Textualizing Historical Individuals in Cicero’s Dialogues

Abstract Focusing on the depiction of Varro in the Academica posteriora , the paper analyses the textualization of historical individuals in Cicero’s dialogues. It starts from the observation that Cicero works with the ambiguities created by the alleged transposition of an oral conversation into the form of literary dialogue. These ambiguities, which concern the perceived ontological status of the speakers, raise questions of merit and responsibility and of the hierarchy between the author and his characters. They cannot be answered by referring to the principle of probability. The paper argues that the ambiguous representation of Varro serves to depict Ciceronian authorship itself ambiguously. With regard to a genre that does not clearly distinguish between fact and fiction, the analysis offers new perspectives on the sociocultural dimension of performing authorship in the Late Republic, and helps to shape our view of the fuzzy aspects of the ancient literary persona .