NEATPAGEINFO:id=01AA61A8-C6F5-4306-B348-D482C796ACE5

LOOKING BACKWARDPast and Present in the Late Roman Republic

James E.G. ZetzelColumbia University

Jam very grateful to the Classics Departmentof the University of Exeter for inviting me togive the twentieth Jackson Knight Memorial

Lecture, to honour the memory of an valuablescholar and inspiring teacher. My topic is not oneon which Knight himself wrote; but in writingabout the relationship between present actions andthe interpretation of the past in the authors of thelast decade of the Roman Republic—particularlyin Cicero’s dialogue Dc republica—l kept findingmyself drawn back (or rather, forward) to theAeneid, Knight’s favorite text, particularly tobooks 6 and 8.In anticipation of coming here, I reread Roman

Vet-gil; and one of the most appealing things aboutit to me is Knight’s broad and generous sense ofthe range of Vergil’s reading and sympathies. Notjust, as one finds so often, Vergil’s relationship toone poetic or historical tradition or another, buthis (both Vergil’s and Knight’s) knowledge of theentire compass of the ancient world; the linking ofthe poetic traditions of Catullus and Lucretiuswith the philosophy of Plato and of Cicero;Knight’s appreciation of the Aeneid as a politicalpoem in the best sense, ultimately concerned withthe interpretation of Rome’s history and destiny;the unapologetic recognition of Vergil as aprofoundly moral poet. I will begin by quotingbriefly from the opening pages of Roman Vet-gil apassage that is relevant to my own argument:The Romans themselves in some moodsbelieved the greatness and loveliness of theirdestiny. But they had to tell themselves, or betold. In the middle of things it is hard to seethe broad lines which point to the future, andto the permanent, perhaps even the eternal.Strangely, what we see happening flatlycontradicts the truth. It is a familiar paradox.There never were any good old days ... It canbe persuasively argued that the record of themarch of Rome by heroic virtues to greatnessneeds no other explanation than the emotional

mind of Livy, with which he uniformlysentimentalized the past, anachronisticallydeducing its nature from Stoic creeds. TheRomans were hard, cynical materialists.Bloodshed was what you saw and the newsthat you heard. Shameless exploitation wasaccepted as normal. We could say the sameof our times. But just occasionally, even tocontemporaries, a window is opened on to thesoul of an age. There are hard things, and thereare soft things, which last and in the futurehave their command. These are the thingswhich it takes a poet to see and say. (pp. 1-2).

Knight’s understanding of Vergil’s sense of his ageis right, but what concerns me more here is thesense of the past—in Vergil as in the authorswhom I will talk about today—the feeling that“there never were any good old days.” Vergil isnot Livy, and does not sentimentalize; but theproblem of how to read the past, of how tounderstand its connections to present problems, issomething that pervades the entire poem. Let metake as an instance of this a passage from Book 8of the Aeneid which raises issues related to mytopic today. When Aeneas visits the site of Rome,the old king Evander gives him a brief history ofthe region and a tour of the neighbourhood. Once,he says, indigenous savages lived here, who hadno mos or cuing. Then Saturn came, organizedthem into society and gave them laws. That wasthe golden age: aurea quae per/ilbent lb sub regefuere / saecula; but after Saturn’s peaceful rulecame degeneration, a decolor aetas with war andgreed. As Aeneas and Evander walk throughRome. they go past the Capitoline, ‘aurea nunc,ohm siluestribus horrida dumis’ (8.348)—goldennow, at one time bristling with thickets—; theythen see the ruins of the cities of Saturn andJanus, haec duo praeterea disiectis oppida muris,reliquias ueterumque uides monimenta uirorum.’—two towns with ruined walls, the remains andreminders of men of old.

Page 20

This evocative passage is important for many• reasons, but there is one that I want to emphasizetoday: that it contains no fewer than three versionsof the history of human society. The first is so-called ‘hard primitivism’—that mankind began assavages, and gradually—in this case by divineintervention—progressed toward civilization. Thesecond is ‘soft primitivism’—the Flesiodic mythof the ages of man, declining from the golden ageof Saturn to the decolor aeras of his successors.And the third, and most elaborate, is the theory ofcycles: the thickets now (in Evander’s time) existon the site of past cities, and will in turn bereplaced by the glories of the present (Augustan)age; both Saturn’s time and Augustus’ arecharacterized as aurea, golden, separated by agesof war, greed, and ruins. But can the cycle bestopped? nitric, aiim in the line describing theCapitol can mean either ‘now golden, formerlycovered with thickets’ or ‘now golden, at somefuture time to be covered by thickets’: aiim iseither past or future. Vergil asks, but neveranswers, whether the destructive cycle of time canbe brought to an end, whether Rome’s history hasa direction or a goal,

I will begin not with Saturn, but with thebeginning of Roman history, the reign ofRomulus, the founder and fIrst king. Hisreputation was always checkered, and changeddramatically over time: on the one hand, he isking, warrior, founder, divinely born and deifiedhimself; on the other hand, he is a fratricide whosecrime becomes in the triumviral period theprecedent for civil war; the organizer of the mass

rape of the Sabines (a precedent pleasing to Ovidalone), a tyrant murdered (like Julius Caesar) byhis own senate, which then deified him to avoidthe suspicion of murder. Founders, of course, arealways in a precarious position, and are reshapedto fit the conscience of the times: the AmericanFounding Fathers are now as frequently execratedas conservative slaveholders as they are praised asstatesmen of vision and virtue.My argument today will largely concern

Cicero’s portrait of Romulus, but I will start withanother text, Catullus’ short poem (49) to Cicero:Disertissime Romuli nepotumquot sunt quotque fuere, Marce Tulli.quotque post allis erunt in annis,gratias tibi maximas Catullusagit pessimus omnium poetatanto pessimus omnium poemquanto tu optimus omnium patronus.

