Probably the most famous single judgment of literary criticism in Greco-Roman antiquity is Cicero’s assessment in the Brutus of Julius Caesar’s historical writings (commentarii) on the Gallic War. The passage’s fame stems from its documentation of two political greats of the late republic who were also eloquent masters of the Latin language, so much so that they would become canonical models for what was long termed “the best prose,” imitated in degrees ranging from obsequious to creative ever since their first publication, and defining even today the standard of “classical” prose for composition courses. This passage also yields up a rare gem in the history of literary criticism, one contemporary assessing the creative output of another, and that as a response (Cicero’s) to an earlier evaluation (Caesar’s) of stylistic and political merits. Caesar, in his treatise on language usage, de Analogia, had said that Cicero was virtually the first inventor of fullness (copia) and had served well the fame and esteem of the Roman people.Footnote ¹

Cicero’s assessment identifies several qualities of Caesar’s writings, traditionally understood as “unadorned” (nudi), “direct” (recti), and “pleasing” (venusti). The subsequent characterization seems to explain Caesar’s unembellished narratives as much as his use of simple, choice language. Succinctness is praised: “you see, nothing is more pleasing in history than pure and plain brevity” (nihil est enim in historia pura et inlustri brevitate dulcius, 262). This last sentence reiterates the initial description with modified attributes: pura ≈ nudi; inlustris/brevitas ≈ recti; dulcius ≈ venusti. In addition to narrative simplicity, the language of the initial judgment, ornatus orationis (“embellishment of style,” “rhetorical artifice”), also indicates a lack of adornment. Cicero describes Caesar’s slick narrative style and his famed linguistic simplicity (elegantia, cf. 252, 261).

The description undoubtedly reflects most readers’ experience of Caesar’s writings. Yet its language and the accompanying simile, suggesting or describing a physical body and its clothing, are remarkable for several reasons.Footnote ² Cicero inherited the analogies to the human physique or clothing from Isocrates and subsequent Hellenistic theorists, yet he also differs from that tradition.Footnote ³ As descriptors of style, the first two adjectives (nudi, recti) are somewhat unusual and are not necessarily complimentary. Nudus occurs infrequently to mean wanting adornment, sometimes as a consequence of brevitas.Footnote ⁴ Rectus meaning “direct” or “straightforward” first appears here in Latin (and so may have been quite striking), but never really catches on in the critical lexicon. Subsequent usage does not greatly increase our understanding of Cicero’s exact meaning.Footnote ⁵ Admittedly, the lexicon of Roman criticism is notoriously vague, but it also tends toward uniformity and repetition.Footnote ⁶ The third term (venusti) is more common and applies to a broad range of attractive or charming phenomena: (erotic) attractiveness, graceful gesture, deft humor, or well-ordered narrative. It is used to describe the effects of several types of rhetorical figures of speech in the Rhetoric to Herennius (see below). Our passage may be a calque on Greek χάρις, indicating graceful succinct narration, but the judgment, as Brian Krostenko remarks, “has been enlivened here by alluding to another of the lexeme’s senses, ‘gracefully shaped,’ said of the human body.”Footnote ⁷ Lastly, it remains unclear how the simile of clothing removed clarifies the terms of the judgment. It offers and then embellishes a visual image more than it elucidates the preceding adjectives.Footnote ⁸ Cicero’s point about lack of adornment (ornatus) could be made without it, and the insistence on the removal of all adornment (omnis ornatus) is harder to square with Caesar’s writing.Footnote ⁹

However seemingly artless or plain his prose, Caesar still employed various embellishments, although with restraint and alongside his famed lexical selectivity (elegantia).Footnote ¹⁰ Rhetorical treatises demand adornment in all stylistic registers. The Rhetoric to Herennius tells us that “rhetorical figures lend each style distinction” (omne genus orationis … dignitate adficiunt exornationes, Rhet. Her. 4.16).Footnote ¹¹ The Orator associates elegantia above all with the low style (genus tenue), which requires a variety of rhetorical effects (Orat. 78–90). Caesar is no exception, as Christopher Krebs remarks: “Almost any passage of the Commentarii will reveal an assortment of the most common rhetorical devices.”Footnote ¹² In short, Cicero’s judgment, while accurate on the surface, merits circumspection. It describes the commentarii fairly reasonably, yet scholars have increasingly called attention to the corporeal imagery of the judgment and have proposed different interpretations of its suggestiveness. Several features in the description and several contexts in and beyond the Brutus give good reason to think that this is more than just a straightforward assessment of Caesar’s commentarii.Footnote ¹³

The following discussion offers the most speculative argument of this book, proposing that Cicero has a specific physical image in mind. The corporeal and sartorial imagery evokes a distinct and symbolically laden object: a statue of Venus, and specifically, a nude (nudi) upright (recti) Venus (venusti), with her clothing removed, such as Praxiteles’ renowned Aphrodite of Knidos. Reference to Venus, given her importance to Caesarian self-presentation, and Cicero’s prominent mention of Minerva in the digression on Caesar (quoted above) establish a meaningful antithesis between the two godesses. Cicero draws on symbolic and historical differences in the representations of Minerva and Venus, prompting us to consider the political and aesthetic divide that separates Cicero from Caesar. Far from being just a famous literary judgment, the assessment of Caesar’s commentarii is also an intervention in the civic crisis, an attempt to communicate a set of ideals that are in competition with Caesar’s ideals.Footnote ¹⁴

Though cautious in its criticisms, the Brutus is a masterfully orchestrated response to Caesarian ideology and aesthetics. As Chapter 3 discussed, Cicero does not criticize Caesar directly, but rather argues that military achievement for self-promotion ultimately endangers the Roman community. Cicero’s countervailing model of civic action, and his own historiography, the Brutus itself, offer an alternative political vision built on the legacies of Rome’s oratorical and textual pasts.

