Abstract

Reviews Peter White. Cicero in Letters: Epistolary Relations of the Late Repub­ lic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 256 pp. Hardcover: $60. Paperback: $29.95. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-538851-0. Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2010. Cicero in Letters is a major landmark in the study of Ciceronian letters, and a book that belongs in the personal libraries of all scholars interested in the fields of Cicero and ancient letters. Building on and extending the seminal work of D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Peter White meticulously analyzes the massive corpus of extant Ciceronian letters, focusing on how the letters function as a form of social media, as it were, constructing and maintaining Cicero's personal networks. Although White engages to a certain degree with sociolinguistic method, the general approach of the book is philological, concerned primarily with close reading of individual letters, analysis of the editorial process that gave form to the extant collect, prosopography, and historical reconstruction of letters' functions as part of the reciprocity systems embedded in elite Roman networks of amicitia. Cicero in Letters, available in hardcover, softcover and electronic ver­ sions, consists of a preface, six chapters, an afterword, two appendices, notes, bibliography and indices. The main body of the book is divided into two major parts. "Part I: Reading the Letters from the Outside In" (83 pages) con­ sists of three chapters focusing on the form and context of Cicero's letters, "1. Constraints and Biases in Roman Letter Writing," "2. The Editing of the Collection," and "3. Frames of the Letter." Next is "Part II: Epistolary Preoc­ cupations" (76 pages), comprised of three chapters emphasizing the content of the letters, "4. The Letters and Literature," "5. Giving and Getting Advice by Letter," and "6. Letter Writing and Leadership." The organization of the book is thematic rather than strictly analytical, and the approach, despite meticulous scholarship, more exploratory and essayistic than scientific or argumentative. All Ciceronian passages are quoted both in Latin and in the author's own translations. The translations are generally accurate and read­ able, and the writing style of both White's text and translations is accessible to the non-specialist. The first chapter, "Reading the Letters from the Outside In," sets letter writing within its social and generic context. It exemplifies ways in which Rhetorica, Vol. XXXII, Issue 4, pp. 0-430, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2014.32.4.0. Reviews 413 the study of Latin letters differs radically from that of Greek. Biblical schol­ ars, especially, and a smaller group of rhetorical scholars, have produced exhaustive studies of the form and context of Greek letters, including the lo­ gistics of letter production and delivery and the relationships among letters, letter-theory and rhetorical theory, but as much ancient epistolary scholar­ ship is concerned with the Pauline epistles, less work has been devoted to Latin letters than Greek, and what work does exist is more focused on seeing letters as a lens through which to examine literature, history or politics rather than studying epistolographv for its own sake. White's work, following this general trend, displays particular strengths in analyzing how Cicero's letters responded to the problem of maintaining political influence and networks at a distance. While White's first chapter does a workmanlike job of dis­ cussing issues of letter transmission and production, and such issues as the importance of the presence formula, the discussion is presented somewhat in a vacuum, approaching, for example, the philophronetic nature of an­ cient epistolographv as a point to be proven rather than as position that has been widely accepted in the study in ancient letters since Deissman (1910, 1911) and Koskenniemi (1956). White's treatment of how Cicero in­ flects these common practices is detailed and meticulous, albeit scholars of ancient letter-writing may find frustrating the lack of comparative material or responsiveness to existing scholarship on ancient letters (e...