In the spring of 45 BCE, Cicero’s 20-year-old son Marcus left for Athens to study. While there, he wrote an affective letter (Fam. 16.21) to the family’s freedman Tiro, in which he mentions his father’s firing of his Athenian rhetoric teacher Gorgias and his close relationship with the Peripatetic philosopher Cratippus. This talk will discuss how Marcus deploys his rhetorical artistry in describing his life in Athens to guilt-trip Cicero for the dismissal of Gorgias. By reading Marcus’ description of his dinner parties with Cratippus against the Alcibiades episode in Plato’s Symposium, I argue that Marcus mischievously invites comparisons of himself with Alcibiades and Cratippus with Socrates, which evokes Socrates’ charge of corrupting the youth. The Platonic intertextuality in turn helps Marcus question Cicero’s similar accusation against Gorgias. Yet, to shield himself from criticism, Marcus also invokes the º£½ÇÍø apprenticeship model of tirocinium fori, which stresses the close relationship between older mentors and teenager mentees. In other words, by mixing, twisting, and playing with Greek and º£½ÇÍø traditions, particularly Cicero’s own playbook of sexual invectives, Marcus crafts and inflicts a rumor of sexual misbehaviors upon himself to both arouse Cicero’s anxiety and to bemoan his arbitrariness in firing Gorgias, all the while shushing his eloquent father who might be reading the letter over Tiro’s shoulders.
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