page_title: Consolatio (Cicero)
section_title: Forgery
hierarchical_section_title: Consolatio (Cicero) / Legacy / Forgery
caption_attribution_description: Carlo Sigonio
context_page_description: Consolatio is a lost philosophical work written by Marcus Tullius Cicero in the year 45 BC. The work had been written to soothe his grief after the death of his daughter, Tullia, which had occurred in February of the same year. Not much is known about the work, although it seems to have been inspired by the Greek philosopher Crantor's ancient work De Luctu, and its structure was probably similar to a series of letter correspondences between Servius Sulpicius Rufus and Cicero.
  Fragments of the work survive, having been quoted by Lactantius, and Jerome makes note of the work in a consolatory letter to Heliodorus of Altino. A popular piece of writing until its loss, the Consolatio is widely accepted as the distinct work that transmitted the earlier consolatio literary tradition to the Romans of the late Republic. In 1583, Italian scholar Carlo Sigonio claimed to have discovered a non-fragmentary version of the Consolatio, although most scholars now agree that this work was a fake, with modern stylometric methods backing this up.
context_section_description: In 1583, Italian scholar Carlo Sigonio claimed to have discovered a non-fragmentary version of the Consolatio. While this news was met with excitement at first, scholars—after reading the work—began to argue that the manuscript was a fraud, with humanist Antonio Riccoboni being among the most vocal. However, Sigonio continued to defend the work until his death, even mentioning in two different orations his belief in the truthfulness of the text. 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. By and large, the academic community concluded that the version of the Consolatio discovered was not genuine, and the document is now known as the Pseudo-Ciceronian Consolatio.
  Despite the gradual condemnation of the work and the accusation that Sigonio had created it himself, there were some holdouts. Robinson Ellis, in 1893, argued that the Pseudo-Ciceronian Consolatio, while probably not a genuine work of Cicero's, was not a forgery by Sigonio. He reasoned that, because St. Ambrose Traversari had claimed to find a copy of the work so close to its rediscovery by Sigonio in 1583, it was possible that Sigonio had simply found the Perugian text. He then considered the hypothesis (also discussed by Evan Taylor Sage) that, because the Pseudo-Ciceronian Consolatio contained all of the extant fragments of Cicero that are to be found in Lactantius's work, the actual Consolatio had been lost in the distant past and quietly replaced at some point by an imitation. 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. It was this false Consolatio, so the hypothesis goes, that was rediscovered by Sigonio, who also unwittingly believed it also to be genuine. Finally, Ellis argued that, because Sigonio was a man of "high character" who had spent much of his life editing the fragments of Cicero, for Sigonio to stoop to forgery would have been completely out of character.
  In 1999, Richard Forsyth, David Holmes, and Emily Tse used linguistic techniques to test the origin of the Pseudo-Ciceronian Consolatio. Forsyth, Holmes, and Tse focused their research on two types of Latin: Cicero's writing and "Ciceronianism" (a style of New Latin popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that sought to emulate the style of Cicero). The three scholars argued that if the Pseudo-Ciceronian Consolatio were devoid of "Ciceronianism"—that is to say New Latin—then it could be accepted as a genuine work of Cicero. Forsyth, Holmes, and Tse collected six Classical Latin authors (viz. Cicero, Julius Caesar, Cornelius Nepos, Gaius Sallustius Crispus, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, and Publius Cornelius Tacitus), and five New Latin authors (viz. Sigonio, Piero Vettori, Marc-Antoine Muret, Bernadino di Loredan, and Riccoboni) and compared them using stylometric methods. The three concluded that the text of the Pseudo-Ciceronian Consolatio is "extremely uncharacteristic of Cicero, and indeed that the text is much more likely to have been written during the Renaissance than in classical times." 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.
caption: Now considered a forgery, the Pseudo-Ciceronian Consolatio was discovered by Carlo Sigonio in 1582.
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