101

Cicero continues to blast Antony for his conduct in Southern Italy. His attack is three-pronged: a brief reference back to the close shave he had at Capua with disgruntled locals treated at the end of the previous paragraph; dissolute living to the point of self-harm; and dissolute squandering of public patrimony on undeserving mates, thus inflicting harm on everyone else and the commonwealth as such. Already in the transitional § 43, Cicero lashed out at Antony’s absurd remuneration of his teacher in rhetoric, one Sextus Clodius, who supposedly had been gifted with 2000 iugera in the plain of Leontini, some of the finest arable land in Sicily. At that moment he deferred more detailed treatment of this and similar matters to some later point in the speech: sed dicam alio loco et de Leontino agro et de Campano, quos iste agros ereptos rei publicae turpissimis possessoribus inquinavit (‘But I shall be speaking elsewhere both of the Leontine and the Campanian lands, the lands Antonius snatched from the Republic and befouled with disgraceful tenants’). The reference is to §§ 101–02. [study questions]

Cui tu urbi minitaris: cui is a connecting relative, agreeing with urbi (= et eae); the dative goes with the deponent minitaris (in form the second person singular present indicative passive). minitari can be used either intransitively (‘to threaten’) with the person or thing threatened in the dative or transitively (with an accusative object, an accusative + infinitive, or an infinitive), again with the person threatened in the dative. The sense here seems intransitive, though a more specific threat, i.e. to retry to found a colony in the city’s territory, hangs in the air.

utinam conere [coloniam deducere Capuam?], ut aliquando illud ‘paene’ tollatur!: conêre is the alternative form of the second person singular present subjunctive of the deponent conor (= conêris) — ‘If only you would try’ — followed by a consecutive ut-clause, in which Cicero quotes the paene from the end of the previous paragraph: next time Antony seeks trouble with Capua, he may well fail to make another lucky escape. Cicero does not specify what Antony should try, and the vagueness may be deliberate, but given the end of the previous paragraph (… tum cum etiam Capuam coloniam deducere conatus es), what Cicero may have in mind is a second attempt to found a colony at Capua.

utinam: the particle utinam introduces a wish clause.

at quam nobilis est tua illa peregrinatio!: quam nobilis, exposed by its front position, is highly derisive. Cicero mocks Antony, shockingly untroubled as he is by any instinct for propriety, for his failure to live up to his family pedigree (and his nobilitas) during his ‘peregrinations’. In fact, the phrase nobilis peregrinatio amounts to something of an oxymoron. A peregrinus is a foreigner or alien, someone who has come from abroad, and if a Roman engages in peregrinatio, foreign travel, he turns himself into one as well — both abroad and, more to the point, back in Rome: ‘For Cicero peregrinatiomay turn the traveller into a peregrinus in his own country’, writes Catharine Edwards (1996: 116), with an apposite reference to Cicero’s letter to Caelius Rufus (Fam. 2.12.2 = 95 SB): urbem, urbem, mi Rufe, cole et in ista luce vive. omnis peregrinatio … obscura et sordida est iis, quorum industria Romae potest illustris esse (‘Rome! Stick to Rome, my fear fellow, and live in the limelight! Sojourn abroad of any kind … is squalid obscurity for those whose efforts can win lustre in the capital’). Put differently, one cannot possibly be nobilis or illustris in foreign parts — rather, peregrinatio destroys nobilitas.

quid prandiorum apparatus [proferam], quid furiosam vinulentiam tuam proferam?: quid here means ‘why?’, ‘For what reason?’ (see OLD s.v. quis 16). proferam is in what grammars call the ‘deliberative subjunctive’. See e.g. Allen and Greenough 443: ‘The subjunctive was used in sentences of interrogative form, at first when the speaker wished information in regard to the will or desire of the person addressed. The mood was therefore hortatory in origin. But such questions when addressed by the speaker to himself, as if asking his own advice, become deliberative or, not infrequently, merely exclamatory. In such cases the mood often approaches the meaning of the Potential…. In these uses the subjunctive is often called Deliberative or Dubitative’. Rhetorically, we are here dealing with a praeteritio — the nifty move of mentioning something in passing, to implant it firmly in the imagination of the audience, without dwelling on details. See further above 166–68.

