Cicero’s Consolatio

Welcome! If you found your way here, you’re interested in the forged Ciceronian Consolatio (Venice, 1583), which I’ve just edited and translated for Princeton University Press under the title How to Grieve: An Ancient Guide to the Lost Art of Consolation.

(If you’re curious how this page came into existence, please read my October 2022 essay Jurassic Marc: Adventures in Decoding Cicero’s Consolation in Antigone Journal.)

This page might not be pretty, but it contains a huge wealth of everything I learned in the process of dissecting and contextualizing the text. There was no room in the book for these notes, so I’ve put them here on the web — and generously seeded everything with links for the curious or indulgent to follow.

The Secret Decoder Ring

Who imitated who? Check this chart and ask yourself!

1. Riccoboni Iudicium (notes many borrowings);
2. Sigonius Orationes Duae;
3. Riccoboni Iudicum secundum;
4. Gulielimius here;
5. Sigonius Accusator (adds nothing);
6. Riccoboni Defensor (which gets a great many of them);
7. Sigonius Postrema Oratio (nothing new);
8. Lipsius here (scorched earth; short; contributes nothing new  = “Referee #2”);
9. Evan T. Sage’s dissertation.

The Sources in Summary

An analysis of the Secret Decoder Ring reveals the following major sources of the 1583 Consolatio listed below:

• Cicero Tusculan Disputations (for an overview of this important text, see here. For the groundbreaking new translation, see here.)
• Plutarch Consolation to Apollonius
• Valerius Maximus
• Jerome Epistle 60 (as a source of fragments)
• Aelian Varia Historia in both Greek and the 1548 Renaissance Latin translation by Justus Vulteius
• Lactantius Divine Institutes (an important source of both (1) direct fragments and (2) rich context.)
• Pseudo-Plato Axiochus — which was attributed to Xenocrates in the Renaissance by Marsilio Ficino (section 3 above)
• Cicero De Senectute
• Cicero De Legibus
• Cicero De Amicitia
• Cicero Lucullus (Academica 2)
• Cicero De Officiis
• Cicero Paradoxa Stoicorum
• Cicero De Divinatione
• Cicero Pro Milone
• Cicero De Oratore
• Cicero De Finibus
• Cicero Pro Archia
• Cicero Somnium Scipionis
• Herodotus Histories
• Plato Apology (as translated and embedded in Cicero Tusculan Disputations 1.97-8)
• Cicero Letters to Atticus from the time (as a source of fragments)
• Seneca De Ira
• Seneca Consolatio ad Marciam
• Seneca Consolatio ad Helviam
• Petrarch Letters on Old Age
• Aristotle Rhetoric
• Seneca De Tranquillitate Animi
• Sallust Bellum Catilinae
• Muret’s intro to Sallust Bellum Catilinae
• Marsilio Ficino Life of Plato
• The vulgate Book of Job
• Horace Odes and Satires

It’s also obvious that the author used a lexicon of Ciceronian Latin, probably the 1535 Thesaurus Ciceronianus of Marius Nizolius (1498-1566). Here it is in a 1576 edition. (For background, see this excellent 2022 essay by Josey Parker.)

Strange absence: I see no evidence of either Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy or Seneca’s Consolation to Polybius, though Seneca’s Consolation to Marcia and Consolation to Helvia are used (sections 108-109). Plutarch’s Consolation to his Wife is used only one (section 127). There is no overlap with the pseudo-Ovidian Consolation to Livia.

Less strange absences: (1) A 1524 dialogue titled On Repressing Grief (Sannutus, sive De Compescendo Luctu, pp. 52-9) by Nicholas Leonicus Thomaeus borrows from the Tusculan Disputations and hence overlaps at those points with the 1583 Consolation, but has no other material in common with it. (2) Around 192 CE, Galen wrote a rambling essay On Avoiding Distress (Peri Alypias) upon the loss of his books, recipes, and medical instruments in a huge fire in Rome. The essay has no material in common with the 1583 Consolation, either (which is nice, because books and instruments aren’t comparable to a child, and unsurprising, because the essay was only rediscovered in 2005).

