Abstract

Almost immediately after the suppression of the Catiline conspiracy, Marcus Tullius Cicero stimulated several poems, composing by different people, and at least one historical work in his honor. Perhaps the only one who lived up to Cicero’s expectations was his best friend, Titus Pomponius Atticus. He devoted a work in Greek and Amaltheum inscriptions (epigrammata) to the consulate of Marcus Tullius. Atticus Commentarii covered the events of 63 BC in the vein of the perished work of Cicero himself. Almost nothing is known about the influence of the Commentarii on his contemporaries. A painstaking and meticulous author, Titus Pomponius did not have outstanding literary talent, but his work titled Imagines (images, portraits) along with Marcus Terence Varro’s Hebdomades formed the basis of a new genre, collections of literary portraits of prominent persons with short poetic passages. Distant predecessors of Imagines were the inscriptions in honor of Cicero written and placed by Atticus in his estate in Epiros. The study of epigrammata can help clarify the essence and typology of Amaltheum, a mysterious building or architectural complex. The ancient tradition allows us to conclude that the poems in Greek, praising Cicero, the consul of 63 BC saving the Eternal City from massacres and arsons, has been lost. Despite the fact that subsequently Atticus became a zealot of fatherly antiquity, he was a Hellenophile in his youth, and he had no reason to ostentatiously reproduce idealized Rome in the Greek villa. Hypothesizing Amaltheum as a “gallery of glory” and direct prototype of the forum of Augustus is unacceptable. The language of the inscriptions compels us to search for analogies in the Hellenic tradition of epigram. Scarce information gives no chance to reconstruct Amaltheum in any way. There is no evidence that it was a regularly planned space with a meaningful sequence of statues or busts. It was highly probable (although not confirmed by any source) that there was Cicero’s portrait.