Caesar's Letters and the Ideology of Literary History

In his biography of Cato the Younger, Plutarch relates an anecdote from the senatorial debates between Cato and Caesar over Catiline's fate. (1) Caesar's speech in support of leniency towards Catiline is interrupted by the delivery of a letter. Cato assumes that the contents of the letter will expose Caesar's sympathies for the conspirators and therefore orders it to be read aloud to the entire Senate. Caesar hands the letter to Cato, who quickly realizes that it is a love letter from his sister Servilia to Caesar. Cato had thought the letter would incriminate Caesar, but in fact he is the one who is publicly shamed. Plutarch's witty anecdote, whether accurate or not, suggests that--from a second-century C.E. perspective, at least--epistolary discourse was considered to be common practice among elite Roman men and women by the mid-first century B.C.E. Paolo Cugusi's collections of pre-Ciceronian letter fragments and references to letter-writing likewise attest to the practice of epistolography in the late Republic. (2) Although Julius Caesar was among these first-century epistolographers, his letters are no longer extant, apart from six letters (or substantial parts of letters) preserved by Cicero and in a Greek fragment found at Mytilene. (3) Consequently, modem literary historians generally pass over in silence Caesar's epistolary activity. I will illustrate, however, that Caesar's letters had a more favorable reception in the first and second centuries C.E. and that Caesar himself enjoyed a certain measure of fame as an innovator of various practices associated with letter-writing and letter publication. The ancient de scriptions of Caesar's letters, I argue, suggest that Caesar may have been one of the earliest Latin letter-writers to present his correspondence in a polished, book-like form, presumably in order to facilitate its eventual publication. I will also speculate briefly on the causes for Caesar's disappearance from literary-historical accounts of Latin epistolography. Besides arguing for the reinclusion of Caesar's letters in such accounts, I will attempt to critique the practice of literary history writ large. The reality of early Latin epistolography is not under investigation here, but rather its representation in later authors, ancient and modern. I am concerned not so much with reconstructing "the way things really were" as with articulating how succeeding generations imagined the origins of the writing and collection of letters. A study of the actual origins of Latin epistolography would, if one were to undertake such a project, examine the testimonia for letters by, inter alios, Scipio Africanus, Catulus, Cato the Censor, and Cornelia; it might discuss the influence of various Greek letter collections, including those of Plato, Isocrates, Demosthenes, and Epicurus. It would certainly consider the relationship between letters and such ephemera as political pamphlets (libelli) in the Gracchan period. Such questions are relevant to a positivist study of early Latin letter-writing, but are tangential to the issues treated here. Theorizing the Literary Past Literary history is the story of how a culture's literary past, including its origins, is imagined by a later age. Although the literary-historical impulse existed in the classical Roman world (e.g., the dramatic prologues of Plautus and Terence; Horace's Ars Poetica and Epistle to Augustus; Cicero's Brutus; Book 10 of Quintilian's Instituto oratoria) as well as in later periods, the organized discipline of literary history gained visibility in the nationalist movements of mid-eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe, especially Germany. As Jauss puts it (3), "The patriarchs of the discipline saw their highest goal therein, to represent in the history of literary works (Dichtwerke) the idea of national individuality on its way to itself." Literary history, as practiced by Cicero and Quintilian and theorized by Romantic scholars like Schiller and the Schlegel brothers, was teleological in nature and had as its goal the rediscovery of a nation's distinctive cultural identity. …