Arendt and the Roman Tradition
Dean Hammer
Despite the variety of interpretations brought to bear on Hannah Arendt, the Greek, and specifically Athenian, contours of her thought remain almost axiomatic starting points in scholarship. Largely unexplored are the Roman aspects, which continually wend their way throughout her writings.1 These Roman influences have implications for how we interpret Arendt. In this chapter, I look at how the Romans help to mediate, in ways the Greeks do not, her paradoxical concerns with newness, on the one hand, and durability, on the other. I look at two Roman strands in Arendt’s thought that revise in important ways the Greek relationship between founding and acting and the role of culture and fabrication.
Founding, Beginning, and Action
One of the aims of Arendt’s thought lies in the recovery of action in the modern world. Arendt is reacting to the forces of commercialism, consumerism, and scientism that reduce our relationship to each other and to the world as behaviors driven by either biological impulses or utilitarian calculations. In contrast to a view of human behavior as motivated by some prior cause, whether biological necessity or a means-ends relationship, Arendt develops a notion of action whose distinguishing characteristic is that it is uncaused. Action springs from the miracle of beginning that lies in our origins as being born, an insight Arendt associates with Augustine and Virgil.
Appraisals of her notion of action invariably focus on its connection to the Athenian polis and her “beloved Greeks.”2 This model of action is given either a Nietzschean spin, seen as a celebration of agonistic display in which individuals, in competitively appearing before others like Homeric warriors on the battlefield, “endow the world with meaning” and “give it a significance and beauty it would otherwise lack,”3 or more of a civic republican guise traced back to Aristotle in which individuals become most human in their ability to act together as political beings.4 Although the Athenian polis continues to be seen by scholars as the “best historical model of a public space” for understanding Arendtian action,5 one quickly encounters its limits in explaining how politics can be something more than “virtuosity” and actually do something.6 We can supplement this Athenian model with what Arendt sees as the paradigmatic models of action in the two foundation legends that would guide Western political thought and, specifically, the American founders: the Hebrew legend of the Israelites and Virgil’s story of Aeneas.
Foundations are political beginnings, moments defined less by agonistic display or already formed habits of civic engagement and more by how a community is born. In On Revolution, Arendt explores most fully the American founders’ uncertainty about how to prepare for “an entirely new beginning.”7 The Israelites provided one model, dating their founding as a people back to the Creation of the universe (and of time) by an eternal God. But in a world that can no longer ground its political life in Creation, the American founders turned to the Romans. The Romans, Arendt claims, provide a “lesson in the art of foundation” and a solution to the “perplexities inherent in every beginning,” a model expressed in its “purest form” by Virgil.8
The perplexities to which Arendt refers lay in the tension between the notion that “an act can only be called free if it is not affected or caused by anything preceding it” and the sense that “insofar as it immediately turns into a cause of whatever follows, it demands a justification which, if it is to be successful, will have to show the act as the continuation of a preceding series, that is, renege on the very experience of freedom and novelty.”9 How is action anything but sporadic bursts that have no relationship to what comes before or after? Stated slightly differently, how can we act within history and how can action be a part of history?