‘Most eloquent of the descendants of Romulus,present, past or future, Cicero, Catullus the worstof poets thanks you greatly, as much the worst ofpoets as you are the best of advocates.’The occasion for this poem has been much

debated, as has its tone—whether it is genuinelycomplimentary or ironic. My own sense is that itis deliberately ambiguous, and is in fact a parodyof Cicero’s own style. But the question thatinterests me here is what it means, for Catullus, tobe a descendant of Romulus (or Remus—Catullusseems to use the two interchangeably in variouspoems). Certainly, in other poems the evocation ofRomulus is meant to create a sense of decline: inpoem 58 L.esbia is performing unmentionable actson the descendants of great-souled Remus (actswhich their ancestors, one assumes, would nothave permitted); in poem 28 the nobles of thepresent day are a disgrace to Romulus and Remus.A similar sense of decline is evident in Catullus’use of the language of political relationships inthe epigrams to characterize his relationship toLesbia (and here I follow David Ross’s interpretation). In those poems, erotic attachment isweighed against the social values of traditionalRoman society — of fides and amicitia, ofbeneficiwn and officium—and found wanting: theaeternum sancraefoedus aanicitiae which Catullusdesires founders on the decayed morality ofcontemporary life. The values have been lost, andwith them the true meaning of the words.

IP,,oo 7!

That, however, is to suggest that the words ever as an aesthetic one, and it is above all exemplifieddid have the meaning that they are supposed tohave had; but an examination of Catullus’ longerpoems, particularly poems 64 and 68, suggestsotherwise. In these more mythological poems.Troy and Achilles replace Rome and Romulus,and Catullus’ criticism is less oblique. The TrojanWar is not the embodiment of the heroic code, butis caused by adultery, and ends in the death ofmen and of virtues: Trola uirum e uirtutumomnium acerba cinis. Poem 64 on the Wedding ofPeleus and Thetis begins with an apostrophe tothe great age of heroes, and ends with a lament onthe decline between then and now, the loss ofcontact between gods and men, the end of justiceand pietas. But within this frame which exalts thepast and laments the decline from heroic past tosordid present comes the tapestry of the weddingbed, portraying heroum virtuxes which in factinclude Theseus’ deceit and betrayal of Ariadne;and the wedding feast itself is celebrated by thesong of the Parcae in which the virtutes ofAchilles include bloody slaughter and humansacrifice. Catullus may lament decline, but hisown narrative reveals that the heroes were nobetter than we are; the good old days are not real.but the product of wishful thinking. And whatabout the descendants of Romulus? Read in thelight of the longer poems, they are all too true totheir ancestors: the corruption of the present ismerely the heredity of the corruption of the past:“There never were any good old days.” When thepast was present, it was just the same as thepresent is now.Is there any remedy to all this? Given the

historical pessimism of the poems and the senseof decline that is not really even decline, none islikely; and the fact that Catullus’ poetry is largelyconcerned with the private rather than the public,with letters rather than with life, is itself corroboration of that. Poetry itself, a concern with truth tolanguage rather than public life, is the neotericresponse; their claim is to restore in privaterelationships the values that the public world hascorrupted.The rejection of public life and public values in

Catullus Is a literary stance rather than biographical truth: Catullus’ friend and fellow-poetCalvus seems to have adopted the same set ofvalues in his poetry, but he took part in public lifenone the less. But such a position was not limitedto neoterics: it was a philosophical attitude as well

in the powerful attacks on politics of theEpicurean poet Lucretius. It was a maxim ofEpicurus that the wise man will take pan in publiclife only if it is necessary; he should live in secret(lathe biosas) and cultivate the simple, asceticpleasures of his own garden. In the preface tobook 2, Lucretius contrasts the lofty and calmcitadel of philosophy with the pointless strugglesof public life: ‘certare ingenio. contenderenobilitate, noctes atque dies niti praestartte Jaboread summas ernergere opes rerumque potiri’—‘pitting their wits against one another, disputingfor precedence, struggling night and day withunstinted effort to scale the pinnacles of wealthand power.’ Part of this passage is repeated in theproem of book 3, in which political activity—among other pointless activities—is described as apathological state resulting from the fear of death;and in his allegorization of the mythologicalfigures of the underworld later in the book,Sisyphus, forever rolling his rock up the hill, isthe model of the politician, the man who is alwaysgaping after office and is always defeated;imperium itself is described as inane, an emptything, an image which has no substance behind it.In a few circumstances, it is necessary to payattention to public life: Lucretius in the proemsays that he could not trouble Memmius with hispoem patriai i’empore iniquo; but in general,public service is a psychological aberration (DonFowler’s phrase) in an atomistic world in whichindividual happiness, not civic good, is the goal.The same hostility to public life is apparent in

the historical account of the growth of civilizationin book 5. Lucretius believes neither in progressnor decline; he advocates no form of government,and views all social organization and law assimply a compact neither to harm nor to beharmed. At one point, Lucretius offers his versionof the Hesiodic ages of man, ironically disguisedas a history of metallurgy: first, he says, gold andsilver were used to make tools and weapons; thenthey were replaced by bronze. “Bronze was morevaluable; and gold was neglected because it wasuseless; now bronze is neglected, and gold hasreached the highest honor:’ And bronze in its turnwas replaced by iron. In primitive times, men diedhorribly through their encounters with wildanimals; now, even more die at once through warand shipwreck. Nor is there necessarily anyimprovement or decline in government: after the

Pare 22

beginnings of family life led men to seekcompacts of social organization, the morevigorous and intelligent among them began, askings, to found cities and distribute property; theorigin of property in turn led to the ascendancy ofwealth over strength and beauty, and hence toambition, struggle and competition. Eventuallymonarchy was replaced by mob rule (Lucretius’version of the foundation of the Republic), butagain the desire for mutual protection led to thecreation of magistrates and the establishment oflaws. Lucretius’ account is strictly utilitarian andnaturalistic: for him, as for Epicurus, the origin oflaw and society is neither from the gods norinnate in mankind. Law and government, evenhuman society itself, are not desirable in themselves, merely a necessary means to safely andorder. The one sigirificant advancement in thehistory of mankind is the philosophy of Epicurus,which has permitted men to overcome their fears,to avoid unnecessary desires and passions. And atthat fisure happy time when all men see the lightand become Epicureans, there will simply be nosociety, according to one of the new fragments ofDiogenes of Oenoanda: “For all things will be fullof justice and mutual love, and there will come tobe no need of fortification or laws and all thethings which we contrive on account of oneanother.” The state will wither away. and sopresumably will history; fanning and philosophywill be the activities of all.The attitude of Lucretius, and of Epicureans in

