In the fall of 43 bce, Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus met on a small island near Bononia, Italy, to formalize an alliance that became known as the second triumvirate.Footnote ¹ Among the provisions of their agreement was the implementation of a new round of proscriptions to fund their armies in the wars to come. After marching to Rome, they ensured their extraordinary commission was invested with the force of law through the passage of the Lex Titia. The next night, the first names of the proscribed were publicly posted. The triumvirs had already sent execution squads ahead to eliminate the most prominent of their enemies, foremost among them Cicero. Fleeing down the coast of Italy with hopes of reaching Brutus in Macedonia, Cicero was apprehended near his villa at Formiae. According to Livy, his assassins caught him as he was being carried on a litter to the sea. Declaring his intention to die in the country he had often saved, he thrust his head forth to be severed.Footnote ² The soldiers also removed the hands with which he had penned the Philippics, a series of speeches that portrayed Antony as a rotting limb in need of surgical removal: in rei publicae corpore, ut totum salvum sit, quicquid est pestiferum amputetur (“In the body of the res publica, in order that the whole is safe, whatever is pestilential must be cut out,” Cic. Phil. 8.15). As Antony displayed the severed membra of his adversary on the speaker’s platform, he offered a symbolic rejoinder to the rhetoric of the Philippics. It was not he but Cicero, it seemed, who required amputation from the body of Rome.

In the years after Cicero’s death, his severed head became an object of fascination to his fellow Romans.Footnote ³ Stories fueled by the declamatory schools began circulating that Antony dined with his head on the table and that his wife Fulvia stuck her hair pins in his tongue.Footnote ⁴ Much of what we know of this tradition comes from the Elder Seneca’s Suasoriae, which preserves several accounts of Cicero’s death. It also includes a eulogy composed by the late Augustan poet Cornelius Severus, from whose epic Res Romanae twenty-five lines are excerpted.Footnote ⁵ The verses open with the jarring image of the rostra piled high with the heads of great men. Despite the horror of their nearly still breathing visages (oraque … spirantia paene), Severus’ imagined viewers do not linger upon them.Footnote ⁶ They are instead seized by the imago of Cicero, so extraordinary that it seems to stand alone: sed enim abstulit omnis, | tamquam sola foret, rapti Ciceronis imago (“but the face of slaughtered Cicero pushed them all aside, as if his were there alone,” Sen. Suas. 6.26). Treating his decapitated head as if it were an ancestor mask, Severus draws out its symbolic significance: egregium semper patriae caput, ille senatus | vindex, ille fori, legum ritusque togaeque, | publica vox saevis aeternum obmutuit armis (“The eternally extraordinary head of his country, that champion of the senate, of the forum, of laws and customs and civic life, a public voice forever silenced by savage weapons,” Sen. Suas. 6.26).Footnote ⁷ Despite writing half a century after the fall of the Republic, Severus is fluent in the elements of its political language: the foundational institutions of the senate and the courts, the civic markers of the forum and the toga, and the role of the statesman in religious rites and public speech. Yet there is one element of his eulogy that reveals him as a thinker of the late Augustan age: his celebration of Cicero as a head of state.

At first glance, Severus’ description of Cicero as a head of state might seem like little more than a rhetorical cliché. Yet in the political discourse of the early-to-mid first century bce, this metaphor was laden with regal connotations that made it inappropriate as a term of praise. Late Republican thinkers instead envisioned the res publica as an autonomous organism composed of interdependent parts. This tradition was primarily oriented towards the relationship between the senate and people. When a statesman was incorporated into it, he typically played the role of a protector or healer. On the rare occasions when capital symbolism did appear, it was used to criticize those whose ambitions posed a threat to collegial governance. Over Severus’ lifespan, however, the caput reversed its signifying force. It was not only Cicero who came to be celebrated in this manner, but also Pompey, Caesar, and the princeps himself. By the end of the Julio-Claudian era, the res publica had been radically reimagined as a collection of limbs and organs unable to survive without a head to command it. Its transformation, I argue, illuminates how Roman writers responded to the establishment of sole rule without acknowledging it as such. The metaphor of the body politic therefore offers a new perspective on the constitutional transformation of the late first century bce and its representation in Latin literature.

Defining the Roman Republic

My book takes a historicizing approach to figurative speech to explore the paradoxical persistence of Roman Republicanism under the Principate.Footnote ⁸ Roman thinkers famously declined to acknowledge the arrival of sole rule for nearly a century after the Battle of Actium, producing a disjuncture between constitutional form and political language that has invited divergent modes of explanation. Ronald Syme influentially argued that Romans were aware of the changes wrought by Augustus but were unwilling to address them directly. “Contemporaries,” as he succinctly put it, “were not deceived.”Footnote ⁹ Those who share his perspective explain this unwillingness in different ways: as a product of the Roman elite’s own value system,Footnote ¹⁰ a collective act of self-censorship,Footnote ¹¹ and the occasional result of direct pressure from above.Footnote ¹² Others have since questioned Syme’s consciously Tacitean approach to the Principate.Footnote ¹³ Rather than viewing Augustan writers as “mere mouthpieces of the political regime” or trying to find hidden moments of subversion in their texts, they invite us to take claims of Republican restoration seriously.Footnote ¹⁴ At the very least, Karl Galinsky argues, we should recognize that witnesses to this era “saw a sea of flux without a big marker that shouted ‘Actium!’”Footnote ¹⁵ To insist that Romans not only perceived, but also understood the significance of, a constitutional change for which they provide no evidence might say more about our own political attachments than theirs.Footnote ¹⁶ Both approaches carry potential pitfalls; the former risks imposing our own conceptual categories onto people who did not experience their world in these terms, while the latter risks internalizing an ideology that benefited the consolidation of power into the hands of the few.