I think it is precisely these questions that led Arendt to look to the Roman experience for an answer. The thought of an absolute beginning—as something created from nothing—is incomprehensible because it abolishes “the sequences of temporality” so that we are left thinking the unthinkable.10 The Hebrew solution to this incomprehensibility lies in locating that beginning in a God who remains outside time. The Romans, too, though not identifying a Creator, seek to locate their origins in mystery. For Cicero, the founders were like gods.11 And what comes before the founding “remains perpetually shrouded in mystery.”12 What is prior to the Roman foundation exists outside history, as a type of “fairy-tale land” inhabited by gods and nymphs in the timelessness of nature.13 It is precisely through “an imaginative interpretation of old tales,” Arendt suggests, that future generations could “come to grips with the mysterious ‘In the beginning.’”14
In describing the American founders’ search for models of founding, Arendt notes that they, with some relief, did not have to stare into the “abyss of pure spontaneity” since the Roman founding is “not an absolutely new beginning.”15 In fact, part of Arendt’s point (contrary to some interpretations16 ) is that action, like its paradigm in founding, always occurs in a world that comes before. Arendt provides us with two different images of what a beginning looks like. One image is of natality, in which the birth of a child brings something new into the world, but “there always was a world before their arrival and there always will be a world after their departure.17 Although the association of political action with natality is often associated with Arendt’s discussion of Augustine, Arendt, in fact, attributes this image to Virgil (and, in turn, to Augustine’s Roman heritage). Arendt traces the image of founding as birth back to Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, which celebrates the reign of Augustus as the beginning of a new order (magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo).18 This new order is one in which a new child and new generation are born into earth.19 The birth of a new age, like the birth of a child, is not an absolutely new beginning, but is a beginning within “the continuity of history.”20 For the Romans, as Arendt suggests, the world’s salvation brought about by Augustus lies not in a divine beginning, but in the “divinity of birth as such.”21 The capacity for beginning, as Arendt argues, “could have become the ontological underpinning for a truly Roman or Virgilian philosophy of politics” in which “human beings, new men, again and again appear in the world by virtue of birth.”22
Arendt provides a second image of beginning, and that is in the interruption of time, between the “no more” of some prior order and the “not yet” of a new order.23 In the founding legends of both the Israelites and the Romans, the interruption of time appears as the gap between liberation from an older order and establishment of freedom through the constituting of a new order.24 In this regard, the Aeneid is the story of the “hiatus” between “liberation from the old order and the new freedom embodied in a novus ordo saeclorum.”25 The lesson that emerges in this recasting of old tales is that freedom is not an “automatic result of liberation.”26 What stands out to the “men of action” who looked to these founding legends was not the “marvelously colorful tales of adventure” but the process by which a yet-constituted people prepare for a new beginning.27
Arendt’s point is that the Roman founding is not the appearance of something from nothing but the marking of human time in the formation of a city. The arrival of Aeneas on the shores of Italy appears as the beginning of time not as a metaphysical moment but as “counting time ab urbe condita.”28 The phrase, which roughly translates as “from the founding of the city,” serves as the title to Livy’s history of Rome and suggests, in Arendt’s interpretation of Virgil, that history begins when there are tales to tell of humans living and acting together. Thus, the Aeneid, as Virgil makes clear in the opening verse, is a song of a man who would found a city (dum conderet urbem).29
There is a larger point I want to make that goes beyond either the Roman or American model of founding. Foremost among Arendt’s concerns for our modern age is how we orient ourselves from the fragments of a past. The Romans suggest one way. They did not see themselves as establishing a new foundation from something unprecedented, but as forming a renewed foundation (erneute Gründung) from something old.30 Arendt describes the Roman founding as an act of rebuilding their community from the annihilating fires of the Trojan war.31 By conceiving of foundations as “reconstructions,” the past could be rescued and made into something new.32 The task of founding appears, thus, not as an “absolutely new beginning,” but as the “resurgence of Troy” and the “re-establishment of a city-state that had preceded Rome.”33
We have thus far looked at how the Roman founding provides a perspective on one aspect of the perplexity of action: that of the incomprehensibility of an absolutely new beginning. The Roman foundation also addresses the second perplexity of action: How, given its authoritative status, does beginning make possible the future experience of freedom? The Romans are noticeably absent in scholarly attempts to answer this question, largely because Roman politics is seen as almost antithetical to Arendtian freedom. Wolin suggests that the Romans conceived of politics as an activity that had to conform to pre-established institutions.34 Canovan characterizes “the Roman experience of foundation” as “a once-for-all affair that establishes a political world and leaves successive generations to carry it on rather than to repeat the experience of action.”35 And Villa sees Arendt as “making a strong case for relief at the passing of authority.”36