general, is distinctly unRoman: no respect forancestors, no desire to serve the state or achievemilitary or political glory. Even Catullus acknowledges, while finding it unattainable, the abstractvalidity of Roman manners, the desire to emulateand to preserve the greatness of Rome; theresignation of the neoteric is itself a politicalstatement, while the retirement of the Epicurean isan anti-political one. The response to Catullus (tothe extent that it is one) does not come for ageneration, until Vergil; but the reply to Lucretiuswas, I think, immediate, and it is Cicero’s c/crepublica, an eloquent statement of the importance of civic life, and an argument in favor ofpolitical participation.For many reasons, Cicero would not find it

necessary or appropriate to respond to Catullus.The type of poetry written by the neoterics did notappeal to him: it was not serious in the way Ciceroexpected poetry to be; it was scornful of the

traditions of earlier Roman poetry, particularlyEnnius. whom Cicero admired greatly; and.indeed, so far as one can tell (particularly from thePro Cuello). Cicero had little use for the peoplewho wrote it. But Lucretius and the Dc rerumnatura were another matter: it was written in astyle and tradition that Cicero honored—themanner of Ennius and the tradition of didacticpoetry: Cicero read it (at least parts of it) and headmired it for its combination of ingenium andars; and the letter to his brother which refers to itwas written only three months before he beganwork on Dc republica. Then, as a decade later,Cicero was disturbed by the fashion forEpicureanism: aside from the disreputability of aphilosophy that named volupsas as the highestgood and which was represented among thenobility by Caesar’s father-in-law Piso, whomCicero detested, the Epicurean withdrawal frompublic life was, from Cicero’s point of view,simply dangerous.

I confess at once that I can not provethat Dc republica was meant as a reply to Dcrerum natura; several scholars have suggested it,but there is no clear evidence, and if that wasCicero’s intention, it was by no means his onlyone. But there are some suggestive features of Dcrepublica: in the first place, a large part of thepreface is directed specifically against theEpicureans, those who advocate otium andvoluptas; similarly, the conclusion of Dcrepublica, the Dream of Scipio. offers a theory ofthe immortality of the soul and the divine order ofthe universe that is diametrically opposed toEpicurean beliefs, both ethical and physical. Nor,finally, do I think it pure chance that the shape thatCicero finally gave Dc republica (after severalrevisions) matches closely that of Dc rerumnatura: six books, divided into pairs by topic, butmoving in opposite directions: Lucretius movesfrom small to large, from atomic physics, tohuman perception and psychology, to the visibleworld. its history and phenomena; Cicero startsfrom the structure of government, and then movesto social institutions, and finally to the individualhuman. In a sense, the relationship between thetwo works is paradoxical: Lucretius, who ought asan Epicurean (if he really is one) to concentrateon the quiet and personal values of tranquility andfriendship, leaves the reader oppressed by thecoldness and indeed hatefulness of the world;Cicero, who believes in the subordination of

D...... ‘2

individual happiness to civic success, emphasizesthe personal rewards of civic participation and thepossibility of being able to affect the world inwhich we live. And in this. I think, I have tomodify the quotation from Jackson Knight withwhich I began: it is not “poets” in the narrowsense alone who can comprehend and express thecomplexity and values of an age; Cicero too is apoet, and De republica is a prose poem of publiclife replying in both form and argument toLucretius’ epic; in that respect, it is both a modelfor Vergil and itself worthy to stand next to theAeneid in “opening a window on to the soul of theage.”De republica is a poetic and philosophical

fiction, a dialogue with historical charactersconcerned both with Rome’s past and with itsfuture. It takes place early in the year 129, in themidst of the crisis over the effects of the Gracchanagrarian law of three years earlier. The speakersare major figures in that crisis, notably theprotagonist Scipio Aemilianus, who proposedlegislation to strip the agrarian commission of itsjudicial powers. Eight others also take part:Laelius and Furius Philus. Scipio’s closestassociates; two older men and three younger ones.The work is unfortunately fragmentary, and so acertain amount of what I have to say is conjectural. Most of the first two books survive, in apalimpsest discovered by Angelo Mai in 1819: wehave substantial fragments of the third book,containing a debate on the possibility ofjustice ingovernment; but almost nothing of the last three

books exists, except for the Dream of Scipiowhich concluded the whole work.De republica is often, and wrongly, thought of

as a treatise on constitutional theory; and althoughit contains such a theory that is only part of thework. Cicero described it to his brother as a workde oprimo stow rei publicae et de oprimo clue—on the best organization of the commonwealth andon the best citizen, and the emphasis was clearlyon the second element. Jackson Knight in RomanVergil translated the title as “Political Theory”,and that is close: I would tentatively prefer“Public Affairs.” The preface, although we havelost the first half of it, makes Cicero’s goal clear:he wishes to encourage the young to participate inpublic life (as he did also in the Pm Sesrio of 56)by arguing that (following Aristotle) virtue isactive, not contemplative—virtus in usu sui towposita est—arid therefore that the life of leisure(Epicureanism) is disgraceful: and that politicalactivity is the highest form of virtue. And, indeed,by the conclusion of the work, political service isrewarded by eternal blessedness and personalimmortality.His argument has two essential elements: on the

one hand a historical argument about the natureof Roman government, showing that the Romanancestral constitution represents the ideal, and thatits success has been based on individual participation; and on the other hand a metaphysicalargument that there is such a thing as true justice,natural law, that is embedded in each person’s souland in the universe itself, and that the success andsurvival of states depends on the transmission ofthose eternal values from individuals to. states.Like Lucretius, Cicero concerns himself with therelationship of the individual to society; but hisanswer is diametrically opposite. Rejecting firmlyutilitarian arguments about the origins of justiceand the state, Cicero is the first person to extendarguments about personal morality to the conductof states. His is the first coherent theory of civicrepublicanism—and it is ironic that the text wasvirtually unknown until shortly after the period itsgreatest influence in the eighteenth century wasover. But here I am getting ahead of myself.As with Catullus, I will begin with the reign

of Romulus. The first book of De republicacontains an exposition of the theory of constitutions: the instability of the three good and thethree debased simple forms (monarchy/tyranny,aristocracy/oligarchy, democracy/ochiocracy) and