Four distinct yet interrelated topics contextualize Cicero’s references to Minerva and Venus and they will be discussed in turn: (1) Cicero’s long-standing appeal to Minerva as an ideological ally, which begins at least as early as the 50s and is especially prominent in his dispute over Clodius’ statue of Libertas on the Palatine; (2) statuary analogies in Greco-Roman literary criticism and in the Brutus; (3) the larger conversational exchange concerning Caesar (251–62); and (4) statues of Athena/Minerva and Aphrodite/Venus and their aesthetic and political implications for Cicero’s judgment of Caesar.

Minerva in the 50s

A decade before the Brutus, in September 57 bce, Cicero returned from exile, he repeatedly reminds us, to great acclamation. Physically restored to the city after eighteen months, he still had to undertake the protracted, painstaking journey toward political restoration.Footnote ¹⁵ That journey ultimately proved endless: he stumbled against the renewed alliance of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, saw Clodius defeated only after Milo murdered him on the Appian Way near Bovillae on 18 January 52, failed to secure Milo’s acquittal with one of the best Latin speeches ever produced, and soon witnessed Rome succumb first to Caesar and then to the triumvirate and the proscriptions that cost him his life.

Upon returning he sought the restoration of his Palatine house, which Clodius had plundered in March 58 in order to build a far more lavish home with an ostentatious portico and shrine dedicated to the goddess Libertas. On 29 September 57, Cicero pled his case before the pontiffs, seeking annulment of Clodius’ consecration of Cicero’s property. They ruled in his favor, and reconstruction began the following year. The full details of the speech de Domo sua are less relevant for our purposes than the crucial rhetorical subplot concerning two statues and the ideological dispute at whose center they stood. This similar dispute over the symbolic differences between two statues provides crucial background for the Brutus’ references to statuary and tutelary goddesses.

Cicero challenged the erection of Clodius’ statue of the goddess Libertas in various ways, claiming or suggesting repeatedly that Clodius had treated the Roman people like slaves (who by definition cannot enjoy libertas): “were you placing an image of Liberty in the very house that itself had been a sign of your most cruel lordship and of the most wretched servitude of the Roman people?” (Libertatis simulacrum in ea domo conlocabas, quae domus erat ipsa indicium crudelissimi tui dominatus et miserrimae populi Romani servitutis?, Dom. 110).Footnote ¹⁶ He also recasts libertas into the neighboring yet negative value associated with it, licentia (“license,” “wantonness”): “you set up an image not of public liberty but license” (simulacrum non libertatis publicae, sed licentiae conlocasti, Dom. 113).Footnote ¹⁷ Connected to this moral reframing is the assertion that the statue actually depicted a foreign prostitute: “It’s said to have been some courtesan from Tanagra” (Tanagraea quaedam meretrix fuisse dicitur, Dom. 111).Footnote ¹⁸

Against Clodius’ immorality stands Cicero’s allegiance to Minerva:

We do not have Clodius’ speech, to which Cicero colorfully responds with rhetoric perfectly calculated to culminate in a favorite punchline: Clodius’ affair with his sister Clodia.Footnote ¹⁹ Cicero’s initial attachment to Minerva – an icon of chastity set against Clodius’ sexual wantonness – takes a serious turn later on: “and you, Minerva, do I pray to and beseech, guardian of Rome, who has always stood fast to aid my plans and witness my deeds” (te, custos urbis, Minerva, quae semper adiutrix consiliorum meorum, testis laborum exstitisti, precor atque quaeso, Dom. 144). Plutarch has this language in mind when he writes that Cicero, just before leaving Rome for exile, “took the statue of Athena, which he had long since set up at his home and honored exceedingly, to the Capitol and dedicated it with the inscription ‘To Athena, Protectress of Rome’” (τὸ μὲν ἄγαλμα τῆς Ἀθηνᾶς, ὃ πολὺν χρόνον ἔχων ἐπὶ τῆς οἰκίας ἱδρυμένον ἐτίμα διαφερόντως, εἰς Καπιτώλιον κομίσας ἀνέθηκεν ἐπιγράψας “Ἀθηνᾷ Ῥώμης φύλακι,” Plut. Cic. 31.6).

Cicero pinned his political hopes on Minerva for the last two decades of his life. He boasted of being savior of Rome for having quashed the Catilinarian conspiracy.Footnote ²⁰ His self-depiction as custos urbis likens his own role to that of Minerva (custodem urbis, Dom. 40; custodem patriae, Dom. 102).Footnote ²¹ In de Legibus, composed in the mid-50s but never completed, Cicero revisits his care for this statuette of Minerva when he abandoned his house and departed Rome in exile: “I brought her from my house into the father’s and was esteemed savior of the fatherland by the judgment of the senate, Italy, and all peoples” (eamque ex nostra domo in ipsius patris domum detulimus, iudicia senatus, Italiae, gentium denique omnium conservatae patriae consecuti sumus, Leg. 2.42). He trades on an equivalence that is suggested throughout his career and that governed his actions during and after the Catilinarian conspiracy: his welfare is inextricable from that of the Roman state. As John Bodel says, “The gesture, both personal and public, effectively suggested that the fate of the res publica was tied to Cicero’s own well-being, even as (more conventionally) his personal salvation depended upon the integrity of the res publica.”Footnote ²²

It’s worth reprising several features of the dispute with Clodius, because they resurface in 46 bce. At the broadest level statuary, its varied symbolism and potential associations, becomes a vehicle through which to craft and convey ideological and rhetorical disputes. Minerva is central to Cicero’s self-depiction as savior of the Roman state, manifested in physical representations of her in Rome. In matching Minerva against Clodius and Libertas he differently interprets his opponent’s favored goddess: connecting her to individual rather than communal well-being, alluding to provocative or sexualized characteristics of the physical statue (versus Minerva’s chastity), and portraying Minerva as the community’s true champion.