But there is little in Arendt’s discussion of the Romans that suggests such a relief. In describing the “sacredness of foundation” for the Romans, Arendt suggests that “the foundation of a new body politic—to the Greeks an almost commonplace experience—became to the Romans the decisive, unrepeatable beginning of their whole history, a unique event.”37 The two main divinities of Rome mirror the Roman answer to the perplexity of beginning: Janus, the god of beginning, and Minerva, “the goddess of remembrance.”38 It is in this relationship to the founding that Arendt argues that auctoritas as a “word and concept” appears.39 Arendt suggests that auctoritas derives from the verb augere, augment, “and what authority or those in authority constantly augment is the foundation.”40 In crediting the Romans with locating authority in the experience of politics, Arendt is drawing a contrast to the Greeks who identify the foundation of rule as lying outside politics: as an architect who is called upon to set up the institutional structures of the state (the laws and constitution) but (like their own artisans) is not an actual part of the community.41 The auctor, the author of Roman politics, is neither the builder nor the Platonic master who gives orders, but “the one who inspired the whole enterprise” and whose “spirit” is reflected in the res publica.42 Auctoritas lies in its connection to the past, both to the original founders and to subsequent generations who continue to augment the founding principles, thus giving some durability to action. Rather than founding being pre-political, as it is for the Greeks, founding for the Romans is itself an ongoing form of action that occurs, as Cicero writes, over “a longer period of several centuries and many ages of men.”43 Roman founding is “not the work of single men,” as Arendt notes, but of “agreement” (der Vertrag) between two groups in conflict, the patricians and plebeians—a sense of agreement that appears in Cicero’s conception of the res publica as a form of societas.44 Wolin, in focusing exclusively on Arendt’s Hellenism, criticizes her for giving us “a politics without the divisive conflicts that have presented the main challenge to politicians” and that have led to the “broadening of citizenship.”45 Arendt does, however, recognize the generative role of conflict in establishing and modifying Roman political life, including, perhaps most importantly, the Conflict of Orders whose “internal civil strife” led to the expansion of citizenship and the establishment of protections.46
Arendt’s use of the Romans gives some depth to Arendt’s conception of action. The association of freedom with “personal display,” as Waldron argues, “tells us very little about what is necessary for politics as inter-action, the politics that involves debate, deliberation, and the making of decision.”47 These interactions depend on institutions and procedures, but more than that, they depend on something that is “elusive and intangible.”48 The Romans provide one way of thinking about the intangible ways in which authority serves to bind people together by reference to a past that remains “present in the actual life of the city.”49 But the Romans do more in Arendt’s thought than stand in for the sanctity of the past; their notion of foundation suggests how beginning can be connected to permanence by conceiving of law, legislation, and institutions as ongoing forms of enactment the arise between people. Moreover, her use of the Romans points to how the negotiation of the tension between beginning and remembering is the touchstone of politics as it orients action to the future.
Culture, Fabrication, and Care
One of the central concerns of Arendt lies in her diagnosis of the modern condition of worldlessness. Worldlessness is not easily defined, but refers to the sense in which “human artifice,” which comprises our home in the world, is no longer seen as shared, secure, familiar, or enduring.50 Artifice refers to the tangible artifacts of human fabrication: roads and buildings by which we organize space, art and literature by which the invisible and fleeting processes of the human imagination are given visibility and permanence, monuments by which the past can be recalled, and laws and institutions by which we bind ourselves to each other. The problem that Arendt confronts is how we can recover our world as a home, as something familiar to us, when the ways by which this human artifice is transmitted—or what Arendt refers to as the “Roman trinity” of tradition, religion, and authority—no longer exist.51 “What has been lost,” Arendt writes, “is the continuity of the past as it seemed to be handed down from generation to generation, developing in the process its own consistency.” Arendt continues, “What we then are left with is still the past, but a fragmented past, which has lost its certainty of evaluation.”52
Villa sounds a note of celebration at the collapse of any claims of the past, suggesting that the elementary problems that face humanity can finally be addressed.53 Fabrication takes a decidedly secondary status in assessments of her thought, seen as reducing value to measures of utility and politics to a “plastic art” that shapes and molds the world.54 Commentators on Arendt have located the recovery of this world in “political action, and only political action.”55 But one of the central problems facing humanity for Arendt is that since we inhabit such a world without stable markers—the artifacts of fabrication—there is little that we share or can talk about. What lies between us, for Arendt, is precisely our cultural world: a world of artificial things that we have endowed with meaning. Curtis, though sensitive to the role of culture and context, seems almost to replace the cultural world of things with the imagination. In Arendt’s account of judging, for example, Curtis notes, “we see the importance of the sheer force of our imagination as it holds our world in common by giving it a certain durability and spatiality. And this we must of course do over and over again.”56 Through this account of the imagination, Curtis sees Arendt as going “a good way toward substantiating her claim” that even with the loss of worldly permanence and stability, we retain the capacity for building and caring for the world.57 As important as the imagination is for Arendt, though, it cannot create a world that endures.