pPage 24

the permutations among them, contrasted with thestability of the mixed constitution which containsthe best elements of all three. At the end of thebook, Scipio asserts that no known state is asgood in its organization or customs as the onecreated and handed down by earlier generations ofRomans; and he promises to demonstrate this. Hedoes so in the second book, most of whichcontains his account—the earliest extantcontinuous history of early Rome — of thedevelopment of Roman government from thebeginnings to the restoration of government afterthe fall of the decemvirate in 449.Cicero’s account of Romulus is, to say the least,

unusual. He pays little if any attention to some ofthe more familiar elements in the legend that wereso amplified by Livy: the story of the twins andthe wolf, the murder of Remus (who is barelymentioned). That is in part because Cicero isinterested not in the story, but in the developmentof institutions; but even given that emphasis, theaccount is curious, Scipio begins with a longexcursus on the site of Rome, discussing themoral and strategic disadvantages of a coastallocation and the corresponding advantages ofRome’s actual site, emphasizing Romulus’prudentia in making such an excellent choice.The first king sounds like the designer of autopian settlement, well versed in military andcommercial strategy and familiar too with therequirements of public health. The same skills inlong-term planning are evident in the rest ofRomulus’ actions: the rape of the Sabines is acrude (subagresi’e) exercise in internationaldiplomacy; his cooperation with Titus Tatius inestablishing a proto-senate and his prudent use ofclienrela in organizing the plebs exempli hispolicy of ensuring domestic tranquility and socialorder. This Romulus, in fact, seems to havestudied Greek political philosphy, and put it topractical employment. Following his death, Ciceroreports his divinization, emphasizing by achronological comparison of Greece and Romethat this was highly unusual, since it took place atan era of such high civilization (a very strangeidea); he is also—something that happensfrequently in Cicero’s narrative—compared withLycurgus.At the end of this account. Scipioc interlocutor

Laelius praises him for the novelty of hisapproach to Roman history, one that is found“nowhere in the books of the Greeks”:

Nam princeps ille, quo nemo in scribendopraestantior fuit, aream sibi sumpsit, in quaciuitatem extrueret arbitratu suo, praeclaramille quidem fortasse, sed a uita hominumabhorrentem et a moribus; reliqui disserueruntsine ullo certo exemplari formaque rei publicaede generibus et de rationibus ciuitatum; tumihi uideris utrumque facturus: es enim itaingressus ut quae ipse reperias, tribuere aliismalis, quam. ut facit apud Platonem Socrates,ipse fingere, et illa de urbis situ reuoces adrationem quae a Romulo casu aut necessitatefacta sunt, et disputes non uaganti oratione seddefixa in una re publica. (Rep. 2.21-22)

Plato (princeps ille), the greatest of all writers,took a new territory to build his state as hewished, one that was glorious in its own way, butalien to human life and habits; other philosophersoffered general discussions of the types andstructures of states with no particular example inmind; while Scipio has set about doing both: “youhave begun in such a way as to wish to ascribe toothers what you have yourself discovered, ratherthan following the Platonic Socrates in making itup yourself; and in talking about the placement ofthe city you attribute to reasons what Romulus didby chance or necessity, and at the same time yourdiscussion does not wander, but sticks to onestate...” (2.22) What Scipio has done, according toLaelius, is something quite new. It exemplifies thevirtues and avoids the weaknesses of the twoprincipal Greek approaches to political theory, ofPlato on the one hand and of the Peripatetics(retiqui) on the other. Plato’s virtue had beenconcentration on the creation and government of asingle state; his failing had been that that statewas imaginary The Peripatetics talked about realstates, but had not paid close attention to thedevelopment of any one state. Scipio deals with asingle state, and it is a real one.It is worth dwelling on this passage, which has

a significance far broader than its immediatecontext. The other authors whom I have beendiscussing are not directly concerned with theinterpretation of the past and its relevance to thepresent; Cicero is; above all, with the applicationof political theory to historical events. Laelius’particular point concerns Scipio’s approach toRoman history—that he interprets the particularactions of Romulus within the framework ofpolitical theory—but it applies to the content of

P,,ot’ 7

Roman history as well: just as Scipio’s method issuperior to Greek abstract theorizing, so tooRoman institutions are superior to those ofGreece, a point made clear a paragraph later,when the Roman system of elective monarchy iscontrasted favorably with the hereditary kingshipof Lycurgan Sparta. Similarly, at the end of theaccount of Numa’s reign, Cicero goes out of hisway to rebut the story that Numa had been a pupilof Pythagoras. It is only with the arrival of theGreek Tarquin in Rome that Cicero allowssignificant Greek influence on Roman institutions.And the contrast, on a number of levels, betweenRome and Greece is central to Cicero’s method,both here and in the very similar earlier dialogue1k’ orarore: both in constructing the dialogues andin applying political theory to government, Ciceropreferred the empirical to the abstract, observation to speculation, the active life to thecontemplative life, Romulus to Lycurgus, Scipioto Plato.In works explicitly modelled on Platonic

dialogues (De republica, clearly, on the Republic;Dc omiore on the Phaedrus), this last isparticularly important. In each work, theprotagonists Scipio and Crassus go out of theirway to deny their own theoretical expertise, andannounce that they will discourse on their subjectsnot like some Greek schoolmaster withoutexperience, but as Roman statesmen withpractical knowledge. You should listen to me, saysScipio, as one Roman citizen, unum e sogalis. welleducated by my father and intellectually curious,but trained more usu.. . et domesticis praeceptisthan by book-learning:

Quam ob rem peto a uobis ut me sic audiatis:neque Ut omnino expertem Graecarum rerum,neque ut eas nostris in hoc praesertimgenere anteponentem, sed ut unum e togatispatris diligentia non inliberaliter institutum,studioque discendi a pueritia incensum, usutamen et domesticis praeceptis multo magiseruditum quam litteris. (Rep. 1.36)

So also Crassus at De omtore 1.111: he speaksnot as some magisrer aique artifex, but as units etogatarum numero. The pragmatic Antonius, inDc orascre, denies the relevance of Plato toRoman politics:

