Cicero’s Topics and Its Peripatetic Sources

Cicero claims in his introduction that in his library at Tusculum were “certain Topics of Aristotle” in several volumes, which his friend Trebatius came upon while working in that library. Cicero’s Topics is clearly not a work of pure invention, and if, as he says, he had no books with him when he wrote it, he must have used his well-stocked memory. In Cicero the distinction between notatio and coniugatio is not clear. Martianus describes both and then says: “This topic differs from the one before because it is one thing to look into the origin of the name, and another to derive an argument from the relationship between two words.” A trace of Theophrastus is perhaps to be found at Topics 83 where Cicero refers to descriptio as a separate way of explaining something.

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• Reading Aristotle at Rome

  Myrto Hatzimichali•Oxford Handbook of Roman Philosophy•2023

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