Statuary Analogies

Moving from the historical to the literary-historical, statuary in the Brutus surfaces in the long passage on Cato (61–69), the first orator of note after the first orator of record, Marcus Cornelius Cethegus (57–60).

The passage explains inclusion of Cato in the catalogue of orators by noting his place in the early stages of stylistic evolution. The sculptural analogy includes an important formulation of stylistic change as a series of progressions across time, with each artist representing a different stage in the evolution from the stiff crudeness of Canachus to the polished realism of Polyclitus.Footnote ²³ Set against the subsequent analogy to painting, which includes only two stages, an earlier and later group divided by the richness of their palette, the statuary analogy importantly sets up gradual evolution as a crucial principle for the Brutus. Cicero avoids the traditional and schematic division into “old” and “new” and establishes a framework that accounts for gradual change over time.Footnote ²⁴ The innovations in his conceptual system are made clear by contrast with the simpler bipartite division among painters. The second analogy does not provide further, simpler clarification of the same point but instead indicates, by way of contrast, the Brutus’ crucial emphasis on sequential evolution.

Yet while Cicero here indicates a methodological premise of his history, revisited and refined in the course of the dialogue, the analogy has provocatively left out Phidias. As long ago as 1978, Doreen C. Innes valuably observed that Cicero ostentatiously excludes him.Footnote ²⁵ Readers familiar with the topos would expect a reference to the premier sculptor of the classical period.Footnote ²⁶ Greek thinkers, as Jerome Pollitt notes, thought that “the art of Phidias represents the supreme achievement of Greek sculpture and that the most perfect rhetoric of the past should be compared to Phidias in its grandeur and perfection.”Footnote ²⁷ Because Phidias would be the next stage in the catalogue, Innes argued, his absence criticizes the less-developed Atticists, while Phidias implicitly represents the perfection of Cicero’s hero, Demosthenes.

The abbreviated catalogue is undoubtedly striking, considering both the history of Greek sculpture and the deployment of the topos elsewhere. Within the context of the Brutus, however, including two explicit mentions of Phidias later, the omission is more complex than a limited intervention in the Atticism/Asianism debate. In the course of the dialogue Cicero extends not only the temporal range of sculptors mentioned, both backward and forward, but also the explanatory power of such comparisons. Right away in the next passage and the next literary judgment, of Rome’s first poet, Livius Andronicus, we hear that “the Latin Odyssey is like some piece from Daedalus and also his plays do not merit a second read” (et Odyssia Latina est sic [in] tamquam opus aliquod Daedali et Livianae fabulae non satis dignae quae iterum legantur, 71). The beginning of Latin literature is likened to the beginning of Greek sculpture, and the alignments are further contrived by making the first Latin poet correspond to the first Greek poet by mention of Livius’ Latin Odyssia, resulting in the neatly schematic trio of firsts: Homer–Daedalus–Livius.Footnote ²⁸ Mention of Livius’ status as un-rereadable also expands the analogy beyond mere stylistic assessment, because the contemporary artistic utility of older texts emerges as a central problem.Footnote ²⁹ Yet in addition to providing a schematic structure for the different stages of development, such analogies also make substantive claims about the pedagogical (and ultimately political) relevance of an author.Footnote ³⁰

Phidias’ centrality to any catalogue of sculptors will soon emerge: “the talent of Quintus Hortensius while he was a very young man was approved of as soon as it was seen, like a statue of Phidias” (Q. Hortensi admodum adulescentis ingenium ut Phidiae signum simul aspectum et probatum est, 228). Phidias is the quintessence of sculpture: his creative accomplishments and renown are as immediately recognizable as the pieces he produces.Footnote ³¹ It also can hardly be coincidence that Cicero names Phidias, so central a figure to Greek art and rhetorical analogies, along with Hortensius. He was a crucial colleague and rival, his death inspired the Brutus, and Cicero wrested from him the mantle of Rome’s premier orator.

Another example adds artistic imitation to the terms of the analogy: “just as Lysippus used to say about the Doryphorus of Polyclitus, so you are now saying that the speech on the Servilian law was your master” (ut Polycliti doryphorum sibi Lysippus aiebat, sic tu suasionem legis Serviliae tibi magistram fuisse, 296). The claim comes from Atticus, who, despite his real-world penchant for antiquarian researches strikes an aggressively presentist pose in the dialogue’s fiction. We find him challenging the canonization of allegedly outdated orators such as Cato and Crassus. Atticus responds to Cicero’s former adoption as a role model of Crassus’ speech promoting the lex Servilia of 106 bce (161). Mention of Polyclitus in this context touches on the initial catalogue of four sculptors, where he was the developmental endpoint. With the addition of Lysippus the entire catalogue now contains seven sculptors.Footnote ³² This last analogy also introduces the imitation of artistic works, which was implicit in the earlier assessment of Livius Andronicus (71, quoted above), since the pragmatic value of reading and rereading, in addition to the recreational purpose of enjoyment, is to find material suitable for imitation. Cicero expands the traditional analogy to statuary in order to include the likening of the specific works produced by an author to the specific works produced by a sculptor.Footnote ³³ The comparison might seem inevitable, but other works do not so extensively elaborate the topos. Among other theorists, statuary analogies tend to elucidate the relative development of an author (Demetrius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus) or a specific quality or characteristic of style (Quintilian).Footnote ³⁴ Cicero has instead interwoven both sides of this analogy to give it greater explanatory power, as authors no less than sculptors engage with a tradition of past works as part of their own artistic development. Just as Lysippus studied and imitated Polyclitus’ renowned statue of a nude warrior, so Cicero relied on a prominent deliberative speech by his role model, Crassus, to improve his eloquence. Statuary and eloquence are more complexly intertwined in the Brutus than anywhere else.

