The Deaths of the Republic Imagery of the Body Politic in Ciceronian Rome

by Walters, Brian

• ISBN13: 9780198839576
• ISBN10: 019883957X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2020-05-03
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

That the Roman republic died is a commonplace often repeated. In extant literature, the notion is first given form in the works of the orator Cicero (106-43 BCE) and his contemporaries, though the scattered fragments of orators and historians from the earlier republic suggest that the idea was hardly new. In speeches, letters, philosophical tracts, poems, and histories, Cicero and his peers obsessed over the illnesses, disfigurements, and deaths that were imagined to have beset their body politic, portraying rivals as horrific diseases or accusing opponents of butchering and even murdering the state. Body-political imagery had long enjoyed popularity among Greek authors, but these earlier images appear muted in comparison and it is only in the republic that the body first becomes fully articulated as a means for imagining the political community. In the works of republican authors is found a state endowed with nervi, blood, breath, limbs, and organs; a body beaten, wounded, disfigured, and infected; one with scars, hopes, desires, and fears; that can die, be killed, or kill in turn. Such images have often been discussed in isolation, yet this is the first book to offer a sustained examination of republican imagery of the body politic, with particular emphasis on the use of bodily-political images as tools of persuasion and the impact they exerted on the politics of Rome in the first century BCE.

Author Biography

Brian Walters, Assistant Professor of Classics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Brian Walters is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has previously published a translation of Lucan's Civil War (Hackett, 2015), in addition to various poems, and articles on Cicero, Roman oratory, and metaphor.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
0. Introduction: The Deaths of the Republic
1. The Republican Body Politic
Harmony and Discord
Mixture, Degeneration, Morals, and Men
'No Longer Provide Your Blood'
2. Healing the State with Violence
Medical Imagery in Late-Republican Politics
Roman Medicine and Roman Oratory
Salus Rei Publicae
Vis Omnium Remediorum
Healing the State with Arms
3. Butchering the Body Politic
Mutilating the Body Politic
Meanings of Violent Imagery
'The Republic's Greatest Wound'
Significant Wounds
4. Outliving the Republic
Deaths, Executions, Funerals, and Murders
Deaths and Consolations
'No Natural Death of the Republic'
'Perish Along with the Republic'
5. Murdering the Fatherland
'Parricide' in Earlier Invective
Murdering (the Father of) the Fatherland
Vitae Necisque Potestas
Coda: Parricide and Caput Patriae
Endmatter
Bibliography
Index of Passages
General Index