The problem is this: not only do images of fabrication abound in Arendt’s discussion of politics but also worldlessness is itself a problem of our attitude toward the things of this world.58 Fabrication’s appearance as art is “the most intensely worldly of all tangible things” because its durability is not worn out in use.59 In its durability, it stands as a “premonition” of “something immortal achieved by mortal hands” that becomes “tangibly present, to shine and to be seen, to sound and to be heard, to speak and to be read.”60 Works of art are also “thought things,” inspired by “thought,” which, for Arendt, “has neither an end nor an aim outside itself” and is not reducible to a use.61 It transforms the “mute and inarticulate despondency” of feeling and introspection into something public and communicable.62 It transforms the futility of words and deeds, which would be lost the moment they are performed, into something that lasts. Its “living spirit,” what gives it life, must be continually renewed through its contact with, and rebirth in, subsequent generations. And this “living spirit” is made possible by its “condensation” of thought and experience, giving it a “closeness to living recollection” that allows the work of art to be transmitted, remembered, and recalled.63 As Arendt writes, “No remembrance remains secure unless it is condensed and distilled into a framework of conceptual notions within which it can further exercise itself.”64
There is no doubt that action is the hero of Arendt’s political thought. But the attitude toward the world that Arendt hopes to recover is one that she associates with culture and the Romans. In paying closer attention to Arendt’s discussion of the Romans, we can give a little more depth to the role of homo faber in the story that Arendt tells. The issue is not whether fabrication is complementary to action; it is how fabrication may play a part in the recovery of thought and action.65 In understanding this role (or roles) of fabrication, we might gain a better sense of the different ways in which, as Arendt writes, “the human capacity for building, preserving, and caring for a world” can find expression in contemporary politics.66
I know I am cutting against the grain. The modern unleashing of the economic forces of production and wealth, as Arendt argues, could be maintained “only as long as all worldly things, all end products of the production process, are fed back into it at an ever-increasing speed.”67 Even the focus of fabrication changes, from an emphasis on creating durable products to an interest in the process of production, itself.68 With the shift in emphasis from “what” to “how,” and thus the transformation of homo faber from a maker of products to a fashioner of tools and instruments, homo faber is “deprived of those permanent measures that precede and outlast the fabrication process and form an authentic and reliable absolute with respect to the fabricating activity.”69 More than anything, what is lost is an audience. Homo faber’s products no longer have a reference to a public realm where they are valued and beheld (as beautiful, as creative, as unique, and as bold), but have a reference only to measures of efficiency and the private pleasures of the consumer, discarded when they no longer bring that pleasure.70 Our relationship to the fabricated world is defined by two sorts of people: the consumer, who judges items by the gratification they bring when consumed, and the philistine, who judges items in terms of the “immediate usefulness” and “material values.”71
Arendt is speaking to a more general loss of any claims of the past—the obsolescence of old products, the inefficiency of old production methods, the irrelevance of tradition, the loss of common standards of value, and their replacement with individual measures of immediate gratification—so that it is as though we are “living and struggling with a Protean universe where everything at any moment can become almost anything else.”72 Lacking any stable markers by which we know and share the world, we look for certainty in introspection, the “sheer cognitive concern of consciousness with its own content.”73 As Arendt writes, “Man, in other words, carries his certainty, the certainty of his existence, within himself; the sheer functioning of consciousness, though it cannot possibly assure a worldly reality given to the senses and to reason, confirms beyond doubt the reality of sensations and of reasoning, that is, the reality of processes which go on in the mind.”74
Worldlessness is also manifest in our theoretical ventures in which the “living force” of our political concepts gives way to empty formalisms.75 In a particularly instructive passage, Arendt draws a contrast between how we have “faithfully preserved and further articulated until they became empty platitudes” the different Greek images of authority—“such as the statesman as healer and physician, as expert, as helmsman, as the master who knows, as educator, as the wise man”—but have “entirely lost and forgotten” the Roman experience “which brought authority as word, concept, and reality into our history.”76 We have so emptied our concepts of any connection to experience that, as Arendt writes in a passage that parallels her description of our Protean world, “we have no reality, either in history or in everyday experience, to which we can unanimously appeal.”77
Arendt points to one response to this disintegrating public realm that she associates with Rome: the use of philosophy to “teach men how to cure their despairing minds by escaping from the world through thinking.”78 Philosophy becomes the animi medicina, as Cicero writes in the Tusculan Disputations, the art of healing the soul.79 Philosophy, as articulated by Cicero and in turn adopted by such a thinker as Hegel, does not appear as a response to “ reason’s need” but “has an existential root in unhappiness.”80 The “disintegration of reality” and the corresponding “dis-unity of man and the world” create a “need for another world, more harmonious and more meaningful.”81 Cicero, Arendt argues, discovers “the thought-trains by which one could take one’s way out of the world.”82
But Arendt also identifies in Rome a second response to this disintegration of the public realm, and that is the way in which philosophy, as cultura animi—a cultivation of the soul—may return us to the world. Cicero, Arendt suggests, is the first to extend the metaphor of cultivating nature to “matters of spirit and mind.”83 She points, for example, to Cicero’s claim, “Just as a field, however good the ground, cannot be productive without cultivation (cultura), so the soul (anima) cannot be productive without teaching.”84 Arendt associates the Roman notion of cultivation with culture, suggesting a disposition of care for the things of the world that humans have made: monuments, buildings, works of art, political institutions, and laws. The cultivation of the soul, thus, directs us back to, and instills a particular attitude toward, the tangibility of the world.