The upshot is that with all its talk of heaven, the fundamental orientation and optimism of the treatise is Platonic, while many of the coping techniques are Stoic. Hence the far heavier reliance on Plutarch (a Platonist) than Seneca (a Stoic). The sources are all designed to point back to Crantor’s Grief. (Crantor was a Platonist, too.) Nevertheless, many of the coping techniques are Stoic. Two attributed to Chrysippus (a Stoic) in the Tusculan Disptuations are (1) eliminating the griever’s preexisting belief that by grieving, he or she is fulfilling some proper and compulsory duty; and (2) persuading the victims of bad circumstances that they can and should endure them by citing famous examples of others who have.

Analysis of the Sources

If the Consolatio were authentic, all the similarities noted above would imply a few bold and interesting ideas, namely that:

• Because Cicero wrote both the Consolatio and the Tusculan Disputations in very short order (which is true), he’d exhausted all the relevant material for the former and hence reused it in the latter. (This is what Sigonius argued in his two Orations.)
• The many echoes of Plutarch’s Consolation to Apollonius and Valerius Maximusare meant to imply they’d both, like Cicero, found similar ideas in Crantor’s book Grief (which is probably true).
• Jerome (in Epistle 60) also has passages that evidently appeared in Crantor’sGrief, and he’d read it (Legimus Crantorem, cuius volumen ad confovendum dolorem suum secutus est Cicero (“I’ve read Crantor, whose treatise Cicero imitated to cope with his own grief .”). But Jerome loved Cicero and may have also found them in Cicero’s Consolation. So, the idea of echoing Jerome’s translation of The Book of Job in section 139 implies Jerome himself was influenced there by Cicero’s Consolation as the most obvious inspiration for the right language.
• The same goes for the similarities in later authors–Sallust, Horace, Seneca, and Petrarch. The idea is that, like Lactantius, who really did consult Cicero’s Consolatio, these other authors also turned to the Consolatio when they needed or wanted similar ideas.

Finally, I’ll note for posterity two similarities between Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and Plutarch’s Consolation to Apollonius that do not appear in the Consolatio, even though their similarity implies a common source in Crantor’sGrief :

1. Tusculan Disputations 3.71-74 = Consolation to Apollonius 32 (“It is a good thing also to call to mind the arguments which most likely we have sometimes employed with relatives or friends…”) and
2. Tusculan Disputations 3.63 = Consolation to Apollonius 33 (Story of Demosthenes & his daughter).

My final analysis

• In 1496, Michelangelo forged the Cupid to see if he could fool the experts. In 1573 or thereabouts, Marc-Antoine Muret forged some verses of Trabea for the same reason. (Morabin noticed this parallel, too.) It seems to me our forger aimed to do the same before eventually revealing the truth. That would explain the obvious and elementary mistakes even a beginning Latin student would not have made, such as using homo instead of vir to mean man. It might also explain why the forger includes quotes from Muret, rather than Muret’s source (in 119-121 and possibly 197): our forger quotes the contemporary master-forger of Latin.
• Unfortunately, the fact that the Consolatio was immediately received and characterized not as a fun experiment (which it probably was), but as a bonafide forgery calculated to deceive, must have spooked whoever put it together. Real forgery was a capital crime in Italy at the time, as the case of Annius of Viterbo shows and as McCuaig 1983 nicely explains. Our forger was no idiot: “There be dragons.” So he or she or they sealed their lips forever.
• That said, the “trap street” bogus quotation attributed to Plato in section 56 was apparently designed as the “tell” to protect against the forgery ever getting seriously taken seriously all along. I guess somebody should’ve checked. Oh well.

Note: While nursing a broken ankle, I spent many bored hours during the coronavirus lockdown of 2020-2021 finding and compiling the sources above. I’ve clearly hit the point of diminishing returns and don’t plan to continue the work. If you, dear reader, find any corrections or supplements, by all means send them to me!  — Calixtus

Lagniappe: Translations and links

Here are all the translations into any language of the Consolatio that I have discovered:

• 1584 (attributed to “Gabriel Pot. Parisien, though Sage & Mangeart attribute it to “Benoist du Troncy”). No notes, just the translation.
• 1596 Nicholas de Malfilastre, Rouen (not online)
• 1644 Camusat and Le Petit. No notes, just the translation.
• 1654 anonymous, probably a reprint of the 1644 edition.
• 1753 Morabin. Interesting introduction, good summary, a few uninteresting and inaccurate footnotes.
• 1811 Mangeart. Superb translation, good notes. Mercilessly critical of Morabin’s translation.

