The epistolographic discourse in Cicero’s "De officiis"

Abstract

Cicero, as a writer, is known not only for the political treatises he wrote, but also for his vast informal correspondence. However, Cicero doesn’t always establish a clear boundary between the types of text he creates: sometimes he mixes rhetorical-discursive procedures of different genres in the same work. This is what seems to happen in his philosophical-political treatise De officiis. Here, Cicero exposes his thoughts on the duties and conduct to be observed by a statesman, and elaborates the text as a long letter addressed to his son. In this investigation, we will establish a comparison between the epistolographic characteristics of the Ciceronian letters and some typical linguistic-textual mechanisms of the epistolary text that are present in the De officiis, in order to understand at to what extent the orator mixes discursive oratory rules with epistolographic rules and if he actually writes a work that, being a philosophical treaty, presents the same marks of epistolary interaction that appear in his letters.