Central to this debate are divergent perspectives on what we mean by “Roman Republic” in the first place. Latin famously lacked a word – whether res publica or something else – to specify the political system that evolved after the mythologized expulsion of the kings. As Claudia Moatti writes, “the Romans could not say in Latin that they lived in a Republic.”Footnote ¹⁷ Res publica only came to signify non-monarchical governance in the Italian Renaissance, when thinkers like Leonardo Bruni reworked it in service of their own political preoccupations.Footnote ¹⁸ Prior to this point, Latin writers could speak comfortably of the res publica that existed under Romulus or that over which Augustus presided.Footnote ¹⁹ When seeking to distinguish between different regimes or constitutions, they used words like forma, status, and species.Footnote ²⁰ The three standard formae rei publicae were rule by the many (populus), few (pauci), and one (una potestas).Footnote ²¹ It was not the distribution of power within them that mattered, but rather their orientation towards the best interest of their citizens. This idea underpins Scipio’s famously vague definition of res publica as res populi, “the property of the people,” in De Republica.Footnote ²² Any form of unjust rule, whether that practiced by Greek tyrants or Roman decemvirs, could serve as its lexical opposite.Footnote ²³ To declare the end of the res publica, as Cicero and his contemporaries often did, was to make a point about political legitimacy rather than constitutional form.Footnote ²⁴ The usage of this term is therefore not the best place to look for evidence of the “Roman Republic” or its demise.

If it is clear that res publica did not mean “republic” in the modern sense, however, its semantic range in Latin remains to be more fully explicated. Louise Hodgson argues that this term did not designate a political system, but rather the civic affairs and property over which a political community (civitas) presided.Footnote ²⁵ She describes it as both the communal space within which public administrators moved and the sphere of action created by their movements. Although this concept remained stable for several centuries, it saw increasing manipulation in the first century bce. As Roman statesmen appealed to the res publica in the service of increasingly tendentious ends, they politicized what had once been neutral. This breakdown of linguistic consensus mirrored and contributed to the disintegration of the political system we call the Roman Republic. The eventual hollowness of the term finds expression in Caesar’s famous quip, nihil esse rem publicam, appellationem modo sine corpore ac specie (“There is no res publica, only a name without body or form,” Suet. Iul. 77). Rather than take Caesar’s words as an anachronistic declaration of the end of the Republic, Hodgson sees them as an acknowledgment that res publica had lost any agreed upon definition.Footnote ²⁶ This loss ultimately helped enable the sustained usage of the term under the Principate, where it could be redefined in new ways.Footnote ²⁷

Moatti addresses the indeterminacy of res publica from a broader historical perspective.Footnote ²⁸ Beginning her analysis in the fourth century bce, she argues that this term designated nothing more than that which was shared between and debated by citizens. Never a locus of stable signification, its meaning was determined by context on a case-by-case basis. The linguistic conflict that Hodgson ascribes to the last decades of the Republic, in other words, was there all along. Its resistance to definition, embodied in the ambiguity of the word res, was precisely the point.Footnote ²⁹ It conveyed a totality composed of plural elements but did not specify what those elements were or how they ought to interact.Footnote ³⁰ Such questions were negotiated through the interactions of citizens themselves, who had competing perspectives, concerns, and voices. Embodying the manifold tensions that structured Roman society, res publica served as a conceptual nexus around which politics revolved. Whereas Hodgson sees this concept becoming more malleable in the post-Gracchan era, Moatti suggests that it became less so.Footnote ³¹ As members of the elite sought to stabilize and control an increasingly turbulent political process, they began to formalize and delimit the definition of res publica in the service of their own interests. They gradually replaced the old idea of “a community of affairs” with a new idea of a unified and unalterable entity separate from and above the citizenry. They used this idea to establish the legitimacy of the senatus consultum ultimum and other extralegal interventions on behalf of the res publica, which came to function as a normative public authority. It was this public authority, not a “republic,” that became the object of the Augustan restoration.

Despite the departure in their conclusions, Hodgson and Moatti agree that the meaning of res publica was highly contested in the first century bce. The metaphor of the body politic served as one avenue through which Roman thinkers debated its signifying force. The parts of the civic body were never standardized in the political discourse of the Late Republic; one writer might see the senate and people as its core components, while another might focus on physical spaces like the Capitoline or Cloaca Maxima. A speaker might praise a consul as a healer or criticize him as a cancerous growth. These divergent figurations of the res publica gave concrete expression to competing visions of the political and social order. They reflected different conceptions of social structures, public institutions, statesmanship, imperial geography, civic values, and the interconnections between them.Footnote ³² Crafted in dialogue with and in response to each other, they created a rhetorical battlefield marked by experimentation, contradiction, and disagreement. My aim is not to impose order upon this tradition, but instead ask what its disorder reveals about Roman political thought. In prioritizing indeterminacy over constancy, I draw inspiration from Hodgson and Moatti even as I diverge at points from their conclusions.

The linguistic history of res publica underscores the extent to which our own categories of “Republic” and “Principate” are a product of modern scholarship rather than ancient perception.Footnote ³³ Just because Romans never employed these conceptual categories, however, does not mean they lack value. “Roman Republic” remains a useful descriptor of a civic community predicated upon the self-governance of a (male) citizen body that expressed its will through voting and regulated its civic affairs through law and custom.Footnote ³⁴ Most scholars would agree upon the existence of such a community between the fifth and first centuries bce, though key elements of its political form, as well as the dates of their instantiation and demise, remain open to debate. Referring to it as the “Roman Republic” is not to deny its evolution over the span of several centuries; innovations in officeholding, legislation, and voting, as well as shifts in citizenship, social identity, and wealth distribution, produced a governing system in constant flux.Footnote ³⁵ Such changes were compounded and intensified by the acquisition of an empire that stretched across much of the Mediterranean world.Footnote ³⁶ Yet whether we stress continuity or change in our analysis, it is still useful to distinguish between a res publica predicated upon the participation of citizens – even if a narrower swath of citizens than Republican political ideology would suggest – from one in which powers of decision-making were consolidated into the hands of a single individual.Footnote ³⁷ I therefore continue to employ the traditional categories of “Republic” and “Principate,” even as I remain on guard against their distortion of key elements of Roman political culture.