• 1767 Blacklock. Flowery and quite expansive.
• 2022 Fontaine. (i.e., my own translation under the title How to Grieve).

• 1585/1593: Fortuniano Sanvitali. A copy held at UT library, but I couldn’t get it.
• 1785: Gazzotti, reprinted here. The reprint includes exceptionally stupid and irrelevant notes by one Marcello Tommasini (1811-1896). A total waste of time.

• I couldn’t get hold of this 1822 edition with Russian notes: M. Tullii Ciceronis Si deo placet, consolatio: Cum rossicis notis aliisque annotationibus. Mosquae: Typographiae S. Selivanovsky. Shoot me an email if you have it. (A teaser here.)

• The Consolatio first appeared in Venice in 1583 and was immediately reprinted a bunch of times in several places.
• Just five years later, it was included in the 1588 Lyon edition of Cicero’s Opera Omnia by Lambinus and Gothofredus  (p. 599ff).
• It was routinely included in opera omnia editions of Cicero’s works thereafter, the last being the 1855 Teubner by Klotz.
• After that it pretty much stopped being reprinted. If you’ve never heard of it before, that’s why!
• Here’s a link to Mueller’s 1879 edition of the fragments of Cicero’s Consolatio. (I used Vitelli’s in my edition, but it’s not online.)

Lagniappe: Some cool liminary poems

1. Epigram of Jean Daurat (1508 – 1588). My text comes from this edition by Sigonio here, p. 836, but I correct docet for decet as is found in this reprint in this edition here, p. 584, which, however, misprints qui usque instead of quisque in the first line. I have changed punctuation and capitalization.

                       Ad lectorem

Sit, quem quisque volet, magni Ciceronis imago:
     nec Cicero, vivo nес Cicerone fuit.
Quisquis at ille fuit, belle declamat et apte
     de miseris hominum casibus atque malis.
Qualis et est Senecae quae Controversia fertur,
     nomine quamque pari Quintilianus habet.
Tu tamen hinc gratos, lector bone, collige fructus,
     quid sit homo, speculo dum docet ille suo.
Quid réfert vetus an nova sit medicina salubris,
     aeger ab hac medica dum relevetur ope?

                    To the Reader

Let great Cicero’s phantom be who we’d each like:
     he wasn’t Cicero, or when Cicero lived.
But whoever he was, he discourses [holds forth] beautifully and aptly
     on mankind’s miserable troubles and misfortunes,
same as it is with the Mock Trials ascribed to Seneca
     and those of the same name attributed to Quintilian.
All the same, good reader, gather pleasing fruits from this Consolation
     as he uses his mirror to teach what a human is.
What difference does it make whether an effective medicine is ancient or modern,
     as long as the treatment helps relieve the patient?

2. Epigram of Julius Signius (bishop of Rieti, died 1621) to Carolus Sigonius de Marci Tullii Ciceronis Consolatione, vel De Luctu Minuendo (printed in Argelatus 1737, 1239, here) on the authorship:

Multiplici ratione probas hunc, magne Sigoni,
     magnum Arpinatem composuisse librum.
Res et verba docent, gravitas permixta lepori;
     asserit hoc procerum docta frequensque cohors.
At longe illorum melior sententia cultum,
     qui manasse tua mente fatentur opus.
Cur modo certandum? Victores vincis, et affert
     certamen pacem, nobile parque decus.
Nec mirere; adeo Tulli sectator haberis,
     alter ut ille Plato, tu vocitere Philo.

3. A closing remark by John Adams (1735-1836): “I am reading a Work of Cicero that I remember not to have read before. It is intituled M. Tullii Ciceronis Si Deo placet Consolatio. Remarkable for an ardent hope and confident belief of a future State.” – August 7. 1796. (By “future State” Adams means life after death.)