Nec minoris inpotentiae voces propalam edebat, ut Titus Ampius scribit: nihil esse rem publicam, appellationem modo sine corpore ac specie. Sullam nescisse litteras, qui dictaturam deposuerit. Debere homines consideratius iam loqui secum ac pro legibus habere quae dicat.
No less arrogant were his public utterances, which Titus Ampius records: that the res publica was nothing, a mere name without body or form; that Sulla did not know his A.B.C. when he laid down his dictatorship; that men ought now to be more circumspect in addressing him, and to regard his word as law.
Suetonius, Divus Julius 77
So far, I have emphasized the conceptual elasticity of res publica, exemplified by the rich material supplied by Cicero during his consulship and its aftermath, which allows us to see Cicero working with res publica in remarkably flexible ways and leads to the important conclusion that different perspectives on res publica were more or less equally valid points on a spectrum and individuals were free to select whichever perspective best suited the immediate circumstances, their political persona, and their persuasive goal. My starting point for this chapter is that such positioning becomes especially interesting in a civil war, when victory potentially means not just the victory of particular individuals but also their particular ideological perspectives. Where previous chapters stressed the flexibility of res publica as a concept and the complementarity of the various available interpretations, this chapter is therefore concerned with division and disintegration. It explores the link between language and political change by outlining how res publica fractured along existing fault lines during the final failure of the Republican political system.
On 7 January 49, the senatus consultum ultimum was passed. In response, two of that year’s tribunes, M. Antony and Q. Cassius, fled to Caesar, and Caesar marched his army out of his province and into Italy, where Pompey, entrusted with the command against Caesar, made the strategically sensible but politically upsetting decision to evacuate the country.1 The outcome was a series of civil wars that ended only with Octavian’s victory at Actium in 31, although the fall of the Republic is more often identified with the defeat of M. Brutus and C. Cassius at Philippi in October 42.2 After Caesar’s victory at Pharsalus on 8 August 48 and Pompey’s murder on the orders of Ptolemy XIII, some of Pompey’s supporters (like Cicero) accepted Caesar’s clementia, but others scattered to raise new armies elsewhere. Having pursued Pompey to Egypt and lingered there to meddle with Egyptian politics, Caesar left Cleopatra and her younger brother/husband on the throne and proceeded to defeat Pharnaces II at Zela in 47, Q. Caecilius Metellus Scipio at Thapsus and M. Porcius Cato at Utica in April 46, and finally Gn. Pompeius and T. Labienus at Munda in March 45. This left Caesar free to return to Rome in October 45, where his plans to mount a campaign against the Parthians (who had seized the opportunity to invade Syria at the behest of Caecilius Bassus, a Pompeian/Republican) were cut short by the Ides of March in 44.3 After Caesar’s assassination, his assassins occupied the Capitol; overnight the magister equitum M. Aemilius Lepidus occupied the Forum; and on the following day the surviving consul, Antony, summoned the senate to propose ‘an illogical compromise’: Caesar’s assassins would not be punished, but nor would Caesar’s acta be thrown out wholesale.4 By mid-April, mob violence had driven Cassius and M. Brutus out of Rome; later in the year they left Italy for the Greek East, where they raised funds and armies. Meanwhile the arrival in Rome of Caesar’s grand-nephew Octavian to claim his inheritance from Caesar (and appeal to Caesar’s veterans) gave rise eventually to the ‘Second’ Triumvirate of 43, featuring Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian, and the proscriptions in which Cicero died.5
Unlike the more opaque civil wars of the 80s, we have at least a partial window into the self-justifications of the civil wars of the 40s, thanks to Caesar’s commentarii and Cicero’s letters and speeches, which makes it possible to show how the collapse of Rome’s political sphere impacted on res publica as a concept. It is here that we start to see some of the possible end points of Cicero’s more innovative rhetoric, as all participants in the dissolution of the Roman res publica laid claim to different aspects of what res publica meant. I begin with the explicit ‘Republican’ claim to be fighting in defence of the res publica, a claim that foregrounds res publica as public (that is, political) space structured and defined by movable political institutions. Next, I examine Caesar’s largely implicit claim to have occupied the res publica by virtue of his occupation of Rome, a claim that foregrounds res publica as geographically fixed public property/business. Between these two positions, Cicero exemplifies the middle ground: his initial hope that the res publica might be recovered from Caesar (res publica reciperata) gave way to despair over the res publica amissa, a despair that led the ‘Liberators’ to assassinate Caesar on the Ides of March 44. Caesar’s assassination revealed the political weakness of Caesar’s res publica, which was premised on his presence; in the confused aftermath, the ‘Liberators’ invoked a libera res publica, which expresses political freedom (but not much more) as a necessary quality of the political sphere. Finally I examine Cicero’s attempts to reconstruct a political res publica in the First Philippic, even though his invocation of res publica as rhetorical fiction in later Philippics could only undermine this vision.
The most clearly defined political position in the civil wars of 49–45 bc was occupied by the Pompeian camp, which made a convincing claim (how convincing is shown by its traditional label of ‘the Republican party’) to be defending the res publica.6 This is implicit in several letters where Pompey makes the same claim to act pro re publica as any magistrate fighting a foreign enemy might have made,7 and is explicit in a letter written on 17 February 49 to L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, who had ignored Pompey’s instructions to evacuate Italy and thereby ended up besieged by Caesar at Corfinium.8 Domitius had requested relief, which Pompey (who had previously written to tell Domitius to evacuate Corfinium9) now refused:
Neque enim eorum militum quos mecum habeo voluntate satis confido ut de omnibus fortunis rei publicae dimicem neque etiam qui ex dilectibus conscripti sunt consulibus convenerunt.
I do not have enough confidence in the disposition of the men I have with me to fight a battle on which the whole future of the res publica would be staked, and the levies raised for the consuls have not yet been mustered. (Cic. Att. 8.12D.1)
For Pompey, this was a fight for the res publica—specifically, a fight in which his side was fighting for the res publica. This was not an unreasonable perspective for Pompey to take: he had, after all, been presented with a sword by the consuls and entrusted with defending Rome against Caesar as early as December 50, in response to rumours that Caesar was marching on the city, and the SCU of January 49 had characterized the situation as an emergency and Caesar as a threat to the res publica.10 A private message from Pompey to Caesar transmitted in Caesar’s Bellum Civile similarly emphasizes Pompey’s ‘position as guardian of the constitution’.11 It was sent to Caesar at Ariminum care of the adulescens L. Caesar, son of one of Caesar’s legates, who explained to Caesar that he had been entrusted with a privatum officium:
velle Pompeium se Caesari purgatum, ne ea quae rei publicae causa egerit in suam contumeliam vertat. Semper se rei publicae commoda privatis necessitudinibus habuisse potiora. Caesarem quoque pro sua dignitate debere et studium et iracundiam suam rei publicae dimittere neque adeo graviter irasci inimicis, ut cum illis nocere se sperat rei publicae noceat.
Pompey wished to explain himself to Caesar, to stop Caesar turning to his discredit actions which he had taken for the benefit of the res publica. He had always, he said, regarded the advantage of the res publica as more important than his private interests. Caesar too had a duty laid on him by his position to set aside for the sake of the res publica his passion and resentment, and not to be so angry with his enemies that in the hope of harming them he did harm to the res publica. (Caes. BC 1.8)12
Wistrand detects ‘unmistakeable irony in Caesar’s careful reproduction of Pompey’s characteristically sanctimonious language with its pretension to disinterested loyalty to the res publica’ here,13 and certainly the surrounding narrative of Pompeian deceit and bad faith undercuts Pompey’s perfectly proper sentiments.14 But it is hard to argue, modern attempts to make Caesar into a progressive champion of the Roman underclasses aside,15 that when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the cause that was legally, morally, and politically (if not militarily) stronger did not belong to his opponents. Caesar did not go to war to spearhead a popular revolt of the downtrodden Roman underclasses; rather, he was a rogue general backed by his army in rebellion against the central authority. Cicero’s correspondent Caelius Rufus, when choosing sides, notoriously preferred the stronger over the better side in civil war,16 and even the Caesarian continuator of the Bellum Africanum put speeches invoking the res publica into the mouths of ‘Republican’ commanders like Metellus Scipio and Cato the Younger.17 The legal and political strength of the ‘Republican’ camp derived from: (a) the SCU passed on 7 January 49, through which the consuls, praetors, tribunes, and local proconsuls were called upon to see that the res publica should take no harm, together with other senatorial decrees;18 (b) the explicit support (or at the very least the absence from Rome) of both consuls, a significant number of other magistrates, and the better part of the senate, whose evacuation Pompey had ordered on 17 January.19
The latter point is relevant not just because of the credibility these people gave the ‘Republican’ cause. Rather, it made it possible for the ‘Republicans’ to stake out a compelling position on the spectrum of what res publica could mean. In Chapter 1, I argued that one of the basic meanings of res publica is ‘the political sphere of a given civic community’ and that when res publica is used in this sense, the specifically Roman res publica will be ‘the currently constituted Roman political sphere’. Furthermore, the more granular political insider’s reading (as transmitted especially by Cicero’s speeches De Lege Agraria and Post Reditum) is that shared political institutions, in this case the magistrates, senate, and popular assembly, together constitute the res publica, without which a given community (civitas) will lack both political autonomy and the ability to take political or military initiative. Cicero had his own reasons for expatiating on res publica in this particular way in these particular speeches, but there is no reason to think that his account was fundamentally inaccurate, as partial and skewed as it may have been. This is res publica in the sense of political space, and it is space defined and structured by inherited (or constituted, as in Sulla’s res publica constituta) political institutions within which everyday political activity comprised of horizontal peer-to-peer relationships might be channelled and contained. Pompey’s evacuation of the senior magistrates and senate, first from Rome and then from Italy, therefore left behind a civitas without a res publica. It was impossible to take the popular assembly too (the populus as a whole could not be shipped out of Italy, and probably would not have wanted to be anyway; furthermore, as observed in connection with Sulla’s first march on Rome, laws existed to prevent consuls abroad from treating their armies as a populus able to vote on measures put to them, so comitia could only be held in the designated places in Rome itself20), but in the absence of magisterial imperium and senatorial consilium, Rome was reduced to the same condition as a city like Capua. What remained of the senate was not only unimpressive (note Caesar’s efforts to lure the dilatory Cicero back to Rome)21 but also unimpressed by Caesar,22 and the absence of the consuls left no one to preside over the consular elections.23
The implications for how the Roman res publica was, could, or should be conceived were tremendous. Cicero had spent the 50s personifying the res publica into his own client, protector, and alter ego, a rhetorical fiction endowed with quasi-autonomous agency that might go into exile and return to Rome with him. This was the rhetoric of personal weakness and it seems unlikely that anyone other than Cicero took it very seriously, let alone literally. Now, though, Rome really was without consuls and rather short on senatorial consilium or auctoritas too. These quintessentially Roman institutions were not personifications but were embodied in actual persons—and people could move themselves. Caesar might have the buildings, but Pompey had most of the constituent political elements. Against the concept of a res publica in exile, however, stood the far from minor matter of whether the Roman res publica (qua ‘structured political sphere’) could actually exist at a geographical distance from Rome. The point of its invocation in the De Lege Agraria speeches and the paradox of the Post Reditum speeches had been its physical location in the city; a res publica that literally could get up and leave Rome (even if what this meant in practice was the movement of magistrates and senators) was more than a rhetorical innovation. Cicero, who had previously innovated on the topic to such rhetorical effect, was distraught:
Per Fortunas! quale tibi consilium Pompei videtur? Hoc quaero quod urbem reliquerit; ego enim ἀπορῶ. Tamen nihil absurdius. Urbem tu relinquas? Ergo idem, si Galli venirent? ‘Non est,’ inquit, ‘in parietibus res publica.’ At in aris et focis.