Asserting the existence of the Roman Republic raises the question of its constitutional basis. Just as Romans shied away from adopting an agreed upon definition of res publica, they also avoided formalizing their customs, traditions, institutions, and laws into a single, prescriptive document. Many scholars have nevertheless followed Polybius in describing a Republican constitution based upon three pillars: the senate, magistracies, and popular assemblies.Footnote ³⁸ These institutions were flexible yet also regulated by a complex combination of unwritten customs and written statutes.Footnote ³⁹ Underpinning them, Benjamin Straumann argues, was “the fundamental constitutional principle of the sovereignty of the Roman people,” which took precedence over other political rules and was not open to revision.Footnote ⁴⁰ He suggests that a conceptual apparatus began to arise in relation to this principle in the Late Republic, when emergency politics and extraordinary powers prompted Cicero, in particular, to identify a set of higher order norms to guide political life.Footnote ⁴¹ The failure of the Republic nevertheless underscores the insufficiency of Cicero’s “inchoate constitutionalism” as a regulatory force. An important theme of my study is how Cicero and his contemporaries used figurative speech to circumvent the judicial norms to which they proclaimed allegiance. Asserting the need for “civic amputations” when public law fell short, they ultimately undermined their own constitutional arguments.

In describing the authority of the Roman people as a form of popular sovereignty, Straumann wades into contested interpretive waters. Many have found the concept of sovereignty useful in conveying the wide-ranging powers of the populus Romanus, which was responsible for electing magistrates and conferring the right of command (imperium) upon them, voting on public laws, ratifying foreign treaties, serving on criminal juries, distributing public honors, and fulfilling countless other functions in the res publica.Footnote ⁴² A constitutive body that represented more than the sum of its parts, its acclamatory consent was necessary for the legitimation of electoral, judicial, and legislative outcomes.Footnote ⁴³ More than that, it was regarded as “the sole source of legitimate public opinion” in the Republic, so that its will became the nexus around which public discourse revolved.Footnote ⁴⁴ Every speaker in the contio competed to be seen as the truest representative of the people, as Robert Morstein-Marx has shown, and every piece of legislation had to be publicly construed in its favor.Footnote ⁴⁵ While the actions that supported or undermined its interests were open to debate, the primacy of those interests was not.Footnote ⁴⁶ The conceptual and practical power of the Roman people was encapsulated by the term maiestas populi Romani, a legal formula that arose in the context of external relations but that came to operate internally as well.Footnote ⁴⁷ Embedded within this concept was the “greater-ness” of the Roman people as the organizing principle of civic and foreign affairs. Invocations of the maiestas populi Romani have therefore often been interpreted as ancient expressions of a doctrine which later came to be known as popular sovereignty.Footnote ⁴⁸

Many political theorists nevertheless argue against the operation of popular sovereignty in ancient contexts. They stress the inseparability of this concept from that of the state, which did not exist in the pre-modern world due to the fragmented nature of public authority, the sources of which were neither singular nor stable.Footnote ⁴⁹ The powers of the populus Romanus, for example, were exercised within a political system that also granted authoritative functions to the senate, priestly colleges, courts, and other institutions. Political life, as Luigi Capogrossi Colognesi argues, was characterized by the overlap and competition between these institutions, which operated within a tense and unstable equilibrium.Footnote ⁵⁰ Because this equilibrium was regulated largely by custom, it produced a more complicated field of power relations than public law might suggest. Daniel Lee argues that the doctrine of popular sovereignty was invented in the early modern period to resolve the problem of plural authority; it designated the people as a single, indivisible source of public power conferred upon an inseparable entity called the “state.”Footnote ⁵¹ Imperial Roman jurists helped lay the groundwork for this innovation through their citation of the lex regia, a statute by which they claimed the Roman people had yielded its governing power to the princeps.Footnote ⁵² As Clifford Ando has shown, however, this legal fiction had no basis in the historical Republic. Like many other elements of Roman constitutionalism, it was invented after the fact to justify the political transition it purports to describe.Footnote ⁵³ This reality is reflected in the body politic tradition, which betrays no evidence of a single, agreed upon source of public authority. When Latin writers sought to identify the institution that best approximated the command of mind over body, for example, they arrived at a variety of conclusions. Because the “normative suppositions and metahistorical assumptions” associated with sovereignty risk effacing the nature of their disagreement, I avoid its invocation in this study.Footnote ⁵⁴

Whatever one’s stance on the concept of popular sovereignty, few would deny the ideological and practical importance of the populus Romanus in the Republic. Whether its importance ought to be understood as a genuinely democratic element in the political process, however, is less clear. Challenging the traditional idea that civic affairs were controlled by a narrow senatorial faction, Fergus Millar has made an influential case for the political efficacy of the crowd gathered in the comitia or contio.Footnote ⁵⁵ “Far from being a tightly controlled, ‘top-down’ system,” he argues, “the late Republic was on the contrary a very striking example of a political system in which rival conceptions of state and society … were openly debated before the crowd in the Forum.”Footnote ⁵⁶ His argument has received significant pushback, however, from those who doubt the efficacy of the assemblies as a venue for the expression of popular power. Henrik Mouritsen underscores the extent to which the popular will was suppressed at every stage of the political process.Footnote ⁵⁷ Only magistrates could convene assemblies and only they could propose the legislation upon which the people voted.Footnote ⁵⁸ Voting itself was conducted in blocks to advantage members of the elite, who employed a variety of strategies to discourage turnout.Footnote ⁵⁹ Those of lower classes who did manage to attend assemblies had the option of voting yes or no, but not of making more substantive contributions to legislation.Footnote ⁶⁰ Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp argues that their acclamatory consent ultimately served to reaffirm, reproduce, and renew the political class.Footnote ⁶¹ The distinction can be summed up as one between ideals and practice. Understood as a political concept, the authority of the populus Romanus was paramount. When viewed in relation to the actual composition of the citizen body, it was restricted – though not negated – by an essentially aristocratic political culture.Footnote ⁶²

