I recently made a fascinating discovery while examining my own copy of Cicero’s Epistolae Familiares, printed in Maastricht by Jacobus Lekens (around 1780). Upon further research, I found that similar humorous doodles—altering the woodcut bust of Cicero—appear in multiple copies of this book. These marginalia often involve students adding hats, beards, or pipes to the portrait, sometimes accompanied by humorous inscriptions in the vernacular. This raises some intriguing questions: Was this a common joke among students who used the book in Latin schools or universities? Could it reflect a forgotten classroom tradition, where students personalized their copies in a playful manner? Does the recurrence of such doodles suggest that these editions were primarily used in an educational context? Has Cicero something to do with tobacco? Cicero’s Epistolae Familiares was a core text in early modern humanist education, often studied intensively by students learning Latin rhetoric and style. The repetitive nature of such exercises might have led to acts of boredom-driven defacement. The fact that these doodles appear in different copies suggests that this behavior was not an isolated incident but part of a broader pattern. My copy This is how the original page looks. This page even contains a Ducth poem about smoking: Cicero smoort op zijn gemak een pijp tabak Cicero leisurely smokes a pipe of tobacco I wonder how may variations are still there. Another copy.
