Souvenirs of Cicero: Shaping Memory in the Epistulae AD Familiares

Cicero’s letters have figured prominently in some of western modernity’s most cherished illusions about the immediacy of its encounter with Classical antiquity. Celebrated since their discovery in the Renaissance for their intimate mode of self-expression, they have been prized since then for the unparalleled proximity they appear to lend to the events and leading figures of the late Republic. However, the letters were only organized into books and collections and published as such by editors after Cicero’s death, and are therefore also the products of a later era.

Souvenirs of CiceroÂis a study of the narratives that the letter collections plot, and of the belated, post-Republican perspectives that shape them. It focuses on theEpistulae ad Familiares, the collection that incorporates Cicero’s widest cast of correspondents, and which has been most vulnerable to the modern editorial impulse to reorganize the letter collections along chronological lines. This book attempts to reverse that impulse by appraising the collection in the format transmitted from antiquity and attending to its status as an artefact of the later imperial age.

Francesca K. A. Martelli traces the social, political and technological agencies that shaped this letter collection in antiquity, and elucidates the interests that these editorial interventions serve both for ancient readers and for our interpretation of the letters today. Integrating close readings of the letters with hypotheses drawn from contemporary media theory, she makes the case for considering Cicero’s letters as residual media, which haunt subsequent history with the Republic’s lost futures as they circulate beyond their own era.

Francesca K. A. Martelli is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles, the author of Ovid’s Revisions, and, with Giulia Sissa, co-editor of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination.