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THE TEXT OF CAESAR

who thinks it better and certainly more helpful to others to practice Academic scepticism. It is not that making a distinction between Cicero and ‘Cicero’ is never an apposite move for the dialogues’ readers, but (as A. himself observes somewhere) it is tricky to handle. Thus ‘M’ is obviously a Ciceronian construction, but equally ‘A’ is made to construe him as at once the author and the principal speaker of the anti-Stoic Book 4 of De finibus (Tusc. 5.32), an identification from which ‘M’ does not demur (ibid. 33). Quintilian’s expression Platonis aemulus (Inst. 10.1.123), however, which A. reproduces in his subtitle, indicates something salutary in his treatment of the writings of 46–44 B.C. There is no question that in the dialogues of the earlier sequence, composed in the later 50s B.C., Cicero was not only intent on imitating and rivalling Plato’s writing, but intensely preoccupied with the philosopher himself, as the correspondence from the period further confirms (see S. McConnell, Philosophical Life in Cicero’s Letters [2014]). Platonic strains and moments in the later sequence are more occasional and mostly less emphatic. But A. rightly stresses that in his account of his philosophical œuvre in Div. 2 Cicero includes works from both sequences cheek by jowl, all as contributions to the same enterprise: philosophy. The Revival of Platonism prompts us to consider the possibility that a single overarching conception of philosophy is in play throughout and that it is in some sense a Platonic conception. After all, between the thoroughly Academic Nat. D. and Div. came De senectute, a dialogue that like the subsequent De amicitia situates itself in the same ambience as De republica. How radically abrupt is the shift in philosophical outlook from its immediate predecessor and successor that its composition represents? Asking such questions need not commit us to A.’s kind of answer. But it might prevent us prematurely putting the two sequences of Ciceronian writings into two mutually insulated compartments. It remains to add that the book is generously indexed, with coverage of verba and loci as well as names and topics. There is a rich bibliography.