Joyce Connolly

Cicero declares that men are motivated to live well by the rewards given to those who win glory in public life. Men are also directly motivated by the exemplars they see, especially other men for whom they feel affection. Cicero’s advice to imitate the powerful and to cultivate ideas of virtue that mimic Roman ideals has suggested to many scholars that his moral beliefs and Roman elite social values are close to one and the same. This short essay argues that the role Cicero gives to sight in his _De Officiis_ (_On Moral Duties_) hints that his account of moral motivation is driven by more than the desire to conform with Roman social mores; it suggests that the fundamental importance in his moral thought of the moral responsibilities engendered by one’s awareness of the other, an awareness triggered by sight.

Rhetorical theory, the core of Roman education, taught rules of public speaking that are still influential today. But Roman rhetoric has long been regarded as having little important to say about political ideas. The State of Speech presents a forceful challenge to this view. The first book to read Roman rhetorical writing as a mode of political thought, it focuses on Rome's greatest practitioner and theorist of public speech, Cicero. Through new readings of his dialogues and treatises, Joy Connolly shows how Cicero's treatment of the Greek rhetorical tradition's central questions is shaped by his ideal of the republic and the citizen. Rhetoric, Connolly argues, sheds new light on Cicero's deepest political preoccupations: the formation of individual and communal identity, the communicative role of the body, and the "unmanly" aspects of politics, especially civility and compromise. Transcending traditional lines between rhetorical and political theory, The State of Speech is a major contribution to the current debate over the role of public speech in Roman politics. Instead of a conventional, top-down model of power, it sketches a dynamic model of authority and consent enacted through oratorical performance and examines how oratory modeled an ethics of citizenship for the masses as well as the elite. It explains how imperial Roman rhetoricians reshaped Cicero's ideal republican citizen to meet the new political conditions of autocracy, and defends Ciceronian thought as a resource for contemporary democracy.

The chapter from which the talk is excerpted addresses a concept commonly identified as the core of republican concerns: liberty. In critical response to the recent work of Philip Pettit and the Cambridge school on liberty, I argue for a new understand of republican liberty that better accounts for its representation in Roman thinkers in the context of Roman history and political practice. I am particularly concerned with two issues: the presence and role of the people in Roman thought, which has received short shrift in recent studies; and the current understanding of what constitutes consensus in republican thought. In the course of handling these two issues, I rethink two common claims: that Roman politics and political thought aim toward the common good attained and articulated through consensus; and second, that the conditions through which consensus is reached confirm the irrelevancy of the Roman political experience for today, either because creation of consensus through public assemblies and the like demanded a high level of civic participation that is not sustainable under the conditions of modernity, or because Roman consensus was a creation of a senatorial elite with little or no investment in popular interests. Participation is a 'bedrock' value of republican thought, but in Roman writing it regularly transcends the strictly ballot-based, reactive role which neo-republicanists tend to assign it.6 Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic politics, Andreas Kalyvas’ 'politics of the extraordinary' and Nadia Urbinati’s work on democratic representation are important interlocutors in my account of republican politics and the interest it holds for us today.