I have thus far described the Roman Republic as a political community that evolved between the fifth and first centuries bce in relation to the ideal of a self-governing citizen body. Because the Romans did not describe their res publica in these terms, however, they also did not identify a moment at which this system ceased to exist. The question is nevertheless an important one. As Harriet Flower writes, “Our whole picture of what republican politics consisted of in Rome depends on when and how we think it came to an end.”Footnote ⁶³ Commonly cited endpoints include Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49 bce, Caesar’s assassination in 44 bce, the formation of the second triumvirate in 43 bce, the Battle of Actium in 31 bce, or the Augustan Settlement in 27 bce.Footnote ⁶⁴ According to the definition of the Republic offered earlier, the outbreak of civil war between Caesar and Pompey in 49 bce serves as the most fitting endpoint. From this date forward, public institutions no longer served as the primary avenue through which politics was conducted. One could argue that similar conditions prevailed under the so-called First Triumvirate or amid the chaotic episodes of street violence during the late 50s bce. In my view, however, such events signified the faltering but not ultimate failure of the Republic. To identify 49 bce as a pivot point is not to date the beginning of sole rule from this moment. The years between 49–27 bce represent an important period of transition that should not be subsumed under the labels of “Republic” and “Empire.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Nor did the Augustan Settlement mark the definitive instantiation of a new political system called “the Principate.” It represented an initial attempt at explaining the position of a single individual whose authority eventually came to supersede that of other institutions.Footnote ⁶⁶ It took much longer for the fundamentals of this new constitutional order to be worked out and appreciated for what they were. That Romans had begun to recognize a shift in the operation of political power by the late first century bce is nevertheless a central claim of this book.

One argument against equating the rise of Augustus with a significant constitutional shift is that elements of monarchy had long been woven into Republican politics. The regal nature of consular power was fundamental to the theory of the mixed constitution and a recurrent theme of exemplary tales.Footnote ⁶⁷ That an even stronger, singular form of authority was beneficial during emergencies was a principle enshrined in the office of the dictatorship.Footnote ⁶⁸ Antipathy to kingship was also likely not as deeply rooted as was once assumed. Andrew Erskine suggests that such hostility only arose out of encounters with Hellenistic kings during the second century bce.Footnote ⁶⁹ Late Republican thinkers retrojected this sentiment onto their narratives of Archaic Rome, using the expulsion of the Tarquins to mark the beginning of the Roman people’s odium regalis nominis (Cic. Rep. 2.52).Footnote ⁷⁰ Even in the Late Republic, it was often tyrants rather than kings who served as the villains of political discourse.Footnote ⁷¹ It must therefore be proven rather than simply assumed that the position of Augustus was regarded as an aberration in need of conceptual justification. I argue that we find such proof in the figurative language that Latin writers used to represent the res publica. In reimagining the shape of the body politic in response to sole rule between the 20s bce and 60s ce, they implicitly acknowledged and confronted a shift in Rome’s governing form. Their imagery allows us to engage with fundamental questions about historical periodization, the nature of Roman Republicanism, and the transformation of politics under the Principate.

Approaching Roman Republicanism

In examining the political thought of the Roman Republic and its Imperial reception, my work draws on, yet also diverges from, the revival of interest in classical republicanism associated with what has been termed the Cambridge School of intellectual history. This movement is closely tied to Quentin Skinner, who began pioneering the methodology of “linguistic contextualism” alongside J. G. A. Pocock and John Dunn in the late 1960s.Footnote ⁷² Skinner argues that the essential question we confront in the study of a text is what its author, writing at a specific time and place for a specific audience, meant to communicate. The aim of the intellectual historian is “to delineate the whole range of communications which could have been conventionally performed on the given occasion by the utterance of the given utterance, and, next, to trace the relations between the given utterance and this wider linguistic context as a means of decoding the actual intention of the given writer.”Footnote ⁷³ Skinner uses the concept of “intended illocutionary force,” borrowed from J. L. Austin, to situate ideas within the historical and ideological contexts that enabled their expression.Footnote ⁷⁴ Only by considering the discourse communities within which authors operated, as well as how political problems were formulated within those communities, is it possible to ascertain the purpose and significance of their works.Footnote ⁷⁵ Skinner is especially critical of the assumption that canonical texts engage with perennial questions that transcend the historical and cultural particulars of their composition.Footnote ⁷⁶ Contextualizing such texts rather than treating them in isolation is one of the operative principles of his work.Footnote ⁷⁷ That this idea might seem obvious today speaks to the success of the Cambridge School, which has transformed the field of intellectual history over the past half century.Footnote ⁷⁸

The now dominant model of linguistic contextualism is not without its critics. Many have expressed skepticism towards the feasibility of Skinner’s methodology, which requires one to know what an author “was doing” (a phrase that encapsulates both what the author intended to do and succeeded in doing) at any given moment.Footnote ⁷⁹ They doubt whether the intention of a writer can ever be conclusively ascertained, let alone independently verified.Footnote ⁸⁰ Pocock distances himself from this critique by focusing on performance rather than intention.Footnote ⁸¹ What matters to him is not what an author meant to say, but how the modes of discourse available to them delimited the range of speech acts they could perform. Pocock’s focus is therefore on the “political languages” operative at a certain time and place. Such languages provide the “categories, grammar, and mentality” that speakers use to formulate political questions and problems.Footnote ⁸² Because their norms and conventions set limits on what individuals can say or be understood to have said, they exert a powerful influence over the discourse communities in which they operate. At the same time, they do not exist independently of their speakers. Every act of communication represents “a moment in a process of transformation of that [linguistic] system and of the interacting worlds which both system and act help to constitute and are constituted by.”Footnote ⁸³ These “paradigms,” as Pocock terms them, are in constant flux, acquiring new idioms and foregoing old ones in response to diverse cultural forces. When they no longer provide a sufficient description of lived experience, they are set aside in favor of alternatives.Footnote ⁸⁴ Delineating their development, operation, transformation, and abandonment over time is the essence of Pocock’s approach to the history of ideas.Footnote ⁸⁵