What do you think, for heaven’s sake, of Pompey’s plan? I mean, why has he abandoned the city? I don’t know what to make of it. Yet there was nothing more absurd. You abandon the city? I suppose you would have done the same if the Gauls were coming? ‘The res publica is not’, he says, ‘within house walls.’ But it is in altars and hearths. (Cic. Att. 7.11.3)24
This was written possibly from Formiae on about 21 January 49, early in the crisis. It is not clear whether the letter records a genuine line of Pompey’s or whether Cicero is imagining what Pompey’s argument might be in the circumstances, but the point of what Pompey did or might have said is that the res publica is not compulsorily coexistent with the urbs: the latter is fixed in space, and therefore has a permanent geographical location, whereas the former is vested in individuals and groups, and is therefore geographically flexible, if not wholly untethered. The res publica belongs to (the citizens of) Rome, but need not necessarily be situated within it. Cicero’s knee-jerk reaction, however, is to reject this eminently pragmatic reasoning: the location of the res publica may not be a matter of house walls, but it is tethered to the sacred spaces of the city of Rome. Interestingly, Cicero does not choose obvious political spaces such as the curia or the Forum; unlike political actors, the gods of Rome could not be moved. On the face of it, this is a simple rhetorical contrast: what Pompey said or might be imagined to have said invokes private property, so Cicero retorts by invoking private religion (not just altars, but also hearths). But this should not overshadow Pompey’s argument, which seems to be that anyone who jibes at his course of action is selfishly clinging to their private property in Rome; Cicero’s response is therefore to affirm the importance of such property. Still, Cicero goes on to say, the thought of the urbs without magistrates or senate, and of Pompey on the run, has had a marvellous impact (Atticus will tell him whether this is also the case in Rome): people now think that nothing should be conceded to Caesar.25
The ‘Republicans’, then, occupied the moral high ground. If the res publica could not be evacuated intact from Italy on Pompey’s ships, there was at least very little left for Caesar to work with: ‘what he will do or how he will do it, without senate or magistrates, I don’t know. He will not be able to put up so much as a façade of constitutional behaviour’ (ne simulare quidem poterit quicquam πολιτικῶς).26 Caesar, whose cause was himself (‘And he says he is doing all this for the sake of his dignitas!’27), was shown up as politically isolated against a mass of ideologically motivated establishment figures, of whom Pompey was only one, albeit the greatest.28 Dio describes the care taken by the ‘Republicans’ to maintain constitutional proprieties even in exile from Rome: land was set aside for the auguries, but a new set of magistrates was not elected for 48 because the consuls, although present, had not proposed the lex curiata. Instead, the magistrates of 49 became promagistrates.29 In contrast, a complete set of magistrates had been elected back in Rome under the auspices of a dubiously appointed dictator, Caesar.30 While some of Caesar’s opponents, notably Cicero, may have taken up arms only reluctantly and more as a matter of personal loyalty to Pompey,31 others, like Cato Uticensis, did not follow Pompey as a person but used him to defend an ideological position.32 The pardoned enemies L. Domitius Ahenobarbus and Lentulus Spinther, for example, were captured and released in Italy but went on to join Pompey’s camp.33 (All of this was a political problem for Caesar, but the corresponding military problem for Pompey is obvious: his inability to treat people like Domitius as subordinates, as Caesar could with his legates.34) Their position was clear-cut: they were fighting for the rei publicae causa (if not as the res publica) against a hostis in a civil war, as Cicero characterized it while still vacillating over what he should do, ‘that has arisen not from a conflict in the civic body (ex civium dissensione) but from the audacity of one lost citizen (ex unius perditi civis audacia)’.35
Cicero’s characterization of Caesar as a ‘lost citizen’ is telling, since Caesar’s response to the strong ‘Republican’ position was to frame the struggle not as a war for the res publica against (Pompeian) hostes, but rather as ‘a matter of personal antagonism, inimicitiae’ in which the conflict is really ‘a difference of opinion, a dissensio’ within the res publica,36 Raaflaub’s contentio dignitatis.37 Wistrand observes the absence of res publica from the Caesarian correspondence aiming to convince Cicero to stay out of the fight and observes that in its place Caesar and his supporters appealed instead to the obligations of amicitia. ‘When Caesar adds that it would be correct for Cicero as a bonus civis to stay neutral (abesse a civilibus controversiis), this is clearly an implicit denial of his adversaries’ claim that it is every good citizen’s duty to defend the res publica, that is to join Pompey.’38 Likewise, in Caesar’s own account of his grievances, given at BC 1.7–8 in the form of a speech supposedly addressed to his soldiers at Ravenna after receiving news of the SCU and resulting action against him,39 his complaints are essentially political: he resents the wrongs done to him by his inimici in the past, that they had turned Pompey against him even though he had always supported Pompey’s honor and dignitas, that a novelty had been introduced into the res publica (the suppression by force of the tribunician veto), and that the SCU was an inappropriate response in the current circumstances. The emphasis on Caesar’s inimici and the role of the persuadable Pompey makes Caesar’s claim to be defending his dignitas40 more palatable and enables him to cast the opposition not as a swath of civic-minded citizens but as, first and foremost, Pompey, a former friend poisoned against Caesar by an envious mob of petty politicians. Caesar could therefore claim to be fighting not ‘Republicans’ but only ‘Pompeians’.41
In Chapter 2, I used Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum to outline the relationship that magistrates and promagistrates enjoyed with the res publica. There is a marked shift of emphasis between the Bellum Gallicum and the Bellum Civile, where Caesar’s self-justification to Lentulus Spinther takes a different tack:
Cuius orationem Caesar interpellat: se non malefici causa ex provincia egressum sed uti se a contumeliis inimicorum defenderet, ut tribunos plebis in ea re ex civitate expulsos in suam dignitatem restitueret, ut se et populum Romanum factione paucorum oppressum in libertatem vindicaret.
But Caesar interrupted him (Lentulus Spinther): it was not to do harm that he had crossed the boundary of his province, but to defend himself from the insults of his enemies, to restore to their proper dignity the tribunes who had been expelled from the civitas over the matter, and to restore liberty to himself and the Roman people, who were oppressed by a faction of the few. (Caes. BC 1.22)
The compound here is no longer Caesar and the res publica but instead Caesar and the populus Romanus, both of whom are said to be oppressed and whose libertas requires restoration. Caesar’s self-reported claim is programmatic for the Bellum Civile as a whole; Carter and, following him, Brown identify a grand ring composition created by the speech of the centurion Crastinus at Pharsalus (BC 3.91), who exhorts his soldiers to follow him into this final battle so that their imperator can regain his dignitas and they can regain their libertas.42 This rather improbably elegant speech, as Brown points out, is designed to express the ‘popular acceptance and support’ for Caesar’s expressed cause43 and exemplifies how the BC is constructed ‘to recall and reinforce Caesar’s own political stance’.44 Raaflaub suggests that Caesar’s libertas populi is an expression of his popularis political stance,45 which may be true, but whatever other political overtones exist here, Caesar’s decision to link himself with the populus Romanus can also be read as a forced alternative to the standard ‘self and res publica’ formula of the legitimate magistrate.
Caesar had linked himself with the populus Romanus before in the Bellum Gallicum.46 There, however, he did so largely in international contexts: twice when addressed by non-Roman leaders, where it is those leaders (the pro-Roman Diviciacus and the book’s chief anti-Roman antagonist, Ariovistus) who compound Caesar with the populus Romanus (BG 1.31 and 1.34), and three times in reference to benefits conferred on Ariovistus by the populus Romanus during Caesar’s consulship (BG 1.35, 1.40, 1.42).47 What these references have in common, other than being part of a specific sequence of events in Book 1, is the international context. The Roman res publica was not the sort of corporate political entity to which outsiders might appeal or which might confer beneficia or auxilium upon them. Instead, such interlocutors address the only ‘entity’ that embraces the Roman nation as a whole, the populus Romanus. For foreigners (and for Caesar when diplomatically engaged with foreigners), to deal with Romans was to deal with the populus Romanus. Diviciacus’s appeal and Ariovistus’s provocations gain point from the presence right on their doorstep of the populus Romanus as manifested in Caesar’s army and represented by its commander, Caesar himself. At 4.17, the last Caesar/populus Romanus compound of the Bellum Gallicum explains Caesar’s reluctance to let the trans-Rhine Ubii tribe transport his army across the river in boats as due not just to considerations of safety but also because he considers it ‘worthy neither of his own nor the Roman people’s dignity’;48 it may be that Caesar invokes the populus rather than the res publica here because the proposed indignity would have an immediate impact on a specific section of the populus (that part of it currently enrolled in Caesar’s army).
When Caesar links himself with the populus Romanus in the Bellum Civile, however, the context is not international diplomacy but civil war and the events he narrates are part of Rome’s internal political business, in which context it was both natural and relevant to talk about the Roman res publica. Caesar does invoke the populus Romanus elsewhere in the Bellum Civile: at 1.9, he reports himself writing to tell Pompey that he is upset because, among other things, a favour granted to him by the populus has been snatched away, a complaint recapped at 1.32, when Caesar, having reached Rome, reiterates it to what remains of the senate.49 But set against the standard magistrate/res publica relationship, Caesar’s choice of populus Romanus at BC 1.22 looks dangerously close to an admission of illegitimacy. Caesar cannot now make the magisterial claim to embody the res publica, as he could while proconsul in Gaul, because his command has expired and the various measures taken by the senate and magistrates in response to his invasion have made it clear that he does not. Caesar could have ignored this and claimed to be fighting to liberate ‘himself and the res publica’ anyway, but given the circumstances that would have looked decidedly hollow. Caesar therefore embarks on a subtler strategy: he falls back into the arms of the populus Romanus (which also has the attraction of a faint popularis flavour) and resorts to implying that he would have had such legitimacy if not for the machinations of the opposition, while simultaneously undermining the opposition’s claim to represent the res publica themselves. Hence he makes the pointed complaint that he had been robbed of a gift bestowed by the populus Romanus (six months of his proconsulship and the right to stand for the consulship in absentia, which would have covered his legitimacy gap), while the whole opening section (BC 1.1–6) is designed to show Pompey and friends behaving as the illegitimate factio paucorum Caesar accuses of oppressing the populus at BC 1.22.
When the ‘self and the res publica’ compound eventually appears in Book 3, it is used in quite a different way. Caesar is again communicating with Pompey by way of a captured Pompeian prefect, L. Vibullius Rufus; his proposal is that since the current state of the war is so evenly balanced it might go either way, it would be a good time for them to negotiate peace, for which terms should be sought from the (Caesarian rump) senate and people at Rome. The summary of losses on both sides leads to the conclusion that ‘they should spare themselves and the res publica, because thanks to their reverses they were in their own persons an adequate proof of how great the power of fortune was in war’.50 Here Caesar links himself, Pompey, and the res publica: they should both stop fighting over it, both out of self-interest and in the public interest, not because of what (if anything) they represent but because of the damage done to the res publica by their quarrel. This is very much an insider’s perspective, one elite Roman civis appealing to another de re publica, and it was calculated to put Pompey in a bad light when he rejected Caesar’s disingenuous offer.51 Meanwhile the legitimacy of Caesar’s cause based on the support of the populus Romanus continues to be stressed throughout the text by other people. At 3.11, when one of Pompey’s lieutenants (Lucius Torquatus) gets besieged by Caesar at Oricum, his attempts to convince the locals to defend their own walls are unsuccessful, as they are unwilling to fight ‘against the imperium of the populus Romanus’. Immediately afterwards, Lucius Staberius at 3.12 fails to persuade the people of Apollonia to hand over hostages, ‘close their gates against a consul, or take a decision that went against the judgement of all Italy and the Roman people’.52 Furthermore, Caesar’s continuators go on to compound Caesar with the populus Romanus in the Bellum Hispaniense and Bellum Alexandrinum.53 Fall-back position or not, the resort to the populus had its merits.
Caesar’s invocation of the populus Romanus at BC 1.22 is therefore both marked and a sign of weakness. If Caesar could have made a plausible claim to be the champion of the res publica, or at least to deny outright the claim of his opponents to represent it, he would presumably have done so. What Caesar claims instead, having received Pompey’s confidential message from young L. Caesar, is to have swallowed the insult of a lost gift from the populus in the rei publicae causa and to be willing ‘to descend to any depths and put up with anything for the sake of the res publica’—if Pompey would only agree to go to his provinces, to universal disarmament, and to permit ‘free elections and all the res publica for the senate and people of Rome’.54 As in his letters to Cicero, Caesar’s rejection of the opposition line is implicit, if also unsubtle. He suggests that the res publica is under the illegitimate control of his inimici, presumably the factio paucorum of BC 1.22, and the obvious conclusion to be drawn is that those currently claiming to champion the res publica are only a fraction of the political elite exerting an illegitimate dominance over the political sphere. This serves to undermine the various senatorial decrees passed against Caesar that the ‘Republican’ opposition could use as evidence that Caesar was a hostis. Framing the conflict as a struggle within the res publica rather than a war for it made it safer to reject the stronger ‘Republican’ position through implication rather than outright attack, especially given the state of the political sphere in Rome at the time. While the personal angle might be less compelling than the ‘Republican’ stance, however, it did mean Caesar could afford to acknowledge neutrality and to forgive those who fought against him, which was a valuable political tool.55 Indeed, Cicero brings up Caesar’s self-presentation to defend the Pompeian Q. Ligarius: Caesar had said originally that the war was not a bellum but a secessio, not hostile odium but civile discidium in which both sides wanted the res publica to be salva but deviated from the communis utilitas, partly from consilia and partly from studia.56 Even after Caesar had clawed his way to victory, it remained a viable defence to say that those fighting against Caesar, especially hapless allies like King Deiotarus of Galatia, had thought they were fighting on behalf of the res publica; after all, that was what the senate had been telling them.57
Implied denunciation continues to be the order of the day throughout the Caesarian corpus. I have already mentioned Caesar’s bad faith suggestion at BC 3.10 that he and Pompey should both stop fighting on behalf of the res publica. This might give the correct impression that the most distinctive thing about res publica in Caesar’s account of his civil war is its lack of distinction. Res publica is not absent from the text (that would have been counterproductive, since the Bellum Civile is a work ‘designed to show that his own behaviour was legal and reasonable while that of his opponents was a subversion of the principles of the very Republic which they claimed to be defending’58), but there is a marked lack of the sort of exciting rhetorical tricks to which Cicero resorted in the 50s. Mostly, res publica is placed (as at BC 3.10) in the mouths of Caesar’s opponents, with the underlying aim of depicting them as hypocrites who appeal to the res publica to maintain their political domination and persecute the innocent Caesar.59 So, in the abrupt opening section, the delivery of Caesar’s letter is followed by a senatorial debate in which the opening speakers both have something to say about the res publica:
L. Lentulus consul senatui rei publicae se non defuturum pollicetur, si audacter ac fortiter sententias dicere velint; sin Caesarem respiciant atque eius gratiam sequantur, ut superioribus fecerint temporibus, se sibi consilium capturum neque senatus auctoritati obtemperaturum; habere se quoque ad Caesaris gratiam atque amicitiam receptum. In eandem sententiam loquitur Scipio: Pompeio esse in animo rei publicae non deesse, si senatus sequatur; si cunctetur atque agat lenius, nequiquam eius auxilium, si postea velit, senatum imploraturum.