prandiorum apparatus: sumptuous lunches. apparatus (a fourth-declension noun) is here in the accusative plural. prandium was the Roman midday meal, not as substantial as the evening repast (cena) and not a meal to which guests were usually invited: Balsdon (1969: 25). The phrase therefore amounts to something like an oxymoron. (I owe this point to Emily Gowers: for the ideology of eating at Rome, see her The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature, Oxford 1993).

furiosam vinulentiam tuam: one of the main vices that Cicero ascribes to Antony is over-indulgence, in particular when it comes to booze. His compulsive desire for intoxication is symbolic of his lack of self-control and moderation throughout the Philippics. See Phil. 2.68 (vinulentus), 6.4 and 12.26 (vinulentia), 13.31 (obrutus vino), 5.24 (semper ebrium) with Evans (2008: 69). See further above 227–28. The furiosus (as noun) is a legal category in Rome, dating back to the 12 Tables: as opposed to the phrase mente captus, which referred to someone in a permanent state of mental insanity, furiosus was the label for a lunatic who experienced periods of lucidity.

tua ista detrimenta sunt, illa [detrimenta sunt] nostra: Cicero again uses chiasmus (tua : ista :: illa : nostra, with tua and nostra in predicative position) around the central term detrimenta to differentiate (and keep firmly apart) the harm caused by Antony to himself and the harm he causes to the rest of Rome’s civic community (evoked by means of the self-identifying nostra). ista refers back to Antony’s over-indulgence in food and drink; illa refers forward to his embezzlement of public funds.

agrum Campanum, qui cum de vectigalibus [agris] eximebatur ut militibus daretur, tamen infligi magnum rei publicae vulnus putabamus, hunc tu compransoribus tuis et collusoribus dividebas: agrum Campanum, picked up again by the demonstrative pronoun hunc after the intervening qui-clause, is the accusative object of dividebas. It is also the antecedent of qui. The relative clause does not present problems initially (‘… which, when it was taken out of the public revenues to be given to soldiers…’), but its syntax goes awry from tamen onwards, when Cicero suddenly abandons his construction (= anacoluthon). What he wants to say is: ‘Even when part of the ager Campanus was taken out of the revenue-generating lands to be given over to veterans (Pompey’s in 59 BCE; Caesar’s in 45 BCE), we nevertheless believed that a grave wound was being inflicted on the commonwealth (though we can concede that settling veterans is a worthy cause); but Antony was parcelling out this public land to his table mates and gambling buddies!’

agrum Campanum… hunc tu compransoribus tuis et collusoribus dividebas: the ager Campanus (‘domain of Capua’ — as Mayor (1861: 142) points out ‘Campanus (not Capuanus) is the adjective for “Capuan”’) is the Capuan territory that the Romans had sequestered as public land after the Second Punic War (a conflict in which Capua had sided with Hannibal). The tax levied on its usage provided a steady source of public revenue until Caesar turned the land into allotments for Pompey’s veterans in 59 and his own in 45 BCE.

qui cum de vectigalibus [agris] eximebatur: a temporal cum-clause referring to the gradual distribution of the public land around Capua to veterans over the past fifteen years. vectigalis ager = land in the possession of the Roman people (as opposed to private patrimony) that yielded public income.

ut militibus daretur: technically speaking, the land was given to ex-soldiers or veterans at the end of their service as a retirement settlement.

mimos dico et mimas, patres conscripti, in agro Campano collocatos: dico introduces an indirect statement with mimosand mimas as subject accusatives and collocatos (esse) as infinitive. The jarring juxtaposition of mimas (‘mime-actresses’) and the vocative patres conscripti (‘senators’) rams home the social perversions perpetrated by Antony. Mimes were as popular as they were disreputable: actors in general carried a stigma (infamia) in Roman society. Cicero expresses his outrage at Antony’s consorting with a star of the mime-stage as early as 49. In the early stages of the civil war he writes to Atticus from Cumae about Antony’s peculiar entourage of girlfriends and toy-boys (Att. 10.10.4 = 201 SB; 3 May 49):

hic [sc. Antonius] tamen Cytherida secum lectica aperta portat, alteram uxorem. septem praeterea coniunctae lecticae amicarum; et sunt amicorum.

[But Antony is carrying Cytheris around with him in an open litter, a second wife. Seven other litters are attached, containing mistresses; and there are some containing friends.]

