Arethusa

1. INTRODUCTION

Cicero wrote the Philippics in 44 and 43 b.c.e. to attack Mark Antony, who had been Julius Caesar’s closest associate and remained one of the most powerful men in Rome after Caesar’s assassination. These speeches have been analyzed as masterpieces of political invective: Cicero’s evident goal is to weaken and counteract Antony’s influence in public life and to frame his contest with Antony as one between the republic established by the ancestors of the Roman people and the tyranny enacted by Caesar.² The Philippics have received little attention, however, as works that illuminate a central issue in Roman political thought: how to contend with the figure of the powerful individual in the context of collective governance. Cicero’s diatribes against Antony demonstrate that, from the perspective of the ruling class at Rome, the powerful leader was often regarded as dangerous: someone who undermined the standing of his fellow elites and so threatened the right functioning of the community. The depiction of Antony in the Philippics, however, also points to a different vision of the powerful individual, according to which figures like Antony were persistent features [End Page 65] of communal life rather than aberrations from the norm—figures whose bonds with the citizen body were essential to producing and sustaining (rather than destroying) the polity. Antony in the Philippics represents not just a threat to the integrity of the state but the potential for love between rulers and ruled that is always present and, in some sense, crucial to the functioning of the whole.

Cicero’s presentation of Antony reveals two ways of looking at love in political life. According to the first model of love, the leader shows a selfless passion for the well-being of the polity and receives the chaste devotion of the people in return. This type of love shares important characteristics with amicitia: while this term often refers to bonds of mutual obligation between social equals, reciprocal obligations between mass and elite were also vital to republican politics (Morstein-Marx 2004.204–78).³ The second kind of love consists of the people’s desire for the leader and for the leader to fulfill their urges; the leader satisfies his followers by asserting and pursuing his own desires.⁴ While Cicero describes only the first type of love as salutary, the second type nevertheless emerges from his characterization of Antony’s bond with the community. For Cicero, the best leader is defined by self-restraint and self-abnegation, but his argument raises the prospect of a very different kind of leader, one who may appeal to those, either mass or elite, who are insufficiently invested in Cicero’s harsh aristocratic ethics. Antony’s dedication to bodily pleasures allows him to enter into a kind of intimacy, and even equality, with those subordinate to him, and his sexuality fosters the sense of mutual commitment and shared purpose that Cicero sees as essential to the survival of the state in its moment of crisis. By re-assessing the invective in [End Page 66] the Philippics, I demonstrate that these speeches illuminate an alternative model of leadership. According to this model, the behaviors and affective forces that Cicero condemns serve to cultivate and sustain political life in republican Rome.

This essay, then, is not a discussion of Cicero’s political program, nor an argument for Antony’s historical successes in the late republic, but an investigation of the allure of the prominent individual that is implicit in the political thought of the Philippics, even as Cicero warns against it. Examining the Philippics for evidence of political values that Cicero does not share is an example of what Jacqueline Rose defines as reading “politically”: she observes that “to read a writer politically is to unpack the points of uncertainty, to follow internally to a single writer the clash of voices pitted, clamoring, against each other in the political world outside” (1996.36). To elucidate these “points of uncertainty” in the Philippics, I draw on studies of the public significance of the body in classical Athens and...