The methodologies developed by Skinner and Pocock have had a particularly pronounced impact on the study of classical republicanism. In perhaps his most influential work, Pocock identifies a political language called “Florentine republicanism,” which arose in the works of Niccolò Machiavelli and his contemporaries in the Italian Renaissance.Footnote ⁸⁶ This paradigm was later coopted by thinkers during the English Civil War and American Revolution, who sought a new vocabulary through which to criticize the monarchies against which they rebelled. By tracing the operation of this language across pivotal intellectual and historical junctures, Pocock helped spark what has been called “the republican revival.”Footnote ⁸⁷ His theoretical framework has since been applied to the study of concepts like liberty, constitutionalism, and civic virtue. A subset of scholars within this movement sees classical republicanism as a solution to some of the problems that beset contemporary liberal democracies, including political apathy, disparities in wealth and power, and infringement upon civil liberties.Footnote ⁸⁸ These “neo-republicans” often trace the origins of their conceptual project back to the Roman Republic, where texts like De Republica and events like the Conflict of the Orders prove useful to think with.Footnote ⁸⁹ Insofar as they use the example of Rome to develop a political philosophy with contemporary relevance, however, they employ an interpretive lens that differs from my own. It is therefore worthwhile to distinguish between their “republicanism,” which refers to a specific intellectual tradition, and my “Roman Republicanism,” which denotes a mode of political discourse operative under certain historical and cultural conditions.

Neo-republicanism is perhaps most closely associated with Philip Pettit, who has drawn inspiration from the Roman world to theorize the idea of liberty as non-domination.Footnote ⁹⁰ Critiquing the negative conception of liberty as the absence of interference and the positive conception of liberty as the right to democratic participation, he argues that republican freedom requires individuals to be in a position where no one can arbitrarily interfere in their affairs.Footnote ⁹¹ At stake is not whether anyone actually does interfere, only whether they could. Liberty is hence unrealizable under kings regardless of their character; in Cicero’s words, desunt omnino ei populo multa, qui sub rege est, in primisque libertas; quae non in eo est ut iusto utamur domino, sed ut nul[lo] (“There are certainly many things lacking to that populace which lives under a king; first and foremost is freedom, which does not lie in having a just master, but in having none,” Cic. Rep. 2.43).Footnote ⁹² Pettit’s inclination to locate the origins of liberty as non-domination in the Roman Republic receives historical grounding from Valentina Arena, who traces this concept through the political discourse of the first century bce.Footnote ⁹³ Neo-republicans see liberty as non-domination as the organizing principle of an intellectual tradition unified across time and space by a shared set of texts, values, and ideals.Footnote ⁹⁴ Using the label “republican” to denote ideas in accordance with it, they are primarily interested in the development of a normative system able to inform the practice of politics in the present.Footnote ⁹⁵

It is perhaps unsurprising that scholars have identified a variety of disjunctures between the forward-looking ideals of neo-republicanism and the historical particularities of the Roman Republic.Footnote ⁹⁶ Janet Coleman stresses the extent to which Medieval and Renaissance thinkers created rather than rediscovered the republican tradition, piecing together “from disparate and fragmentary sources what they thought the Roman republic to have been.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Clifford Ando underscores the ease with which the ideals of the Roman Republic proved amenable to monarchical cooptation under the Principate, a lesson that cautions against the uncritical reception of this tradition in the present.Footnote ⁹⁸ They are joined by many others in drawing attention to the deep inequities of the Roman world, which took slavery, patriarchy, imperialism, poverty, and countless other injustices for granted.Footnote ⁹⁹ Why should those invested in contemporary democratic ideals, they ask, look back to a political system organized around and in service to the interests of an elite interested primarily in its own self-perpetuation? “To those who have observed in the Roman republic the rule of an enduring senatorial oligarchy,” Graham Maddox notes, “the choice of Rome as the fount of liberty for the subsequent history of the West may seem curious.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Liberty as non-domination might have resonated with Cicero and his contemporaries, but it was an ideal that could only be realized at the expense of most Roman citizens, provincial subjects, and slaves. In failing to emphasize this fact, neo-republicans risk replicating the inequities they seek to remediate.

Critics of neo-republicanism also question the extent to which contestability and consensus, two prerequisites for the achievement of liberty as non-domination, can be traced back to the Roman Republic. In Pettit’s view, citizens can only achieve freedom if they are able to effectively contest the arbitrary interference of individuals and laws.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Public institutions like courts and assemblies serve as the primary avenues through which such contestation takes place. The decisions rendered by those institutions, which should be made on the basis of “reasoned deliberation,” allow for the effective resolution of conflicts and the realization of consensus.Footnote ¹⁰² Consensus, in turn, enables the successful repetition of this process over time. Joy Connolly argues that Pettit’s model of deliberative democracy rings hollow in the context of the Roman Republic, which prioritized more aggressive forms of conflict and confrontation.Footnote ¹⁰³ She characterizes Republican politics as a field of antagonism between the overreach of the senatorial elite and the resistance of the people. Freedom was rooted in the capacity of individuals to fight back against inevitable incursions by the more powerful. Their resistance might find institutional expression but might also manifest in “the relatively unpoliced territory of protest or mass action.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Neo-republicans, she points out, are often reluctant to consider such forms of popular resistance, which can disrupt the nexus of civic norms and virtues that Pettit terms “civility.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Those who see civility as the foundation of deliberative democracy ignore a key strand of confrontational populism within Roman Republicanism.

For scholars interested in developing a more agonistic model of Roman Republicanism, the tribunate plays a key role. Citing Cicero’s description of the tribunate as “born for sedition” (ad seditionem nata sit, Cic. Leg. 3.19), Maddox underscores the revolutionary possibilities of this office and the vociferous resistance of the senatorial elite to their realization.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ John McCormick makes a similar point in his reading of Machiavelli’s Discorsi, the text that made Livy’s portrayal of the Conflict of the Orders central to classical republicanism. He argues that members of the Cambridge School “seriously distort Machiavelli’s thought and the republican tradition itself” through their de-emphasis on class conflict as a constitutive element of his political vision.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ He underscores Machiavelli’s appreciation of the tribunate as an office that arose out of discord and embodied the resistance of the many to the few. Praising tribunes for encouraging public shouting, street demonstrations, and popular withdrawals from the city, Machiavelli correlates their confrontational actions with the realization of freedom. The value that he places on “public tumult,” McCormick suggests, confirms the insufficiency of rational deliberation and public institutions as checks on elite oppression.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ His reading of Livy shows instead “the necessity of properly institutionalized class conflict for healthy domestic politics within popular governments.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In tracing this strand of Machiavelli’s thought, McCormick joins Connolly in reorienting the republican tradition away from consensus and towards conflict.

