Browsing by Subject "Cicero"
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Item Cicero the dialogician : the construction of community at the end of the Republic(2009-08) Hanchey, Daniel Parker; Riggsby, Andrew M.In the opening lines of the preface to De Divinatione 2, Cicero describes his motivation in composing of the complures libros of his post-exilic years. Most of all, he says, he wished to prevent any interruption in his service to the state. Though he does not say so explicitly, he clearly refers to an interruption occasioned by his exile and Caesar’s ascension. Elsewhere Cicero describes this period of his life as enforced otium, an otium threatened by the absence of the dignitas which Cicero identifies with the otium of L. Crassus in the opening words of De Oratore. As he claims in Div. 2, Cicero achieved a level of usefulness to the state (and so maintained a certain amount of dignitas) by writing his theoretical books, books which he says communicate the optimarum artium vias to the Roman reading public. What Cicero does not explicitly explain is why the great majority of those works assume the form of the dialogue. In this dissertation I seek to explore the formal capabilities of the dialogue which would make it attractive to a Cicero seeking to maintain dignitas and to render significant service to a state faced with a rapid shift of political and social structure. In general I argue that the dialogue form itself represents an antidote to the decommunalizing and populizing nature of Caesarian hegemony. As I contend, the dialogue achieves its communal nature through an emphasis on three major ethics, each of which is demonstrated in the theories expressed within the dialogues, in the actions of the interlocutors, and in the activity of Cicero himself as author. These three ethics (imitatio, memoria, gratia) each depend on community for their actualization and themselves generate the bonds that lead to community. By placing significant, multi-layered emphasis on each of these ethics, Cicero aims to communicate their validity to a generation of boni faced with the non-traditional, non-communal power of Julius Caesar.Item Cicero's critique of popular philosophy in De Finibus(2010-05) Baruh, Carly Tess; Pangle, Lorraine Smith; Pangle, ThomasThis paper considers Cicero’s dialogues concerning Epicurean and Stoic philosophy in De Finibus. In it, I consider Cicero’s portrayal both of the deep appeal of the promise of perfect wisdom and invulnerability to chance offered by both philosophical schools as well as the confusions that necessarily lie at the heart of philosophies that seek these ends.Item Free association : Libertas, metaphor and the politics of Cicero(2007-05) Lundy, Steven James; Riggsby, Andrew M.Libertas is a notion central to the politics and culture of the Roman Republic, yet commentators have found difficulty in interpreting the word and giving a coherent and cohesive account of its semantic and rhetorical content. This report attempts to throw further light on the discussion by examining the conceptual and rhetorical content of libertas, incorporating a substantial study of its metaphorical structures following the linguistic and cognitive work of George Lakoff. The central texts under discussion are: the comic plays of Plautus, which offer an insight into libertas in its "source domain"; the epistolary corpus of Cicero, which is used as a basis to study libertas in its political context and as a contrast to the final text under analysis: Cicero's De Lege Agraria 2.Item Paving the past: Late Republican recollections in the Forum Romanum(2009-05) Bartels, Aaron David; Davies, Penelope J. E.; Clarke, John R.; Riggsby, Andrew M.The Forum was the center of Roman life. It witnessed a barrage of building, destruction and reuse from the seventh century BCE onwards. By around 80 BCE, patrons chose to renovate the Senate House and Comitium with a fresh paving of tufa blocks. Masons leveled many ruined altars and memorials beneath the flooring. Yet paving also provided a means of saving some of Rome’s past. They isolated the Lapis Niger with black blocks, to keep the city’s sinking history in their present. Paving therefore became a technology of memory for recording past events and people. Yet how effective was the Lapis Niger as a memorial? Many modern scholars have romanced the site’s cultural continuity. However, in fifty years and after two Lapis Nigers, the Comitium had borne a disparity of monuments and functions. Rome’s historians could not agree on what lay beneath. Verrius Flaccus reports that the Lapis Niger ‘according to others’ might mark the site of Romulus’s apotheosis, his burial, the burial of his foster father Faustulus, or even his soldier, Hostius Hostilius (50.177). Nevertheless, modern archaeologists have found no tombs. Instead of trying to comprehend these legends, most scholars use them selectively to isolate a dictator, deity or date. We must instead understand why so many views of the Lapis Niger emerged in antiquity. Otherwise, like ancient antiquarians, we will re- identify sites without end. Recreating how these material and mental landscapes interacted and spawned new pasts tells us more about the Lapis Niger than any new attribution.Item The Policy of Clodius from 58 to 56 B.C.