Earlier on in Philippic 2, he claims that Antony had mimes and pimps in train already as tribune of the people (§ 58):

Vehebatur in essedo tribunus plebis; lictores laureati antecedebant, inter quos aperta lectica mima portabatur, quam ex oppidis municipales homines honesti, obviam necessario prodeuntes, non noto illo et mimico nomine, sed Volumniam consalutabant. Sequebatur raeda cum lenonibus, comites nequissimi; reiecta mater amicam impuri fili tamquam nurum sequebatur.

[As tribune of the plebs, he used to ride about in a two-wheeled carriage; lictors decked with laurel led the way, and in their midst a mime actress was carried in an open litter. Respectable folk from the country towns, who were obliged to come out and meet the cortege, greeted her not by her well-known stage name but as ‘Volumnia’. Then followed a carriage full of pimps, Antonius’ utterly worthless entourage. His mother, relegated to the rear, followed her worthless son’s mistress as if a daughter-in-law.]

Antony’s alleged provision of financial welfare for the dregs of society at the expense of the commonwealth’s coffers remains a source of invective also in later Philippics. See e.g. Phil. 8.26: cavet mimis, aleatoribus, lenonibus, Cafoni etiam et Saxae cavet, quos centuriones pugnaces et lacertosos inter mimorum et mimarum greges conlocavit (‘he provides for mimes, gamblers, and pimps; he provides even for Cafo and Saxa, pugnacious and brawny centurions whom he has posted amid his herd of male and female mimes’).

quid iam querar de agro Leontino? quoniam quidem hae quondam arationes Campana et Leontina in populi Romani patrimonio grandiferae et fructuosae ferebantur: Cicero moves on to another region that Antony used for land distributions, the ager Leontinus in Sicily, which he already mentioned in § 43. Unlike the earlier question, which functions as praeteritio, Cicero here answers his own question: ‘Why should I at this point grumble about the ager Leontinus? Because — needless to say (quidem) — (both of) these arable regions of Campania and Leontini used to be contained within the inheritance of the Roman people, as (particularly) fertile and profitable’. Cicero underscores the outrageous misappropriation of public lands by means of a querulous qu-alliteration (quoniam quidem… quondam, picking up on querar) and lexical grand-standing (reinforced by etymological and alliterative play) in grandi-ferae et fructuosae ferebantur. The sense of ferebantur is ‘… used to be contained within…’: OLD s.v. fero 12b. The compound adjective grandiferae (consisting of the adjective grandis ‘great in volume’, and the adjectival suffix -fer, -fera, -ferum, from fero, denoting ‘carrying, bearing, bringing’) refers to the large volume of produce that the land yielded, whereas fructuosae designates the correspondingly large tithes for Rome’s coffers.

quoniam: a causal conjunction construed with the indicative in direct discourse.

hae … arationes Campana et Leontina: ‘these arable lands of Campania and Leontini’. Note that the two attributes Campana and Leontina are both in the singular, though arationes, the noun each modifies (the subject of ferebantur) is in the plural: ‘those arable lands, i.e. that of Campania and that of Leontini’.

arationes… grandiferae et fructuosae: aratio is initially the action of ploughing and sowing the field and then came to refer also to ‘arable land’ (as opposed to lands used for pasture and forests).

in populi Romani patrimonio: ‘in the possession of the Roman people’

quondam: the adverb specifies a point in time in contrast to the present, which may be located in the past (as here) or in the future.

medico tria milia iugerum [dedisti]: quid [dedisses] si te sanasset? rhetori duo [milia iugerum dedisti]: quid [dedisses]si te disertum facere potuisset?: Cicero moves on to professionals in Antony’s entourage (an anonymous doctor and his teacher in rhetoric, Sextus Clodius), to whom he gave lavish handouts for no services rendered, asking rhetorically in two past counterfactual conditions how much they would have received if they had actually done their job, i.e. healing Antony of his manifest insanity and teaching him how to speak properly. The amount of land Antony parcelled out to his associates is huge, given that veterans received allotments in the range of 10–12 iugera.

sanasset: the syncopated form of the third person singular pluperfect subjunctive active (sana|vi|sset).

sed ad iter Italiamque redeamus: for some moments Cicero’s discourse had jumped to the land distributions around the Sicilian town of Leontini. He now exhorts himself (redeamus is exhortative subjunctive: ‘let us…’) to return to Antony’s journey through Italy (ad iter Italiamque is perhaps best understood as a hendiadys).