CHAPTER FIVE

CICERO'S CONSULAR SPEECHES

Robert W. Cape, Jr.

Great is the name of consul, great is the appearance of one, great the dignity, and great the majesty. In Pisonem 24

Cicero's consulship in 63 B.C. crowned a doggedly ambitious polit­ ical career that has become one of the most memorable in Roman history. In his year as Rome's leading magistrate Cicero reconciled factional strife among the social classes, defeated a threat to the Senate's power, and rescued the city from a potential political and military coup known as the Catilinarian Conspiracy.l He accom­ plished these feats through political rather than military means, by presenting his arguments openly before the Senate, various juries, and the Roman people. For his success, Cicero was named parens patriae, granted the corona civica, and a special thanksgiving was voted in his honor, the first ever granted a civilian for non-military action. 2 Yet Cicero's fame was not due to the fact that he happened to be consul in interesting times, but that he thrust himself into the mid­ dle of fractious domestic political issues and dared to develop-and to articulate- a social policy. His program of concordia ordinum required that he ostensibly balance the competing political and economic inter­ ests of the Senate, equites, and the populus. 3 Oratory was the natural

I Nearly all major works about Cicero contain a discussion of his consulship. Most important are E. Ciaceri, Cicerone e i suoi tempi. 2nd ed. (Genova, Roma, Napoli: Societa Anonima Editrice Dante Alighieri 1939- 1941 ) vol. I: 181-311, M. Gelzer, Cicero. Ein biographischer Versuch (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner 1969): 71 - 104, T. N. Mitchell, Cicero: The Ascending Years (New Haven: Yale University Press 1979): 177-242. For an account based on the speeches but with a completely different approach, see C. Meyer, "Ciceros Consulat," in Cicero. Ein Mensch seiner Zeit, edited by G. Radke (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1968): 61-116. 2 Cat. 4.5, 4.20; Sest. 121 ; Pis. 6. 3 H. Strasburger, Concordia Ordinum· Eine Untersuchung zur Politik Ciceros (Borna-Leipzig: R. Noske 1931; reprint Amsterdam: Hakkert 1956). 114 ROBERT W. CAPE, JR. means to reconcile these interests, for public speech in the forum and Senate compelled the parties to argue their positions according to commonly accepted values and negotiate their differences in the presence of an audience. Oratory had been the traditional vehicle for publicly reconciling competing factions at Rome;4 speeches them­ selves, however, were ephemeral, their arguments subject to the vicis­ situdes of memory. As he had done for nearly twenty years, Cicero published his speeches to ensure that they- and he- would not be forgotten. But the consular orations present a unique challenge for interpretation because Cicero was later concerned that they be read not individually but as a coherent group. In the ·case of these speeches, Cicero was clearly thinking beyond the level of the individual speech to the potential of a collection that represented him as a serious politician. The selection of a group of speeches to present a coher­ ent image of the author as a politician was a unique event.5 Historians and literary critics of the past century have generally dismissed the corpus of consular speeches as revised documents designed to help Cicero save his political career in light of the forming coali­ tion between Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, and the threats of P. Clodius.6 There are two reasons for suspecting revisions: the fact that Cicero does not mention the speeches until he sends them to Atticus in 60, and a deep-seated, eighteenth and nineteenth century positivism that led scholars to believe they could detect and correct perceived infelicities in Ciceronian texts and attribute them to cir­ cumstances based on historical hindsight. 7 Moreover, ancient histo­ rians since Mommsen, emphasizing Realpolitik, have discounted the speeches because they are rhetorical and cannot be trusted as source

4 See F. Millar, "The Political Character of the Classical Roman Republic, 200- 151 B.C.," Journal if Roman Studies 74 (1984): 1-19; idem, "Politics, Persuasion and the People Before the Social War (150- 90 B.C.)," Journal if Roman Studies 76 (1986): I-II; K.-J. Holkeskamp, "Oratoris maxima scaena: Reden vor dem Volk in der politischen Kultur der Republik," in Demokratie in Rom? Die Rolle des Volkes in der Politik der rb'mischen Republik, edited by M. Jehne (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner 1995): 11- 49, and note 9. 5 W. C. McDermott, "Cicero's Publication of his Consular Orations," Philologus 116 (1972): 277- 284. For a general outline of Cicero's consular speeches, see G. A. Kennedy, Art if Rhetoric in the Roman World, 300 B.G.- A.D. 300 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1972): 173-187. 6 See McDermott (1972): 277- 8, n. 3. 7 For a discussion of eighteenth and nineteenth century criticisms of Cicero's speeches, see J. Nicholson, Cicero's Return .from Exile: The Orations Post Reditum. Lang Classical Studies, 4 (Bern: Peter Lang 1992): 1-18.