The productive, generative nature of class-based struggles has been a central focus of recent scholarship on Roman Republicanism. Equally important to confront, however, is the ease with which such struggles could become destructive and deadly. Daniel Kapust centers this problem in his interpretation of Sallust’s “antagonistic republicanism,” which revolved around conflicts between and within social classes.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Sallust viewed these conflicts positively insofar as they encouraged citizens to achieve rights and rewards compatible with the public good, including liberty, virtue, honor, and glory. When pursued in the name of selfish aims like wealth and domination, however, they turned toxic. It was therefore necessary to implement societal mechanisms that could effectively channel individual ambitions towards collective ends. Kapust focuses on fear of a foreign enemy (metus hostilis) as one such mechanism within Sallust’s texts.Footnote ¹¹¹ Other Roman writers were interested in alternative mechanisms; Cicero stressed the role of oratory in communicating and reinforcing shared civic values, while Livy endorsed the didactic function of exempla in achieving goodwill among citizens.Footnote ¹¹² While Cicero and Livy tended to prioritize consensus over conflict, they joined Sallust in identifying the boundary between productive and destructive conflict as a key problem of political thought. Their works gesture towards a model of Roman Republicanism that is more conflictual, yet perhaps also more fragile, than that theorized by neo-republicans.

My own approach to Roman Republicanism takes methodological inspiration from the Cambridge School while also shying away from the normative political vision associated with neo-republicanism. Drawing on the studies of Skinner and Pocock, I define Roman Republicanism as a linguistic paradigm used to think and talk about the system of governance operative in the res publica between the fifth and first centuries bce. Its boundaries were not coextensive with the dates of the historical Republic, a prerequisite that would exclude Tacitus, Livy, and even Sallust from consideration as Republican thinkers.Footnote ¹¹³ Nor were they defined by the values that later came to dominate the classical republican tradition, an approach that risks overemphasizing those elements of Roman Republicanism with contemporary relevance.Footnote ¹¹⁴ I instead use this term descriptively to denote the questions, problems, and concepts that Romans themselves regarded as politically important. Although such an inclusive definition might risk interpretive dilution, it conveys the fluidity of a discourse community that largely avoided systematizing its terminology, formalizing its constitution, or extrapolating abstract principles from norms and customs. This paradigm originated in a specific time and place, but it ultimately outlasted the downfall of the system that it arose to describe. What enabled the survival of Roman Republicanism under the Principate is a guiding question of my study. I use the metaphor of the body politic to show how its persistence was paradoxically enabled by its transformation.

Metaphor as a Source of Political Thought

The republican revival and the critiques formulated in response to it have transformed the study of Roman political thought, a field that used to be regarded as theoretically impoverished. As the political theorist Sheldon Wolin once wrote, “Although there is no dearth of material for the student of Roman political practices, the student of political ideas must deal with a period notoriously lacking in great political thinkers.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ This attitude can be traced back to the Romans themselves, who often positioned their culture in opposition to the Greek philosophical tradition.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Styling themselves as doers rather than thinkers, they largely resisted the conceptual abstraction favored by Plato and Aristotle.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Those who did make forays into political philosophy, Cicero foremost among them, were later dismissed as derivative translators of Greek originals.Footnote ¹¹⁸ As a result, Roman politics was long understood as a set of practices rarely subjected to critical analysis.Footnote ¹¹⁹ If we set aside the presumption of theoretical abstraction, however, we can find evidence of political thought throughout Latin literature. Romans examined the nature of the res publica across generic boundaries, putting historiography, rhetoric, epic, satire, and other genres in the service of political questions.Footnote ¹²⁰ They implanted lessons about virtue, justice, civic duty, and legitimacy in historically specific yet constantly evolving exempla.Footnote ¹²¹ They communicated their values in public speeches, ritual performances, and religious practices.Footnote ¹²² While they sometimes distilled their ideas into treatises like De Republica and De Clementia, these texts represent the exception rather than norm. They are important but not exclusive contributions to a conversation conducted across countless genres by thinkers of varying backgrounds, intellect, and prestige.

Because the methodology of the Cambridge School insists upon viewing political ideas in relation to the linguistic contexts in which they operate, it is well-suited to the exploration of this discourse community. I also draw inspiration from Dean Hammer, who describes Roman political thought as “the assimilation of different practices, interests, and experiences into symbolic systems that orient how one makes sense of and responds to the political world.”Footnote ¹²³ These symbolic systems go beyond formal institutional arrangements, explicit usages of terms like res publica and princeps, and legal opinions of jurists under the High Empire.Footnote ¹²⁴ They are not worked out in the mind of the philosopher, but rather in the shared experience of a messy and complicated world. It is in Romans’ affective responses to this world, Hammer argues, that the “conceptual core” of their political thought can be found.Footnote ¹²⁵ My work builds on his by identifying figurative speech as an important avenue through which Romans made sense of their shifting political landscape. By tracing their evolving metaphors of the body politic, we can discern a key symbolic system through which they responded to constitutional change. This system sheds new light on an age-old question: how the transition from the Republic to Principate was perceived by those who lived through it.

Central to my study is an understanding of metaphors as historically contingent rather than timeless elements of political discourse. In this respect, I am guided by Hans Blumenberg’s theory of metaphorology.Footnote ¹²⁶ Blumenberg argues against the common perception of metaphors as intuitive ways of thinking that eventually yield to the clarity of logic. He describes them more like imaginative reserves that invest concepts with vitality, explaining, “They have a history in a more radical sense than concepts, for the historical transformation of a metaphor brings to light the metakinetics of the historical horizons of meaning and ways of seeing within which concepts undergo their modifications.”Footnote ¹²⁷ By tracing the evolution of metaphors across time, we can discern shifts in the mental superstructures that guide the formation of new ideas. Figures of speech can therefore provide access to a more gradual model of conceptual change than the paradigm shifts pioneered by Kuhn and Pocock. In the case of Rome, they provide tangible evidence for the incremental adaptation of an old political language to a new constitutional form, one that proceeded so carefully that it never produced a major rupture in discourse. By allowing us to see how Romans responded to a political shift they did not discuss directly, they offer a new perspective on the persistence of Roman Republicanism under the Principate.

