Joy Connolly

The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome

Founding the state of speech -- Naturalized citizens -- The body politic -- Virtues passionate aesthetics -- Republican theater -- Imperial re-enactments.

Virtue and violence: The historians on politics

In his 1864 book La Cite antique , Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges warned against glorifying ancient narratives of civil government in the fashion of revolutionaries like Robespierre and Desmoulins, who had vainly hoped to re-make modern France in the image of the regime memorialized in Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus: virtuous republics where, Fustel de Coulanges complained, the citizen was the virtual property of a state governed by an austere militaristic code. Latin historical writers no longer command the influence they did in the age of revolutions, but the political questions they pose remain the subject of critically important debate today: the nature of civic virtue, the collective values of the community and the extent of its legitimate claim on the citizen, the role of conflict in domestic and foreign politics, the significance of public speech, and the corrupting power of tyranny. In what would doubtless strike Fustel de Coulanges as an ominous return to the past, some political theorists argue that the republican tradition opens up the possibility of a third way between communitarianism and liberalism, “hope for revitalizing our public life and restoring a sense of community.”

The Promise of the Classical Canon: Hannah Arendt and the Romans

HANNAH ARENDT DIED IN 1975 at the age of 69. 1 She had left Germany, where she studied at Marburg with Martin Heidegger, in 1933; she reached the United States in 1941. She burst into European andAmerican intellectual life in 1951 with her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. She continued to gain attentionwith TheHumanCondition, which appeared in 1958, and she became the object of public notoriety and controversy with her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which she covered for theNew Yorker and published as the book Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Through this period, and into the early 1970s, writing on topics from violence to segregation, Arendt drew deeply on the premodern tradition of political thought and history. These days Arendt is well known among political theorists for her innovative uses of Greek texts. But Arendt is as much a Roman thinker as she is a Hellenic one. Shaped by the tragedies wreaked by the Third Reich, Arendt felt an attraction to the Romans that was heightened by her conviction that they share with us the apocalyptic awareness of supreme evil and the possibility of total war. The Romans felt “the awful extremity of having been thrown into a world whose hostility is overwhelming, where fear is predominant, and from which man tries his utmost to escape.” To Arendt, the Romans and we in modernity, especially Americans, have two things in common. First, we are linked by the experiences of violent rupture through war, displacement, radical change, and the traumatic loss of memory that results from these things. Second, Romans and moderns are both successful (though with very differently instantiated results) at producing novelty through the invention of a political culture that manages to assimilate the newwhile retaining memories of the past. For the Romans and for the American founders (on which more below), this political culture was born along with the choice respectively to invent and invest in tradition.

Being Greek/Being Roman: Hellenism and Assimilation in the Roman Empire

In the second century ce, Greeks living throughout the Roman empire consolidated the Hellenistic Greek invention of the great “classical” past, centred on the history and literature of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries bce, by writing travel guides, building library collections, studying a small list of carefully selected texts, even reviving outdated dialects of spoken Greek. This reconstructed Athens was the primary point of reference in practices of identity formation, especially education, for Greek elites under Rome. Recent scholarship has argued that the pursuit of a “classical,” “Attic” ideal served to separate Greek from Roman, cementing exclusive Greek ownership of a tradition whose cultural glories compensated for the political subordination of the Roman-dominated present. This essay defends a different interpretation of imperial Hellenism. First, it argues, precisely because the Greeks constructed Athens as a universal model of human greatness, classical Hellenism turned out to be a habit available to all, including the Romans who had conquered Greece. If Athens could be claimed as the model for refined human culture on a global scale, it was Roman military might that made its memory and continued cultural circulation possible. Second, the habits of thought and practice advocated by classical Hellenism, especially training in rhetoric and Stoic-style cosmopolitanism, promoted a worldview peculiarly favorable to imperial, unified government. Classical Hellenism thus not only accommodated itself to the demands of empire; it provided imperial elites with a common cultural heritage that justifies and celebrates empire. Like most disciplines, classical philology tends to avoid critical investigations of its own history. The paper concludes with the reminder that some Greek imperial attitudes continue to shape our professional self-image and our own disciplinary uses of the past. It calls for a close look at the way classical Hellenism’s ideological flexibility anticipates the modern academy’s tendency to accommodate current structures of inequality and injustice. Joy Connolly 42 47 I am very grateful to Stephen Hinds and Thomas Schmitz for their invitation to the German-American Frontiers of the Humanities conference for which this paper originated, and for their editorial interventions at a later stage. I would like to thank Michael Peachin for his helpful comments on a draft, and to Jim Porter and Michèle Lowrie for their insights into classicism and Roman Hellenism.