Cicero’s Political Personae, by Joanna Kenty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Abstract

Cicero’s Political Personae is a study of the characters Cicero crafted, embodied, and performed in his postexile speeches. By proxy, it is also a study of oratory from the end of the Roman Republic to the beginning of the Principate, a period of political metamorphosis that author Joanna Kenty notes is more often studied by military historians than by rhetoricians. Kenty’s readings of Cicero’s speeches contextualize the place of orators in this era, and in turn assert orators’ value as negotiators of and with power and as shapers of the Roman political landscape, even during a period of waning republican power (16).Kenty’s project is a rhetorical one insofar as her objects of study are Cicero’s speeches, though her readings intentionally lack a theoretical framework and are not grounded in classical rhetorical theory. There is no mention of a “middle style,” for example, and discussions of rhetorical figures are rare. The absence of theoretical framing may cause rhetoricians to bristle. However, this absence offers an opportunity to read Cicero outside of traditional, often restrictive, classical rhetorical models, models that Cicero himself helped to generate and uphold.Underlying Kenty’s work is the notion that successful speeches are not solely ones by which the rhetor persuades an audience or enacts something tangible. Indeed, Kenty focuses not on the strategies Cicero used to win arguments but rather on the mechanisms by which he engaged in self-fashioning and the purposes served by his invented personae. Many of Cicero’s postexile speeches allude to his shifting place in politics, and the self-fashioning evident in these speeches aims for a delicate diplomatic balance. For example, chapter 2, “The Orator as Friend,” primarily explores Cicero’s persona as friend to Pompey and Caesar. Most intriguing in this chapter is Kenty’s comparison of Cicero’s friend persona in Pro Marcello, in which he praised then-dictator Caesar for allowing the senate to debate Marcellus’s exile, with his persona in parts of the First Philippic, in which he strongly cautioned consuls Antony and Dolabella to take care of the people of Rome—by all accounts, two very different speeches. Throughout Cicero’s Political Personae, Kenty links seemingly unrelated speeches by their shared personae, which allows for a uniquely complex and comprehensive cross-section of Cicero’s later work.Kenty occasionally mentions contemporary politics, though there is ample potential here for reading this text as part of a larger project in classical rhetorical reception. In particular, chapter 6, “The Popular Orator,” which centers on Cicero’s insistence that he was popular despite not being a popularis (i.e., a demagogue), might be read alongside discussions of present-day demagoguery. On a whole, Kenty resists the narrative that oratory declined in the transitional period between the Republic and early Principate by reading Cicero’s postexile speeches both broadly and deeply, and invites us to reconsider the measures by which we determine what is effective oratory.