(The Classical Quarterly, 1927) Marsh, Frank BurrItem Tully’s the fashion : Ciceronian fame in Frances Burney’s Cecilia(2017-05) Hall, Kirsten Anne; Barchas, JanineAcross a festively lit drawing room at a fashionable London masquerade, the eponymous heroine of Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782) catches sight of a man dressed in Ciceronian costume. She identifies him as the famous Roman statesman by his toga and “consular dignity.” At first glance, this brief scene is utterly forgettable because, as Peter Gay has noted, Cicero today is “at best an interesting politician and a master of a certain Latin style; at worst he is a bore or an unknown.” A closer look, however, reveals not only Burney’s deep awareness of Cicero’s significance as a “culture hero” but also her and her contemporaries’ complex relationship with his legacy. By the time of Cecilia’s publication, Cicero is no longer simply the purview of pedants and politicians but is famous to a wider London public. The popular desire to be like Tully, as he was frequently and affectionately referred to during this period, newly manifested itself in material culture, as it had become the height of fashion for his name and face to appear not only in books but also on jewelry, clothing, shop signs, and home décor. It was also during this era that Cicero’s character came under scrutiny: readers had begun to notice that Cicero’s public persona in his orations and treatises was far more virtuous than how he appears in his private correspondence. As Burney’s portrait of the masquerader reveals, her own attitude towards Cicero’s fame was equally complex: while she shared her culture’s admiration for Tully, she had misgivings about those like the Ciceronian Frenchman for whom that emulation was an affectation and an opportunity for celebrity mongering. I argue that Burney exposes her society’s affectation of Ciceronian virtue, an affectation that mirrors Cicero’s own hypocritical self-fashioning. By presenting the reader with a heroine who, like Cicero, strives for virtue and is ambitious of the fame virtue enables, the novel can be seen as a meditation on the nature of ambition itself and whether, if even those who seem to understand virtue best are undone by their desire for fame, ambition and virtue can exist simultaneously.Item Virtue and irrationality in republican politics : Cicero’s critique of popular philosophy(2014-12) Herold, Carly Tess; Pangle, Lorraine SmithThis dissertation examines the political thought of Cicero in order to shed light on the question of the extent to which politics is or can be made rational. Much of modern political science and policy-making treats citizens as calculating pursuers of interests and preferences, if not as consistently rational. But this view has been powerfully challenged by evidence that human beings are far less adept at the determination and pursuit of our preferences than we believe ourselves to be. As a result, political scientists and policy-makers alike have begun to grapple with the question of how regimes committed to self-government ought to address the limits of our rational capacity, not only in the crafting of particular policies, but also in the rethinking of foundational and constitutional principles and institutions. By considering Cicero’s presentation of virtue and republican politics together with his analysis of the popular philosophical schools that were widely influential in his day, I show that Cicero recognizes and reflects on the pervasive irrationality in human decision-making. Like our modern critics of the irrationality of republicanism, the popular philosophical schools of Cicero’s day both deprecated politics for its inherent unreasonableness and sought to make the world as they experienced it conform to strict rules of reason. Through a reading of Cicero’s evaluation and critique of the schools in De Finibus, De Natura Deorum, and De Officiis, this dissertation aims to shed light not only on his account of the limits of reason in the political arena and the danger of attempting to overcome them, but also on his insistence that the irrational parts of human nature are the source of much that is beneficial in republican politics. Only by understanding this aspect of Cicero’s thought can we understand his reflections on the virtues of republicanism.