Consul Lucius Lentulus promised the senate that he would not fail the res publica, if they were willing to express their opinions boldly and forcefully; but if they kept an eye on Caesar and tried to please him, as they had done on previous occasions, he would decide for himself what to do and would not obey the authority of the senate; he too could take refuge in Caesar’s favour and friendship. Scipio spoke to the same effect: Pompey’s intention was to do his duty to the res publica, if the senate would follow him; but if they hesitated and procrastinated they would beg in vain for his help if they wanted it later. (Caes. BC 1.1)
Both men are shown to be making a show of traditional behaviour while trying to coerce the senate into make a firm declaration against Caesar.60 Lentulus is open about his intention to ignore any pro-Caesarian sententia and drops a not very veiled threat to go over to Caesar, while Scipio channels the intentions of the inscrutable Pompey, currently lurking outside the pomerium so as not to sacrifice the imperium attached to the Spanish proconsulship he continues to exercise through legates.61 This is compounded by the ‘abuse’ (convicium) hurled by Lentulus at more moderate views,62 which, together with the ‘fear of the looming army’ (terror praesentis exercitus) and the threats of Pompey’s friends, is said to have forced the majority to vote ‘unwilling and compelled’ (inviti et coacti) for Scipio’s motion: ‘that Caesar should dismiss his army before a certain date; and if he did not, he would be judged to be committing an act hostile to the res publica’.63 Later, in the second book, the ‘Republican’ M. Varro is shown terrorizing the frightened (perterriti) Roman citizens in Spain into promising money, silver, and wheat ‘to administer the res publica’ (ad rem publicam administrandam), exacting more from those civitates he suspects of being friends with Caesar and putting privati on trial ‘who might have spoken in conversation or speeches against the res publica’.64 In contrast, Caesar depicts himself seeking a meeting with Pompey in the interests of res publica et communis salus,65 while the citizens of Auximum refuse to fortify the city against ‘Gaius Caesar, imperator, who deserved well of the res publica’.66 Whereas the ‘Republicans’ invoke the res publica hypocritically, Caesar’s nine years of working for the res publica67 are recognized by the communities in the path of Caesar’s armies.68 In sum, Caesar constructs ‘a contest for Rome and whether it will remain Rome, the republic, the possession of the public, protected by “our men”, or become the private possession of his enemies, men who abandon Rome and throw away their insignia of office’,69 but he does so through innuendo and narrative implication in the Bellum Civile, rather than stating it outright in his letters or reported speeches.
Rhetorically, this is elegant; conceptually, it might seem to add little to res publica. But Caesar’s reserve is striking: it is the challenger in this civil war who stakes his position on a restrained, conceptually conservative version of ‘political reality’. The obvious reason, as suggested above, is that Caesar would have had to strain so hard to make res publica relevant to his actions that he was better off saying as little as possible about it. Understandably, however, his opponents were strident on the topic of their fight for the res publica, so Caesar responded by pretending as far as possible that the civil war was a heightened version of ‘politics as normal’, a pretence furthered by keeping the invocation of res publica to an acceptable minimum on his own behalf and also by downplaying as much as possible just how far Pompey’s evacuation had dismantled the structures of Rome’s political sphere. Caesar’s deliberate textual conservatism does not, however, mean that his conceptualization of res publica added nothing to the debate that no one really knew they were having. This becomes apparent at BC 1.32–3, where Caesar’s unsatisfying first return to Rome (he failed to sweet-talk the senate, faced tribunician opposition, crossed the pomerium to plunder the treasury in the Temple of Saturn against the opposition of that same tribune, got cold feet about addressing the people, and departed the city in anger70) becomes an orderly, if largely wasted, visit. Caesar claims to have dismissed his soldiers beforehand, shunts the summoning of the senate into a discreet ablative absolute (coacto senatu) that conceals just who was doing the summoning and on what authority,71 and reports the speech he had given (docet) to the senate laying out his grievances and proposing a senatorial peace mission to Pompey. This the senate as a body agrees to send, but as individual senators refuse to join, since, according to Caesar, they were afraid of Pompey, who had already made it clear that he did not recognize political neutrality.72 The plunder of the treasury is omitted (‘Caesar’s bad conscience is evident’73); three days of dilly-dallying and the obstruction of the tribune L. Metellus, ‘put up by Caesar’s enemies (inimici) to disrupt this business and to interfere with whatever else he decided to do’, eventually cause Caesar to abandon his original aims and to leave Rome for Gaul.74 Pompey’s threats had rendered this last attempt on Caesar’s part to make peace futile: henceforth ‘it will be war, and the terms that refer to governmental processes are, for the most part, abandoned’.75
Caesar gives the impression that routine channels for public business and communication remain available, albeit blocked by political deadlock, an impression underscored by Caesar’s report of his own speech, in which he complains at length about his inimici (Cato and Pompey are both named), makes disingenuous gestures to his own proven willingness to compromise, and:
Pro quibus rebus hortatur ac postulat ut rem publicam suscipiant atque una secum administrent. Sin timore defugiant illi, se oneri non defuturum et per se rem publicam administraturum.
For these reasons he encouraged and requested them to take responsibility for the res publica and administer it with him. But if they were frightened and ran away, he would not shirk the task and would administer the res publica by himself. (Caes. BC 1.32)76
On the face of it, telling the senate to ‘take up’ the res publica should not be controversial. Naturally, though, Caesar’s account is misleading. Firstly, there was the problem of whether the handful of largely undistinguished senators remaining in Rome could really be considered the ‘senate’. Cicero’s opinion was that it was only a ‘gathering of senators’ (consessus senatorum),77 hence his refusal to attend. This is therefore Caesar asking a body of doubtful legitimacy to collude in administering the res publica ‘with him’, he being a dubiously legitimate proconsul in open revolt against the res publica, as proclaimed by previously passed senatorial decrees and the actions of the consuls. Exactly what Caesar might mean in practical terms by ‘administering the res publica’, other than ‘passing decrees against my inimici, whose unfairness towards me I have just explained’ and ‘sending a “senatorial delegation” to Pompey so that his inevitable refusal will undermine his claim to represent the res publica’, is not obvious, especially given the dearth of magistrates willing and able to carry out the usual civic business. The fundamental point of addressing ‘the senate’ must have been to get its endorsement of Caesar’s take on the civil wars, and the refusal of the senators to comply with this was a definite problem. Caesar implies that fear (of Pompey, presumably) is the only reason the remaining senators might have to be unwilling to work with him; his willingness to shoulder the burden of administering the res publica if they fled might be taken as a pledge to ensure political stability whether or not other political figures were willing to help, but looks a lot more like a threat in the turbulent context indicated by other sources.
What this implies for the conceptualization of res publica requires some rather fine hair-splitting, because the conception being used here is entirely unarticulated, but a number of useful points may be made. The lack of articulation and the refusal to pontificate over whether or not Caesar is dealing with ‘the senate’ or merely an unrepresentative gaggle of senators conceal a problem: what, and where, is the Roman res publica when a significant proportion of the people who embody its constituent institutions have removed themselves from Rome? This might be resolved by taking Cicero as the outlier—by arguing, in other words, that Cicero’s occasional, not very detailed attempts to articulate just what constituted the res publica should not be taken as typical of Roman political thought, which might be more typically represented by Caesar’s understated use of res publica here. If so, any concern for constituent elements might be abandoned and the standard Roman understanding of res publica reduced to an indefinite, unitary, easily personified concept (or, as Morgan prefers, slogan78) that genuinely resisted articulation, except perhaps in a single sentence that boils down to ‘this is a good thing’. This solution might be tempting, or at least simple, but it does Caesar the injustice (he might not see it this way) of accepting uncritically his claim to present a plain, objective, non-innovative account of events. Instead, it is more fruitful to return to the distinction between res publica as ‘space’ (the insider’s perspective, the res publica as an arena within which politicians move and which is defined by its political institutions) and res publica as ‘business’ (the civic property and affairs magistrates were elected to administer, a perspective that fed into popularis/contional oratory in which the literal meaning of res publica is stressed and magistrates are cast as stewards selected by the populus to look after its property). Caesar’s opponents clearly viewed res publica from the former perspective, as the political structures that Caesar’s invasion had displaced, whereas res publica as it appears at BC 1.32 looks more like the latter: the public business routinely administered by magistrates and senate, including sending peace embassies to revolting citizens.
It is important to remember that these are differences of perspective, not policy. In ordinary circumstances, these different perspectives on the res publica would be complementary rather than contradictory; after all, rem publicam administrare (or gerere) was a standard term for any magistrate’s activities that carried no particular political connotations, whatever use the populares made of the implicit relationship between magistrates, public business, and the populus. In periods of political turbulence, however, differences of perspective become significant, and this is particularly true of a civil war in which one side staked its position on the defence of the res publica. Once ordinary political activity gave way to war, pushing both perspectives to their logical extremes resulted in two distinctively different conceptions of what res publica meant. Quite apart from any lingering popularis sympathies, the advantages to Caesar of adopting this perspective were considerable. Caesar and past populares faced similar obstacles (opposition from the senate and fellow magistrates) and so shared a similar strategy even if in pursuit of different aims. The populares had appealed directly to the populus in order to bypass the opposition of senate and fellow magistrates; Caesar in 49, meanwhile, faced the awkward problem that a substantial proportion of the people who constituted the structures of the spatial res publica had removed themselves from Rome. On his chosen perspective, the res publica looks less like a combination of political institutions and more like an amorphous amalgamation of public property (revenues, temples, public monuments) and routine civic business (justice, wars, provincial government), all of which remained to be administered whether the magistrates and senators were present in Rome or not. Consequently, the most charitable version of the reasoning underpinning BC 1.32 seems to be that Caesar, as the most senior quasi-magistrate (troublesome issues of non-prorogued imperium and crossed pomerium aside) currently in Rome, was left with the responsibility of administering the res publica, which would ideally be done in consultation with the senate but was ultimately the business of the magistrates. The co-operation of the senate (what remained of it) would therefore be appreciated, and was certainly to be expected from appropriately dutiful senators, but was not actually necessary: Caesar was competent to keep routine public business ticking over without it. The less charitable reading is that Caesar’s army ensured his competence to administer the res publica whether the senate liked it or not.
