Cato Maior and Laelius as imagines maiorum

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2019
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en
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Abstract
Cicero’s Cato Maior and Laelius, just a “pair of minor dialogues,” have struggled not only to secure consistent names for themselves but even a dependable characterization of their genre. However much the variations of title and description may reveal of the dialogues’ complexity, they surely reveal uncertainty about their form and purpose. In response to this difficulty, I argue that we must consider these works as especially for Atticus. Cicero’s relationship to Atticus and Atticus’s interests should therefore prompt and drive this study. After justifying the treatment of Cato and Laelius as a pair, I examine the place of history in these dialogues, especially as seen in Cicero’s characterization of Cato and Laelius therein as well as the family tree of the Cato in which he roots the Laelius. Following Harriet Flower’s great treatment of ancestral masks (imagines maiorum), we briefly sketch out the primary purposes of imagines, finally returning to Atticus and arguing for the propriety of such a work to this dedicatee. To this end, I argue that Cicero made literary imagines maiorum as a tribute to Atticus’s love of and request for history and family history in particular. In the end we shall see that the imagines dissolve the tension between drama and history: they were the means whereby Romans brought their past to life at every funeral in a great historical pageant.
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