Chronology should be borne in mind as well, since Lysippus takes us into the later classical period, well after Polyclitus and Phidias, and suggests one guiding principle of the Brutus: change continues beyond a notional classical acme. Lysippus (fl. 330) was a somewhat younger contemporary of Praxiteles (fl. 360) and along with him is seen as a great innovator who helped to establish the bridge from the late classical period into the Hellenistic.Footnote ³⁵ If the initial catalogue of four sculptors was surprising for having suppressed mention of Phidias, especially given its listing of figures from the sixth and fifth centuries and the notion of artistic perfection, the absence of Praxiteles is notorious, since the larger range of analogies offered in the Brutus brings us well into the fourth century.

It is noteworthy that only in the digression on Caesar does Cicero directly identify himself with a sculptor producing a work of art, claiming that he would prefer to be Phidias crafting a Minerva than a useful workman (ego me Phidiam esse mallem, 257, discussed below). Other examples compare statuary to style in general or individual speakers and speeches, while Cicero essentially collapses the analogy, identifying himself with Phidias’ cultural and political relevance. He asks not merely What object does Phidias produce?, but How is artistic production meaningful in the broadest sense? By inserting himself into the digression on Caesar’s style and emphasizing the importance of his own actions over those of other military commanders, Cicero sets himself up to be compared to Caesar. To then liken himself to a Phidias producing a Minerva prompts the inevitable question: what sculptor and sculpture might we associate with Caesar in comparison? From there it is no great interpretive leap for Cicero to suggest that Caesar in producing his commentarii is essentially a Praxiteles producing a Venus. Yet even with the conceptual framework in place, and even in light of the Brutus’ repeated tendency to have readers posit comparisons and meaningfully fill in conceptual gaps, the identification still requires further evidence connecting Caesar to the statuary analogies.Footnote ³⁶

The Conversational Exchange (251–62)

The evaluation of Caesar comes as part of an extended, complex, and animated exchange on a range of topics. It is the most intricate digression in the Brutus and among the liveliest scenes from any of Cicero’s dialogues, dramatically reminiscent perhaps of the mid-conversation exchange that opens de Legibus or the occasional Socratic back-and-forth between Laelius and Scipio in de Republica. The digression on Caesar challenges the value of military triumphs while promoting Cicero’s civic and oratorical achievements. All three interlocutors participate, a rarity in the dialogue, and the trio together evaluates no other orator. Coupled with the evaluation of Marcus Claudius Marcellus (248–50), the topic also seems to violate the injunction to discuss only the dead, further marking its importance.Footnote ³⁷

Cicero begins by seeking Atticus’ opinion of Caesar (251), while Brutus vainly recalls the intention to evaluate only the dead, before Atticus gives a brief account (252–53) and hands over to Brutus (254–55); he quickly yields to Cicero (255–58) and his inbuilt digression on the true utility of eloquence over military achievement, in which Cicero fields the imagined objections of a fictive interlocutor; Atticus picks up the relay (258–59), followed by Brutus’ query of Atticus’ mentioning Sisenna and C. Rusius (260), prompting Atticus to relay the notorious sputatilica story (260), to discuss the analogical method, and to note Caesar’s oratorical elegantia (261); Brutus then moves from the orationes to the commentarii (262), which Cicero takes up in the well-known judgment (262) before urging a return from the digression to the main account (revertamur, 262).

The topics broached are central to the dialogue and indeed encapsulate the most essential themes in it: the use of language (analogy and anomaly), the utility of public achievement (military and civic), state well-being (salus civitatis), communal memory (historia), literary exchange, aesthetic evaluation, and Greek culture as a model for explaining Roman artistic practices (Phidias’ Athena/Minerva). Formally and topically the long digression is a masterpiece of rhetoric.Footnote ³⁸ The key to understanding the judgment of Caesar lies in Cicero’s mention of Phidias’ famed statue:

Mention of Minerva is almost an afterthought, a fortuitous example to support his dismissal of the average commander and his triumphs and to promote his own civic achievements as an orator and politician. Cicero does not challenge the triumph outright but revises the values attached to it and offers countervailing sources of civic value, a strategy already prominent in his dialogues of the 50s and in many respects the distinguishing feature of his self-fashioning.Footnote ³⁹

Cicero’s association of himself with Minerva, while it feeds into the larger network of statuary analogies, is different from them in character. It underscores a key theme in Cicero’s history of oratory: the interrelationship of the Roman state and stylistic practice. He transposes the statuary comparison to the political plane, underscoring how Phidias and Athena are central to Athenian civic identity in the classical period. Phidias, of course, was inherently tied to Pericles, the orator-statesman who plays a surprisingly outsize role in the Brutus.Footnote ⁴⁰ The association of Cicero with Phidias and Minerva, inserted into the digression on Caesar, provides an interpretive framework for Atticus’ subsequent analysis of Caesar’s style. Even if Atticus does not explicitly cite Praxiteles and his vastly influential Venus, Cicero has primed us to expect an artistic analogy in the discussion of Caesar.

The Aesthetic and Political Judgment of Caesar

Statuary’s importance to the Brutus is signaled early, if indirectly, in the dialogue’s dramatic setting: after the long preface the speakers sit in a small meadow near a statue of Plato (in pratulo propter Platonis statuam consedimus, 24). Reference to spatial settings and their physical objects within dialogue-frames typically allude to a Platonic forerunner and foreshadow a significant theme in the Ciceronian version.Footnote ⁴¹ In no other dialogue does Cicero insert a statue of Plato into the dramatic transition from preface to discussion, and the detail, along with mention of the meadow, points us to the setting of Plato’s Phaedrus, with its locus amoenus, statuettes, and shrine. Statuary there crucially elucidates the work’s analysis of writing, rhetoric, and philosophy, and refers to specific individuals in the Athenian social and political milieu.Footnote ⁴²

Direct reference to statues of Plato and Minerva in the Brutus are likely of special significance for the conversation in which they are engaged, a significance underscored by the fact that Cicero has otherwise modeled the Brutus less on the dialogues of Plato (or his follower, Heraclides of Pontus) in the way that he did for de Oratore and de Republica, and more on those of Aristotle, in which the author takes the leading role in exposition of the material rather than use intermediaries such as Socrates (Plato’s works), Scipio (de Republica), or Crassus (de Oratore). Given the formal design of the dialogue, the reference to Plato in the dramatic setting, including reference to Plato’s Phaedrus, is striking and indicates the thematic relevance not just of oratory but also of statuary as a crucial theme in the Brutus.

