Quintus Cicero's Astronomy?

Abstract

Among the Eclogues of Ausonius, we find a fragment of astronomical poetry, attributed in its superscription to Quintus Tullius Cicero, the brother of the orator. The Quintus fragment has survived by a twist of fate. It was preserved because it was included, perhaps by accident, among the Eclogues of Ausonius, in a single manuscript, V (Leid. Voss. Lat. 111). 1 The Quintus fragment represents a reasonably lengthy piece of Republican poetry, written in a period when there are many gaps in our record; otherwise, perhaps, we might believe it unworthy of much excitement. Yet some excitement might indeed be merited, since, if it is by Quintus, it surely represents one of the earliest zodiac lists in Latin, after that of Marcus Cicero, in his Aratea. 2 So too, it might be worthy of more than a little suspicion, and in this article I propose to reassess its date and attribution. For reasons I shall argue below, it seems fairly clear to me that this is not one, but two fragments, transposed, then juxtaposed by the closing-up of a lacuna between them. These may plausibly come from a translation of Aratus, one from an earlier part, one from a later part. I shall tentatively suggest that these fragments may have been by Marcus Cicero rather than by his brother, and belong to the Aratea. Such speculation is perilous, however, not least because, once we have done away with the certain authorship of Quintus Cicero, we open up a receding vista of possibility. Our fragment may be attributed to Marcus; this would at least keep it in the Republican period. But (I shall argue) there is little firm evidence available for dating our fragment before Ausonius (A.D. c. 490); indeed, were it not for the Ausonian superscription, which almost certainly indicates that Ausonius himself wrote our poem down, there would be no firm evidence for assigning to it a date earlier than the writing of V, in about A.D. 800. 565 * My sincere thanks go to the Kudos Foundation for their support during the time this article was written, and to those of my friends and colleagues who have listened to or read it, particularly John Ramsey and Frances Muecke. I also thank Miriam Griffin as editor of CQ, and the readers, for their helpful comments.