It is not just by way of philosophy that the Romans extend the idea of fabrication beyond the Greek experience; it is also in their conception of legislation and foundation, which Arendt describes as “the political genius of Rome.”85 Arendt gets to the Roman genius by way of a comparison to the Greeks. For Arendt, Plato and Aristotle “elevated lawmaking and city-building to the highest rank in political life” because in such activities, “men ‘act like craftsmen’: the result of their action is a tangible product, and its process has a clearly recognizable end.”86 There is, in fact, an affinity between Greek philosophy and this image of the political actor as architect, and that is that both act from an ideal: an already formed model to which politics is fashioned to conform. But often overlooked is that Arendt is comparing the Greeks unfavorably to the Romans. The problem is that such an image of the craftsman deprives politics of the openness, uncertainty, and spontaneity that is the centerpiece of human freedom. In employing the image of politics as craft, Plato and Aristotle, as Arendt argues, turn “against politics and against action” by transforming politics into a form of making (poiēsis).87
For the Greeks, law, like founding, is conceived as “pre-political” because it is understood as originating (like the Greek conception of fabrication) in violence from outside the community as it is derived from the lawgiver.88 For the Romans, law is a form of action, established in settlement and agreement. The power of law exists not as a boundary handed down by the lawgiver that defines the space of politics, but as a “perpetual bond” (dauernde Bindung) forged in speech and argument, in which people continually bind themselves together.89 Thus, Arendt notes that lex initially means “intimate connection.”90 Unlike in Athens, where law creates a fixed space in which political activity can occur, itself limiting the ability of political freedom to be extended beyond the confines of the polis, for the Romans the boundaries of political community can continually be expanded and negotiated as political acts, including the incorporation of previous enemies.91
The Roman revision of the Greek boundaries of fabrication and action appear as well in the overlapping relationship of what are seen by Arendt as the respective realms for these activities: the private realm of the oikos and the public sphere of the polis. Brunkhorst, for example, in grouping together the Greeks and Romans, emphasizes the “stable hierarchy” between the “lower” realm with its emphasis on instrumental action and the “higher” realm where men (specifically) experience freedom and achieve glory.92 But for Arendt, the Romans offer a greater balance between the public and private realm, one that emerges in the Roman revision of the Greek conception of glory and immortality. As Arendt writes, the Greek hero, born in the image of Achilles, can achieve greatness only by sacrificing his private attachments. Glory is the celebration of the great individual and the great deed. But for the Romans, born in the image of Hektor, the guarantee of earthly immortality (die Garantie für irdische Unsterblichkeit) is tied to the defense of the household and “the care for the continuation of the family and its glory” (die Sorge um den Fortbestand des Geschlechts und seinen Ruhm).93 The interpenetration of the republican Roman household and politics is seen in a variety of contexts: the public courtyards for Roman houses, the prominent display of ancestor masks in the house that served both private and public functions, and the public celebration of household deities.