Roman writers relied on metaphors of civic organization because they offered a space for exploration and play that was less encumbered by the norms regulating the direct expression of political ideas. As participants in a discourse community that prioritized continuity over change, they discovered that allusive speech facilitated shared conversation. The dynamics of this conversation provide access to the shifting “ways of seeing,” to borrow Blumenberg’s phrase, that eventually allowed the Younger Seneca to refer to the mutatio rei publicae that followed the death of Cato.Footnote ¹²⁸ Seneca does not explain what exactly he means by this phrase, but his willingness to diverge from a normative narrative of political continuity has rightly been identified as a turning point in Roman political discourse.Footnote ¹²⁹ Karin Sion-Jenkis describes it as the first explicit acknowledgment in Latin literature that the Republic had come to an end.Footnote ¹³⁰ My book uses figurative speech to show how earlier thinkers laid the conceptual groundwork for Seneca’s claim.

In examining the symbolic resonance of the body politic, I also respond to recent work by Brian Walters and Hunter Gardner. In The Deaths of the Republic: Imagery of the Body Politic in Ciceronian Rome, Walters treats organic imagery as a key site of rhetorical conflict in the Late Republic.Footnote ¹³¹ He illuminates how metaphors of wounding and healing operate in the writings of Cicero, who provides most of our evidence for this tradition during the early-to-mid first century bce. Walters’ comprehensive study establishes an invaluable foundation for my more selective approach. Because I am primarily interested in figurations of political authority, I make no claim to account for all the corporeal metaphors that appear in Cicero’s works. I instead approach Cicero as one of many thinkers reexamining the relationship between the statesman and res publica at a pivot point of Roman history. Although his outsized influence on the source tradition is unavoidable, it is nevertheless my ambition to foreground the discourse community in which he operated rather than his individual intellectual contribution. Insofar as my focus is on the Julio-Claudian reception of Roman Republicanism, the ramifications my study diverge significantly from those of Walters’.

In Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature, Hunter Gardner considers the role of plague narratives in Latin literature between the Late Republic and Early Empire.Footnote ¹³² She argues that Roman writers exploited the symbolic capacities of pestilence to address the collapse of the social order in the mid-first century bce and evaluate remedies for its recovery. She draws on the work of René Girard to stress “the homogenizing force of contagious disease,” which transforms individual citizens into a heap of corpses.Footnote ¹³³ By leveling the status distinctions that give rise to discord, pestilence emerges as a horrifying yet effective tool in reconstructing a more unified civic body. I draw on her persuasive treatment of this material at key points in my study, though there is relatively little overlap in the texts we consider. My interest in political authority steers me instead towards figurations of statesmanship like the healer and the head of state. By asking what these models can tell us about the implementation of sole rule in the res publica, I engage with a different set of questions than those posed by Gardner or Walters. Our studies work in complementary fashion, however, to assert the fundamental importance of the body politic metaphor to Roman political culture.

My book further expands our knowledge of Roman political thought by using the evolution of single metaphor to reconstruct a discourse community over the longue durée.Footnote ¹³⁴ In an ideal world, this discourse community would encompass every thinker who compared the res publica to an organism to make a point about the nature and operation of political power. Of course, most of these thinkers and their works have been lost to the vagaries of time. Yet there remains much to be learned from putting Cicero in conversation with P. Albinovanus, a rival orator in the trial of P. Sestius, treating G. Valgius Rufus alongside Ovid, and rehabilitating the Elder Seneca and Curtius Rufus as political thinkers. Interweaving these voices and others in a chronological narrative that stretches from the 80s bce to 60s ce, I seek to reconstruct, however imperfectly, a conversation among Latin writers who lived through a transformative period of Roman history and sought to communicate their understanding of it to their peers and posterity. Taken together, they tell the story of how a society deeply committed to Roman Republicanism eventually reconciled itself with the conditions of autocracy.

Chapter Outlines

The conceptual history of the Roman body politic begins in Chapter 1 with the Fable of the Belly, a foundational myth of social organization that Romans linked to the Conflict of the Orders. Legend held that Menenius Agrippa resolved the First Secession of the Plebs in 494 bce by comparing the plebeians to a group of limbs that rebelled against the belly, analogous to the patricians, only to end up starving themselves. When the plebeians realized that their survival was intertwined with that of the belly, they abandoned their revolt in the name of organic harmony. Using the fable to naturalize the hierarchical distribution of power between the senate and people, Menenius Agrippa identified concord as the foundation of civic health. Late Republican thinkers drew on this interpretive framework to explain the problem of discord, which seemed akin to the splitting or doubling of the res publica. While writers like Cicero and Sallust crafted such imagery to lament the loss of civic unity, Catiline used it to justify the acquisition of personal power. Standing on the senate floor in the summer of 63 bce, he described the senate and people as separate bodies that should be governed by separate heads. Cicero interpreted Catiline’s words as those of a tyrant, confirming the transgression inherent in naming oneself the caput populi. Although Catiline’s conspiracy would be put down in a matter of months, the language he used to articulate his ambitions proved more difficult to extinguish.

Cicero counteracted the rhetoric of his adversary by proposing a rival model of the body politic in his consular oratory. Chapter 2 shows how he used medical metaphors to assert the need for an exemplary statesman capable of diagnosing and curing the Republic’s ills. This idea drew upon a well-established moralizing tradition that identified vice as a contagion that had infected Rome’s governing class. Using the corrupted bodies of the Catilinarian conspirators as proof of a figurative civic disease, Cicero framed their deaths as a curative purge. Although he sought to protect a constitutional order that was under threat, he ended up exacerbating the problems he meant to solve. After the conclusion of the Catilinarian Conspiracy, he simply identified new contagions that required expulsion from the body politic. Foremost among them was P. Clodius Pulcher, whose murder on the Via Appia was portrayed as a remedy that the law could not administer. This cycle of violence culminated in Pompey’s sole consulship and Caesar’s dictatorship, two constitutional innovations that were likewise justified through the language of healing. While Cicero could not have foreseen the transition to autocracy, his descriptions of a body politic in urgent need of a healer proved susceptible to appropriation by those less invested in collegial governance than he.

