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SUMMARY: In a letter to Atticus defending the treatment of Scaevola in De oratore, Cicero appeals both to the example of Plato, "that god of ours," and to the memory of what the real Scaevola was actually like. Turning from the letter to De oratore itself, I show how this juxtaposition of Platonic divinity and Roman memory reflects a pattern present in the prefaces to each of the three books. I argue that Cicero presents his characters, in pointed response to Plato in general and the Phaedrus in particular, in such a way as to privilege history and oratory over philosophy.
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IN THE LATE SPRING OF 54 B.C.E., ATTICUS SENT CICERO A LETTER THAT contained, among other things, some comments on the recently published dialogue De oratore, which he had apparently just finished reading. In general he seems to have been complimentary about the work-at least to judge by the letter Cicero wrote in answer (Att. 4.16, as always the surviving half of the exchange), which refers to praise on two separate occasions.1 Yet Atticus did venture to register one small cavil: he lamented the absence from the dialogue's later sections of the interlocutor Q. Mucius Scaevola, whom Cicero had caused to leave the scene of the conversation at the end of the first book. And this prompted Cicero to mount a vigorous and rather interesting defense. He had not, he explains in his reply, removed the persona of Scaevola for no reason; instead he had followed in the footsteps of Plato (Att. 4.16.3): non eam temere dimovi, sed feci idem quod in ... deus ille noster Plato ("I did not take it away thoughtlessly, but I did the same thing that that god of ours, Plato, did in the Republic"). For just as Plato had made the rich and elderly Cephalus excuse himself from the discussion at an early stage-a decision that Cicero attributes to a recognition on Plato's part that it would "scarcely be sufficiently fitting" (vix ... satis consonum) to make an old man stay throughout so long a conversation-so he had caused Scaevola to depart at the end of De oratore 1 because he realized, with even greater urgency, that it would be "hardly...