The Romans may point to how homo faber might be persuaded to a “change of attitude,” to step back from and take pleasure in his creation.94 This change would not be a “radical turnabout” since, as Arendt suggests, the fabricator would only have to be convinced to “let his arms drop” and prolong the act of beholding the “excellence and beauty” of the model “he had formerly wanted to imitate.”95 In Cicero’s “Scipio’s Dream,” Scipio, in much the same way, is directed to return to earth where he is told that happiness lies in the ability to contemplate that which lies outside one’s body, not as a disavowal of the earth, but as a rejection of the devouring impulses of gratification.96 Cicero’s sense of loss of the res publica as a beautiful painting has less to do with the Platonic loss of the conformity of politics to an ideal and more with a change of attitude that extends to all groups of society and has implications for how we think and act. For Cicero, current generations have failed to maintain (tenere), preserve (retinere), or renovate (renovare) the Republic as a work of art.97 Indicative of the importance of homo faber, absent such care, the mark of human permanence on earth faces “oblivion,” erased from earth and from memory.98
Conclusion
The Romans disrupt our reading of a Hellenized Arendt, alerting us to the resistance of Arendt’s thought to easy classification: we are not just beginners, but rememberers; we are not just actors, but fabricators; and it is not just the polis, but also the res publica, that serves as a model of politics. But how she uses the Romans also tells us something about her own blindspots.
I want to return to her Virgilian reading of the American founding where Arendt makes several interpretive moves. The backdrop of Arendt’s reading is her concern with the emergence of the social question—of how to liberate people from want and misery—that both unleashes the terror of other modern revolutions and is ultimately destructive to politics as a realm of action free from want.99 In her effort to separate violence from politics, she limits the violence of both Virgilian and American origins, suggesting that Aeneas’ war “was necessary in order to undo the war against Troy,” just as the revolutionaries restricted violence to constituting a public realm of its own for the “‘public happiness’ of its citizens.”100 She further minimizes the dislocation of wandering by suggesting that the experience of “mass immigration” was unknown at the time of revolution.101 And she sees in Aeneas’ actions “Virgil’s demonstration of Rome’s famous clementia,” thus freeing future generations from the memory of violence.102 These claims are as incomplete in their depiction of the Aeneid as they are of the American founding.
What emerges from Virgil and gives us insight into America’s founding experience is that the connection between past and future hinges on a paradox. In both mythologies of founding, there is less a constitutional moment of beginning than the dislocating experience of wandering that separates a people from who and where they were before. The sense of a future, which for both Rome and America lie similarly in the promise of a new age, rests on the experience of discontinuity. The power of these narratives is that they provide a basis for the incorporation of new peoples and new territory. But the myth of origins haunts the Roman imagination like it does for Americans. There is a tension to this identity between a new history that rests on a rupture from the old and the continual infusion of new people who bring with them their own histories. Arendt puts her finger on the issue when she suggests that the American myth of a new age in “a land of migrants” casts education in the political role of continually building a new world by helping to “shed an old world and to enter into a new one.”103 Arendt’s discussion of education mirrors the question of how one begins something new in an already constituted world. Reacting to what she sees as the crisis of education, in which children are increasingly immersed in the world, Arendt seeks to “divorce” education from the “realm of public, political life.”104 In this dislocation from the past, the child—the image of newness and beginning—can be gradually introduced to, and given the possibility of renewing, the world. Moreover, in this divorce from a realm in which authority no longer has validity in our modern world, a type of authority modeled by the Romans can emerge—one in which the children are taught that they are “worthy of their ancestors,” and thus worthy of beginning.105 The problem, and I think Arendt understands this better in “We Refugees”106 than in her essay on Little Rock (though she recognizes it in her response to Ralph Ellison), is the sense of history that individuals bear, even with the illusion of a new history.107 My interest is not to revisit the controversies surrounding the Little Rock essay. I only want to suggest that Arendt shares with both the Romans and Americans a struggle to identify a public place for these dislocated histories in the ongoing renewal of a founding identity.
