Res Publica and the Roman Republic : 'without Body or Form' (9780191083211): 'Without Body or Form' by Hodgson Louise

Author:Hodgson, Louise [Hodgson, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191083211
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2016-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

The current consensus on the rector follows Powell, for whom Cicero’s rector rei publicae is simply an ideal statesman.225 He reappears in the De Republica, where he is placed in direct contrast to the tyrannical Tarquin (Rep. 2.51): whereas the tyrant’s abuse of his power overturns ‘that whole kind of regal community’ (totum genus hoc regiae civitatis), the rector is ‘good, wise, and skilled in civil utilitas and dignitas, the guardian and protector (tutor et procurator), as one might say, of the res publica; for so may be called someone who is truly the guide and pilot (rector et gubernator) of a civitas’.226 Scipio Aemilianus’s audience is advised to be sure they can recognize a rector in the wild, ‘for he is the one who, by counsel and work, can safeguard the civitas’.227 According to Scipio the rector’s main duty is to focus on self-improvement in order to provide an example for others;228 he should know about ius et leges, but for practical reasons rather than a subject of academic interest, and his actual involvement should be strictly limited, since his principal concern is with the stewardship of the res publica.229 And ‘just as the aim of the helmsman is a successful voyage, of the physician, health, and of the general, victory, so this director (moderator) of the res publica has as his aim for his fellow-citizens a happy life, fortified by wealth, rich in material resources, great in glory, and honoured for virtue’.230 Once the prospect of pro-monarchic political theorizing has been dismissed, what remains excites interest for Cicero’s apparent conceptualization of politics as a sort of profession to be practised, along with the possibility of a professional practitioner.231 The rector should probably not be imagined as a single figure or official position, but rather as a generic type (after all, as Laelius says at Rep. 2.67, there are plenty of such men to be found in the Scipionic circle).232 He is therefore an ideal statesman whose task it is to contemplate himself and to guide the res publica by virtue of being extremely wise; he is to have theoretical knowledge of laws and justice, but he is not to involve himself directly, since his task is not the administration of details but rather to ensure that the res publica as a whole remains salva. His role is fundamentally conservative; he works within the system to preserve the traditional res publica; and while circumstances may sometimes necessitate structural adjustments, he brings no grand reforms of the mos maiorum to the table. Rather, he himself is the embodiment of the political structures transmitted to the present by the maiores.233

It seems reasonable to read the ordinary life of Cicero’s rector as a philosophically informed update of the elder Cato’s political persona, especially given explicit Catonian influences elsewhere in the dialogue.234 On Zetzel’s reading, Cicero ‘attempts to combine a historical and traditionalist theory of governmental legitimacy with a rationalist one: he combines, to put it in the starkest terms, Cato with Plato’.235

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