Against the untethered ‘Republican’ res publica, then, Caesar opposes a res publica vested in the civic business of the urbs, which he held. Caesar’s line that ‘the res publica is nothing, a mere name without body or form’79 may therefore have been his response to the ‘Republican’ claim that the res publica could get up and leave Rome with them. Wistrand puts it most generously: ‘Caesar’s adversaries thought—or rather some thought and others may have pretended to think—that the war was a war for or against the res publica, that is, on their part, a holy war in defence of a sacred ideal. Caesar saw the war as a conflict between rivals and personal enemies: on one side were himself and his friends, on the other Pompey and his allies. They had corporeal existence, they could be seen. I would like to think that the phrase quoted was Caesar’s spirited answer to those who—as Cicero said—rei publicae sanctissimum nomen opponebant.’80 Spirited or not, it would have been more convincing if the senate had been willing to go along with Caesar at the time. Technically he had relinquished his proconsular imperium by crossing the pomerium to seize the treasury, but he bolstered his position at the end of the year with a dubiously legal fudge (Cicero was not impressed81) that saw him appointed dictator by the praetor M. Lepidus in order to oversee his own election as consul in December 49.82 It is doubtful whether the ‘Republicans’ accepted the validity of this election, but Caesar’s line must have been that propounded uncritically by Meier: ‘Caesar was now consul. His opponents could no longer claim to be the lawful rulers. The republic was with him.’83 In the third book of the Bellum Civile, Caesar’s occupation of the consulship is therefore promoted by the narrative: ‘both foreign and citizen groups recognize Caesar as the legitimate holder of Roman consular power’ and ‘the emphasis on his consulship is aimed at clarifying his position as the civil war against Pompey culminates’.84 It also appears in a letter from Dolabella encouraging Cicero to abandon the ‘Republican’ side:
Satis factum est iam a te vel officio vel familiaritati, satis factum etiam partibus et ei rei publicae quam tu probabas; reliquum est, ubi nunc est res publica, ibi simus potius quam, dum illam veterem sequamur, simus in nulla.
You have done enough for obligation and friendship; you have done enough for your party too and for that res publica which you approved. It is time now to take our stand where the res publica actually is, rather than, by following after that old one, to find ourselves in none. (Cic. Fam. 9.9.2)
For Caesar and his supporters, the physical occupation of Rome and the consulship gave him a claim to occupy and derive legitimacy from the res publica. Meier sees it as ‘a bold use of language to localize the republic in this way; it was no longer just a question of the legitimacy of the magistrates’.85 In fact, locating the res publica firmly and physically in Rome was an obvious counterpoint to the untethered ‘Republican’ alternative, which had fled the city to end up—where? in nulla. Furthermore, focusing on the administration of public business conceals how dramatically Caesar had disrupted Rome’s political structures. This can be seen in the works of Caesar’s continuators, not just in the characterization of docile pro-Caesarian communities and kings as keen supporters of the res publica86 or Caesar’s reported invocation of the res publica while dismissing a military tribune, C. Avienus, during his African campaign,87 but also in two passages in the Bellum Alexandrinum that echo Dolabella’s location of the res publica in Caesar’s camp. The first concerns the chaotic situation in Rome in Caesar’s absence:
Cum in Syriam Caesar ex Aegypto venisset atque ab eis qui Roma venerant ad eum cognosceret litterisque urbanis animadverteret multa Romae male et inutiliter administrari neque ullam partem rei publicae satis commode geri.
On his arrival in Syria from Egypt Caesar learned from those who had joined him there from Rome, as well as from information contained in dispatches from the city, that there was much that was bad and unprofitable in the administration at Rome, nor was any part of the res publica being really efficiently conducted. (Caes. B. Alex. 65)
The reason given was rivalry among the tribunes and lax legionary commanders; the solution, Caesar reportedly saw, would be his immediate return to Rome; and the excuse given for his failure to do so was his belief that it was more important to organize the provinces thoroughly. On the one hand, then, the res publica and its administration is located in Rome, whither Caesar will have to return if he wants to sort out the mess his subordinates have made of the situation. On the other hand, the res publica now requires Caesar’s presence to function properly, since the political isolation that gave Caesar his military edge left him without competent managers to oversee the routine business of the res publica in Rome and Italy. What had previously been administered by the magistrates and senate together, in conjunction with the will of the populus as expressed formally through the comitia, was now reliant on Caesar personally. As long as Caesar still had wars to fight abroad, this would continue to be a problem. So in December 46 Cicero wrote to Trebonius, then on his way to Spain with Caesar, that ‘whereas in the old days people in Rome used to write to their friends in the provinces de re publica, it is now for you to write to me, for the res publica is over there with you’.88 Caesar becomes the avatar of the res publica that Cicero had once considered himself to be, but in a rather more concrete way, since Caesar was now (at least as far as those who supported him, or at least conformed to his regime, were concerned) the sole source of meaningful political initiative. Both public business and political activity had warped around a single figure, and he was only irregularly in Rome.
The second passage reports Caesar’s tart remarks to King Deiotarus, who begged Caesar’s pardon for siding with Pompey on the grounds that he had been compelled to do so by the nearness of Pompey’s armies—and after all, it was not Deiotarus’s business to pass judgement on the disputes (controversaria) of the populus Romanus, only to obey the present possessor of imperium.89 According to the continuator,
Contra quem Caesar, cum plurima sua commemorasset officia quae consul ei decretis publicis tribuisset, cumque defensionem eius nullam posse excusationem eius imprudentiae recipere coarguisset, quod homo tantae prudentiae ac diligentiae scire potuisset quis urbem Italiamque teneret, ubi senatus populusque Romanus, ubi res publica esset, quis denique post L. Lentulum, C. Marcellum consul esset.
In his reply Caesar reminded him of all the many loyal services he himself as consul had rendered to him by official decrees, and went on to point out that his apology could not be accepted as any excuse for his imprudence; a man, in fact, as wise and careful as he was could have known who held the city and Italy, where the senate and people of Rome were, where the res publica was, and finally who was consul after L. Lentulus and C. Marcellus. (Caes. B. Alex. 68)
Senate, people, and res publica are all located in Rome and Italy, which had been held by Caesar at the time when Deiotarus took up arms for Pompey; and not only had Caesar therefore held all three by virtue of occupation, but to cap it all he had been the consul of 48. (Deiotarus would presumably be forgiven for forgetting Caesar’s colleague, P. Servilius Isauricus.) Caesar presents two claims to have held the res publica, one de facto and one de iure, and dismisses completely any implication that there might have been a case to have been made for the legitimacy of the opposition’s claims. When he pardons Deiotarus, the pardon (as represented by Caesar’s continuator) is therefore based on the king’s pre-existing personal ties to Caesar rather than his political excuses.90
It is no coincidence that subtlety slips when the narrative escapes Caesar’s control. Cluett diagnoses the continuators as ‘Romans on campaign abroad’ who saw themselves as fighting foreign enemies and ‘enemies who behaved as foreigners’,91 a combination that ‘gives Caesar’s cause a double legitimacy: not only is he a legitimate commander, as one of his centurions retorts to Scipio (Afr. 45), but he is engaged in a legitimate assertion of Roman power abroad’.92 The authors were personally loyal to Caesar, who emerges from the texts as omniscient, ubiquitous, and supremely rational, even if his troops do not always appreciate this, a portrayal that implies ‘an assumption and acceptance that all power—at Rome and in the field—ultimately rests with Caesar’.93 This was not likely to mollify Caesar’s opponents, but reflects at the very least the views of Caesar’s supporters and, increasingly, reality. Caesar himself was less winning in person than in text, as White’s study of the correspondence between Caesar and Cicero shows: whereas the limitations of letters tended to work out to Caesar’s advantage, especially when he was absent from Italy,94 in face-to-face encounters ‘it was not so easy to pretend that peer relationships were simply dyadic, or to elude direct encounters indefinitely, or to leave requests and controversies unsettled’.95 Caesar’s remark on the insubstantiality of res publica, for example, was transmitted to show his inpotentia by one of his enemies, Titus Ampius, whatever Caesar himself meant by it.96 His abrasiveness was on full display in his response to the tribune Pontius Aquila, who refused to rise for the triumphal procession for Caesar’s Spanish victory in October 45:
indignatus sit, ut proclamaverit: ‘Repete ergo a me Aquila rem publicam tribunus!’ Nec destiterit per continuos dies quicquam cuiquam nisi sub exceptione polliceri: ‘Si tamen per Pontium Aquilam licuerit.’
he was so incensed that he cried: ‘Come then, Aquila, take back the res publica from me, you tribune!’ For several days he would not make a promise to any one without adding, ‘That is, if Pontius Aquila will allow me.’ (Suet. Jul. 78)
There is no ambiguity here. The res publica is something to be possessed, as it is currently possessed by Caesar, who is not going to give it up to a mere tribune or indeed to anyone else. This is the least charitable version possible of what Caesar represents himself as promising to what remained of the senate after marching on Rome: a straightforward vertical relationship between himself (in possession of the potestas formerly exercised by the magistrates as a body, now concentrated on Caesar by virtue of military superiority) and the res publica. There was space in this world view for senators and other magistrates, but only insofar as they were willing to assist and accommodate themselves to Caesar. (He expanded the senate and increased the magistracies, after all.97) Against both the basic premise of popularis activity and Caesar’s own remarks in the Bellum Civile on the topic of returning the res publica to the senatus populusque Romanus, however, there was very little space for the comitia.98 In this new world, the elite owed magistracies and dignitas not to the beneficia of the populus Romanus but to the gratia of Caesar himself.99
If Caesar and his ‘Republican’ opponents each adopted different perspectives on what constituted the res publica, there lay between them a convincing middle ground: despair. Cicero’s letters provide ample evidence of this.100 He has a great deal to say about the res publica, which is dearer to him than anything else;101 he would happily have sacrificed himself to save it from civil war;102 he is uncertain whether ulla res publica will survive,103 or whether there is anything he or anyone else can now do to help it.104 No one had been more affected than he by this disaster to the res publica.105 His perception of res publica here is consistent with that expressed in his less experimental rhetoric: ordinary political structures rooted in a specific civic locale, in this case Rome. He, like L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, had complicated Pompey’s plans for the evacuation of Italy, although unlike Domitius he had not taken up arms in Italy but had instead refused to take command of Sicily and had then done very little in defence of the Campanian coast.106 Writing to Atticus from Formiae in December 50, he had protested that the plan of Pompey and his consilium to send him to Sicily because he had imperium was senseless:
Nec enim senatus decrevit nec populus iussit me imperium in Sicilia habere; sin hoc res publica ad Pompeium refert, qui me magis quam privatum aliquem mittit?
For the senate has not decreed nor has the populus ordered me to hold command in Sicily. If on the other hand the res publica refers this to Pompey, why send me rather than a private individual? (Cic. Att. 7.7.4)
This was written before Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Res publica here functions as a compression of ‘the decrees of the senate and the orders of the populus’, or at least ‘the political will of the community’. It is purely political; there is nothing to tie this concept of res publica down to any specific place, should the senate and populus decide to take to the road. It is also a casual usage, if a slightly odd one. The complaint is that Cicero has not received any formal instruction from any competent element of the political res publica to take his imperium to Sicily, and if Pompey has been empowered to issue such commands then he is not limited to persons in possession of imperium and could choose anyone he wants for a task that Cicero certainly did not want. To say that the res publica had referred the matter to Pompey was another way to say that Pompey had been given overall responsibility for the issue, a minor act of personification that harks back to Cicero’s depiction of Pompey’s relationship with the res publica in the speeches after his exile.
On the face of it, Cicero should have been open (at least on a theoretical basis) to the decision taken by Pompey, and supported by senatorial decrees, to evacuate the political res publica from Rome. The various despairing letters cited above show that this was not the case; Cicero was intensely unhappy about the evacuation of Rome and Italy and eventually threw in his lot with Pompey more as a matter of personal loyalty than political commitment (so he said).107 This is certainly the claim of his Caesarian speeches, which tactfully reflect Caesar’s chosen explanation of the civil wars. In the Pro Marcello, for example, Cicero claims to have followed an individual (Pompey) as a matter of privatum officium108 and describes the war as a confused situation in which both sides had good qualities and many people were unsure what to do.109 His letters bear out the confusion and uncertainty of the time, even if they are less charitable about the participants: Caesar’s supporters are a mob of desperadoes,110 while Pompey’s actions ‘have throughout been destitute alike of wisdom and of courage (nihil actum…sapienter, nihil fortiter); and, I might add, contrary throughout to my advice and influence (consilium auctoritatemque meam)’, Cicero told Atticus, before going on to rehash Pompey’s previous involvement with Caesar at considerable length.111 At this point, Cicero was distinctly unwilling to accept a wandering res publica. This particular letter was written on 18–19 February 49, while Cicero was still coming to terms with the prospect that Pompey might really abandon Italy, and features a revealing theme: rem publicam reciperare, ‘to recover the res publica’. In considering whether to remain in the city, Cicero identifies two issues: the first practical, how far Caesar was to be trusted, and the second moral,
sitne viri fortis et boni civis esse in ea urbe in qua cum summis honoribus imperiisque usus sit, res maximas gesserit, sacerdotio sit amplissimo praeditus, non futurus <sit qui fuerit>, subeundumque periculum sit cum aliquo fore dedecore, si quando Pompeius rem publicam reciperarit.
