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Ideology for an Empire in the Prefaces to Cicero's Dialogues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Thomas N. Habinek
Thomas N. Habinek*
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Extract

Ideology is a process as well as a product. To extract a set of political principles or mystificatory arguments from a text and call them ‘ideology’ is to overlook the fact that a text is ideological only insofar as it seeks to affect an audience. As J.B. Thompson has written, in a passage cited with approval by Terry Eagleton, ‘to study ideology…is to study the ways in which meaning (or signification) serves to sustain relations of domination.’ The ideology of a text, such as a dialogue of Cicero, cannot therefore be understood except in strategic relationship to a particular context. And the question that allows us to explore that relationship and thereby to begin to reconstruct the ‘relations of domination’ underwritten by the text is cui bono: to whose advantage is this text constructed and situated as it is?

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 23 , Issue 1-2 , 1994 , pp. 55 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1994

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References

1. Thompson, J.B., Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Cambridge 1984), 4Google Scholar, cited by Eagleton, T., Ideology: An Introduction (London 1991), 5Google Scholar.

2. A. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Mutatio Morum: The Genetics of Cultural Change’, in A. Schiesaro and T. Habinek (eds.), The Roman Cultural Revolution (in preparation).

3. Wallace-Hadrill (n.2 above); Rawson, E., Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic (Oxford 1985Google Scholar).

4. Throughout this paper I use the term ‘aristocracy’ to refer to the ruling elites generally, that is, those who as a group had the power to distribute resources and regulate behaviour. On the multiple definitions and functions of aristocracies, see Kautsky, J., The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill 1982Google Scholar); Powis, J., Aristocracy (Oxford 1984Google Scholar); and Giddens, A., The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge 1985Google Scholar), who also discusses the relationship between allo-cative and authoritative power.

5. Most recent work on the political aspect of Cicero’s treatises treats his writing as reflective rather than constitutive of political and social context. See, for example, Lotito, G., ‘Modelli etici e base economica nelle opere filosofiche di Cicerone’, in A. Giardina and A. Schiavone (eds.), Società romana e produzione schiavistica, 3: Modelli etici, diritto e trasformazioni sociali (Rome 1981), 79–126Google Scholar; Wood, N., The Social and Political Thought of Cicero (Berkeley 1986Google Scholar); Narducci, E., Modelli etici e società (Pisa 1989Google Scholar); and Perelli, L., ll pensiero politico di Cicerone (Florence 1990Google Scholar). Strasburger, H., Ciceros philosophisches Spät-werk als Aufruf gegen die Herrschaft Caesars (Hildesheim 1990Google Scholar), discusses Cicero’s philosophica as an intervention against Caesarianism, but ends up praising them as much for their failure as their success. He writes (6): ‘Als die kompositionelle Einheit gewüdigt, die diese Werkreihe zu bilden bestimmt war, und also Monument der lateinischen Prosa ist sie nicht nur eines der grossen Wunder der antiken Literatur; sie ist auch ein mächtiges Dokument der Geisteskraft, das intellektuellen Mutes und der sittlichen Integrität.’ For another instance of Ciceronian ideology viewed as prescription rather than description, see Habinek, T.N., ‘Towards a History of Friendly Advice: The Politics of Candor in Cicero’s de Amicitia’, Apeiron 23 (1991Google Scholar).

6. For line-by-line analysis see Leeman, A.D. and Pinkster, H., M.T. Cicero, De Oratore Libri III: Buch I (Heidelberg 1981Google Scholar).

7. Wagenvoort, H., Roman Dynamism (Oxford 1947), 119–27Google Scholar; also ‘Gravitas et Maiestas’, Mnemosyne 5 (1952), 287–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Leeman and Pinkster (n.6 above ad loc.) refer to the use of praeclara studia at Cic. Mur. 22 as ‘in andere Bedeutung’. In fact the passage is closely related to De Oratore 1.1, for in Mur. 22 Cicero contends that ‘everything pertaining to the city, all praeclara studia, and the praise and industry of the forum itself reside [latent] in the guardianship and protection of military prowess’. The difference is not in the meaning of praeclara studia but in Cicero’s relative ranking of them and military achievement. Here in De Oratore he acknowledges the importance of the military but begins to move in the direction of regarding culture as the real source of tutela or guardianship, as will be discussed below.

9. Tusc. Disp. 1.1–2: hoc mihi Latinis litteris inlustrandum putaui, non quia philosophia Graecis et litteris et doctoribus percipi non posset, sed meum semper iudicium fuit omnia nostros aut inuenisse per se sapientius quam Graecos aut accepta ab illis fecisse meliora, quae quidem digna statuissent in quibus elaborarent nam mores et instituta uitae resque domesticas ac familiaris nos profecto et melius tuemur et lautius, rem uero publicam nostri maiores certe melioribus temperauerunt et institutis et legibus.