Notes
1 Noel O’Sullivan, “Hannah Arendt: Hellenic Nostalgia and Industrial Society,” in Contemporary Political Philosophers, ed. Anthony De Crespigny and Kenneth R. Minogue (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975), 229: Hellenic nostalgia; Peter Fuss, “Hannah Arendt’s Conception of Political Community,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 157: Athens as last “authentically ‘political’ community in Western history”; Bhikhu C. Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), 57: Arendt’s focus on Athens turns politics into “a theatrical and somewhat pointless activity”; George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), 7: “philosophical incapacity of the Romans”; Patricia Springborg, “Hannah Arendt and the Classical Republican Tradition,” in Hannah Arendt: Thinking, Judging, Freedom, ed. Gisela Kaplan and Clive Kessler (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 15: “desire to legitimise the Western nation-state as heir to the political institutions of Athens”; Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 143: Rome “lacking in the sparkling creativity” to articulate its political experiences, though recognizes importance of Roman model for Arendt; Jürgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 219: “stylizes the image she has of the Greek polis to the essence of politics as such”; David Macauley, “Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Place: From Earth Alienation to Oikos,” in Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology, ed. David Macauley (New York: Guilford, 1996), 117; Dana Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 132: “Arendt’s beloved Greeks” without any reference to Romans; Dana Villa, “Introduction: The Development of Arendt’s Political Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9: Arendt transforms Athens into “ideal type”; Jerome Kohn, “Freedom: The Priority of the Political,” The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 121: Arendt turns to Greeks; Finn Bowring, Hannah Arendt: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 30: Athenian polis as “best historical model of a public space” for Arendt. Discussions of Roman aspects of her thought have been made by Kristie McClure, “The Odor of Judgment: Exemplarity, Propriety, and Politics in the Company of Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig J. Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); John E. Seery, “Castles in the Air: An Essay on Political Foundations,” Political Theory 27, no. 4 (1999): 460–90; Roy T. Tsao, “Arendt against Athens: Rereading the Human Condition,” Political Theory 30, no. 1 (2002): 97–123; Hauke Brunkhorst, “Equality and Elitism in Arendt,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 188, characterizes a as a “neo-Roman” phase in her thought; Dean Hammer, “Hannah Arendt and Roman Political Thought: The Practice of Theory,” Political Theory 30, no. 1 (2002): 124–49; Dean Hammer, Roman Political Thought and the Modern Theoretical Imagination (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 38–77; Dean Hammer, “Authoring within History: The Legacy of Roman Politics in Hannah Arendt,” Classical Receptions Journal 7, no. 1 (2015): 129–39; Patricia Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Caroline Ashcroft, “The Polis and the Res Publica: Two Arendtian Models of Violence,” History of European Ideas 44, no. 1 (2018): 128–42.
2 Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt, 132.
3 Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 11, emphasis in original. See also Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil; Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
4 Springborg, “Hannah Arendt”; Anne Phillips, “Feminism and Republicanism: Is this a Plausible Alliance?,” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000): 279–93; Philip Pettit, “Two Republican Traditions,” in Republican Democracy: Liberty, Law and Politics, ed. Andreas Niederberger and Philipp Schink (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 169.
5 Bowring, Hannah Arendt, 30.
6 Ilya Winham, “Rereading Hannah Arendt’s ‘What Is Freedom?’: Freedom as a Phenomenon of Political Virtuosity,” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 59, no. 131 (2012): 95.
7 7 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 2.210.
8 8 Ibid., 1.152, 2.210.
9 9 Ibid., 2.210.
10 Ibid., 2.208.
11 Ibid., 2.209; Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 201; Cicero De republica 1.12, in Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Republic, On the Laws, trans. Clinton W. Keyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928).
12 Arendt, Life, 2.212.
13 Ibid., 2.214–15.
14 Ibid., 2.203.
15 Ibid., 2.216, 11.
16 It is perplexing to me that commentators interpret Arendt as rejecting a Roman conception of beginning. See J. Glenn Gray, “The Abyss of Freedom—and Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 230: Arendt’s “disappointment” in search for models of action; Robert Carl Pirro, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 83: Arendt rejects the Roman model of foundation in favor of a Greek one. Others simply pass over the Roman model of revolution and founding: Bowring, Hannah Arendt, 75: Rome did not address the idea of beginning for Arendt and the American founders; Daniel Gordon, “‘The Perplexities of Beginning’: Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Revolution,” in The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr and Philip Walsh (London: Anthem Press, 2017), 114–18: no mention of the Romans in discussion of revolution; Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (vi, 217 pages) vols. (London: Routledge, 2001), 68: revolution tied to the rediscovery of truth known to the Greeks; ibid., 69: in discussion of On Revolution, no mention of the Romans; Gordon, “‘The Perplexities of Beginning’” 114–18: no mention of the Romans in a discussion of revolution.
17 Arendt, Life, 1.20. See Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996) for her earliest statement of natality and the world.
18 Virgil, Eclogues, 4.5, in Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough and G. P. Goold, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Arendt, On Revolution, 210–11; also Virgil, Aeneid, 6.792–95 in Virgil, Aeneid. See Seery, “Castles.”