Evidence for Cicero’s admiration of statuary and its representative potential in his own life abounds. Despite occasionally feigned dilettantism and criticism of statuary’s extravagance in the Verrines, Cicero knew Greek art well and was alert to the intellectual and symbolic value of objects and images.Footnote ⁴³ He eagerly sought a Hermathena, a double-faced composite bust with Hermes and Athena, for the gymnasium in his Tusculan villa nicknamed the Academy, probably a peristyle garden. “That decoration is appropriate to my Academy,” he tells Atticus, “because Hermes is common to all (such) places and Minerva is the special symbol of that gymnasium” (est ornamentum Academiae proprium meae, quod et Hermes commune omnium et Minerva singulare est insigne eius gymnasi, Att. 1.4.3 [SB 9]).Footnote ⁴⁴

Both the language and the structure of the digression on Caesar’s style are closely connected to the analogies with the visual arts. After mentioning Phidias, Cicero notes that sculptors are valuable, “especially since few men can paint or sculpt with excellence” (praesertim cum pauci pingere egregie possint aut fingere, 257). Given that Cicero has only just offered an analogy to statuary, the additional mention of painting, which otherwise serves no purpose, points beyond the immediate context. First, it directs us back to the double analogy of style to painting and statuary earlier in the work (70), connecting the contents of the later digression with the earlier statements about the development of style. The claim pauci … possint also reinforces at a general level the close connection between the visual arts and the production of oratory, since this “paucitas motif” is one of the crucial premises of the Brutus (and of Cicero’s rhetorical dialogues in general): only few men achieve greatness in oratory because oratory is so difficult and therefore valuable.Footnote ⁴⁵ Employment of this motif here further aligns the creative uniqueness of visual artists to the rare skills of the true orator.

Second, the two verbs pingere and fingere also direct us forward to the description of Julius Caesar himself, in which Caesar is likened to an artist producing works of art, first as a painter and then as a sculptor.

Caesar’s speeches abound in oratorical adornment. Ornamenta is a related if more specific version of the abstract ornatus that his commentarii allegedly lack, and the cognate terms align the qualities of his speeches with the (absent) qualities of his histories.Footnote ⁴⁷ The metaphor, signaled by tamquam, presents Caesar as a painter: his use of ornament allows him to paint pictures well and place them in good lighting.Footnote ⁴⁸

In describing Caesar as a painter (261) Cicero paves the way for us to discern his role as sculptor (262): Caesar’s speeches are like painting, his commentarii like statuary. The later language nudi, recti, venusti, etc. thus continues the idea of Caesar as a producer of artworks but shifts from painting to statuary. Given Cicero’s earlier mention of Phidias’ Minerva it also suggests that in his commentarii Caesar creates a specific sculpture. The questions remain, which one and why?

Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos

When read with attention to its visual elements, Cicero’s judgment of the commentarii most closely suggests a nude upright statue of Venus: Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos. Nudity is evident (nudi). Recti in the sense of “upright” identifies the Knidian original while differentiating that version from variations – all the major variations present Aphrodite as less upright than the Knidia.Footnote ⁴⁹ The term venusti plays on the name of the goddess, who was, of course, so central to Caesarian ideology: Venus.Footnote ⁵⁰ As Christina S. Kraus observes, “any application of venustus to Caesar must conjure up the image of the most famous Julian ancestor, the goddess of love herself.”Footnote ⁵¹ Lastly, the detail concerning the clothing removed also perfectly matches the typology of the Knidian Venus, who alluringly holds in her left hand the garment removed for bathing. Simply put, Cicero’s description of Caesar’s commentarii corresponds to Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, the paradigmatic upright statue of a nude Venus.

Praxiteles’ innovative and controversial Knidia is thought to be the first rendering of a full-size female nude in the plastic arts. She inspired several formal variations that became immensely popular beginning (probably) at the end of the second century bce and would even establish themselves in the iconography of self-presentation for respectable Roman matrons in the imperial period.Footnote ⁵² There was the crouching Venus tying her sandals or putting up her hair, or Venus rising from the sea, reclined, as we see in a fresco from Pompeii – rather than upright as Botticelli portrayed Venus’ emergence into the world.

