The following is a draft introduction to one of the items (a copy of Cicero’s De Officiis from c.1400) to be digitized as part of a new digitization effort of the USC Libraries, led by Danielle Mihram and Melissa Miller. The project aims in particular to promote ways of using these digitized MSS in teaching.  I hope that it will help promote broader dialogues about how we can teach through Special Collections, especially when current circumstances make us now wholly reliant upon digital versions of rare books and manuscripts.

Cicero’s De Officiis: Text and Author

Cicero’s De officiis (On Duties) offers more than just lessons in ethics, though in that it is undoubtably rich. Written in 44BCE, when Cicero faced political persecution and but a year before his violent death during the Second Triumvirate, it is presented in the form of advice to his son, then studying abroad at Athens. Much of the treatise is based upon the work of the Stoic philosopher Panaetius of Rhodes, and hence it represents part of Cicero’s larger project of transmitting and adapting Greek philosophy for Roman audiences. De officiis constitutes a handbook on ethics, a mix of the philosophical and practical. In it, Cicero dissects morality, examines personal utility, and then weighs what to do when these two imperatives are seemingly at odds. In other words, the Roman orator tackles the age-old question of how to reconcile our obligations and our interests. De officiis remains instructive, millennia after its author’s death.

But though De officiis is surely rich in its contents, the text—like so much else in the Ciceronian corpus—offers equally rich lessons in its transmission. Cicero’s afterlife was just as eventful as his life. His elevation to posthumous canonicity proved remarkably swift. As Thomas Keeline has charted most recently in his Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2018), this was due above all to the role his works occupied in the Roman schoolroom. His speeches were held up as models of rhetorical virtuosity. And his Latin was mimicked for its eloquence. Generations of Roman students were brought up on Cicero.

Cicero still enjoyed this prominence centuries later, even as the Roman world changed in profound ways. Although Cicero, like all classical pagan authors, posed challenges to Christian readers, many early Christians embraced him—sometimes with anxiety, and sometimes with enthusiasm. The church father Jerome confessed a partiality to Cicero’s Latinity, and he famously recounted a dream in which he claimed an angel had scolded him for being more a Ciceronian than a Christian. But one of his contemporaries, Augustine, did not betray such guilt. In his Confessions—an account full of anxieties about other canonical works of pagan literature, Virgil’s Aeneid included—Augustine had nothing but positive things to say about another of Cicero’s works, his Hortensius. In fact, Augustine credited his encounter with this book as beginning the journey that ultimately led to his conversion to Christianity. Unfortunately, unlike the De officiis, the Hortensius is now lost, a testament to the vagaries of textual transmission. However, we know that early Christians also took particular interest in De officiis. For instance, Augustine’s mentor, the bishop Ambrose of Milan, even wrote an ethical treatise modeled upon it, his De officiis ministrorum.

Cicero remained canonical throughout the Middle Ages. He continued to train generations of students, even if they were no longer Roman. In many ways, nothing had changed. And De officiis in particular enjoyed a success that is by any measure remarkable. Michael Winterbottom, editor of De Officiis for the Oxford Classical Texts series, counted some seven hundred extant manuscripts, while noting that the true number is likely still higher. De Officiis continued to enjoy success in the Renaissance. It was one of the very first classical texts to be printed. And Cicero remained as exemplary in the Renaissance as he had been in antiquity. Some humanists even took their homage to Cicero to extreme lengths: these so-called “Ciceronians” argued that Cicero’s Latin was the best—and perhaps the only—model worth imitating, while critiquing advocates for a more expansive canon. Erasmus of Rotterdam would famously satirize the excessive devotion of these Ciceronians to their ancient hero in his mock dialogue, the Ciceronianus. But even if not all readers were as zealous in their boosterism, the centuries have been rife with Ciceronians—perhaps including the scribes and readers of our manuscript.

The Manuscript

Our manuscript, listed in Winterbottom’s catalog as “Los Angeles, Hoose Library 7,” is one of the hundreds of codices containing De officiis that remain with us today. Likely written around 1400 somewhere in Northern France, it is but one of many witnesses to Cicero’s ubiquity. It is written in Gothic Littera Bastarda—a common late medieval hand which may at first appear rather cramped and difficult to modern eyes. The minims, for instance, can prove notoriously tricky as students begin to study paleography: n’s, m’s, u’s and i’s swirl together on the page. [Note: The remainder of the catalogue entry will discuss details including illumination, binding, provenance, etc etc]. Yet thankfully students of the Hoose Library Cicero are not without a guide, as its history at USC is especially rich. The manuscript was also the subject of a PhD dissertation by Doris Merithew, defended in the USC Classics Department in 1958. Merithew’s work offers a case study in the sheer unpredictability of textual transmission: she documents “almost forty-five variations hundred variations from the modern established text, ranging from minor differences in spelling to major interpolations, omissions, and substitutions.”

The manuscript offers numerous opportunities for teaching. For instance, undergraduate Latin students may use it to think about textual transmission in general—one stop in that tortuous, uncertain process that got Cicero’s text from Cicero himself to our contemporary classrooms. Even if they have no paleographical training, they can try using their modern edition as a “key” to deciphering the script in the manuscript. Find a passage in the modern edition, track it down in the manuscript (made more difficult by the lack of numbered divisions, unfortunately!), and then work backwards to figure out what each word must be. Variations can be noted and discussed. Students of classical Latin will also be exposed to some common features of medieval Latinity present in the manuscript, such as the use of “e” for the diphthong “ae.” And they can also see just how heavily abbreviated Latin was in medieval manuscripts, while using their knowledge of the language and their modern editions to try to expand these abbreviations. (A good introduction to this process can also be supplied by an early printed book, many of which still contained scribal abbreviations. And along these lines, early printed copies of Cicero—especially some heavily annotated copies at Doheny Special Collections—will open students’ eyes to another chapter in Cicero’s journey through the centuries).

And—whether or not they practice it in their own books, or perhaps PDF documents or Google Docs—they will see how so many medieval and Renaissance readers digested texts: i.e. through annotations and marginalia. Students might discuss how the script of the marginalia differs from that of the text itself—and debate which one they consider more legible! And they will also discover one of the most wonderfully quirky of notation marks lurking in this manuscript: the so-called manicule or pointing hand, the distant ancestor of the hand-shaped icon that hovers over our hyperlinks on the web. Lessons await, even if slightly different from those Cicero imagined for his university-aged son.