Roman Past and Roman Identity: Cicero's De Re Publica

Roman Past and Roman Identity: Cicero’s De Re Publica The turbulent period of the late Republic created an identity crisis in the Roman state as political, social, and military tensions produced increasing pressures on its republican form of government. This paper contextualizes Cicero’s De Re Publica as one effort to reestablish a cohesive identity that would unify competing factions in Rome by recalling and reenacting a Roman past that represented the order and stability that was so lacking in the late Republic. Composed in the late 50s BCE but set in 129, the dialogue imagines the renowned Roman statesman Scipio Africanus Minor discussing, along with other eminent men of his day, the role of justice in government and the characteristics of an ideal citizen in that government. Although previous scholars (e.g., Wood. 1988; Asmis. 2004) have noted that the use of the past and the philosophical dialogue format serve to disguise and distance De Re Publica from the political controversies of Cicero’s day, this paper argues that the deployment of this past and dialectic mode of discourse is deliberately intended rather to provide a model from the Greek and Roman past on which the chaotic Roman state of Cicero’s day might reshape itself and its identity. As a companion piece to De Re Publica (cf. Dyck, 7-10), Cicero wrote De Legibus, which is set, in contrast to De Re Publica, in the present, in the summer of 51, when Quintus, Cicero, and Cicero’s close friend, Atticus, engage in a discussion about the laws and practical applications for the theories of the ideal state set out in De Re Publica. Cicero employs a similar technique in two later, but similarly related works, De Natura Deorum and De Divinatione. The former presents Cicero along with three older statesmen from an earlier generation in a theoretical discussion of the nature of the gods, while the latter is set at Cicero’s villa in Tusculum and presents Cicero and Quintus in a discussion of the practical aspects and problems of divination. David Kertzer has argued persuasively that the ambiguity of political and social symbolism and representations allows each person to experience the symbol or representation differently, with no explicit articulation of those differences necessary. Thus the power of these representations lies in the fact that they emphasize political and social unity over perhaps vast differences in perception. In both De Re Publica and De Natura Deorum, Cicero is clearly indicating that the universally acclaimed statesmen of Rome’s past consider political, philosophical, and theological discussions of a theoretical nature to be worthy, necessary, and important activities that they characteristically engage in as part of the political and ethical values that they both represent and uphold (cf. Colish, 112); the similar pairing of theoretical with practical works gives the urgency of civic engagement and repair of the republic a parallel legitimacy to the theological concerns of the two later works. By appealing to a common, unarticulated, but universally shared belief in the justness of Rome’s past and its former statesmen, Cicero was trying to forge and foster a shared desire to engage in a new dialogue about the future of the Roman Republic, even as the cascade of cataclysms made Cicero’s ideal republic a still hoped for, but swiftly receding, vision. Bibliography Asmis, E. 2004. “The State as a Partnership: Cicero’s Definition of Res Publica in his Work On the State.” History of Political Thought 25: 569-99. Colish, M.L. 1999 (3rd rev. ed. from original of 1985). The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. I: Stoicism in Classical Latin Literature. Leiden. Dyke, A. 2004. A Commentary on Cicero De Legibus. Ann Arbor. Kertzer, D. 1988. Ritual, Politics, and Power. New Haven. Wood, N. 1988. Cicero’s Social and Political Thought. Berkeley.