.philosophorum autem libros reseruet sibi adhuiusce modi Tusculani requiem atque otium,

ne, si quando ei dicendum erit de iustitia ettide, mutuetur a Platone. qui cum haecexprimenda uerbis arbitraretur, nouamquandam finxit in libris ciuitatem; usqueeo lIla, quae dicenda de iustitia putabat. auitae consuetudine et a ciuitatum moribusabhorrebant. (Dc oral 1 .224)

The orator should leave philosophy for his ct/urnat Tusculum, and should not borrow from Platowhen he needs to speak of justice andfides: whenPlato thought that he had to talk about suchsubjects, he invented a new state—so alien werethe ideas he wished to express about justice tonormal life and the habits of states. And he goeson to describe the trial of the Stoic statesmanRutilius Rufus:

Nunc tails uir amissus est, dum causa itadicitur, Ut si in illa commenticia Platonisciuitate res ageretur: nemo ingemuit, nemoinclamauit patronorum, nihil cuiquam doluit,nemo est questus, nemo rem publicamimplorauit, nemo supplicauit. quid multa?pedem nemo in illo iudicio supplosit, credo, neStoicis renuntiaretur. imitatus est homoRomanus et consularis ueterem ilium Socraten,qui, cum omnium sapientissimus essetsanctissimeque uixisset, ita in iudicio capitispro se ipse dixit, ut non supplex atit reus, sedmagister aut dominus uideretur esse iudicum.(Dc cmi. 1.230-31)

The case was presented as if the trial weretaking place in Plato’s fictitious state: therewas not a groan or a shout from the advocates,no pain and no lamentation, no invocations ofthe republic, no prayers. In short, no one in thecourtroom so much as stamped his foot, afraidthat someone might report him to the Stoics. ARoman consular imitated Socrates of old, who,although he was the wisest of all men and hadlived the holiest of lives, spoke in his owncapital trial not like a humble defendant, butlike the lord and master of the jury.

The description of Rutilius’ trial in Dc oratoreechoes an incident described in Cicero’s letters. Inthe summer of 60 B.C., the younger Cato’spolitical stance toward the equites annoyedCicero, who commented to his friend Atticus: “Asfor our friend Cato, I have as warm a regard forhim as you. The fact remains that with all his

Page 26

patriotism and integrity he is sometimes apolitical liability (nocel inte.rdum rd publicae).He speaks in the Senate as though he were livingin Plato’s Republic instead of Romulus’ cesspool(did! enim tamquam in Plaronis poll/eta, nonramquam in Romuli faece, Lenten/jam)” (Alt.2.1.8. Shackleton Bailey’s translation). Cicero’sexasperation at Cato’s dogmatic approach toRoman politics was not new—he had ridiculedCato’s Stoicism three years earlier as part of thedefense of Murena—but the terms in which heputs it in this letter offer the same set ofoppositions that lies behind Laelius’ comments inDe republica: between Greek theory and Romanpublic life; between dogmatism and pragmatism;between what one should read and what oneshould live.Seipio, indeed, in the introduction to his history

of early Rome, makes an explicit contrast betweenPlato and Cato—but this time the elder Cato, theauthor of the Origines. Cato, he says, called theRoman constitution better than those of any of theGreeks, because the Greek constitutions wereeach made at one time by one man; Rome’s wasthe product of many minds over manygenerations. And he prefers to follow Cato’smethod of historical writing than. .likeSocrates inPlato, to make up a state from whole cloth. Thecontrast between Rome and Rome’s laws on theone hand and Greek legislators and philosophers—the two are frequently lumped together—isperhaps clearest in a famous passage of Deoratore in which Crassus declares:

Fremant omnes licet, dicam quod sentio:bibliothecas mehercule omnium philosophorum unus mihi uidetur XII tabularumlibellus, si quis legum fontis et capita uiderit,et auctoritatis pondere et utilitatis ubertatesuperare...percipietis etiam 111am ex cognitioneiuris laetitiam et uoluptatem, quod, quantumpraestiterint nostri maiores prudentia ceterisgentibus, turn facillime intellegetis, si cumillorum Lycurgo et Dracone et Solone nostrasleges conferre uolueritis. (Dc orat. I .195-97)

Everyone can object as much as they like, but Iwill say what I think: if you inspect the sourcesand principles of the laws, the one littlevolume of the Twelve Tables seems to me tosurpass the libraries of the philosophers, inboth weight of authority and richness ofutility. ...You will see how far our ancestors

surpassed all other races in wisdom mosteasily, if you compare our laws to theirLycurgus and Draco and Solon.

When Plato’s Republic is mentioned in Cicero’sDc republica, it is praised for its style andimagination, but attacked for its content: it isderided as fiction, as showing no knowledge ofreal life, as an inhuman and inhumane straightjacket imposed on society. Just as the knowledgeof the practical politican is derived from experience, so the understanding of government isderived from history.The contrast between the practical man and the

philosopher was not, of course, discovered byCicero; and we know that, a few years beforewriting these dialogues he was studying thecontrast between the contemplative life and theactive life in the works of the PeripateticsTheophrastus and Dicaearchus. The principal textfor this dichotomy, however, is Plato’s Gorgias—adialogue to which Cicero refers in both Dcoratore and Dc republica. In the earlier work(2.1 54ff.), Cicero has the statesman Catuluswonder why, given the long tradition of Romanassociation with Greek philosophy (notably thephilosophers’ embassy of 155), Antonius haddeclared war on it like Zethus in Paeuvius’ play.Antonius denies that Zethus is his model, andprefers the maxim of Neoptolemus in Ennius’Andromacha, to philosophize only a little,philosaphari. sect paudis. The same pair ofreferences, in the same order, and with the samepreference for Neoptolemus, appears in Laelius’speech at Dc republica I ,30—the argument thatphilosophy is all right, but only in its proper,limited place. The debate between Zethus andAmphion in Euripides’ (and Pacuvius’) Antiopeover the relative merits of the practical man andthe philosopher was famous; and its mostmemorable appearance is in Callicles’ speech inPlato’s Gorgias (485e), in which Callicles.obviously, takes the pan of Zethus, attackingphilosophy.There is another memorable image which

immediately precedes the allusion to Euripides inCallicles’ speech. the image of philosophers asgrownups playing children’s games, avoiding theaffairs of city and agora, and instead spendingtheir lives with three or four young men, whispering in a coriler, en gonia. . .psithurizonta (485d).That too is imitated by Cicero, in both dialogues.

