Date/Time
Date(s) - 13 Dec 2016
5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Location
Columbia University Faculty House
Category(ies) No Categories
Patricia J. Osmond, Iowa State University and Robert W. Ulery, Jr., Wake Forest University
“Disputing Ancient Authorities: Costanzo Felici’s Rewriting of Sallust’s Conspiracy of Catiline”
In an article of 1950 Arnaldo Momigliano stated that men of the Renaissance saw no reason why Roman history should be rewritten. “To the best of my knowledge,” he declared, “the idea that one could write a history of Rome which should replace [the major ancient authors] was not yet born,” and would not be until the seventeenth century.
Today we can cite various exceptions to Momigliano’s claim, but one of the most interesting—and the subject of this paper—is the De coniuratione L. Catilinae liber unus of 1518 by a young Italian humanist, Costanzo Felici (senior), from Castel Durante (now Urbania). The work aimed at revising Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae (42-41 B.C.), the canonical version of the conspiracy of 63 B.C., in order to give Cicero the credit he deserved for saving the Commonwealth. Sallust, he argues, had deliberately passed over the consul’s achievements and the honors granted to him; he had also shown a definite bias toward his patron Caesar by ignoring the latter’s (alleged) role in Catiline’s plot.
Our papers explore Felici’s aims and methods in the context of humanist historiography and the contemporary Ciceronian controversy: his attempt to reconstruct the true history of events, from a Ciceronian perspective, and his efforts to rewrite Sallust’s account in a Ciceronian voice. In conclusion we shall look briefly at the influence of his work in Renaissance England, where it was translated into English more than fifty years before Sallust’s own monograph, and in the development of modern anti-Sallustian criticism, culminating in the ‘Mommsen-Schwartz thesis’ of the early twentieth century.
All meetings are held at the Columbia University Faculty House (enter through the gates on the North side of 116th St., between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive), at 5:30 pm, followed by dinner there at 7 pm for those wishing and able to dine with the Speaker to continue the discussion ($30, payable by check only, to Columbia University). In order to attend dinner, you must RSVP to Rapporteur Barbara Vinck no later than Friday December 2nd.