Both Catiline’s model of a head of state and Cicero’s model of a healer made their way into the political language of the Principate, but their Republican histories invested them with divergent Imperial trajectories. Chapter 3 examines the role that each played in Augustan political discourse. Because Cicero had already normalized the figure of the healer, it could soon be incorporated into the burgeoning language of Imperial panegyric. An early example comes from G. Valgius Rufus, whose treatise on medicinal botany opens with a prayer for Augustus to heal the ills of humanity. The regal resonance of the head of state metaphor, in contrast, made it inappropriate for describing the position of the “first citizen.” It is therefore absent in the works of Vergil, Horace, and Propertius, all of whom were highly attuned to the nuances of political representation. The dichotomy of head and body was nevertheless of obvious utility to thinkers seeking to explain the relationship between the princeps and res publica. Livy responded to this quandary by incorporating the head of state metaphor into his Archaic history, investing it with the Republican pedigree that it historically lacked. His first pentad stages its adaptation to Republican politics through the figure of Camillus, who cures a body politic sickened by discord and earns the role of caput rei Romanae. Suggesting that Rome had always needed a head to thrive, Livy pursued a project of historical revisionism that helped make capital imagery available for contemporary usage. When Cornelius Severus and Ovid began using the caput as a term of praise, they confirmed the success of this conceptual rehabilitation.

Although the rise of Augustus prompted the transformation of the body politic metaphor, its figurative potential was only fully realized under Tiberius. Chapter 4 considers the role of Tiberian writers in constructing a normative narrative of civic regeneration under sole rule. Celebrating Augustus for banishing civil war to the distant past, they identified the princeps as both a head of state and healer. Despite their best efforts, however, they struggled to incorporate the transfer of power into this imagistic tradition. Velleius Paterculus chose to portray Augustus and Tiberius as the two heads of the body politic, inadvertently importing a signifier of discord into the representation of the Principate. The idea that discord might have found a new home in the House of the Caesars came into clearer view under Caligula. The instability and inefficacy of his rule prompted the Elder and Younger Senecas, as well as Philo of Alexandria and Curtius Rufus, to return to imagery of an aged, sick, and headless body politic. In doing so, they implicitly acknowledged that the establishment of the Principate might not have been the panacea for which they had hoped. As they began to describe a body politic whose health fluctuated in relation to the virtue of its ruler, they anticipated the transformation of political discourse under Nero.

In Seneca’s De Clementia, the metaphors of the healer and the head of state were finally subjected to critical examination. That their theorization came nearly a century after the transition to sole rule is a testament to the conservative nature of Roman political thought. Chapter 5 puts Seneca in dialogue with his nephew Lucan, both of whom describe a body politic that has changed too drastically to ever regain its earlier form. Seneca portrays Nero and Rome as inextricably intertwined, proclaiming that the former needed strength and the latter a head. Although he frames this arrangement as natural, he elsewhere explores the risks posed by a head that grows sick and surgeon whose scalpel cuts too deeply. The negative manifestations of these increasingly common metaphors of command reappear in Lucan’s Bellum Civile, which uses historical figures to represent competing models of statesmanship. Through the figures of Sulla and Pompey, Lucan stresses the precarity of a body politic dependent upon a healer or head of state for its survival. Yet his critique of these metaphors need not indicate his Republican sympathies or revolutionary impulses. By expressing skepticism towards the ability of the res publica to survive on its own, he joins Seneca in setting aside the fantasy of ancestral refoundation and confronting the ramifications of autocracy in the present.

The Conclusion brings this story up to the so-called Year of the Four Emperors, which served as a practical realization of the fears of civil war latent in Julio-Claudian literature. While the overthrow of Nero exposed the vulnerability of the Imperial body politic, it also confirmed the practical entrenchment of sole rule. For whatever the flaws of the Principate, there was no talk of its abandonment. As Tacitus’ Galba puts it, si immensum imperii corpus stare ac librari sine rectore posset, dignus eram a quo res publica inciperet (“If the huge body of the empire were able to stand and maintain balance without a guide, I would be worthy to be the one from which the res publica began,” Tac. Hist. 1.16.1). Too much had changed, however, for such a counterfactual to ever be realized. This book helps clarify how such a foreclosure of political alternatives became possible. By using figurative speech to adapt the paradigm of Roman Republicanism to the House of the Caesars, Roman thinkers refashioned the ancestral res publica in their own image. Doing so enabled them to respond to the arrival of autocracy without violating the norms of a discourse community predicated upon its denial. Yet it also made it difficult to recover the conditions under which there had ever been an empire without an emperor. Gradually ceasing to speak a political language rooted in collective governance, Roman thinkers effected a conceptual revolution without ever recognizing it as such.

One reason why the transformation of the Roman body politic has escaped scholarly notice is because Julio-Claudian writers went to such lengths to deny the novelty of their imagery. Repeatedly blurring the boundary between the old and the new, they created fictive precedents for the position that Augustus and his successors occupied in the res publica. They thereby avoided the paradigm shift we might expect in the aftermath of Actium. Yet their impulse to incorporate a head of state onto their civic body confirms that they were under no illusions about the constitutional changes wrought in the late first century bce. This recognition might not have been communicated in juridical or constitutional language, but it was given expression in a shared symbolic system. Even as Roman thinkers participated in a discourse community characterized by extraordinary conservatism, they still found ways of acknowledging the revolution through which they lived. Their efforts confirm that no paradigm is ever so entrenched as to forestall the development of new ideas. Recognizing the articulation of those ideas, however, requires us to rethink what constitutes political thought in the first place. I offer this book as an example of what might be gained by pursuing a more expansive approach to Roman Republicanism and its Imperial reception.