whether it is the part of a brave man and a good citizen to remain in a city in which he has held the highest offices and commands, has done great things, and been invested with an exalted priestly function, in a reduced status, and in prospect of danger along perhaps with some discredit should Pompey ever recover the res publica. (Cic. Att. 8.3.2)
Since the basic meaning of reciperare is ‘to recover’ (money, persons, territory, things), the phrase either concerns or at least has connotations of an actual repossession: that is, recovering a concrete thing from, it is implied, some other people who have improperly possessed it.112 As Cicero uses it, that thing is clearly located in ea urbe, Rome. Pompey will recover the res publica only when he recovers the city. This is clear from the way Cicero sets out the case against leaving Italy, which turns on Pompey’s imprudence to date and the insufficiency of his preparations for a war in Italy. Having vented his feelings on Pompey’s past political alliances, Cicero expresses a deep pessimism about the war to come. ‘But he may recover (reciperabit) the res publica’, he imagines Atticus saying, to which he retorts: how? ‘Picenum has been lost, the road to the city left open, its entire wealth, public and private, handed over to the enemy. To cap it all, there is no organization (causa), no power (nullae vires), no rallying point (sedes quo concurrant) for those who want the res publica defended.’113 As far as Cicero was concerned, the res publica to be recovered or defended, insofar as it existed at all, was located in the urbs Roma. This supports the point that the ‘Republicans’ and Caesar should be seen as pushing complementary perspectives to extremes (or perhaps trying to divorce the opposite ends of a spectrum) rather than staking their claims on genuinely opposing theologies of state. Cicero, wholly convinced by neither side, was torn between them; he ‘equated the city with the fatherland, and viewed Pompey’s withdrawal, which left the city without Senate or magistrates, laws or courts, and a prey to arson and pillage, as a virtual dissolution of the Republic’.114
Ultimately, rem publicam reciperare was a mirage. The phrase reappeared when Cicero’s decision to stay put was wavering in a letter to Atticus on 2 March 49, in which he balances the horrors of an overseas war against Pompey’s claims to his loyalty. He does not, he says, consider those who have gone abroad to prepare war laudable, although the situation in Italy was unbearable, but he is moved by the thought of Pompey, whose companion in flight and fellow in recovering (reciperans) the res publica Cicero feels he ought to be.115 The result of this sentiment was not happy and the phrase next appears in the Brutus of 46, where it is used in relation to the tumultus for recuperanda re publica during Cicero’s youth, that is to say Sulla’s return from the east, during which various orators died but the leges et iudicia were constituta and recuperata res publica, an interesting party-political stance on the Sullan civil wars in a dialogue containing a not very hidden hint that its addressee should imitate his illustrious tyrant-killing ancestors.116 Meanwhile, the contrast between Cicero’s speeches and his letters following Caesar’s victory at Pharsalus, when Cicero had given up the fight for the res publica, is marked. What stands revealed is resistance on the part of even lukewarm ‘Republicans’ to Caesar’s account of what the res publica was.
This tension underlies the Pro Marcello of 46,117 where Cicero casts Marcellus’s pardon as the return of both Marcellus and himself (his long silence having finally broken) to the res publica,118 just as restoring Ligarius would be a gift to the res publica as well as to Ligarius’s brothers.119 Caesar, he says, has raised a standard (signum) for all those present to hope well (ad bene…sperandum) for the res publica and has shown that he places senatorial auctoritas and the dignitas rei publica before his own dolor or suspiciones;120 it is to his credit that he had wished to see Cicero and the salvaged Pompeians with him in the res publica.121 This praise is undercut as the speech goes on: the welfare of all citizens is now bound up with the welfare of Caesar, which gives Cicero cause for dolor, since the res publica, which should be immortal, is now dependent on the anima of one mortal man.122 It is consequently vulnerable—what if Caesar should fall prey to chance or ill-health or (heaven forbid!) human treachery? How could any god help the res publica then, even if s/he wanted to?123 Caesar should therefore raise up everything that had been overturned by the war: he should restore iudicia and fides, rein in bad behaviour, encourage people to have children,124 and, since his res gestae had embraced cuncta res publica, he should devote himself to ensuring its salus.125 Should Caesar leave the res publica in its current condition, his divina virtus would win only admiration, rather than gloria.126 It remained for Caesar to constituere rem publicam, as Sulla had done, and so win the tranquillitas et otium that Sulla had won.127 Although Sulla is not named, his precedent stands behind the course Cicero advocates: put things back the way you found them, then get out of the way.128 Cicero acknowledges the existence of a res publica, but only one in poor shape. Meanwhile, his private commentary for Servius Sulpicius Rufus was even less sanguine: he had been inspired to speak by the impression of seeing ‘some semblance’ (species aliqua) of ‘a reviving (reviviscens) res publica’ and had thereby forfeited his honestum otium, while escaping Caesar’s displeasure, since Caesar ‘might have thought I did not consider this a res publica if I was silent in perpetuity’.129 This implies that Caesar was still rather sensitive about what people like Cicero thought of his res publica and that he suspected they were not too impressed by it, as indeed Cicero’s underwhelming impression of green shoots confirms.130 Cicero had written to Marcellus too to encourage him to come home: if there was going to be any sort of res publica, Marcellus should be in it; and if not, well, Rome was still the best place to be in exile.131
It might be tempting to read defensiveness into Cicero’s letter to Sulpicius, i.e. that Cicero felt a need to justify his broken silence, in which case this is all the more telling, since Cicero had at least gone so far as to join Pompey abroad. Sulpicius, on the other hand, had remained in Rome after Caesar crossed the Rubicon, was one of the two consulares who had attended the desultory senate meeting that Cicero refused to attend,132 and spent the war quietly outside Italy.133 Furthermore, Caesar had appointed Sulpicius as the proconsul of Achaia;134 he was barely even a lukewarm ‘Republican’ like Cicero, let alone a diehard like Cato. All the same, after Tullia’s death the following year, Sulpicius wrote to console Cicero with the thoughtful recommendation to tell himself that
illam, quam diu ei opus fuerit, vixisse, una cum re publica floruisse, te, patrem suum, praetorem consulem augurem vidisse, adulescentibus primariis nuptam fuisse, omnibus bonis prope perfunctam esse, cum res publica occideret vita excessisse.
she lived as long as it was well for her to live, and that she and the res publica flourished together. She saw you, her father, praetor, consul, and augur. She was married to young men of distinction. Almost all that life can give, she enjoyed, and she left life when the res publica was ruined. (Cic. Fam. 4.5.5)
Cicero should not, he adds, give people reason to think his mourning is for Tullia so much as for the rei publicae tempora and the victory of others.135 Sulpicius’s attitude is mirrored in Cicero’s reply, in which Cicero points out that the loss of the res publica only makes his condition worse. Whereas former bereaved statesmen could be consoled by their dignitas derived ex re publica, this had been snatched away from Cicero; his sole remaining comfort, given the current state of the Forum and the curia, had been his daughter. In the past, he had withdrawn a re publica to the sanctuary of his domus, but he could not now seek refuge ad rem publicam from his domestic grief. Both domus and Forum gave him dolor, and so he avoided both.136 He was looking forward to seeing Sulpicius soon, however, so that they could discuss how best to behave at a time when everything had to be accommodated to the wishes of a single man—a man prudens and liberalis, no enemy of Cicero’s and very friendly to Sulpicius, but nonetheless in need of consideration.137 This is res publica perceived as political space, as Cicero’s liberal use of prepositions indicates. Stockton observes that on the evidence of Sulpicius’s former letters ‘his blank despair at the seemingly irretrievable loss of the Republic is no polite pose’, but rather the result of ‘the continuing arbitrariness of Caesar’s rule, understandable and acceptable for a comparatively brief period of emergency but increasingly difficult to bear as time hardened it and bedded it deeper in the soil of the Republic’.138 For men such as Cicero and Sulpicius, the res publica of Caesar’s regime was either a very poor shadow of itself or did not exist at all, however much routine business might be conducted in Rome.
Zwi Yavetz has said that ‘even those who reject the idea that Caesar tried to establish a monarchy and a divine cult must admit that he was much more than just a Roman dictator. They must also agree that his performance and achievements made restoration of the old Republic impossible once and for all.’139 It is uncontroversial that Caesar was more than ‘just’ a Roman dictator; the only other dictator like him had been Sulla, whose precedent Caesar had pointedly not followed, both in his policy of clementia and in his disregard for res publica. If the impact of Nasica’s murder of Tiberius Gracchus manifested in the general concern afterwards for res publica salva, and if Sulla’s dictatorship was similarly remembered in the res publica constituta, the mark of Caesar’s divorce of res publica as participatory political arena from res publica as routine political business must be the modern catchphrase for the traditional Republic: libera res publica. The term is both rare and late; while the res publica is regularly ‘liberated’ from various pestes and perils in Cicero’s rhetoric,140 it is libera only on three secure occasions that I have been able to find: (1) at Fam. 11.3.4, a letter sent by Marcus Brutus and C. Cassius to Antony on 4 August 44; (2) in Cicero’s Thirteenth Philippic, delivered on 20 March 43 (Phil. 13.6); (3) in Velleius Paterculus, writing under the principate (2.32).141 The distinction between liberata and libera is fine but revealing: the res publica might be liberated as many times and from as many minor or major perils as individual orators required, since ‘liberation’ is an event and events may be repeated. Libera, however, expresses an essential quality. So, for example, the category of ‘freedmen’ (libertini) stands in contrast to ‘free men’ (liberi): a libertinus is defined by having once been freed, whereas a liber is a man who has always been free.142 To cast the res publica as libera both expresses freedom as an essential quality of the Roman res publica and implies that this quality (since it needs to be expressed) may be contingent. In other words, libera res publica is a discursive reaction to the very recent past when the Roman res publica had not been free. It defines res publica against an alternative, specifically an alternative that had only occurred before in Rome as ancient history, political rhetoric, or under Sulla, who, however, had resigned his dictatorship and ostentatiously retired into ordinary life.
After Sulla, the res publica was constituta rather than libera because it preserved at least the outwards form of the traditional res publica of the maiores; there was a lively quarrel to be had over libertas within the res publica,143 but not so much over liberty as an essential quality of the res publica. Furthermore, res publica constituta expresses a single event (the Sullan settlement of 82–81), whereas res publica libera echoes the concern over res publica salva which appeared with Nasica and never really went away. That, too, was not just an innocent phrase but indicated a strong concern that the res publica was not or soon would not be salva and that something must be done about this. The appearance of libera res publica after Caesar’s death indicates a new twist resulting from the conflict between Caesar’s limited conception of res publica, wherein the political organization is subordinated to routine public business, and the more expansive version espoused by his opponents, who saw Caesar as a rex or tyrannus oppressing the res publica and who intended his assassination to reset the Roman res publica to its default factory setting, that is, libera. Indeed, Valentina Arena, in her 2012 study of libertas, argues that Brutus’s well-known coinage of 43/2, which featured a pilleus between two daggers and a reference to the Ides of March, indicates a ‘redefinition of the semantic range of liberty’, since ‘the status of non-slavery guaranteed by the slaying of the tyrant, as Brutus successfully styled Caesar here, was the liberty of the commonwealth, rather than the liberty of individual citizens’.144 Whereas res publica salva implies an extended metaphor (the ‘body politic’), res publica libera makes a political claim about how the res publica should be organized.
For Caesar and his opponents, the situation at the start of the civil wars was relatively clear-cut, both as far as legitimacy went (he lacked it) and for the war more generally (those fighting were fighting for or against Caesar). Caesar’s biggest non-military challenge was to manoeuvre himself into an ideological position where he could make the same claim to legitimacy that he had made in the Bellum Gallicum, even though it was highly questionable whether he could now claim any relationship with the res publica. This clarity was missing after Caesar’s death, when his various fellow magistrates were left to haggle over the future shape of Rome’s political sphere and their places in it.145 The impact of Caesar’s regime and the lack of forethought on the part of the ‘Liberators’ resulted in a confused and difficult period in which Cicero complained to Atticus, not long after the assassination in April 44, that ‘I can only be sorry that the res publica has not been recovered (reciperata) at the same time as liberty, a thing that has never happened in any civitas’.146 Note the reappearance of res publica reciperare, now in the negative: the removal of Caesar, which restored libertas, was not sufficient to restore a functioning political sphere.147 Although Caesar was dead, his supporters were not, most prominently the other consul of 44, Marcus Antonius, and the magister equitum, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. Additionally, some inadvisable realpolitik had induced the senate to confirm Caesar’s appointments (which ensured the ‘Liberators’ their offices, but also confirmed various Caesarians in theirs) and acta (which could be tampered with by Antony, who acquired Caesar’s notebooks from Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia).148 As a result, not only were most of the legions commanded by Caesarians,149 but those commands had been confirmed by senatorial auctoritas, so the position of the senate (which Caesar had packed with loyalists anyway) was compromised. This resurrected an old problem: how to rein in magistrates, especially those at a distance from Rome? Cicero’s letters show just how complicated this could get in a situation where the central authority (now Caesar) had been abruptly removed and multiple managers of the res publica were left to float free in a contentious vacuum.
