Cicero

Dante does not include Cicero in the canon of major Latin writers in De vulgari, II 6 7, perceiving him essentially as a philosopher. This is in fact the role in which he appears, together with the filosofica famiglia (“philosophic family”) surrounding Aristotle, in Limbo, in Inf., IV 141.Most of the references and allusions to Cicero in Dante’s work are from his philosophical works, including De officiis, De senectute, De finibus and De amicitia. This last is acknowledged in the Convivio (II 12 3), along with Boethius, as providing helpful consolatory reading after the death of Beatrice, but also as encouraging the study of philosophy. Cicero’s idea of disinterested friendship may have been familiar to Dante before he read the actual text of De amicitia, through the mediation of anthologies and textbooks. Cicero’s view of friendship as detached from the pursuit of what is useful or pleasurable, but as something that makes life joyful, was an important precedent for Dante’s idea in the Vita nuova of gratuitous love, whose most authentic value consists of praise of the loved one, and not in any kind of reward.

The role played by other works by Cicero is equally decisive at certain crucial points in the Commedia. The moral structure of Inferno is clearly derived from Aristotele’s Ethics, but the distinction which Dante makes between two kinds of ingiuria (“injustice”), namely violence and fraudulence (Inf., XI 22-24: D’ogne malizia … / ingiuria è ’l fine, ed ogne fin cotale / o con forza o con frode altrui contrista; “all evil… aims at injustice, and all such aims afflict someone either by violence or by fraudulence”), is clearly based on a passage from De officiis, I 13, which he translates almost word-for-word: Cum autem duobus modis, id est aut vi aut frode, fiat iniuria. Also the complex nature of Dante’s Ulysses is more easily described in the light of De officiis, in which the Ithacan hero is cited as an example of magnanimity that could easily turn into sins of audacia and calliditas.