p,,an 7

At De oratore I .57, Crassus portrays philosophersas claiming the sole right to speak on the largeissues of ethics and nirlus, and replies that whatthey speak about tenui quodam et exiguo sermonein corners to while away their otium, the oratorwill handle in public with the full range oforatorical power. And in the preface to Dcrepublica, in explaining that uirtus can be realizedfully only in public life. Cicero describes it asaccomplishing in deeds rather than words thosethings quas isti in angulis personant:

Nec uero habere uirtutem satis est quasi artemaliquam nisi utare; etsi quidem cum ea nonutare scientia tamen ipsa tcneri potest, uirtus inusu sui tota posita est; usus autem eius estmaximus ciuitatis gubernatio, et earumipsarurn return quas isti in angulis personantreapse non oratione perfectio. nihil enimdicitur a philosophis. quod quidem rectehonesteque dicatur, quod <non> ab us partumconuirmatumque sit, a quibus ciuitatibus iuradescripta sunt. (Rep. 1.2)

The similarity between the attitudes towardPlato of Cicero in his direct comments and of hischaracters within the dialogues is not altogethersurprising, but it is significant for Cicero’sconstruction of Roman experience. Cicero createsPlatonic dialogues to refute Plato, portrayingcharacters themselves attacking Plato. And notonly are these characters historical, but they arediscussing the importance of history over theory.In both dimensions of these works, Cicero makesan argument for the specific and empirical overthe general and theoretical; his literary construc

tion exemplifies precisely the approach to the pastthat he is advocating.But like the chapters on method which I have

been discussing, my own discussion has beensomething of an excursus on method, and I wantto return to my primary subject, the organizationand interpretation of the Roman past in Cicero.Here too, however, it is necessary to deal withanother Greek model, this time the second-century historian Polybius who was in fact afriend of Scipio and whose account of constitutional theory and Roman history in book 6 ofthe Histories is the primary model for the first twobooks of Dc repzth!ica.Polybius’ version of Rome’s development is a

curious and inconsistent blending of the twoconstitutional schemes that he presents at thebeginning of book 6: on the one hand the cycle ofthe simple constitutions, on the other the stabilityof the mixed constitution, in which elements of allthree good simple forms serve as checks to thetendency to degeneration of each, and which thushas a longer life than any simple form. His Romedevelops a mixed constitution by accretion: afterthe monarchy degenerates to tyranny under thelast Tarquin, a monarchic element (the consuls) isretained under the aristocratic constitution; whenthat decays to oligarchy under the decemvirale,the restored republic combines monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements, and thereforeremains reasonably constant for the more thanthree hundred years up to the battle of Cannae.Nevertheless, at the end of book 6, Polybiuspredicts the decay of the mixed government ofRome, when it will become lax and corrupt fromtoo much empire and luxury.There are several significant differences

between Cicero’s version of the theory ofconstitutions and Polybius’. none more so thantheir handling of the problem of decline. ForCicero, the paramount goal of good government isits own eternity; and essential to the biologicalmetaphor which both he and Polybius employ isthe cycle of birth, growth, maturity—and death.For Polybius, perhaps because he is a historian.perhaps because he is not Roman, decline may beunfortunate, but it is a fact of life; for Cicero, asfor his protagonist Scipio. both of them experiencing moments of crisis for Rome, it isunthinkable.As a result, Cicero’s version of early Rome,

although following the chronological framework pPage 28

of Polybius. has a very different version of theforces which govern history and change. Cicero’smixed constitution does not grow by accretion,like Polybius’. Instead, the mixture begins at thevery beginning of Rome, with Romulus’ creationof the senate and his concern with the well-beingof the plebs. There is in fact no real change in thestructure of Roman government in Cicero’saccount at all, merely alterations in emphasis andchanges in the form which the differentconstitutional principles take. Thus monarchy isreplaced by the consulate, which has regalauthority, the patres become a formal senate; theliberty of the people—which is asserted as earlyas the election of Numa—is focussed in thetribunate. Thus, the far greater continuity andessential stability of Cicero’s constitution is onemore reason for it to last forever. And while thePolybian system displays an inherent tensionbetween the stability of the mixed constitution andthe natural pattern of growth and decay thataffects all earthly affairs. Cicero bases his systemon a different antithesis: between the natura ofstates and the reason of statesmen. This occursmost clearly when C. describes the origins of thetribunate: it was natural, he says, that when thepeople were freed from kings they should seek toincrease their rights; but the aristocracy did notrecognize this, and so the first secession of theplebs resulted in the election of tribunes: in quodefuit fortasse ratio, sed tamen uincit ipso reruinpublicaru,n natura saepe rationem (2.57). Thesenate should have recognized the naturaltendency of the state, but did not—defüit ratio—and so the natural tendency to equilibrium withinthe mixed constitution asserted itself. For Cicero,all government tends toward the ideal balance(which is, we learn in book 3, in fact part of thedefinition of any genuine P-es publica); but it mustbe helped (or can be hindered) by the actions ofindividual statesmen.This brings me to the central feature of Cicero’s

vision of Roman history, the role of theindividual—the rector rei pubiicae as he is called.Romulus is the first example of this, through theforesight (prudentia) of his policies, but he is notthe only one, and he is followed by the next fivekings, by the consuls of the first year of therepublic, by \lalerius and Horatius, the consuls of449, and, of course, by Scipio and (by implication) Cicero himself. Modern interpretations ofDc republica (which I will not discuss in detail

herdJ have tended to emphasize either the extra-constitutional role of the rector—Cicero arguingfor a dictatorship, or somehow predicting theprincipate of Augustus (or of Hitler)—or theinstitutional structure of government—Ciceroarguing for the restoration of the aristocraticconstitution of the middle republic. But what ismost significant is the interplay betweenindividuals and institutions; as he appears to haveargued in book 4, good institutions are necessaryto provide good men, but good men—men oflearning, experience, and skill—are alwaysneeded to restore institutions to their true nature.Cicero is not alone in this interpretation of

early Rome: Machiavelli (Discourses 3.1) thoughtthat such a restoration might be accomplishedeither by good laws or by a great man,

whose noble example and virtuous actions willproduce the same effect as such a law...But (headds) to give life and vigor to those lawsrequires a virtuous citizen, who will courageously aid in their execution against the powerof those who trangress them ... We mayconclude, then, that nothing is more necessaryfor a...republic. ..than to restore to it from timeto time the power and reputation which it hadin the beginning, and to strive to have eithergood laws or good men to bring about such aresult.