Senators were supposed to consulere rei publicae, that is, to serve as a well of practical wisdom (consilium) for the guidance of the magistrates in the management of the res publica.150 The fact that magistrates and promagistrates writing home from their provincia typically address their official reports to the magistrates, senate, and people of Rome indicates that while individual magistrates might embody the res publica abroad, this particular combination of elements traditionally comprised the (caretakers, advisors, and possessors of the) res publica at home.151 Those in the field or governing provinces had considerable freedom, but were tethered to the central hub in Rome—until Caesar’s regime collapsed the individual elements into a single source of publicum consilium, himself, which then dissolved on Caesar’s death. In the aftermath, it was not clear what had or should replace him. For the ‘Liberators’ and those who, like Cicero, applauded Caesar’s death, it was a particular problem that many of the magistrates and senators were Caesarians. This is clear from Fam. 11.3.4, a joint letter from Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius to the consul Marcus Antonius written in August 44:
Deos quaesumus consilia tua rei publicae salutaria sint ac tibi; si minus, ut salva atque honesta re publica tibi quam minimum noceant optamus.
We pray to the gods that your counsels should be salutary for the res publica and for you. If not, then we pray they may bring you as little hurt as possible without detriment to the welfare and honour of the res publica. (Cic. Fam. 11.3.4)
Antony, as consul, was intimately linked with the res publica, a reality reflected in the careful formalities of this letter. The difficulty of distinguishing between a disaster for the consul (even if that consul was Antony) and a disaster for the res publica is apparent, as is the fact that Brutus and Cassius were in the awkward position of having to do so.
These contortions indicate the dangerous fragmentation of legitimacy derived from the magistrate’s traditional relationship with the res publica in what was shaping up to be a new civil war. There were people on all sides with some claim to represent the res publica. It will come as no surprise that Cicero and his various friends among or supporting the ‘Liberators’ used this discourse; so in a letter from March 43, Cicero informs Q. Cornificius that he has been attacking someone (Calvisius) who had formerly been acting as a provincial governor in absentia, a gross insult to Cornificius and the res publica.152 Elsewhere, on 7 May 43 Cassius wrote to Cicero from Syria, a province where he was not supposed to be, to commend his dignitas and questionably raised army to Cicero’s care, since Cicero ‘would appear not only to wish me well, as you have always done both for my sake and that of the res publica, but to have taken a grave responsibility upon yourself and to be very anxious on my account’.153 Again, the younger Cornelius Lentulus Spinther, who had originally gone to Asia as Trebonius’s quaestor, wrote a letter to Cicero and a dispatch to the senate and people from Perge at the end of May 43 to update them on his activities in the region as proquaestor propraetor after Trebonius’s death in Smyrna at Dolabella’s hands.154 He resented the efforts of the Rhodians to obstruct his pursuit of Dolabella, who had a proconsular command in Asia and whom the Rhodians seem to have taken more seriously than Lentulus: ‘The contempt which the Rhodians have displayed for me and for the res publica you will see from my official dispatch’,155 he told Cicero, and asked Cicero to try to get him appointed to govern Asia in the period until one or other of the consuls (to whom Asia had been assigned) was able to take up the command in person. ‘I want to collect and make good the sums I gave Cassius and lost by Trebonius’ death, also by Dolabella’s ruthlessness or the bad faith of those who broke their word to me and to the res publica’.156 Similarly, in the dispatch Lentulus protests his devotion to the senate and res publica and promises to keep them updated: ‘As soon as I have made a rapid tour of the province and found out who has kept faith with me and the res publica in preserving intact the funds I deposited, as well as the villains who went to Dolabella with the public money in their hands as an offering with which to buy their way into a partnership of crime, I shall apprise you accordingly.’157 The language in all these passages is that of rightfully appointed magistrates of unquestionable legitimacy, even though the actions they describe are dubious, to say the least.
The misuse of legitimacy becomes an open conflict in a three-way conversation during March and May 43 between Cicero, L. Munatius Plancus (proconsul of Gallia Comata and consul-designate), and Caesar’s former magister equitum M. Aemilius Lepidus (proconsul of Gallia Transalpina and Hispania Citerior).158 The main unknown quantity was Lepidus, a Caesarian of exceedingly uncertain loyalties moving around in the shadows in possession of an army, although Plancus too commanded an army and had fought for Caesar both in Gaul and during the civil war. Plancus, who was in the field and in open dialogue with Lepidus, claimed to be friendly to Cicero, loyal to the senate, and doing his best to persuade Lepidus onto the side of all that was good and proper; meanwhile Lepidus himself teetered dangerously between being at best fickle and at worst outright treacherous.159 Cicero, writing from Rome, aimed to yoke Lepidus to the senatorial cause; his efforts are attested by the Fifth and Thirteenth Philippics, where he expounds his theory that educating Lepidus on his duties and rewarding Lepidus for behaving dutifully would have the happy effect of making this behaviour continue.160 The reward in question was a vote of thanks and a gilded equestrian statue on the Rostra; when Lepidus sent a letter arguing for peace in which he failed to thank the senate for this, Cicero wrote on 20 March 43 to chide him. He was glad Lepidus wanted to restore pax inter civis, but not altogether sanguine about Lepidus’s long-term plans: ‘If you draw a line between peace and slavery, you will take thought (consules) both for the res publica and your own standing (dignitas)’.161 Cicero’s language concedes a degree of qualified legitimacy to Lepidus: if Lepidus behaves as Cicero thinks appropriate, Cicero will allow and confirm his legitimacy in return. In linking Lepidus’s dignitas with the res publica, self-interest with public-spiritedness, Cicero uses the standard, self-reinforcing duality in an attempt to convince Lepidus to do as Cicero says. Lepidus should refrain from making peace with his fellow citizen Antony, because civil war with Antony is in the interests of both the res publica and of Lepidus. Lepidus’s positive relationship with the res publica, in other words, was contingent on his behaviour.
Plancus, who had sent a similar letter to the senate, received a somewhat more nuanced response: ‘our Furnius’ had reported good things about Plancus’s political sentiments (de animo tuo in rem publicam) to an approving senate and people, but Plancus himself had written to advocate for peace when D. Brutus was besieged by Antony. Unless Plancus dissociated himself from his Caesarian correspondents and joined himself with the libertas populi Romani and the senatus auctoritas, all his gradus dignitatis would be meaningless.162 An elaborate and self-justifying letter from Plancus survives, written at about the same time to the magistrates, senate, and people, in which Plancus explains his various delays and deceptions as perfectly understandable responses to the constraints of the situation;163 he also wrote to Cicero insisting on his ambition to be recognized and remembered as someone who had been a great guard for the res publica,164 in furtherance of which he kept Cicero updated on his progression towards Mutina and the opening of communications with Lepidus after the deaths of the consuls at Mutina.165 By 18 May, Plancus was willing to risk negotiating directly with Lepidus, in the hope (so he said) of bolstering the waverer and his army; he was striking camp on the Isara and going to meet Lepidus.166 A day later, Lepidus himself wrote Cicero a brief, informative letter: hearing that M. Antony and his brother Lucius were on the move, he had started to advance against them; various people had joined or deserted Antony; and ‘as for this war, I shall not fail the senate or the res publica’.167 Addressing a senator in residence at the central hub of public activity, Lepidus genuflected towards the senate as a legitimate locus of consilium on the res publica’s behalf.
The culmination to all this careful diplomacy came at the end of the month. On 30 May, after the exchange of more letters by all and sundry,168 Lepidus wrote to the praetors, tribunes of the plebs, senate, people, and plebs to inform them that although his heart was in the right place (deos hominesque testor, patres conscripti, qua mente et quo animo semper in rem publicam fuerim), his army, dedicated as it was to preserving Roman citizens, had mutinied:
In qua re ego vos, patres conscripti, oro atque obsecro ut privatis offensionibus omissis summae rei publicae consulatis neve misericordiam nostram exercitusque nostri in civili dissensione sceleris loco ponatis. quod si salutis omnium ac dignitatis rationem habueritis, melius et vobis et rei publicae consuletis.
Therefore, conscript fathers, I beg and implore you to put private offences aside and to consult the supreme interests of the res publica. Do not treat the compassion shown by me and my army in a conflict between fellow countrymen as a crime. If you take account of the welfare and dignity of all, you will better consult your own interests and those of the res publica. (Cic. Fam. 10.35.2)
Lepidus again yokes the senate and res publica together: it will be in the interests of both for the senators to take into account the salus ac dignitas of all players and to treat his alliance with Antony as mercy shown in a civil dissension rather than a crime. This is perhaps a response to Cicero: whereas Cicero casts the struggle as slavery versus freedom, Lepidus talks of civil war, misericordia, and the duties owed to fellow citizens; this, he says, is what taking thought for the res publica (the senate’s duty) is all about. There may also be an echo of Caesar’s disingenuous proposal to Pompey at BC 3.10 and the threat is not particularly veiled, especially as Lepidus links himself with his army, misericordiam nostram exercitusque nostri. When political life had fragmented to this extent, traditional claims to legitimacy became largely meaningless because people on all sides could reasonably make them: what mattered was whether or not such claims could be backed up with force. The instability of all political constellations at this point is illustrated by the diplomatic consul-designate Munatius Plancus, whose impending office gave him a reasonable claim to represent the res publica and who joined the triumvirs and held the consulship as Lepidus’s colleague in 42.
To return to my starting point, then, the explicitly libera res publica is a symptom of this crisis. As a concept, it stands in pointed contrast not just to Caesar’s regime but also to the impending resumption of the civil war Caesar had begun. For this, we need only look at my first reference, Fam. 11.3, that tart letter from M. Brutus and Cassius to Antony written at Naples on 4 August 44. I cited it above to highlight the difficulty of divorcing the consul from the res publica at a time when people claiming to champion the res publica were developing a stance of public (and potentially military) opposition to that very consul. This letter, and the associated correspondence from which the vagaries of source survival exclude us, are therefore part of a universal renegotiation of all aspects of (and perspectives on) res publica in the crisis of legitimacy created by Caesar’s death. This makes for some interesting tension in the text, where Brutus and Cassius are at pains to be perfectly proper in a situation that is not at all proper and looks likely to get even less so in the very near future. Since the popular (Caesarian) reaction in Rome had given the ‘Liberators’ the idea that it might be prudent to leave town, Brutus had been lurking near Naples for about a month, hoping to hear good news from Rome of the response to the ludi Apollinares that he was responsible for organizing as the urban praetor (albeit an urban praetor at a safe distance from the urbs).169 At the end of July, he and Cassius had issued an edict offering to leave Italy and refrain from starting any more civil wars;170 this had provoked a sharp public and private response from Antony, to which Fam. 11.3 is their ‘firm and dignified reply’.171
The formality of the address (‘Brutus and Cassius, Praetors, to Antonius, Consul, greetings’) establishes that the letter is being written by two magistrates to a third, while the opening paragraph offers a critique of Antony on grounds of appropriate conduct. Antony’s letter, like his edict, was ‘offensive and menacing’ (contumeliosas, minacis), and scarcely worthy (minime dignas) of being sent ‘by you to us’, not simply because of the offensive content but because this attack had been unprovoked. The letter is couched in the language of traditional political activity. Brutus and Cassius had ‘attacked you with no insult’ (te nulla lacessimus iniuria) and had supposed that Antony would not be surprised ‘if, as praetors and men of that dignitas we should ask something in an edict from a consul (si praetores et ea dignitate homines aliquid edicto postulassemus a consule)’. If Antony should resent (si indignaris) them for daring to issue their edict, he must concede to them a corresponding dolor that even this was not granted by him to Brutus and Cassius.172 In short, Antony’s overbearing behaviour is not how a consul should interact with praetors; they therefore have every right to hold a grudge against him. Antony’s accusations are untrue; and since, as Antony says, he has made no protest about these alleged actions, it is surprising that Antony could not contain his anger (iracundia) so far as not to throw Caesar’s death at them.173 Furthermore, Antony should consider how tolerable it was that ‘praetors should not be permitted in the interests of concord and liberty to abate the rights of their office by edict without a consul threatening military violence’. Brutus and Cassius will not be intimidated by Antony’s threats and Antony should not ‘order around those by whose labour he is free’ (iis imperet quorum opera liber est), not least because it will not work: ‘free men are not impressed by threats’ (nulla enim minantis auctoritas apud liberos est).174 So,
Nos in hac sententia sumus ut te cupiamus in libera re publica magnum atque honestum esse, vocemus te ad nullas inimicitias, sed tamen pluris nostram libertatem quam tuam amicitiam aestimemus. Tu etiam atque etiam vide quid suscipias, quid sustinere possis; neque quam diu vixerit Caesar sed quam non diu regnarit fac cogites.