Other explanations of the language have argued that it indicates the shape of a human form in general, Caesar’s body itself, or Caesar portrayed in the Greek tradition of the heroic nude.Footnote ⁵³ Several objections to these identifications can be made. There is no evidence that by 46 bce the heroic male nude had claimed a spot at Rome in the repertoire of artistic self-presentation among the political class. There exists, certainly, a history of the Roman heroic nude from roughly the second century bce onward, although a controversial history in many respects. Cicero excoriates Verres’ son for one such statue in Greek-speaking Sicily in the 70s.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the pro Rabirio Postumo (54/53 bce) Cicero defends Rabirius’ choice to don Greek attire at the court of King Ptolemy XIII Auletes of Alexandria by noting that Scipio Asiagenus was honored with a statue on the Capitol depicting him wearing a chlamys and crepides for his victory over Antiochus III of Syria in 189 bce.Footnote ⁵⁵ As Christopher Hallett notes, that this was the only example Cicero cites (or perhaps could cite) “must make it extremely unlikely that the heroic portrait was a generally accepted part of Roman self-representation at this date.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The first clear examples we have of individuals portraying themselves in this way do not appear until Sextus Pompey’s and Octavian Caesar’s issuance of coinage after the death of Caesar, and they appear to be an innovative attempt to portray their martial virtue and filial piety during the propaganda wars of the triumviral period: Octavian as son of divus Iulius, Sextus as son of Neptune/Pompey. Such portrayals were fostered in large measure by the association of the Greek nude with the idealized physique of young men. For Caesar and Pompey, however, we have no clear evidence of their self-presentation using the heroic nude.Footnote ⁵⁷ Perhaps like the triumviral successors years later, Cicero in the Brutus might have been appealing to a possibility latent but not yet realized in the repertoire of celebratory iconography at Rome.Footnote ⁵⁸ His audience surely will have been able to make this and other conceptual leaps along with him. Yet arguing against such a reference is the unquestionably honorific nature of such a portrayal, even if we allow for hints of ironic criticism in the polysemy of the description: reference to the heroic nude would associate Caesar with the majesty of a Hellenistic ruler or the great heroes of mythology. “The costume,” in the words of Michael Koortbojian, “declared that they were to be thought of as having achieved a level of honor et gloria far beyond the norms toward which all good Romans might ordinarily strive.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Such panegyric hardly accords with Cicero’s desire to downplay Caesar’s achievements and to express displeasure at the contemporary distress of the Roman state.

Furthermore, despite the potential erotic connotations of nudity, venustus is hardly an attribute of the heroic male nude, which emphasized grandeur, reverence, and military virtue above all else. It justified nudity through the associations with physical training, competitive fighting, exploits in battle, and the heroes and gods of mythology. In addition, the nudity of the heroic nude is paradoxically not really “nude.” Such statues do not have the garment, typically the Greek battle cloak, the chlamys, fully removed, but rather at a minimum draped over the left shoulder and accompanied by weaponry, such as a sword, spear, or balteus (swordbelt). Nudity is a feature of the statues insofar as they show the genitalia, but the heroic nude is a type of costumed portrait with accoutrements. While nudus is a flexible term, typically meaning not “nude” but “mostly nude” or “unadorned,” Cicero’s specific description – omni ornatu orationis tamquam veste detracta – better fits the versions of a fully disrobed Venus, in which the nudity itself, including the presence of the garment fully removed for bathing, is a crucial element of the statuary typology and an integral part of its erotic appeal, all tied back to Praxiteles’ innovations. Quite differently, the nudity of the portrait in heroic costume was, paradoxically, a representation in which the nudity itself was important but was not the sole emphasis; rather, nudity in conjunction with the military apparatus formed a crucial mode of dress that symbolized an entire Hellenic world of martial and mythological heroism. It was not nudity alone that was on display for visual consumption but rather the heroic majesty and virtue of which nudity was an index and iconographic convention.Footnote ⁶⁰

The questions are essentially twofold: which of two standard topoi does Cicero refer to, and how does each of those topoi determine the analogy he uses? The first commonplace is talis oratio, qualis vita, which aligns in largely moral terms the qualities of an author’s style with his own life. The scholarship thus far has largely emphasized this topos. The operative analogy in this case is that Caesar’s writings are a reflection of Caesar as a person (and thus are meant to describe him).Footnote ⁶¹ The second possibility is the commonplace that likens writings to monuments, structures, or objects.Footnote ⁶² On this second explanation, the analogy compares Caesar’s writings to another object, specifically a statue.

It is true that Cicero’s indirectness, his innovations with statuary analogies in the Brutus, and the subsequent history of the topos might suggest a comparison of Caesar’s works to his physical body, thus creating the possibility of moral judgment of that body. Elements in the surrounding discussion, such as the mention of the calamistri (“curling irons”) applied by imitators (262), are used by authors such as Seneca and Tacitus to describe a figure such as Maecenas; they rework the passage precisely in line with the topic talis oratio, qualis vita. However, the subsequent reception may mislead us about the original text’s purpose. While the two topoi are closely related, they have fundamentally different aims; the second topos – the comparison of written texts to objects – has a crucially different focus: not on the craftsman but the craft he produces.

Cicero’s judgment does describe a human or human-like form, but the target of the analogy is not Julius Caesar but rather the object that Caesar by analogy produces in his writings: the commentarii are like the Aphrodite of Knidos. Praxiteles’ Aphrodite and Phidias’ Athena, probably the two most celebrated female statues of Greco-Roman antiquity, are crucial to the work’s political and aesthetic commitments. Cicero’s reference to Venus offers a potent and contextually relevant criticism of Caesar, bringing into focus the symbolism that separates Minerva from Venus.

Cicero’s Minerva: The Symbolic and the Real

The symbolic contrast between Minerva and Venus is the greatest strength of the implicit comparison. Cicero portrays himself as the defender of state and civic order in his actions and writings and reprises the association with Minerva he first made in battling Clodius. Phidias’ Athena and Praxiteles’ Aphrodite embody fundamentally different attitudes and contexts for producing statuary, and Cicero aligns himself with the former in order to promote a specific vision of Rome modeled on Athenian learning, Periclean Athens, and its martial and civic accomplishments. Phidias represents classical Athens at its highpoint, after the defeat of the Persians, which was accompanied by a sense of Athenian supremacy in the military and artistic spheres. Praxiteles, by contrast, whatever his artistic fame, represents a subsequent phase of Athenian history, the decline of Athens that would culminate in capitulation to Macedonian rule. Minerva marvelously encapsulates Cicero’s promotion of his theoretical and historical ideology as a countervailing force against military accomplishment. As the quintessential goddess of Athens and learning, Athena/Minerva suits Cicero’s attempts in the 50s and 40s to align Roman civic identity with broad-based theoretical learning derived from Greek sources.Footnote ⁶³ Thus Minerva’s championing of the learned arts crucially supports Cicero’s rejection of military triumph as Rome’s main source of greatness.

