed forever gone. Ironically, given Scipio the Elder’s admonition to the Younger in Book 6 of De re publica—“Do you suppose that your fame or that of any of us could ever go beyond those settled and explored regions?”2—Cicero

1 Anthony Everitt, Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician (New York, 2001), p. 178. 2 Marcus Tullius Cicero, De re publica, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (Cambridge, UK, 1943). All subsequent citations from Cicero are from this source, and page numbers will be 86 timothy a. shonk needed the public acclaim that brought power to his ideas, and, like any serious author, feared the thought of his words and actions being lost from the public forum forever. True, his public performances had been remarkable, but the vibrations of sound in the air are as ephemeral as the moment that prompts them, and the memories of those hearing the speeches inevitably fail and die. As Levitt describes it, “a speech was a one-time, live event like an actor’s performance and that, in the public eye, he would be only as good as his latest appearance.”3 The remaining hope of some permanence, then, was that the words would be recorded, available to the reading public for some time after the moment, the live event, had ended. There were no scribes, of course, sitting at his feet recording his speeches, and “publication” in his time resembled nothing like that which came with the advent of print- ing, though one could argue that blogs and personal websites return us to the self-publishing stage. Thus, Cicero accepted the responsibility that others in the pre-publication centuries did: he wrote out his thoughts and speeches, committing them to the written word and ensuring that his words survived beyond the “one-time event.” I do not mean to argue that Cicero was as shallow, as self-occupied as this brief summary suggests. There is every indication in his work and in the views of his peers that his concerns about and models for the social and political welfare always remained central to his work. Indeed, in his defense of the rhetorician (De oratore), he envisioned rhetoric as means by which the morally good life could be presented and advocated.4 His superb speaking performances, then, were linked in his mind to his hope that the Republic would indeed develop into a harmonious, moral society, and it was the power and persuasion of rhetoric that could effect this end. But Cicero was human and, one would think, as is the case for nearly every person in a position of prominence, at least a little vain, wanting his name remembered, as those names in the conversation of De re publica were remembered, and his words preserved. And preserved they were, of course. Although the manuscripts of De re publica have survived in a fragmented state, they have survived. For a

cited parenthetically within the text. William Harris Stahl, Macrobius: Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (New York, 1952), pp. 69–77 provides a translation of the Somnium based upon the interpretation of Macrobius that varies slightly but not substantially. 3 Everitt, p. 179. 4 Ibid.