Cic. Rep. 4: A Guidebook for the Formation of a Normative Positive Social Behaviour and a National Identity (original) (raw)

2019, Mediterranean Chronicle

This study examines the behavioural norms proposed by Cicero in Book Four of his political dialogue De re publica, which aim to shape and enforce a positive social identity for the Roman citizens, in order for the state to achieve its goal, the beata et honesta vita. The norms cover various aspects of public and private life, which contribute to building positive in-group relations and a collective social identity for Roman citizens. In the same time, their comparison with corresponding Greek institutions and behaviours strengthens the inter-group relations and differences between the Romans and Greeks, which contribute to consolidating a Roman national identity. Although the text of Book Four of the dialogue is preserved in a fragmentary condition, it provides sufficient information for Cicero’s conscious and consistent effort to impose a normative behaviour based on the mos maiorum and a sound and morally superior social and national identity that will allow the Roman society as a whole and the state as an institution to consolidate Rome’s leading role in the world and impose its position in it. The study also addresses two major issues related to Cicero’s political dialogues: a) the relationship between them and whether or not the laws proposed in De legibus were meant for the state as described in De re publica, and b) Cicero’s understanding of the idea of a ‘constitution’. It revises, supports or overturns recent scholarly opinions, and concludes that Cicero did not propose a certain constitutional change, but the norms proposed in the first dialogue as well as the laws of the second dialogue must be viewed within and as part of a broader political culture.

Virtue, Consensus, and Authority without Tradition: Cicero’s De imperio Cn. Pompei

Cicero’s first speech as praetor before a contio meeting, De Imperio Cn. Pompei, gives us a sense of the early stages of the development of imperial metaphor. De imp. Cn. Pomp. is an ingenious attempt at articulating a vocabulary of consensus for its audience, which consisted of a large swath of Roman inhabitants in addition to the reading public cultivated by Cicero. It reveals to us the creation of several different areas of public discourse. Many biographers of Cicero and historians of the Roman republic seek the impulses toward their creation in the socio-economic position of Cicero himself, and in his own original assimilation of Greek rhetorical techniques to Roman circumstances. But this explanation is clearly insufficient to explain the public appeal of the extension of the idea of personal patronage (clientela) into the realm of foreign affairs, for instance, and its institutionalization in the late republic and early empire. Certainly, emphasizing the virtus and auctoritas of Rome as compared with its foreign peers and allies was one important way in which the Roman ruling class could legitimate its own imperialist ideology. But the appeal of the argument was also an eminently popularis one. Metaphorical claims to ancestry and precedent consequently play a prominent role in the opening speech of Cicero’s praetorship: they provide a “pre-text” for Roman imperium as it was embodied by first the late republican warrior-generals, and then the emperor himself. They lay the necessary rhetorical groundwork for linking populist claims to imperial politics. This paper will concentrate on three of these: the relationship of Roma/socius as imitative of the traditional Roman relationship of patronus/cliens; the idea that virtus historically grounds the claim of the Roman people to rule over groups that might alternatively have been imagined as peers or rivals within the world of the Hellenistic Mediterranean; and the idea that there is a kind of auctoritas that belongs to the Roman people as a whole.

Individuality and hierarchy in Cicero's De Officiis (European Journal of Political Theory)

This essay explores a creative argument that Cicero offers to answer a fundamental question: how are we to judge among different ways of life? Is there a natural hierarchy of human types? In response to this problem, Cicero gives an account of a person's possessing two natures. All of us participate in a general human nature, the characteristics of which provide us with certain universal duties and a natural moral hierarchy. But, we also each possess an individual nature, qualities that make us unique and which we have an obligation to cultivate. By employing different concepts of natura to refer either to common human nature or to particular individual nature, Cicero establishes a basis for a normative standard that manages to affirm the superiority of certain especially valuable types of life, such as the philosopher and the statesman. At the same time, he advances a coherent account of individuality that places high value on natural human diversity.

Cicero, Society, and the Idea of Artes Liberales (Congress Booklet)

2019

A Booklet for the Second Ciceronian Congress in Poland "Cicero, Society, and the Idea of Artes Liberales" (12-14 Dec. 2019), on the 30th Anniversary of the VII Colloquium Tullianum "Cicerone e lo Stato" in Warsaw (1989). For the Congress website see: http://www.obta.al.uw.edu.pl/en/cicero-congress-materials

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