Person misses census
On Sunday night I had two tasks, the first to send off my census form - after struggling through pages for Person 1 and Person 3, how they are related and how many bedrooms they have - and the second to finish a short piece on Cicero's speech, Pro Archia.
Poor old Archias, a Syrian immigrant and Cicero's former poetry teacher, was in deep trouble in 62 BC. Was he legal or not? Was he a citizen or not? He had got himself stuck in a row between two big beasts of the Roman jungle, Lucullus and Pompey. He was a flatterer by trade but it wasn't easy even for the smartest foreign poet to please everyone all the time.
Archias lacked the proper paperwork. His citizenship records had been destroyed by war - an early version of the 'cat ate my homework' defense. But worse than that, he had then missed the census. He had been abroad with Lucullus at the time. How was he going to get out of that?
Not even Cicero could pretend that a man had filled in his census form when he had not. So he had to deliver a brilliant passage of distraction (Confirmatio B, as the scholars call it), describing all the virtues of poets and poetry for a civilised state, once a key text for the Renaissance and the only part of the speech that anyone now remembers.
The best possible justification for a Person missing the census.
One might say that Cicero, a very eloquent pleader, deliberately ignored the the letter of the law (uncorroborated citizenship) to concentrate on the spirit of the law: the value of a poet to Rome.
Posted by: Candadai Tirumalai | 4 Apr 2011 15:31:32
I learn from a biography of Cicero that he wrote a good deal of verse, which none of his contemporaries thought much of. His exposition of the value of poetry, on the other hand, seems to be in a higher class. Of the Renaissance apologies for poetry inspired by Cicero, Philip Sidney's may be the best known.
Posted by: Candadai Tirumalai | 18 Apr 2011 15:22:49
I had a better version of the 'cat ate my homework' a few years ago, videlicet 'the cat ate my printer cord' - and it was some very special cheap Japanese printer whose cords could only be obtained at vast expense from its native land. What is more, the story was (for once) true.
Posted by: Oliver Nicholson | 28 Apr 2011 14:18:26
Yes but even though Cicero couldn't convince the masses that a fraudulent census was filled out, he could have forged them and I'm sure he did.
Matt From Cicero Storage
Posted by: Matt From Cicero Storage | 27 Jun 2011 20:02:58