Self-Citing and Other Remnants in and around Cicero’s Theological Trilogy

As has often been remarked, writing was vital in Cicero’s ambitious project of self-fashioning and the canonization of his oratory. Through writing, Cicero was able to overcome the problems associated with his novitas and to transform his oratory into a paradigm by constructing texts as replacements of his embodied presence. This paper complicates constructionist approaches towards Cicero’s self-fashioning by reflecting on Cicero’s self-citing from his poetic texts in his theological trilogy. What makes citational practices compelling is how they affect the citing agent’s subjectivity through dynamic processes of assimilation and distancing triggered by the replication. Methodologically, the complexity of these processes unsettles the possibility of approaching the citational episode as the expression of a single, self-contained individual. Matters get even more complicated when agents like Cicero cite themselves through other figures and include a variety of remarks and observations along with their citation (see Balbus in the De natura deorum and Quintus in the De divinatione). My analysis reveals that each bit of text cut out from one work and inlaid into another contains manifold links to the original context, to other textual bits, to Cicero’s past and present, to other agents, and to the new text, simultaneously. What this means from a subjective point of view is that our textual Cicero does not emerge as a unitary identity but as a key node of transactions constituted by multiple realities and subjectivities. This multiplicity frustrates any attempt to recompose Cicero and his existence into a neat puzzle; however, self-citing creates a space where the subjectivities constituted by their relationship with the citation come to be condensed into textual substances. Ultimately, Cicero’s texts are less a straightforward replacement of his embodied presence than an emotionally dense “remnant” of his attempts to salvage a world going under.