10. On the Roman institution of guardianship or tutela, see Dixon, S. ‘Infirmitas sexus: Womanly Weakness in Roman Law’, Tijdschrift voor Rechtgeschiedenis (= Legal History Review) 52 (1984), 343–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Dixon differentiates between guardianship of children, which is seen by the Romans as protecting property for the children’s own benefit, and guardianship of women, which, at least in early Rome, derives from a desire to exclude women from male prerogatives, but whose restrictive aspects are gradually abandoned during the late Republic and early Empire. Cicero’s metaphor of tutela here inclines toward the child model, although it is perhaps closest to his own idiosyncratic explanation of tutela of women as due to the sex’s ineptitude at planning (propter infirmitatem consilii, Mur. 27). That is, in the case of both women and Greeks he sees guardianship as a means of protecting property against its owner’s mismanagement. On guardianship of women see also Gardner, J.F., Women in Roman Law and Society (London 1986), 5–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On women and colonies, see Joshel, S., ‘The Body Female and the Body Politic’, in Richlin, A. (ed.), Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome (Oxford 1992), 112–30.Google Scholar

11. De Officiis 1.1–2: quamquam te, Marce fili, annum iam audientem Cratippum, idque Athenis, abundare oportet praeceptis institutisque philosophiae propter summam et doctoris auctoritatem et urbis, quorum alter te scientia augere potest, altera exemplis, tamen, ut ipse ad meant utilitatem semper cunt Graecis Latina coniunxi neque id in philosophia solum, sed etiam in dicendi exercitatione feci, idem tibi censeo faciendum, ut par sis in utriusque orationis facultate. quam quidem ad rem nos, ut uidemur, magnum attulimus adiumentum hominibus nostris, ut non modo Graecum litterarum rudes, sed etiam docti aliquantum se arbitrentur adeptos et ad dicendum et ad iudicandum.

12. Bloch, M., Political Oratory in Traditional Societies (Cambridge 1970Google Scholar), esp. introduction; Hopkins, K., ‘Conquest by Book’, in Literacy in the Roman World (Ann Arbor 1991), 143fGoogle Scholar., has some useful remarks on the subject from a Roman perspective.

13. Gellner, E., Nations and Nationalism (Oxford 1983), 14ff.Google Scholar

14. Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, Prologue to Book VI of General History of New Spain, printed with translation in Anderson, A.J.O. and Dibble, C.E. (eds.), Florentine Codex, Introductions and Indices (Salt Lake City 1982), 65.Google Scholar

15. Le rouge et le noir.

16. See T.N. Habinek, ‘Love, Honor, and Possess’, to appear in Schiesaro and Habinek (n.2 above).

17. Gellner (n.13 above), Giddens (n.4 above).

18. Gellner (n.13 above); Giddens (n.4 above); Hobsbawm, E., Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge 1990Google Scholar). On language see in particular Anderson, B., Imagined Communities (Ithaca 1983).Google Scholar

19. Gellner (n.13 above); Giddens (n.4 above).

20. Bourdieu, P., Outline of a Theory of Practice, tr. Nice, R. (Cambridge 1977), 177ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. Bourdieu, (n.20 above); also ‘The Disenchantment of the World’, in Algeria 1960, tr. Nice, R. (Cambridge and Paris 1979).Google Scholar

22. T.N. Habinek, ‘Why Was Latin Literature Invented?’ (unpubl. essay).

23. This may explain why traditional historians have tended to downplay the political impact of Cicero’s writings. See, for example, Habicht, C., Cicero the Politician (Baltimore 1990Google Scholar), with review of earlier opinions, and Mitchell, T., Cicero: The Senior Statesman (New Haven 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Schäfer, M., ‘Cicero und der Prinzipat des Augustus’, Gymnasium 64 (1957), 310–20Google Scholar; Cambeis, H., ‘Das monarchische Element und die Funktion der Magistrate in Ciceros Verfas-sungsentwurf’, Gymnasium 91 (1984), 237–60Google Scholar; Eder, W., ‘Augustus and the Power of Tradition’, in Raaflaub, K. and Toher, M. (eds.), Between Republic and Empire (Berkeley 1990).Google Scholar

25. Gil Robles, J.M., Cicerón y Augusto (Barcelona 1974), 108–10Google Scholar; Schäfer (n.24 above).

26. Wood (n.5 above).

27. Horsfall, N.M., ‘Virgil, History and the Roman Tradition’, Prudentia 8 (1976), 73–89Google Scholar; Habinek, T.N., ‘Science and Tradition in Aeneid 6’, HSCP 92 (1989), 223–56Google Scholar. On Cicero and Horatian panegyric see Schafer (n.24 above).