The Ancient Phonograph by Butler Shane;

Author:Butler, Shane; [Butler, Shane;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781935408727
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2016-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Track Five

Amazing Grace

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)

That sav’d a wretch like me!

— John Newton, “Amazing Grace,” 1779

“What is this sound — so loud, so sweet — that fills my ears?”

— Cicero, “Scipio’s Dream,” On The Republic 6.18

We shall approach antiquity’s most famous voice from a distance, beginning some fourteen centuries after the brutal dismemberment of the body to which that voice had once been attached. We are in Verona with Petrarch, in the summer of his fortieth year, surrounded by medieval towers perched atop the still hulking remains of the city’s Roman past. We find him in the library (as we did Julius Pollux), among the dusty books of the cathedral’s chapter house. Here the scholar and poet uncovered at last the text that had eluded his meticulous searches throughout Europe: Marcus Tullius Cicero’s collected letters to his friend and confidant, Titus Pomponius Atticus.1 The discovery would prove to be a watershed in literary history, not least because no other ancient text would exert as pervasive an influence on the Latin of the emerging movement we call the Renaissance.

When Petrarch had finished reading, he drafted a letter of complaint, addressed to none other than Cicero himself. Sometimes misread as genuine condemnation, the letter is instead full of tender irony, as the man who has been called the father of humanism pretends to reproach his most beloved author precisely for having been human. In the letter’s opening lines, this story of books and libraries yields to the language of living sound:

Francesco to his dear Cicero: Greetings. With enormous eagerness I have read through your letters, which I sought far and wide and found where I least expected to. I have heard (audivi) you saying (dicentem) many things, bemoaning (deplorantem) many things, changing many things, Marcus Tullius, and having long known the kind of teacher you were for others, I now realize who you were for yourself. In return, hear (audi), wherever you are, what I can no longer call advice but, rather, a lament (lamentum), born of true affection, which one of those who came after you, devoted to your glory, pours out not without tears.2

We often imagine that our texts “speak,” and Petrarch’s language here underscores the vividness with which Cicero’s intimate letters have just made their author present to their distant reader (and vice versa, given the conceit of a reply). Nevertheless, such noisiness would perhaps be more natural in response to Cicero’s orations or dialogues, which pointedly invite us to hear him “saying many things”; a letter, by contrast, as its very name suggests, does not ordinarily pretend to be anything other than a written text.3 So, let us ask what exactly Petrarch thought he “heard” in Cicero’s letters, there in Verona in the summer of 1345.

For a first answer, we must briefly detour south, and back to 58 BCE, when, in March and April, Cicero traced an erratic path down the Italian peninsula. Along the way he dispatched a series of seven remarkable letters in

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