Machiavelli called for such restorations to takeplace every ten years, but Cicero is apparentlymore cautious, recognizing the need for the activeintervention of a rector (the equivalent toMachiavelli’s citizen of virtu) only in crises; buthe too recognizes the need for some means ofrecalling Rome to its original principles ofgovernment. The link between individual moralityand good government is central to the classical (inthis case l7th-lSth century) theory of civicrepublicanism; it is not until the Federalist thatanyone proposed a constitutional system designedto withstand individual immorality.The idea that individual citizens can make a

difference (illustrated most clearly by thestatement that Lucius Junius Brutus showed thatin the defence of popular liberty no one is aprivate citizen) is in itself a reply to Lucretius;there is, in fact, a good and practical reason forengagement in public life. More specificallydirected against the Epicureans, however, isCicero’s other main innovation in the theory of

[n_-,,., o

government, which is as foreign to Machiavelliand Polybius as it is to Lucretius: and that is histranscendental justification for civic life. Begin-fling from the preface, in which he asserted thatnature has implanted in us a love of country,Cicero gradually develops an argument to showthat the universe is ordered and lawful; that statesshould be in harmony with this natural law—setout most fully in Laelius’ great (but unfortunatelyvery fragmentary) speech on justice in book 3—.and that individuals, by acting in accordance withthis eternal law can not only serve their country,but can ensure for themselves eternal blessedness:the final proof is the sublime vision of the afterlife vouchsafed to Scipio in the Dream whichconcludes the entire treatise, The argument aboutthe best constitution fades away; it is supplantedby Cicero’s central vision of Roman life andRoman history—-that the fundamental issues arenot political at all, but moral, and that the realhistory of Rome is found in the distinguishedseries of individual contributions to fair government and natural law. The emphasis on themorality of stales (as opposed to individuals) ishighly unusual—and certainly not shared byMachiavelli. Its rationale appears in a fragmentof Laelius’ speech in book 3 quoted by St.Augustine: individual humans often welcomedeath as a release from exile or other civilpenalties, but for states death itself is the penalty:

debet enim constituta sic esse ciultas ut aeternasit, itaque nullus interitus est rei publicaenaturalis ut hominis. in quo mors non modonecessaria est, uerum etiam optanda persaepe.ciuitas autem cum tollitur, deletur, extinguitur,simile est quodam modo, ut parua magnisconferamus. ac si omnis hic mundus intereat etconcidat. (Rep. 3.34)

For the state ought to be set up in such a wayas to be eternal. There is no natural death forstates as for men; for them, it is not onlynecessary but sometimes desirable, but when astate is destroyed it is as if (comparing smallto large) the entire world were to die andcollapse.

A state is not natural, and the organic analogyfails precisely because it has no immortal soul:its immortality is dependent on the virtue—theimmortal souls—of its citizens alone.The argument of Dc republica, put very simply,

is that a state can survive only by being just, andthat the justice of the state, both in its institutionsand its behaviour, can only be maintained againstcorruption and decline by the continual application of reason by citizens educated to understandthe moral imperatives of the universe, and willingto subordinate their private good to the good ofthe community. They need no earthly reward; theycan edure disgrace, exile, even death, becausetheir reward is in another life; and by remembering that, they can behave rightly in this one. insome sense, they are truly Platonic philosopher-consuls, but with important differences: theirwisdom is practical, not philosophical; they arenot absolute rulers; and the ideas that theyunderstand are not the Forms, but the essence ofRome itself.And yet, one must ask, does Cicero really

believe this sort of thing? Can it be true? For no-one recognized better than Cicero that the realityof Rome in his day—the cesspool of Romulus didnot resemble the ideal Republic of his story. Lookone more time at Laelius’ comments on Scipio’saccount of Romulus: “you have begun in such away as to prefer to attribute to others (Romulus)what you have yourself discovered than in themanner of the Platonic Socrates. to make it upyourself; and you ascribe to reason what you sayabout the site of the city—things which Romulusdid by chance or necessity” In other words,Laelius is saying, although Scipio claims to be

1*

Paze 30

telling the truth, he is in fact inventing out of more than a few years after the outbreak of thewhole cloth. Scipio’s Romulus is no morereal than the Platonic State; and Scipio. Laelius,and the reader know it. To put the problemin Vergilian terms, is Scipio’s dream true orfalse?That question—like the problem of the end of

,leneid 6—---was never intended to have a singleanswer, but some hints may be gleaned from theprefaces, from Cicero’s comments about thehistorical setting of the dialogue and the role ofmemory in his composition of it. The verybeginning of De republica is lost, but the openingof De oratore is equally relevant: “cognitanti mihisaepenumero et memoria vetera repetenti perbeatifuisse. Quinte frater, illi videri solent...”—ln myfrequent thoughts and recollections of old times.those men seem to me, Quintus, to have beenmost blessed. ..—ln this sentence, the syntax ofwhat Eric Laughton calls the reciprocal use of thepresent participle—the complementary meaningsof cogitanti and videri—is matched on thesemantic level by the concept of memory itself:the greatness and blessedness of the men of oldand of the republic for which they stood ispreserved and guaranteed by Cicero’s memorial,one that (as he virtually admits on the next pagewhen he echoes the opening words) in fact is farmore an act of re-creation than one of recollection. But the pleasure of recalling a better timethat colors the opening of the first book becomesmuch darker in the preface of Book 3, whichdeliberately echoes both the syntax and thethought of the opening sentence of the prefaceitself: “Instituenti mihi, Quinte frater...” In book3 the memory is not pleasant, but painful:“acerba sane recordatio veterem animi curammolestiamque renovavit”—”a truly bitter memoryhas renewed the old concerns and burdens of mymind.” And that memory, of course, is theextraordinary depiction of the scene of Crassus’sudden illness in the senate and of his death,just afew days after the dramatic date of the dialogue in91. “After his death, we used to come into thesenate house to look at the last spot on which hestood”..”O fallacem hominum spem fragilemquefortunam et inanis nostras contentiones!”—Oh.the deceitful hopes of men, their fragile fortune.and our empty struggles!—Cicero goes on todescribe, in grim detail, the actions and the deathsof the participants in the dialogue, only one ofwhom—Cicero’s alleged informant Cotta—lived