This is not to deny a martial connection. Athena/Minerva is a goddess of war, but symbolizes war combined with wisdom, guided policy to benefit the polity, and battle conducted with strategic deliberation.Footnote ⁶⁴ She differs from her typically bloodthirsty, glory-seeking counterpart, Ares/Mars, who in the worst versions represents the brutal aspects of warfare and destructive slaughter.Footnote ⁶⁵ Most notably, Athena symbolizes the salvation of Athens from the great Persian enemy, and her monumental function as the protectress of Greece underpins Cicero’s self-description as the savior of Rome. Built in the 450s and 440s, the Parthenon celebrated Athenian victory over the invading Persian forces and offered tribute to the gods for their assistance. The temple was rebuilt over the older temple to Athena, which the occupying Persians had destroyed in 480. It contained Phidias’ massive chryselephantine statue of Athena, dressed in a peplos, with a shield lowered to the ground and supported upright by her left hand while she held a statue of Nike in her right.Footnote ⁶⁶ The temple complex, with its central position in the city, massive size, elaborate friezes, and dazzling statue of its patron goddess celebrated Athenian victory, thus suggesting for Cicero’s audience an alternative vision of triumphal success, one based not solely on military conquest, but on defending the welfare of the state and promoting civic harmony.

This emphasis emerges in Brutus’ remark that Cicero’s supplicatio (of 63 bce, rather than 51 bce) outranks Caesar’s praise for Cicero’s oratorical accomplishments, which in turn outranks the triumphs of many men (hanc autem, inquit, gloriam testimoniumque Caesaris tuae quidem supplicationi non, sed triumphis multorum antepono, 255). The hierarchy is a crucial reminder that great oratory must serve great political ends. It also cautiously locates Caesar in that hierarchy even as it demotes military honor. Caesar had unabashedly promoted Venus as the patron of his military success. He vowed a temple to Venus Genetrix at the battle of Pharsalus in 48 and dedicated it on 24 September 46, the last day of his magnificent quadruple triumph. It is important, of course, to keep in mind that at the writing of the Brutus Caesar had received supplicationes but had yet to triumph, and thus Cicero’s prioritization of his own supplicatio likens their achievements while giving pride of place to Cicero. He offers a deliberate countermodel to Caesar’s self-representation as a descendant of Venus and to his impending celebration of victory.

Phidias’ Athena was also a prime example of civic benefaction and especially of Pericles’ centrality to classical Athens. Cicero’s emphasis on the statue dovetails remarkably with Pericles’ political and oratorical prominence, emphasized in the Brutus far more than in any other dialogue.Footnote ⁶⁷ Pericles is the first Greek orator of merit (28) and anticipates the first Roman orator, Marcus Cornelius Cethegus (cos. 204). Cicero excludes orators prior to Pericles/Cethegus by claiming not to know or not to value earlier texts.Footnote ⁶⁸ Pericles also assumes a notably Ciceronian profile as the first to introduce learning (doctrina) to his oratory, allegedly through his philosophical association with Anaxagoras. Pericles, seeming to follow Ciceronian prescriptions, turned abstruse philosophical knowledge into material for public speeches, and in addition to stylistic fullness (ubertas, copia) he also mastered powerful, almost violent, persuasion: “they [the Athenians] feared the terrifying force of his speech” (vim dicendi terroremque timuerunt, 44). His applied doctrina, ubertas, and copia, as well as a command of vis (“forcefulness”) makes him resemble Crassus, Antonius, or Cicero much more than a politician active well before the classical canon of Greek speakers.

Pericles also crops up, somewhat unexpectedly, at the “beginning” of Roman oratory, since Cicero claims, probably wrongly, that Ennius’ description of Cethegus as the “marrow of persuasion” (Suadai medulla) was crafted in imitation of Eupolis’ description of Peitho sitting on the lips of Pericles (59). He plays a crucial role not only in the history of Greek oratory, but also in the history of literary history at Greece and Rome. Pericles becomes a forerunner for Cicero’s stylistic and political values. By likening himself to Phidias Cicero associates himself with Periclean Athens and underscores his political and artistic superiority.Footnote ⁶⁹

The juxtaposition of Minerva and Venus also trades on the opposition of virginal purity to licentiousness that was central to criticizing Clodius’ statue of Libertas in the previous decade.Footnote ⁷⁰ Minerva’s chaste adult maidenhood is wholly unlike Venus’ associations of sexual frivolity and sensual pleasure.Footnote ⁷¹ The absence of Venus’ vestis also pointedly contrasts with Athena’s most prominent garment, the peplos presented to Athena (Polias) at the Panathenaia each summer.Footnote ⁷² Cicero thus represents the Greek civic and artistic worlds so that they match up with his own political and aesthetic designs. He draws on the symbolism of Minerva as a foil to Caesar’s Venus-driven ideology and to promote a coherent and powerfully persuasive civic and artistic alternative for Rome and its past.

