1 Auctor Personae Meae: Cicero on Personhood and Self-Authorship Brian Marrin ABSTRACT In De Oratore Cicero modifies the metaphor of the persona (theatrical mask), used by some early Stoics to explain their doctrine of indifference, arguing that one must be not the actor but the author (auctor) of one’s own persona. Understanding Cicero’s concept of auctoritas allows us to reread his famous doctrine of the four personae in De Officiis as a rejection of Stoic indifference and as suggesting a new relation between the self and its personae. For Cicero, to be an auctor in the most profound sense is not to produce but rather to foster and give testimony. Thus, to be author of one’s own persona is not in the first place to construct and adopt a social role, but to accept and affirm both one’s rational human nature and the contingencies of existence in the world. Keywords: Cicero, Stoicism, Personhood, Persona En De Oratore Cicerón modifica la metáfora de la persona (máscara teatral), empleada por algunos Estoicos tempranos para explicar su doctrina de la indiferencia, afirmando que uno no debe ser actor sino el autor (auctor) de su propia persona. La comprensión del concepto ciceroniano de auctoritas posibilita una relectura de su famosa doctrina de las cuatro personae en De Officiis como un rechazo de la indiferencia estoica y el desarrollo de una nueva relación entre el yo y su personae. Según Cicerón, ser auctor en su sentido más profundo no consiste en el producir sino en el acto de fomentar y ser testigo. Entonces, ser autor de su propia persona implica no principalmente construir y adoptar un rol social, sino también aceptar y afirmar tanto su propia naturaleza racional humana como las contingencias de la existencia mundanal. Palabras clave: Cicerón, Estoicismo, Persona One of the more curious cases in the history of ideas is that long semantic evolution whereby the word that originally designated a theatrical mask (prosôpon, persona) came eventually to refer to what is most essential to the human being. In his seminal essay on the development of the concept of the person, Marcel Mauss (273) identified the Roman Stoics as constituting a crucial turning point in this evolution. But in his necessarily general remarks, Mauss did not present any detailed readings of the latin texts themselves, and more importantly, failed to consider the prehistory of the concept of the person in the early Stoics. 1 But if one follows Mauss’ suggestion and examines the evidence of the latin texts themselves, it seems to be Cicero above all who is the turning point in the development of the concept of the person. While for the early Stoics (and still for Epictetus) the persona represented all that was external and inessential to the human being—the mask that all men wore but with which they must not identify—Cicero affirms a much closer relation self and persona and even argues, somewhat paradoxically, that one must become the author of one’s own persona. 2 Cicero, then, adopts the concepts and metaphors of the early Stoics apparently only to subvert them, and in so doing makes a decisive contribution to the conceptual evolution of our idea of the person. Given the lack of other middle Stoic texts, it appears to be only through Cicero that we can understand how 1 For general documentation of that influence, see Forschner 40-45. 2 For the differences in Epictetus’ and Cicero’s conception of the persona (prosôpon), see Gill 193.