The Deaths of the Republic by Walters Brian;

Author:Walters, Brian; [Walters, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2020-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

4

Outliving the Republic

Writing to Atticus in mid-July 59, Cicero bemoans the extra-constitutional compact between Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus: “As things now stand, the state is dying of a new sort of disease. All disapprove, complain, and grieve over what’s been done; everyone feels the same, openly muttering, even groaning aloud, yet no remedy is administered.”1 The reason for this discontented paralysis among the elite, the next sentence explains: “We all suppose that resistance will lead to extermination, yet can see no end to concession apart from death.”2 The stranglehold of the so-called triumvirs on the republic’s traditional political organs is envisioned as a murderous illness that defies all hope of treatment.3 To combat the disease or to give in to its continued onslaught both promise the same bleak outcome—the demise of the body politic—so members of Rome’s political class are left grumbling and complaining, with no clear cure in sight. The diagnosis in the next surviving letter, from a few weeks later, is even more despondent. “About the republic, why mince words with you? It has utterly perished.”4 As the remainder of the letter unfolds, the earlier image of sickness is revealed to have been replaced by a “mild poison” (or maybe “medicine,” lenibus venenis can signify either) but the death of the state is certain all the same.5

This is neither the first nor only time that the res publica was said to have died. In fact, assertions that the state was dead or dying were commonplace in the public discourse of republican Rome and formed a standard part of the political vocabulary. Although rarely pointing to a permanent or irreparable breakdown of the body politic, such suggestions were routinely played upon for persuasive ends. Finality, after all, has always been one of death’s most defining features, even if Rome’s political body, unlike its mortal corollaries, was also portrayed as able to return to life.6 As studies of grief make clear, confrontations with death provoke a mixture of emotions—love, affection, fear, anger, guilt, relief, remorse,7 all of which were conjured at times by imagery of the republic’s end. Indeed, it is this expressive richness more than anything—along with a greater sense of urgency and desperation—that separates the images of the present chapter from other imagery examined thus far. As with claims about violence and disease, references to the state’s death relied on evocative associations of embodiment and experience to sway opinions toward a variety of political ends. Yet their complex emotional resonances facilitated employment in a unique range of contexts. In particular, beyond an obvious utility in invective, images of the dying republic enjoyed frequent use in letters of personal and political consolation. But no matter how employed, such images shared with other invocations of the state’s afflictions a tendentiously partisan nature. Assertions of the republic’s demise gave shape to deep-seated anxieties about the fate of Rome’s traditions and institutions, yet also constructed, through visions of decay, a contentious variety of perspectives on what the political community, imagined as lost, ideally ought to be.

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