Rumination, resentment and repetition: Latin epistolarity and the performance of difficult emotion

Ancient critics considered Cicero excessively emotional, and several agonised letters survive describing his sufferings during his exile and after his daughter’s death, including some in which friends urge him to temper his grief. However, the surviving corpora demonstrate that ancient letters could also encompass a wider and subtler range of uncomfortable feeling. This chapter considers first a single letter to Atticus (Ad Att. 9.10), where Cicero has constructed a personal ‘collection’ of his addressee’s letters; the new assemblage enhances the inherent repetitiveness of the epistolary genre to underscore Cicero’s own persistent emotionalism in wartime. By contrast, the editor of Ad Familiares Book 5 has built a more sophisticated ‘emotion anthology’ about the resentments that follow upon professional high points; in two load-bearing letters (5.7 and 5.12) Cicero seeks his addressee’s praise for the consulship of 63, and a hunger for commemoration becomes the book’s fil rouge.