A filosofia em letras latinas: identidade e consciência linguísticas nos Acadêmicos de Cícero

Abstract

In the prooemia of his philosophical works, Cicero defends the use of the Latin Language for discussing philosophical matters. The preliminary presentation of the subject is due to a dominant notion during the period of the Late Roman Republic according to which only Greek could properly express debates of philosophical nature, while Latin would lack sufficient lexical and grammatical means to reproduce and further discuss the subjects and concepts defined by the Greeks, as Lucrece briefly delineated in the phrase patrii sermonis egestas . Cicero deals extensively with this problem in his dialogue-treatise Academica , in which not only does he accomplish an abstract defense of the expressivity of the Latin Language, but also applies several translations of terms derived from Greek Philosophy. In this context, we aim to investigate Cicero’s linguistic consciousness as presented in the prooemium of the Academica , as well as to analyse the method and the functionality of the translations found in this work. We intend to draw attention to the way in which the studied work may contribute to the comprehension of the construction of Roman identity, of Cicero’s linguistic attitudes and of the position held by Philosophy in the Late Roman Republic.