Consolatio (Cicero)

Consolatio (Latin: [koːnsoːˈlaːtɪ.oː]; Consolation) is a lost philosophical work written by Marcus Tullius Cicero in the year 45 BC.

He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators, and one of the premier prose stylists during the Golden Age of Latin.

[8][9] But if ever any living creature ought to have been consecrated, surely it was she; if the offspring of Cadmus or Amphitryon or Tyndareus deserved to be raised to heaven by fame, for her the same honor ought certainly be declared.

Pliny the Elder quotes Cicero in the preface to his Natural History as saying, "I follow [the Greek philosopher] Crantor in my Consolatio" (in consolatione filiae Crantorem ...

[11][12] Centuries later, the Christian theologian Jerome, in a consolation letter to Heliodorus of Altino concerning the death of St. Nepotian, makes a similar reference, writing that the Consolatio was heavily based on Crantor's ancient work De Luctu ("On Grief").

[15] Seven other fragments were preserved by the early Christian author Lactantius in his work Institutiones Divinae (The Divine Institutes).

[18][19] The scholar Latino Latini, however, later claimed in a letter that Sigonio had admitted to the forgery on his deathbed, although the truth of this statement is unknown.

This falsely-attributed work, Ellis wrote, could have then been read by those late antiquity authors who quoted Cicero, such as Lactantius, Augustine, and Jerome.

[18] In 1999, Richard Forsyth, David Holmes, and Emily Tse used linguistic techniques to test the origin of the pseudo-Ciceronian Consolatio.

Sigonio, Piero Vettori, Marc-Antoine Muret, Bernadino di Loredan, and Riccoboni) and compared them using stylometric methods.

"[23] The study also provided evidence that the pseudo-Ciceronian Consolatio matched more closely with Sigonio's, rather than any of the other New Latin writers, suggesting—although not proving—that he penned the document.