To summarize our position, we are desirous to see you an important and respected member of a libera res publica. We are not fastening any quarrel upon you. At the same time, our liberty means more to us than your friendship. On your part, consider well what you undertake and what you can sustain. Bear in mind not only the length of Caesar’s life, but the brevity of his reign. (Cic. Fam. 11.3.4)
The res publica of the letter is libera in the first place because the rhetoric of libertas suffuses the whole letter, as it does Brutus and Cassius’s rhetoric in general.175 Thus Antony’s use of the assassination of Caesar as an accusation (one which, unlike the other accusations, Brutus and Cassius do not deny, but merely use to point up the hypocrisy of what was presumably praeteritio on Antony’s part) is transformed into a commendation with the pointed remark that Antony is free thanks to Brutus and Cassius; from free men the letter then moves to a free res publica. This libera res publica looks both backwards and forwards: backwards to the condition of the non-libera res publica under Caesar, from whose regnum the ‘Liberators’ had freed it, and forwards to a highly uncertain future in which Antony might be a great and respected man among other great and respected men in a res publica that remains libera—or the civil wars may resume, the res publica might lose its freedom, and Antony could prove to be a new Caesar (in which case he should consider Caesar’s fate). Even though libera res publica expresses an essential quality, it invokes a past when the res publica had not been libera (although it should have been) and evokes a future in which free men may have to act to keep it libera. It stands, in other words, as a standard for a future fight.
It seems reasonable to conclude from this letter that an explicitly libera res publica belongs to the rhetoric of the ‘Liberators’ and is anchored in this specific and ephemeral context. It is a res publica principally perceived as (free) political space and (free) movement within the political structures that Caesar’s regime had disregarded. Cicero invoked it the following year in an argument against peace initiatives that carries the same implications of contingent libertas: if Sapientia advised self-preservation above all, even at the cost of slavery, then he would ignore her, but he would obey as if obeying a god if she told him instead:
Tu vero ita vitam corpusque servato, ita fortunas, ita rem familiarem, ut haec libertate posteriora ducas itaque his uti velis, si libera re publica possis, nec pro his libertatem, sed pro libertate haec proicias tamquam pignora iniuriae.
Preserve your life and body, your fortunes and property, but only as valuing them less than freedom and as desiring to enjoy them only if you can do so in a libera res publica, and do not sacrifice liberty in exchange for these things but them for liberty, regarding them as pledges exposed to ill usage. (Cic. Phil. 13.6)
By the time Velleius Paterculus had Q. Lutatius Catulus argue against the lex Gabinia on the grounds that Pompey was certainly great but was becoming too great for a libera res publica, the lively debate of 44–43 and the preceding decades had crystallized into tragic history.176 There are, however, broader points to be gleaned from Fam. 11.3, of which the most important concerns its authors’ dimly perceived shape of the future. In the contentious vacuum created by Caesar’s sudden removal from the scene, everyone was obliged to renegotiate not just how they related to each other but also (because the ‘Liberators’ had wrongly thought that the old ways would snap back into place with Caesar dead and therefore took no measures to ensure that the former structures of the res publica would be re-established) just what sort of political system they were going to end up with. The libera res publica defines the sort of res publica Brutus and Cassius want to have: one not dominated by a single man or clique, as opaque a definition as anything Caesar came up with, which might be charitably attributed to the fact that this is formally a letter rather than a political pamphlet. It is distinct from Pompey’s rallying cry: he and the ‘Republicans’ had fought for the res publica, whereas the ‘Liberators’ express their willingness to fight for the res publica to be free. They make, it might be said, a purer claim: not a res publica for themselves and their allies, but a libera res publica in which everyone, including Antony and the Caesarians (if they are willing to go along with this), can participate.177
Against this claim, Antony’s communications seem to have struck a personal chord. In Fam. 11.3, he is reported to have made personal attacks on the ‘Liberators’, to have accused them outright of preparing for a new civil war, and to hold Caesar’s assassination against them. This fits with what we hear about the former Caesarians elsewhere; Cicero had previously written on 14 May 44, after a dinner with A. Hirtius, that ‘they are scared of peace (otium). Their theme and slogan is that a great man (clarissimum <virum>) has been killed, that the whole res publica has been plunged into chaos by his death, that all he did will be null and void the moment we cease to be afraid, that clemency was his undoing, but for which nothing of the sort could have happened to him.’178 Antony’s own self-justification is expressed in a letter sent to Hirtius and Octavian a year later in March 43, sarcastically dissected and so preserved by Cicero at Phil. 13.22–48; Lintott supplies the reconstruction and translation I use here.179 Given the care taken by Brutus and Cassius to use the proper formulae, it is worth noting the abruptness of the letter, which begins ‘Antony to Hirtius and Caesar’. Cicero takes the opportunity to comment on the lack of titles, observing that ‘rather than give them their proper titles, he has chosen to drop one that is not rightfully his’ (that of imperator).180 But Antony’s implication is the reverse: he means that Hirtius, having been ‘honoured through Caesar’s generosity and left by him such a figure that you are amazed at yourself’, and Octavian, a puer who owes everything to the name inherited from Caesar, do not deserve the titles they claim, since they are actively hindering attempts to exact revenge for Caesar’s murder. The importance of exacting punishment on the assassins of Caesar is the keynote of the letter, where Antony reproaches Hirtius and Octavian for siding with the senate (which he calls the castra Pompeii), for taking the victus Cicero as their leader, and for doing or deliberately overlooking many dubiously legal things: in short, Antony asks, had they done anything that Pompey himself, if revived, or his son Sextus, had he the power, would not have done? He describes the recent death of the assassin C. Trebonius at Dolabella’s hands, which Cicero regarded as a crime,181 as Trebonius’s penalty ‘to the ash and bones of a supremely distinguished man’ and an indication that the numen deorum was in action after less than a year, since a parricide had already been partially revenged; however,
Iudicatum hostem populi Romani Dolabellam eo quod sicarium occiderit, et videri cariorem rei publicae filium scurrae quam C. Caesarem, patriae parentem, ingemiscendum est.
It is a matter for grief that Dolabella has been declared an enemy of the Roman people on the ground that he killed an assassin, and the son of a comedian seems dearer to the res publica than Gaius Caesar, the father of his fatherland. (Cic. Phil. 13.23)
It was worse, though, that Hirtius and Octavian should justify Dolabella’s treatment and try to liberate the venefica D. Brutus from siege so that Cassius and M. Brutus should be potentissimi. Hirtius and Caesar represented themselves as intervening on behalf of the soldiers interned by Antony’s siege; Antony’s response was that the soldiers could leave—all he wanted was ‘the death of the man who deserved it’. Nor did Antony believe that the senate had talked of reconciliation. Hirtius and Octavian should therefore consider whose death they should be avenging and whom they should be fighting. They are all on the same side, Antony tells them: that is to say Caesar’s side, which should now devote itself to hunting down Caesar’s assassins and repressing the resurrected castra Pompeii. Fortune herself had so far avoided the spectacle of two armies from the same side fighting with Cicero (who is felix to have deceived Hirtius and Octavian with the honours he once boasted of having used to deceive Caesar) for a lanista.182 Antony would not abandon his men, the party Pompey hated, or his allies Lepidus and Plancus; if he survives, he will rejoice, but if he falls, he can at least die rejoicing in anticipation of the punishment of Hirtius and Octavian by the Pompeians. Ultimately, however, he expresses a willingness to forgive actions taken against him and his men if those concerned (his correspondents are implied) will join him in seeking revenge for Caesar.
‘One may question Cicero’s wisdom in reading this to the senate’, Lintott remarks, noting that while for Cicero, ‘the letter proved that Antonius was an irreconcilable enemy to the res publica, as indeed he was to Cicero’, his ‘largely Caesarian audience’ must have found it less comfortable to hear—especially those references to Lepidus and Plancus.183 The contrast with the sentiments expressed by Brutus and Cassius is striking. Whereas the ‘Liberators’ staked their cause on an abstract political principle, Antony stakes his on a very personal principle: revenge for that clarissimus vir, Caesar. He has little to say about the res publica, but a great deal to say about the dead Pompey, whose defeated causa he depicts as dominating the senate under Cicero’s treacherous leadership. If the contrast between political and personal principles seems reminiscent of the ‘Republicans’ against Caesar, it is unsurprising that the themes of the first round of civil wars should be echoed by the successors to that struggle. Like the ‘Liberators’, Antony inherits an apologia to which he adds his own twist. For the ‘Liberators’ it was libertas; for Antony, revenge. This came with the happy bonus that Antony was free to ignore senatorial decrees, fight fellow magistrates, and in general pursue his own interests at the expense of anything that could be considered the res publica, since the senate was only the castra Pompeii and anyone who had been involved in Caesar’s assassination or got in the way of Antony’s personal mission deserved whatever they got. Res publica, meanwhile, features only as a word to discredit those who wanted to avenge Caesar; it remains as the spoils, presumably, for whichever party wins out in the end. For Antony, the civil war was one to be fought over the res publica, not in aid of a particular vision of it.
It remains to discuss someone who did make a detailed attempt to define what res publica should mean amid all this confusion: the Pompeian lanista Cicero, who had had a very gloomy summer but who by late October 44 was starting to feel a little more hopeful; ‘it seems’, he wrote to Atticus, ‘the res publica may recover its ius’.184 My starting point for the Philippics, then, is that in these difficult and conflicted times there was a real place for argument over the shape of Rome’s shared political space, if only because the structures of the res publica constituta had been seriously eroded, if not displaced altogether, by Caesar’s regime. Delivered on 2 September 44, Cicero’s First Philippic is concerned, consciously or not, with working out parameters for the (libera) res publica that he calls upon Antony as consul to administer and will spend the rest of the Philippics calling on the senate to defend against Antony.185 By praising Antony’s actions from 15 March to 1 June, and by passing comment on what should and should not be acceptable, he aimed (or at least managed) to establish a set of working guidelines for the post-Caesar future. This begins with the narrative of events after Caesar’s assassination at Phil. 1.1–5 and Cicero’s hope that the res publica had now been recalled (revocare) to the consilium and auctoritas of the senate. At the time, Antony had been the model of a consul in difficult times: he had helped calm things down during the senate meeting on 17 March and had continued on the same fine lines, laying admirable proposals before the senate, discovering no unexpected material in Caesar’s papers, restoring only a single exile, granting no exemptions from taxes, and approving an approvable motion moved by Servius Sulpicius on the topic of Caesar’s decrees. He also ‘regularly brought the principes civitatis to those deliberations de re publica which he was holding in his home’. Best of all, Antony had wholly removed the dictatorship (an office that had gained the ‘force of regal power’, vis regiae potestatis) from the res publica, through a bill that he had put to the senate, which had naturally cheered him all the way to a decree of thanks.186 He and his colleague Dolabella had saved the senate from a massacre, and Dolabella by himself had taken action to stop riots.187 It seemed, Cicero says, as if some light had dawned (lux quaedam videbatur oblata),
non modo regno, quod pertuleramus, sed etiam regni timore sublato, magnumque pignus ab eo rei publicae datum, se liberam civitatem esse velle, cum dictatoris nomen, quod saepe iustum fuisset, propter perpetuae dictaturae recentem memoriam funditus ex re publica sustulisset.
with the removal not only of the monarchy which we had endured, but even of the fear of its recurrence; it seemed as if Antony had given the res publica a mighty pledge of his desire for a libera civitas when, because of the recollection of the recent dictator perpetuus he totally removed from our res publica the office of dictator, legitimate though it had often been. (Cic. Phil. 1.4)
The future res publica that Cicero wants is one where the traumatic immediate past is forgotten (he himself argued for an amnesty along the lines of ‘the ancient Athenian precedent’ in which discordia are laid to rest, he says),188 Caesar’s decrees are not rejected wholesale but are handled carefully, the magistrates consult with leading statesmen (principes) before doing anything, a traditional (albeit controversial) magistracy is removed entirely, and the senate’s safety is ensured. This is a mix of the traditional and the not so traditional; and, crucially, it is a res publica tucked snugly under a senatorial wing.
