Cicero dramatizes the conflict between rhetorical aspirations and the central issues of Roman political life in his representations of the elite of his time and their ancestors, but the same conflict is in turn dramatized by his own life, and has motivated the different historical evaluations of Cicero which characterize his reputation in the modern period. Most importantly, for Theodor Mommsen (expanding the even more negative assessment of the pioneering historical biographer Drumann), Cicero was a political failure and a frustrated man of letters. Mommsen was responding to the sense that emerges from Cicero’s writings of a thwarted ambition to use literary prowess to compensate for a lack of political will. In this extremely influential analysis, Cicero’s literary skill was interpreted as the expression of an inability to recognize and work with the main political forces of his day, and Cicero comes across, therefore, as someone lacking either firm political principles or any sort of political vision. Literary interests, and in particular rhetorical ones, robbed Cicero of the ability to form sound judgment: the moral relativism necessary to be an effective advocate was, in Mommsen’s view, incompatible with effective political vision. Cicero’s rhetorical skill deprived him of the ability to take up a principled political stance, and his attempt to put across the skill as the cornerstone of political success at Rome was an act of vanity that rested on a vast overestimation of his own importance.
As I shall explore in more detail below, such an analysis builds upon a view of literature as something different from real life (essentially a view dominant from the eighteenth century onwards), and of rhetoric as an activity that could be demarcated from other ways of exercising political and social power. The latter view has, as I have already suggested, some corroboration within Cicero’s own writings, and the later developments in rhetorical training at Rome (principally the rise of declamation) do perhaps support the idea of rhetoric as a literary rather than political activity, a social and cultural adornment, rather than the essence of social power itself. There have, however, been recent developments in our approach to this problem at Rome which have shown a way of moving beyond the intractable polarity between ‘‘rhetoric’’ and ‘‘politics’’ or between ‘‘literature’’ and ‘‘real life.’’ Gleason’s work in particular (Gleason 1995) has led to a reevaluation of the social significance of rhetoric that goes beyond the narrow definition of politics, to suggest that even in the more literary forms of rhetorical expression (ones essentially epideictic in origin, for example), the forces of social conditioning can be clearly seen (see too Vasaly 1993; Habinek 1998a). This work is a useful corrective: it suggests that at Rome, it is wrong to see political power and social (even sexual) status as operating in different areas. What is different about this approach is its attitude to the question of political power.
Traditionally, both by the Romans themselves, and by much modern historiography (particularly in the twentieth century), political power at Rome was equated with the holding of particular magistracies or military commands. The cursus hon-orum, Rome’s clearly structured career ladder, with its blend of civic and military posts, provided a way of measuring the power of any individual; the tussles around elections which are recorded in such detail in Cicero’s letters and some speeches, and the manner in which constitutional powers were exceeded in the final generations of the republic, provided the main way of measuring the status of the individual citizen. However, with changes in approaches to historical evidence that reflect the rise of the newer disciplines of sociology and social/cultural studies, political power has come to be viewed in a less specific manner, and a different approach has developed with regard to the question of literary and visual representation: representations of power and status can be regarded not just as an account of that power but also as a positive enactment of it. So political power is beginning to be thought of as a combination of different areas: social status; social networks that place the individual in a context; selfimage; and the development of self-image in relation to other images, which at Rome are often from history and mythology. The enormous role played by images in the concretization of the power particularly of the emperor Augustus (Zanker 1988) has led to a much greater awareness of the role played by visual imagery in conferring and reinforcing political power; in this light, the active role of literary representation in conferring and sustaining power has also been revealed.
In Augustus’ case, his rule rested upon a power that, while accompanied by constitutional measures, could not be adequately explained by them. His contemporaries called this auctoritas, which was crucial to the political power examined by Cicero in De Republica as a phenomenon that resided outside clear constitutional forms (1.12, 2.15, 2.56-61). We might call this power ‘‘ideology’’ - the constellations of ideas and mental images that grant any individual or group an aura of superiority or special privilege. In the most recent scholarship on rhetorical texts, the function of rhetoric in granting ideological power has begun to be explored (e. g., Gleason 1995; Bloomer 1997a, 1997c). We can now think about how rhetorical texts themselves express the valences of power of their speaker. Crucially this power is not something to which the speech or even the theoretical writing alludes; rather, it is created anew within the text itself as it is read. The image of the speaker that emerges from the text gives us an understanding of value systems precisely because such value systems were preserved and perpetuated within these texts.
This approach sees rhetorical texts themselves as a form of social performance, and in so doing, refutes any idea of a space between the world of rhetorical activity and the record of that activity in the texts. The images created in the rhetorical presentation are enactments of social and political power, even if those take the form of references to the sexuality of individuals, or the particular historical events. In Cicero’s Pro Caelio, to take a well-known example, we can see how Cicero manages simultaneously to castigate Clodia for her immorality, and to excuse Caelius for his involvement with her. He makes much witty use of cultural stereotypes from the comedy of Terence. However, the main thrust of his rhetoric is directed at producing a consensus, and a sense of identification, between himself and his audience. The moral inconsistencies displayed in his argument are much less important than the pull that Cicero exerts on his audience to coerce them into a sense of simultaneous moral indignation and forgiveness; he creates an inescapable sense, here as in many of his speeches, of what ‘‘people like us’’ should think, and how, accordingly, they should act. Roman social values are being both explored and produced.
World History
