Antony, Cicero, and the Colloquium Absentium Amicorum

Jennifer Ebbeler (University of Texas, Austin)

In his Second Philippic, Cicero harshly criticized Antony for reading aloud a private letter that Cicero had sent to him (4.7ff). Such behavior, asserted Cicero, threatened to undermine the colloquium absentium amicorum. If a letter-writer could not trust that his addressee would safeguard the integrity of the correspondence, regardless of the circumstances, how could the practice of letter exchange survive? Cicero’s sharp criticisms of Antony’s actions have encouraged readers to assume that Antony’s error was publicizing a private correspondence, in effect violating Cicero’s privacy (cf. Ramsey, ad loc.). Yet, as this paper will argue, Cicero’s outrage was not especially a consequence of Antony’s publication of the letter (indeed, Cicero himself had previously forwarded a copy of the correspondence to Atticus); but instead, was motivated by Antony’s use of the letter as evidence for an erstwhile friendship between the two. In the aftermath of Cicero’s hostile First Philippic, Antony apparently charged that Cicero had violated the rules of amicitia. In order to address this charge in the Second Philippic, Cicero must first explain away any evidence of friendly relations, including the apparently damning letter he wrote to Antony on the question of Sextus Cloelius’ recall in the weeks after Caesar’s assassination (Cic. Att. 14.13b). Thus, countered Cicero, his letter to Antony was written against his will and, in case, is evidence of nothing more than his good epistolary manners (Phil. II.4.9).

In the first part of the paper, I will look at the controversial letter exchange between Cicero and Antony (Cic. Att. 14.13a-b). Shortly after Caesar’s death, Antony wrote to Cicero to solicit his support for the recall of Sextus Cloelius. Cicero’s response was, according to Shackleton-Bailey, a masterpiece of Late Republican epistolary politesse: suspiciously fulsome in its praise, accommodating, and clearly disingenuous. As Cicero himself made clear in a letter to Atticus (Att. 14.13), he felt that he had no choice but to accede to Antony’s wishes. Antony had deliberately addressed the matter in a letter, knowing that Cicero could not avoid a response without risking harm to his reputation as an officious correspondent. Further, Antony knew that Cicero’s response would be modulated since such a letter would inevitably become public.

The second half of the paper will offer a detailed explication of Cicero’s criticisms of Antony’s behavior in the Second Philippic. As will become clear, Cicero was not concerned about issues of privacy per se: not only had he circulated the correspondence himself, but he would later allude to the contents of a love letter between Antony and Fulvia (Phil. II. 31.77); and there are numerous other instances where Cicero read aloud or circulated his correspondents’ letters. Rather, Cicero was outraged by Antony’s deliberate misuse of the apparently friendly letter that Antony had all but extorted from Cicero several months earlier. Though most letter exchanges did attest to friendly relations between the correspondents, Cicero explains, his response to Antony was a result of his own sense of epistolary duty. The letter was no different from something he would write to any other Roman citizen and cannot be interpreted as evidence of a friendship, as Antony had tried to suggest. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the relationship between Cicero’s attack of Antony’s epistolary propriety and Cicero’s broader efforts to depict Antony as a boorish populist in the Second Philippic.