Against the positive view of what the res publica should be, the activity that allegedly made for a sharp break after 1 June stands as a negative foil. ‘Nothing was enacted through the senate, but many important measures were put per populum—in the absence of the people and against their will’; the consuls-designate claimed they dared not attend the senate; the ‘liberators of the fatherland (patriae)’ were missing from the city ‘from whose neck they had cast off the yoke of slavery’, even though the consuls still praised them hypocritically in public; and the veterans (who had been carefully cultivated by the senate) were incited to hope for fresh plunder.189 Cicero presents this as his reason for leaving Rome, but the account also functions as an alternative res publica dominated by rogue consuls backed up by greedy troops, where people with a right (indeed an obligation) to take part in public business dare not do so, while public heroes dare not stay in the city at all. Rather than overt opposition, Cicero’s reaction was to retreat. He returned to Rome, he claims, only when a chance delay gives him time to find three reasons to be hopeful: a speech of Antony’s, Brutus and Cassius’s edict, and a somewhat exaggerated account of what was going on in Rome according to which Antony would repudiate his evil advisors, give up Gaul, and ‘return to the guidance of the senate (ad auctoritatem senatus esse rediturum)’.190 He hoped, in other words, that his preferred version of the res publica (one firmly guided by senatorial auctoritas, rather than the whims of magistrates) had been adopted by those currently in a position to make or break it. He therefore rushed back towards Rome to present his congratulations,191 which, however, turned out to be premature. A meeting with M. Brutus at Velia enlightened Cicero and gave him a model, that of L. Piso, who had made a (not very well supported) speech against Antony in the senate. By the time he arrived in Rome, his intention was to follow Piso’s lead, ‘not in order to achieve anything—that was not in my hopes or power to guarantee—but so that I might leave the words I speak today as witnesses to the res publica of my abiding loyalty (mea perpetua voluntas)’.192
What follows is a fairly tactful argument that Antony should adopt Cicero’s preferred res publica, in the course of which Cicero provides detail for his political vision by listing what should and should not be carried over from Caesar’s regime. Like Brutus and Cassius in Fam. 11.3, he critiques Antony and the senate on the grounds of appropriate behaviour. Cicero’s amicus Antony should not have been harsh about Cicero’s failure to attend a meeting of the senate devoted to voting on a thanksgiving; the proposal at hand was a bad one anyway; and the failure of any other consulares to talk about the other mali rei publicae or to support L. Piso indicates a sort of voluntary slavery that Cicero himself rejects: whereas in the past (that is, under Caesar) some such slavery was unavoidable, things are different now.193 These criticisms apply the standards of the pre-Caesar era: had the populus Romanus made Cicero and the other consulares consuls in order that ‘we in so exalted a station, the highest in the land, might set the res publica at naught?’194 In contrast, Piso is thanked as someone ‘who did not think about how much he could achieve in the res publica but about what he ought to do’,195 a credit that marks the transition to Cicero’s positive recommendations on Caesar’s acta,196 the retention and rejection of specific laws,197 and the suggestion that any laws that may in future be passed in a Forum surrounded by armed guards should not be considered laws.198 Furthermore, Cicero suggests limits on how the consuls should conduct themselves in office—not just in how they pass laws, but in how they behave towards other inhabitants of the political sphere. The consuls should not be angry with Cicero for speaking pro re publica like this, he tells Dolabella; he has no problem incurring Antony’s inimicitia if he attacks Antony personally, but
sin consuetudinem meam quam in re publica semper habui tenuero, id est si libere quae sentiam de re publica dixero, primum deprecor ne irascatur; deinde, si hoc non impetro, peto ut sic irascatur ut civi. Armis utatur, si ita necesse est, ut dicit, sui defendendi causa: eis qui pro re publica quae ipsis visa erunt dixerint ista arma ne noceant.
if I hold to my invariable practice in re publica, that is, if I speak my mind freely de re publica, in the first place I beg him not to be angry: and if that plea fails, then I ask him to be angry with me as a fellow citizen. Let him use arms, if that is necessary (as he says it is) for his own defence, but let those arms do no injury to people who speak their own minds on behalf of the res publica. (Cic. Phil. 1.27)
Cicero argues not just for the structures of the old res publica to be restored, but also for the restoration of its culture. Against this plea, he reports that Antony’s friends have told him Antony is inclined to be deeply offended by contrary views and will not grant Cicero the same licence as Piso, who, after all, had been Caesar’s father-in-law: death is as good a reason not to attend the senate as illness.199 Whatever the truth of this, there was evidently some renegotiation of traditional patterns of behaviour versus inconvenient realities underway, and Cicero was pushing for the reinstatement of the former (or at least an idealized version of it). He substantiates this push with a brief discursion on the nature of gloria, which ‘consists in the credit for honourable deeds (laus recte factorum) and the reputation (fama) for great services benefiting the res publica, approved by the testimony of the best among us and also by that of the multitude’.200 Dolabella and Antony both seek gloria,201 but are ignorant of the ‘true path of glory’, which may lead them wrongly to think that supreme power is glorious and to prefer fear over esteem. What is actually glorious is ‘to be a dear citizen, to deserve well of the res publica, to be praised and courted and esteemed’, whereas to be feared is invidiosum, detestabile, imbecillum, caducum.202 Antony and Dolabella should therefore change course and ‘so guide the res publica that your fellow countrymen will be glad that you were born’203—all the way back to the version of the res publica preferred both by Cicero and by the populus Romanus, as various manifestations of popular will have shown.204
What Phil. 1 proposes, then, is a combination of the old and new. Cicero recommends a res publica that incorporates Caesar’s measures selectively, is founded on the free interaction of peers, adheres to traditional political etiquette, and subordinates the magistrates to the senate’s auctoritas.205 The redefinition of gloria is telling: it was not the first time Cicero had played this particular semantic game,206 but with everything in flux, criticism of ‘the motivational nexus that drove political competition at Rome’ began to look like a genuine manifesto for change.207 This sort of gloria valorizes ordinary political activity over an extraordinary political position and is linked to ‘social approval on the part of the good’;208 in political terms, it adds conceptual glitz to the hope that the consuls will return to a senatorial fold. Stressing the authority of the senate was not new, of course, and it would be cynical to suggest Cicero stressed it now because his ability to influence events was mostly limited to his influence in the senate; the particular emphasis given to it in Phil. 1, however, starting with Cicero’s hope that the res publica had been returned not to the populus Romanus but to the senate’s consilium and auctoritas, indicates something beyond the fact that Cicero was addressing a senatorial audience. Rather, it reflects the trauma of the recent past, in which excessively powerful magistrates had disregarded senatorial authority all the way to civil war and regnum, and the uncertainty of the present, in which the most senior magistrates were former Caesarians and the champions of libertas rei publicae lacked the military support to back up their principles. Subordinating the magistrates to the senate was one way with at least a reasonable claim to traditionalism to reduce the (high) risk of this happening again.
This strategy became more problematic as events unfolded and Cicero’s hopes turned out to rest on the unauthorized military exploits of magistrates and private citizens acting on their own initiative. The actions taken to ‘save’ or ‘recover’ the res publica209 (and saving/recovering the res publica is the major theme of the Philippics210) could only undermine Cicero’s orderly vision of what the res publica should be. It is therefore worth considering Cicero’s resort to a somewhat gelatinous rhetorical fiction at key moments in the texts. Dawes points out the intangibility implied by Cicero’s expression in the Second Philippic:
Habet populus Romanus ad quos gubernacula rei publicae deferat: qui ubicumque terrarum sunt, ibi omne est rei publicae praesidium vel potius ipsa res publica, quae se adhuc tantum modo ulta est, nondum recuperavit.
The Roman people has men to whom it can commit the helm of the res publica: wherever in the world they are, there is the entire defence of the res publica, or rather, there is the res publica itself, which has so far only avenged itself, not recovered itself. (Cic. Phil. 2.113)
Whereas Phil. 1 provided concrete criticism and recommendations, this formula returns us to the realm of a wandering res publica, which ‘defies locality and a definite semantic meaning’ and is defined more in ‘moral rather than constitutional’ terms.211 It is superficially similar to the claims of the ‘Republicans’ in the Caesarian civil wars, but there are significant differences. I argued above that Pompey’s evacuation of Rome had dismantled the res publica in a rather concrete way, whereas Cicero’s identification here of the res publica with the ‘Liberators’ (most of whom were wandering around in other people’s provinces in the east on very little authority whatsoever) is a purely rhetorical move based on the premise that they had liberated the res publica from Caesar. This is closer to Cicero’s rhetoric of the 50s, in that the surface glitter of the oratory is intended to conceal the weakness of the actual argument, but the weakness then had been personal rather than structural: in the 50s, Cicero had been defending himself against personal attacks, rather than arguing for his conception of the res publica and the men he conceived to be defending it during a civil war. Cicero might have wanted to end up with the res publica of the First Philippic, but he was willing to take it down some very unlikely rhetorical paths to get there. This mattered because once the dust settled, those left standing were likely to need some decent apologia to stand on; and the further Cicero pushed his rhetoric, the more rhetorical ground he gave them.
The unlikely rhetorical path that demonstrates this most clearly is Cicero’s argument in the Tenth Philippic that the legality or otherwise of M. Brutus’s claim to his eastern armies was immaterial, since all armies belonged to the res publica, which Brutus was fighting to defend.212 Cicero had previously argued in the Fourth Philippic that the resistance of D. Brutus’s Gallic province to Antony showed that Antony was not a consul, on the ‘outrageously sophistic argument’ that all provinces ought to acknowledge the consul’s ius and imperium.213 Even if Gaul had been entitled to decide for itself who was or was not the consul, this argument ‘neglects the fact that in the late Republic the root of the Roman conception of provincia was the separation of the fields of action of magistrates when they were not specifically required to cooperate’;214 it was not in fact true that the consuls could exert imperium in whichever provincia they pleased, only in those entrusted to them by the senate. While the point is to deny Antony’s legitimacy as consul, taking Cicero’s argument seriously breaks down the boundaries between different areas of responsibility and transforms the whole res publica into a consular province, which increases the consuls’ powers dramatically and opens the way for conflict between the consuls themselves. The same dangerous blurring of legal protocol appears at Phil. 10.11–14, where Cicero distinguishes between the illegal activities of M. Brutus and C. Antonius in Illyricum on the basis that
Omnes legiones, omnes copiae quae ubique sunt rei publicae sunt: nec enim eae legiones quae M. Antonium reliquerunt Antoni potius quam rei publicae fuisse dicentur. Omne enim et exercitus et imperi ius amittit is qui eo imperio et exercitu rem publicam oppugnat.
All legions, all forces, wherever they are, belong to the res publica: and the legions that abandoned Marcus Antonius will not be said to have belonged to Antonius rather than to the res publica. For all right to an army and authority is forfeited by a man who uses his military authority and his army to attack the res publica. (Cic. Phil. 10.12)215
This is a very grand perspective. Rather than legitimately elected and appointed magistrates administering specific provincia of the res publica, Cicero edges towards a res publica that appoints its own heroes to take whatever action required in whichever province requires it. Indeed,
Quod si ipsa res publica iudicaret aut si omne ius decretis eius statueretur, Antonione an Bruto legiones populi Romani adiudicaret?
If the res publica itself were to judge, or if all rights were determined by its decisions, would it judge the legions of the Roman people to Antonius or to Brutus? (Cic. Phil. 10.12)
This is a rhetorical fiction, but it expresses something interesting about the conception of res publica developing in these speeches. Cicero’s goal in Phil. 10 was to convince the senate (which was still full of Caesarians) that in a situation of at best murky legality, and at worst outright illegality, his preferred champions were doing the right thing. He evaded the problem by skipping the details, resorting instead to a rhetorical personification that ‘holds Macedon, holds Illyricum, and safeguards Greece’ through its avatars in the region.216 The legal status of individuals here matters less than their attitude towards the res publica, which Cicero takes it upon himself to illumine, and magistrates are subordinate not just to the senate but to the res publica, which is free to strip them of their magistracies whenever it pleases, a superficially attractive claim, except that (a) it was untrue; and (b) to echo Caesar and misquote Margaret Thatcher,217 there was no such thing as the Roman res publica. Except as a tendentious rhetorical extension, the res publica did not exist in any way that would allow it to make such spontaneous decisions (or indeed any other decisions, lacking critical decision-making faculties). Traditionally it had magistrates, who took action after consultation with the senate and affirmation from the populus in the form of voting assemblies. But since the traditional res publica was in flux, Cicero was free to remake it in his rhetoric, which elides legal constructs into ‘a more coloured narratio and argumentatio which develop around ethical argument’.218 Stripped of colour, the implication is that Cicero adds to the prescriptions of Phil. 1 a firm, not to say arbitrary, control over magistrates and military commands; he attributes this control rhetorically to the res publica, but in practice presumably assumes that decisions will be referred to the consilium of the res publica’s critical decision-making faculty, which he wants to be the senate. This is a sharp divergence from the traditional res publica where honores are the beneficia of the populus. Like the adaptation of consular imperium for Phil. 4, it dramatically enlarges the competence of the political element entrusted with such decisions—in this case, whichever element ended up in control of the res publica.