The Dynamic Text: Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and Beyond

Abstract

This article focuses on the evidence of five related Carolingian manuscripts (GVRKF) and what they reveal about the history of the Tusculans in the ninth century and earlier. Productive questions issue from three characteristics of the transmitted text: (1) its material organization; (2) corrections, variants, and notes entered by an active corrector (V²) in one of the ninth-century manuscripts, Vat. lat. 3246 (V); and (3) the potential presence of doublets. Connecting these three issues is an attitude towards Ciceronian speech that treats it as dynamic, fluid, and open. Persistent circular movements in Ciceronian discourse suggest that he himself viewed his speech in this way. And there is evidence of a similar attitude towards Ciceronian speech in the transmission of the Tusculans – in the material embodiment of the text, and in certain historical readers’ engagement with it. In the final portion of the article, a system of cross-references is proposed as a means to address the dynamism of Ciceronian speech. Cross-references are necessary both for a better understanding of Ciceronian methods and for making informed and more nuanced judgments about the textual-critical status of passages.