A Barzunesque View of Cicero: From Giant to Dwarf and Back

PROLOGUECicero's cover letter to Trebatius introducing his Topica has been a frequent object of study in attempts to interpret the source of this work. However, another letter to Trebatius is deserving of attention. Cicero wrote to Trebatius since the latter had mocked him during drinks for saying that it was a moot point whether an heir can institute the actio furti for a theft committed from the hereditas iacens. Once back at home he looked it up and made a note, which he sent to Trebatius the following day, stating that this opinion, which according to Trebatius was held by no one, was in fact held by Sextus Aelius, Manius Manilius and Marcus Brutus, but that he, Cicero, agreed with Scaevola and Testa. This short, informal note to a friend persuades more that Cicero was indeed advocate and jurist, rather than the positivistic criticism that he was a mere rhetorician with superficial legal knowledge hiding his ignorance by over-reliance on equity.INTRODUCTIONThe global modernisation of legal studies makes the perennial question whether the law is an art, a craft or a science topical. In his short story ‘In the Park’ Primo Levi created a fantastic country inhabited by literary characters. There are five or six Cleopatras: Pushkin's, Shaw's, Gautier's, Shakespeare's version, and so on. Some years after his arrival Antonio notices that he is becoming diaphanous and understands that the memory of him is extinct. He takes leave of his new friends and waits for his flesh and spirit to dissolve into light and wind. The relevance of this fiction to this chapter is twofold: for centuries many versions of Cicero have competed, but in Capogrossi Colognesi's ‘Un futuro senza storia?’ Cicero will become more transparent eventually turning into the invisible man. Evelyn Waugh parodied this development in his novella ‘Scott-King's Modern Europe’: in 1946 Scott-King had been a classical master at Granchester for twenty-one years. When he arrived the school was almost equally divided into a classical and a modern side. Now out of 450 boys scarcely fifty read Greek. When the school reassembled in September the headmaster told him that the year started with fifteen fewer classical specialists as parents wanted to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world and stated that there may be something of a crisis ahead.