19 Virgil, Eclogues, 4.7–8, in Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid.
20 Arendt, On Revolution, 211.
21 Ibid.; Arendt, Life, 2.212; see Cicero, De republica 1.12 in Cicero, On the Republic, On the Laws.
22 Arendt, Life, 2.216–17.
23 Ibid., 2.204.
24 Arendt, On Revolution, 205; Arendt, Life, 2.204.
25 Arendt, Life, 2.204.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., 2.213.
29 Virgil, Aeneid 1.5 in Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid.
30 Hannah Arendt, Was ist Politik?: Fragmente aus dem Nachlass, ed. Ursula Ludz (München: Piper, 1993), 102.
31 Ibid., 105.
32 Arendt, On Revolution, 211.
33 Arendt, Life, 2.211–12. On the theme of refounding in Livy, see Christina S. Kraus, “‘No Second Troy’: Topoi and Refoundation in Livy, Book V,” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974- ) 124 (1994), 267–89.
34 Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 76.
35 Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 147.
36 Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 158.
37 Hannah Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” in Between Past and Future; Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Press, 1968), 120–21.
38 Ibid., 121.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 122.
41 Arendt, Politik, 109; Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 122.
42 Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 122.
43 Cicero De republica 2.2 in Cicero, On the Republic, On the Laws; also Livy 2.1.2: “successive founders” (deinceps conditores) in Livy, History of Rome, trans. B. O. Foster, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919).
44 Arendt, Politik, 110.
45 Richard Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 293.
46 Arendt, On Revolution, 188.
47 Jeremy Waldron, “Arendt’s Constitutional Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 208.
48 Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 122.
49 Ibid.
50 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 173.
51 Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 125; Arendt, On Revolution, 117.
52 Arendt, Life, 1.212.
53 Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 158.
54 Ibid., 247.
55 Ibid., 11, emphasis in original.
56 Kimberley Curtis, Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 121.
57 Ibid.
58 On the abundance of images of fabrication, see Margaret Canovan, “Politics as Culture: Hannah Arendt and the Public Realm,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994).
59 Arendt, The Human Condition, 167.
60 Ibid., 168.
61 Ibid., 169–70.
62 Ibid., 168.
63 Ibid., 169.
64 Arendt, On Revolution, 220.
65 See Canovan, “Politics as Culture,” for a discussion of the relationship between Arendt’s notion of politics and her understanding of culture.
66 Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 95.
67 Arendt, The Human Condition, 256.
68 Ibid., 296–97.
69 Ibid., 307.
70 Ibid., 307–8.
71 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 194–222.
72 Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 95.
73 Arendt, The Human Condition, 280.
74 Ibid.
75 Hannah Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 17–40.
76 Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 136.
77 Ibid.
78 Arendt, Life, 1.152.
79 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.3.6 in Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. John Edward King (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927).
80 Arendt, Life, 1.153.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid., 1.157.
83 Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” 212.
84 Ibid.; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2.3.13 in Cicero, Tusculan Disputations.
85 Arendt, The Human Condition, 195.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid.
88 Arendt, Politik, 111–12.
89 Ibid., 109.
90 Arendt, On Revolution, 187.
91 Arendt, Politik, 99, 108, 11. Brunkhorst, “Equality and Elitism in Arendt,” 180, 92, for example, sees Roman political freedom as fixed and defined within the walls of the city. Discussions of Arendt’s use of Roman lex include Tsao, “Arendt against Athens,” 108–9; Owens, Between War and Politics I, 77–80; Ashcroft, “The Polis and the Res Publica,” 132–37.
92 Brunkhorst, “Equality and Elitism in Arendt,” 183.
93 Arendt, Politik, 103.
94 Arendt, The Human Condition, 304.
95 Ibid.
96 Cicero, De republica 6.29 in Cicero, On the Republic, On the Laws.
97 Cicero, De republica 1.1–2 in ibid.
98 Cicero, De republica 5.2 in ibid.
99 Arendt, On Revolution, 69.
100 Ibid., 209, 133. Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 223 notes that Arendt “sidestepped the fratricidal violence of Romulus.” See Ashcroft, “The Polis and the Res Publica,” 137–42, for an interesting discussion of how Arendt understood the relationship between violence and politics in the Roman world.
101 Arendt, On Revolution, 139.
102 Ibid., 210.
103 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 170–93.
104 Ibid., 195.
105 Ibid., 189, 194.
106 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in The Jew as Pariah: Je wish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978).
107 Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent (1959), 45–56; also Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 315–18.