After the Past. Andrew Feldherr
this perspective, the Sullan break seems less absolute, just another temporal distance to be overcome. And, in place of a dramatic change in modes of commemoration that altered the function of written historiography, Brutus’ historical excerpting may configure writing history as the perpetuation of tradition.
The subject of the next of Brutus’ works I want to consider, his Cato, similarly challenged its readers to balance perceptions of continuity and change. Certainly from the distance of the Neronian period, Cato’s death could designate a sweeping break in Roman history, precisely coinciding with the death of libertas itself: neque enim Cato post libertatem uixit nec libertas post Catonem (“for neither did Cato survive freedom nor freedom Cato,” Sen. Constant. 2.3). And if, in the case of the epitomes, an awareness of Brutus’ reproduction of the works of pre-Sullan writers could mark writing itself as a manifestation of continuity between past and present, the treatment of Cato seemed to demand a similar attention to the presence of the narrative, but with an opposite effect. The various portraits of Cato produced sequentially in the year and a half after his death by Cicero, Hirtius, Brutus, and Caesar (not to speak of Fadius Gallus, Cic. Fam. 7.24.2) must have required considerable tact in balancing praise and blame with discretion. Cicero famously called the project a “problem for Archimedes” (Att. 12.4.2), and there has been some scholarly debate about how balanced the contrasting accounts of Cato would have been, and what scope they gave for creating consensus.9 Nevertheless, irrespective of their contents, the network through which these rival Catos were circulated may well have emphasized the social bonds connecting the authors in all camps. Atticus, after all, had a hand in distributing Hirtius’ salvo, which began with a copious praise of Cicero (Att. 12.40.1). Caesar’s own elaborate tribute to the stylistic qualities of Cicero’s Cato (Plut. Caes. 3.4; Cic. 39; Plin. HN 7.117), echoed in a letter to the orator himself (Att. 13.46.2), suggests that explicitly embedding the orator’s work in a very contemporary nexus of literary exchange may have been a strategy to neutralize the revolutionary potential of its content as well as to win favor for his own rebuttal of it. In this contest, then, attention to the stable present, strongly demarcated from the civil war past, contrasts with the impression of recreating the past through writing I have imagined for Brutus’ epitomes.
If it is true that the synchronic form of the treatises, their textual presence as objects of polite exchange, stood in tension with their subject matter, where current political rivalries about the state of Rome were activated by and through looking back at the life of Cato, that problematic relationship between present and the past may well have been manifested in other ways in this new literary form. In Cicero’s case, the perspective of looking back at Cato may well have been met by Cato looking forward toward the future from the time of his life. The precise problem with praising Cato, according to Cicero, was that it required “celebrating his foresight of the present circumstances, his struggle to prevent them from occurring, and his suicide lest he see them having come to pass” (nisi haec ornata sint, quod ille ea quae nunc sunt et futura viderit et ne fierent contenderit et ne facta viderit vitam reliquerit, Att. 12.4.2). The traffic in Catos threatens to become dangerous for the author when the reader not only looks back at Cato himself but looks at the present as Cato. Such a double perspective may have been encouraged by the very title of the work which, as Kumaniecki (1970, 172), argues, was not the “Praise of Cato” but simply the “Cato.” After the mortal Cato passes from the scene, Cicero’s work would present itself less as retrospective praise than as a textual avatar of its subject.
Another of Kumaniecki’s observations about the formal properties of Cicero’s treatise suggests further complexities in the relationship between the historical Cato and his representation in words. For he demonstrates that Cicero did not structure his Cato as a traditional Roman funerary oration, following the public career of his subject, but organized it systematically according to the virtuous qualities demonstrated by his life. Such a choice not only pushed against generic boundaries by bringing the work closer to Cicero’s philosophical productions.10 If Cato’s struggle became to escape from history, not to see the present come in to being (facta), that may well have given special significance to Cicero’s shift from a traditional Roman means of maintaining the political presence of the deceased as political capital for his gens to a more international style of praise focusing on subordinating actions to the virtues they exemplify. Caesar’s response, which began by opposing his own persona as a man of action with Cicero’s as a man of words, although also arranged by topics, may have been to bring Cicero’s Cato back down to earth by offering sordid details from his personal life to demonstrate vices that countered the virtues Cicero had praised. The distinctive importance of such a tension between representation and reality for portraying Cato emerges from a statement Cicero made in his own treatise: “[Cato’s] case reversed what usually happens to most men, for everything about him seems to have been greater in reality than in reputation; not often is expectation surpassed by knowledge and the ears by the eyes.”11
This fragment of Cicero would be echoed in Sallust’s concluding words about Cato: “he preferred to be rather than to seem a good man, and therefore the less he sought glory the more it came to him” (Cat. 54.6). But Cicero’s comment also has an important programmatic aspect, in a sense pitting the real Cato against Cicero’s literary accomplishment: What verbal portrait can match the reality? Such a formulation allows us to perceive the relevance of the flurry of epideictic writing surrounding Cato for Sallust’s work in terms not only of its shared content but also of its own ambiguous literary affiliation. Quintilian reports that the form Sallust chose for the work’s opening, its inclusion of a prologue that has no obvious connection to its subject, was itself an imitation of epideictic practice (Quint. Inst. 3.8.8–9). While some have doubted the specificity of this formal gesture,12 the contents of the Catiline’s beginning might well have reinforced its evocation of epideictic. For the theme of virtus, which we will later discuss as a philosophical topic, also points to the aspect of historiographical writing that brought it nearest to epideictic oratory, praising and blaming the characters of its protagonists. Indeed, the emphasis on virtus in the Catiline prologue may have particularly evoked the Catonian innovations in panegyric suggested above. While all subjects of laudations would inevitably be praised for their virtues, Cato’s exalted moral reputation, in addition to his stoic leanings, make him a likely embodiment of virtue itself. So Cicero elsewhere attributes his reluctance to tackle a Cato on his fear of “times unfriendly to virtue” (tempora timens inimica virtuti, Orat. 35). Strikingly, when Sallust in his own preface turns to praise the specific literary task he has taken on, writing history, both of the reasons why it is praiseworthy recall Cicero’s comments about the Cato (Cat. 3.2). The difficulty of “matching words to deeds” would be amplified by recalling the unique position of Cato, whose deeds were so much greater than their reputation, and the possibility of a hostile audience’s reaction to excessive praise was what Cicero too had feared.
Cato, then, as this tradition perhaps constructed him, polices the border between history and epideictic from both sides. His virtues seem to transcend what was possible, to require the language of fama, and yet they remain in the realm of fact; the eyes, recalling the autopsy on which the authority of historiography especially depended, win out over hearsay. And perhaps for that reason he seems to wander suddenly into Sallust’s account. Unlike his opponent Caesar, there has been no mention of him in the work before he begins to speak, and that speech itself shows him less as the ideal subject of a work of praise than as the practitioner of vituperation: “Often have I complained about the luxury and avarice of our citizens, and therefore I have made many men my enemies” (saepe de luxuria atque avaritia nostrorum civium questus sum, multosque mortalis ea causa advorsos habeo, Cat. 52.7). This language not only makes Cato amplify the moralizing elements of Sallust’s own history,13 it similarly puts him in the position feared by the very author of his praise, Cicero. On this single, “historic” occasion, however, he is not talking about virtue and vice but the condition of the republic. And, as praising him, according to Cicero, demanded emphasizing his later foresight of what Caesar’s victory portended, so in the Catiline his theme is not “whether to live with good or bad morals”