Back in the sack

 ‘Pro Roscio’ was the shortened title of the first proper Latin book I ever read, from pages that are back beside me now this morning, the two words still overwritten by hand in bright blue ink on a grey cloth cover faded by schoolboy use and abuse. Why? Well, there has arrived at the TLS a bright green-and-yellow copy of this speech, Pro Sexto Roscio, that Cicero gave in 80 BC; and tonight, in celebration of that, I'm going to read it again.

Celebration? Yes, absolutely. There is something peculiarly enjoyable about a new book that has meant alot as an old book. I even found myself rereading Wind in the Willows the other day just because it had arrived as a crisp Oxford World's Classic. Ratty and Mole filled a Summer evening better than any June party.

My original copy of E.H.Donkin’s 1916 Pro Roscio has survived its last forty years rather better than its first fifty. Among its fragile pages there is much side-lining, underlining and micro-lettering between the lines, the means by which a stumbling translation could be made aloud at the master’s demand. The first sentence, heavily marked, has still some of the magic of the first memory of anything: ‘Credo ego vos, iudices, mirari  quid sit quod cum tot summi oratores hominesque nobilissimi sedeant. .. .’ the words with which Cicero is justifying to the jury the appearance of one so young and inexperienced a man as himself in a case of such criminal and political weight as that of Sextus Roscius, accused of parricide by allies of an all-powerful dictator. If only one Latin sentence were to stay for a lifetime, this is surely a substantial improvement on 'Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres'.

 You may think that it does not reflect well on P. Stothard, Lower 6th Classics, 1966, that he still possesses one of his school’s Donkins, a text which could certainly have served another generation at least, telling its inspirational story of how Marcus Tullius Cicero, aged only 26, took on the tyrannical establishment of his time and saved an innocent farmer from being sewn up in a bag, thrown into the river Tiber and drowned. Too late for that now. Perhaps there were extenuating circumstances for its removal from its proper home. I wish I could say I made extensive use of it. What I did achieve, I can safely say, was to save it from the depradations of being further read.

Roscius was accused of killing his father in a case that Cicero claimed was a conspiracy to ensure that his valuable farmlands could be divided between allies of the dictator Sulla. Much of the discussion over the centuries has been about the known facts, few as they are, the motives of the main players and the institutional laws under which the trial was conducted. Did Roscius deserve the not-guilty verdict that Cicero won for him? Wasn’t he more like a rural loner, just the sort that would blow away a father in town, than Cicero's rustic innocent, the sort that felt nervous beyond his own fields and hedgerows. As the editor of the new CUP edition, Andrew R. Dyck, argues, his approach has had to be ‘rethought with reference to the needs and questions posed by today’s students’. I’m looking forward to seeing how he does that.

Was it the punishment itself that saved Roscius? That is what we were once told, as I recall. Apart from the declaratory introduction to the speech, the description of the peculiar Roman penalty reserved for parricide – varied at times with addition of a viper, a cock and an ape – was the passage which, to judge by the density of ink and pencil, most of the Donkin’s previous owners seem to have noticed most. This nasty fate, as Dyck points out in his introduction, was not meant to be a deterrent, as Cicero claimed, but was more likely to have been a ritual for removing something strange and nasty from the body politic; hermaphrodites and other freaks might also, it seems, have found themselves choking to death in a leather sack with only some very cross creatures for comfort.

No matter what the original motivation was, discussion of the ‘gruesome and unique punishment’, as Dyck describes it, was definitely an attraction of the speech to the young and curious. (We did not yet have the benefit of comparing the Chinese version, pictured above.) When Cicero grew older, grander, more pompous and often less likeable than the man of 80 BC (and before his own hands and tongue were nailed to the woodwork where he had made his speeches) he became ‘slightly embarrassed by the purple passage about the parricide’s sack’. But the Pro Roscio was still a speech he recommended that his own son should read. It likened prosecutors to dogs, assassins to gladiators and became a standard in the oratory schools. Donkin and Dyck are in a distinguished tradition of its explicators. Since no small part of the political context was the argument of the time about how to change Rome’s traditional voting methods, there may even be some new echoes.

Comments

[Miriam]

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Miriam