Social War.in Dc repubbca, the importance of memory is

made clear at the end of the preface (the openingis lost), when Cicero introduces the dramaticsetting of the dialogue (113). and in Scipio’s ownintroduction to his account of Roman history(23). But a fragment of the preface of Book 5shows that Cicero made his point even moreclearly in Dc republica than in Dc oratore. Afterquoting Ennius’ verse “moribus antiquis res statRomana virisque,” and declaring that in past times(ante nostram memariam) Rome had prosperedthrough the greatness of its leaders and throughtheir respect for ancestral custom, Cicero turns tothe present day:

Nostra uero aetas cum rem publicam sicutpicturam accepisset egregiam. sed iameuanescentem uetustate, non modo earncoloribus isdem quibus fuerat renouareneglexit, sed ne id quidem curauit ut formamsaltem eius et extrema tamquam lineamentaseruaret. quid enim manet ex antiquis moribus,quibus illle dixit rem stare Romanam? quos itaobliuione obsoletos uidemus, ut non modo noncolantur. sed iam ignorentur.. .nostris enimuitiis. non casu aliquo. rem publicam uerboretinemus. re ipsa uero iam pridem amisimus,(Rep.5.2)

Our generation inherited the state in acondition like that of a beautiful picture fadingfrom age, and it has not only neglected torestore its colors, but has not even tried topreserve its shape and outlines. What remainsfrom the ancient mores, which Ennius said tobe the basis of the res Romana? They are soforgotten (oblivione obsoletos) that they arenot only not cultivated, but they are not evenknown...Jt is by our faults, and not by merebad luck, that we retain the republic in nameonly, but we long ago lost its substance.

Cicero had been deploring the loss of the republicfor several years, but this passage makes twoimportant additions. In the first place. the use ofcasus, chance, echoes and reverses Laelius’observation on Scipio’s account of Romulus, thatScipio had attributed to ratio what had in factbeen done casu aut necessitate: much of the gooddone by Romulus was the result of luck; thedecline of the present day is the result not of luck,

l,.n-., ?

but of corruption. In the second place, thereference to ancient moirs as a faded painting,and as oblivione obsoletos — comparable toHerodotus’ preface, with its desire to ensure thatthe great deeds of the Greeks and barbariansbecome neither exitéla nor aklea—points to acentral aim of Cicero’s work: to restore thegreatness of Rome, if not in fact, at least in men’sminds. The decline of political morality; thefailure of memory; the resurrection of an idealpast which is simultaneously recognized as false;the loss of the heroic virtue of yin antiqui: allthese are facets not only of Cicero’s vision ofRome, but of Catullus’ as well. But for Cicero, thesolution is different: rather than lowering the pastto the level of the present, and urging the transferof virtue from public to private, Cicero attempts toelevate the past into something grand, noble, andpermanent, worthy of emulation and continuation:if only it can be remembered, it can be restored—whether or not it ever existed.“Perhaps. I said, it is a model laid up in heaven,

for him who wishes to look upon, and as he looks,set up the government of his soul. It makes nodifference whether it exists anywhere or willexist.” So Socrates, at the end of Republic 9. Butthat is not entirely true for Cicero. At theconclusion of his speech on justice in book 3,Laelius attacked Tiberius Gracchus for hisimmoral behaviour towards citizens, Latins, andallies, his alteration of Roman rule from ius to uis.“I am concerned,” he concludes, “for our descendants and for the immortality of the republic,which could have been eternal if it lived byancestral custom.” For Laelius, the natural justicewhich alone animates and preserves the respublica is no longer; and so too for Cicerohimself.

I have left to the end one important feature ofthe setting of Dc republica which will bring me, atlong last, back to Vergil. In the prophetic passageat the beginning of Scipio’s dream, his deadgrandfather, the great Scipio, tells him of hisaccomplishments in the twenty years between thedate of the dream and the date of the dialogue. Atthat point, he says, at this moment of fate, theroad forks. The whole state and all the allies andLatins will turn to you, you will be the solesupport of the state. “In brief: you will have torestore the republic as dictator, ‘you escape theimpious hands of your relatives.” He did not:Scipio was found mysteriously dead in the midst

of the crisis; he did not become dictator, and hedid not save the state. The hope of restoring therepublic is an unfulfilled condition whose sadnessVergil well recognized: “Heu miserande puer. siqua fata aspera rumpas—tu Marcellus ens.”Crassus in Dc oratore, Scipio, Marcellus are allinstances of promise unfulfilled. of crisis unresolved, of future possibilities that are in factimpossible.In the concluding chapter of Roman Vergil,

Jackson Knight describes the optimism of theAcne/cl: “It is clear why Vergil had to see the goodof the present, and elicit it, if not make it, bylooking at the past. And it is clear too that he hadto look at a composite, blended past. in order todraw from it, and draw straight, the strong lines ofhope in the present.” My own sense of the Aeneidis less sanguine than Knight’s, but Vergil certainlymade considerably lighter the dark picture that heknew from Cicero. In a book published as hedeparted from Rome in 51, never to return to thefree republic of his dreams, Cicero looked backthrough the lens of unfulfilled hope to the idealRome that, in his most enduring act ofstatesmanship and poetry, he invented andrestored.

NoteI am very grateful to the Department of Classics of theUniversity of Exeter both for the invitation to give this lectureand for their generous hospitality; I am also grateful to theeditors of Pegasus for publishing an unaltered and unannotated lecture. Much of the material presented here will appearin a somewhat different form in the edition of Dc re pubhcawhich I am preparing for Cambridge Greek and LatinClassics.

lIt Pmtnns’ iwtnov&K.sesataticn fr tW3tGfiJdjfri kmer.cJiy 2e45.

Page 32