The Real Goddess Minerva

When Cicero claims that he would rather be a Phidias sculpting a Minerva, he indulges not in fantasy but fact. In one very real sense he was a creator of Minerva, having crafted a Roman equivalent to Athena at the center of Roman public worship by transferring a Minerva from his domestic sacrarium to the Capitoline (discussed above). The statue still occupied its place, presumably in Minerva’s precinct as part of the Capitoline Triad, in 46 bce and stayed beyond Caesar’s (and probably Cicero’s) death.Footnote ⁷³ In a letter of 43 to Cornificius she again makes an appearance: “on that very day [19 March, Quinquatrus, the festival of Minerva] the senate decreed that our Minerva, guardian of Rome, whom a gale overturned, be set up again” (eo ipso die senatus decrevit, ut Minerva nostra, custos urbis, quam turbo deiecerat, restitueretur, Fam. 12.25.1 [SB 373]). The real-life placement of Minerva on the Capitoline and her textual notice in the Brutus connect the location of Cicero’s Minerva on the heights of the Capitol to its monumental equivalent in Athens, the Parthenon, perched above the city Athena protected.Footnote ⁷⁴ Cicero’s dedication of Minerva as he departed Rome may even have been calculated to recall the dedication of Athens to Athena as citizens abandoned the city to the invading enemy during the Persian War.Footnote ⁷⁵ The gesture is inseparable from the subsequent triumph of Athens over the Persians and claims to superiority over other Greeks. Once again Cicero’s ingenuity found a way to indulge the Brutus’ obsessive creation of meaningful parallels between Athens and Rome. This masterful manipulation of spatial and geographical resonances throws into relief Caesar’s Venus, still in search of a place in Rome’s urban topology. Cicero knew this well, since, in conjunction with Caesar’s financial creature-in-Rome, Oppius, he already in 54 was busy helping to secure land for Caesar’s forum with its temple of Venus Genetrix.Footnote ⁷⁶

Cicero may also be responding to Caesarian provocation. Caesar too had sought to lay claim to Minerva and to connect her to Julian propaganda. Almost contemporaneous with the Brutus is Caesar’s issuance in 47/46 bce of silver denarii with Venus on the obverse and Aeneas fleeing Troy with Anchises on his left shoulder and, crucially, the Palladium in his right hand. This wooden image of Pallas Athena may have been stolen by Diomedes and/or Odysseus; the mythological differences are part of the complex story of post-Homeric reception. Somehow, it arrived at Rome and was housed in the temple of Vesta. Caesar’s numismatic vision is clear: Aeneas brought her to Rome and therefore it is Caesar who protects Rome during the civil war. It will also have reinforced Caesar’s already prominent connection to Troy via Venus, since the Palladium was given by Zeus to Ilus, Troy’s mythical founder. And as pontifex maximus Caesar had a close connection to the Palladium, since the Vestal Virgins were its sacred keepers in the temple of Vesta and were in turn under control of the pontifical college. Caesar appears to have crafted an East–West lineage of devotion to the Roman state, and Cicero through Minerva similarly matches Caesar’s efforts at crafting an eastern precedent as part of civic ideology.Footnote ⁷⁷

Caesar’s citation of the Palladium on coinage is also a claim on her powers of intellectual and artistic production. Caesar ranked, after all, among the chief intellectuals of his day and was no less eager than Cicero to emerge victorious from the ideological battles that depended on rhetorical skill and the manicured presentation of public image. His commentarii and de Analogia are both products of that scholarly persona, but no less so are his administrative reforms, such as the solar Julian calendar, established from new knowledge derived from Greco-Egyptian scholars.Footnote ⁷⁸ Caesar’s calendrical reforms were in full effect by the end of 46 bce, the monstrous year bloated beyond all measure to allow the new calendar to begin in 45. Cicero, for his part, acutely felt the imperious weight of knowledge turned into power: once told that Lyra, the constellation, would soon rise, he quipped, “Well of course, it’s been ordered to” (Plut. Caes. 59.6).Footnote ⁷⁹

From this larger network of complex representation, of claims and counterclaims about knowledge, authority, and civic duty, emerges Cicero’s citation of Phidias’ famed statue of Athena on the Acropolis. Certainly it is much more than part of the local argument against the limited value of military triumphs. Allusion to Venus in Cicero’s judgment of the commentarii strikes directly at the heart of Caesarian self-promotion through his familial claim of descent from Venus, a point perhaps given special piquancy in light of Atticus’ composition of family histories, including of the Julii.Footnote ⁸⁰ It is as if Cicero says defiantly, “You may have Venus, Caesar, for yourself and your family, but that is all. Minerva is mine, just as she and I belong to Rome.”

Much as Cicero manipulated the antithesis between Minerva and Libertas (or Licentia, as he calls her) to attack Clodius, so in the Brutus does he repeat the rhetorical ploy. Yet in place of Libertas and her statue emerges Venus, so crucially associated with Caesar and the gens Iulia, allegedly descended from Aeneas, son of the Trojan Anchises and the goddess Venus. The shift in statuary reflects Cicero’s shifting struggles against Rome’s turbulent self-destruction in the 50s and then the emerging problem of autocratic rule in the 40s. It also reflects, in his literary career, the shift from the (begun-and-then-abandoned?) de Legibus, with its emphasis on Clodius, to the Brutus, with Caesar occupying his energies and Clodius barely an afterthought.

The Brutus crucially contextualizes Caesar’s attempts to define his public image and his divine descent, a reminder of the extent to which the elevation of Venus and the promotion of Julian ancestry from her were a long and contested process that may only have seemed complete with the rise of Augustus and the writing of Vergil’s Aeneid. Yet if we fast-forward nearly half a century, then perhaps Vergil too produces a distant and sympathetic echo of Cicero’s claims on Minerva. Aeneas is depicted fleeing Troy with Anchises and the Penates, but Vergil makes no mention of the Palladium, and this despite the famous Caesarian denarius showing Aeneas fleeing, Palladium in hand.Footnote ⁸¹ There are of course any number of explanations, yet it’s tempting to ask if Vergil, out of sympathy for the lost cause and with full knowledge of Cicero’s Minervan attachments, conceded this small yet meaningful ideological battle in a war that Cicero and his like-minded contemporaries would never win.

Cicero, for his part, well imagined that powerful weapons against Caesar, or perhaps just refuge, could be found in Minerva, who, in a single potent symbol, commanded the arts of learning, and of resistance. She had long buoyed him in the ideological maelstrom of the late republic and would continue to do so even after the dictator’s death. In the crisis of 46, the crucial moment of the Brutus, Minerva became the last hope-filled image of salvation before the political iconoclasm that Caesar and his lovely Venus would bring soon enough.