Cicero’s Political Personae by Joanna Kenty

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cicero’s Political Personae by Joanna Kenty Jonathan P. Zarecki Cicero’s Political Personae. By Joanna Kenty. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp x + 274. Hardback, $100.00. ISBN: 9781108839464. Matthew Fox once wrote that we all make our own Ciceros.16 In this handsome and eminently readable book, Joanna Kenty has set out not to make her own Cicero but to expose the way that Cicero made his Ciceros in the years between his return from exile in 57 and his death in 43 BC. Kenty identifies eight separate personae adopted by Cicero during these years: the Attacker, the Friend, the Martyr, the Orator without Authority, the Champion of the Senate, the Popular Orator, the Voice of a Faction and the Spokesman of a Dynast. In each of the eight succinct chapters, one for each of the personae, Kenty describes the persona, its deployment across 3-6 speeches utilizing a roughly chronological approach and relates it to not only the complicated interpersonal relationships that dominated the Late Republic but also the practice of oratory during those tumultuous years. Kenty’s analysis aims to expose and clarify the complicated “value system of the Republican political culture” (223), with Cicero’s personae being one of his most important tools for navigating the fluid political and personal relationships that characterized the last two decades of his life. While Kenty admits that these personae were, overall, less than effective in achieving Cicero’s aims, the study of his failures is as useful as studying his successes for understanding his motivations and how Cicero himself viewed the role of the orator in the Late Republic. Chapter 1 looks at Cicero’s most well-known persona, the Attacker. Kenty, however, focuses on Cicero’s restraint when on the offensive, characterizing this [End Page 492] persona as a purifier of public morality, one who has a duty to call a spade a spade but also who must hold back, even when responding to deeply personal attacks, from allowing his speech to devolve into the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind. This persona is on full display, according to Kenty, in Cicero’s vituperation of Vatinius, Clodius, Piso and, of course, Antony in the Second Philippic. Crucially, Cicero only resorts to the attacker when he has been the victim of attack and he uses this persona to assault his opponents’ credibility while using the same opportunity to demonstrate his complete mastery of the situation and his own emotions. The second chapter, one of the strongest and most interesting, takes the opposite track from the first chapter and examines Cicero as Friend. Kenty is not interested in Cicero’s actual friendships but rather the way that Cicero employs amicitia as a rhetorical trope. Cicero was certainly in need of friends in the 50s and Kenty highlights how Cicero uses his friendships with Pompey and Caesar to promote a persona of the friend chock full of gratitude for beneficences on his behalf. The uses of this persona, which Kenty calls “ritualistic” (57), are directly related to the scale of the deeds performed on Cicero’s behalf; hence, the effusive praise of Caesar in De Provinciis Consularibus, while perhaps disingenuous, is a calculated move designed to win over Caesar’s allies in the Senate, if not Caesar himself. After Pompey’s death and Caesar’s victory, Cicero’s rhetoric of friendship becomes a way for him to dispense advice, for example, to Caesar in Pro Marcello and the next generation of statesmen in the First Philippic. Chapter 3 turns inward, from public demonstrations of hostility or cordiality to the pain and suffering that resulted from Cicero’s exile, which Cicero channeled into the persona of the Martyr. Oddly, this chapter is as much about Cato the Younger as it is Cicero. Kenty argues that it is Cato who is the best representation of the Martyr persona, with Cicero creating an alternative version of the Martyr that was still noble and heroic but predicated on excessive emotion and a concurrent claim for sincerity, as demonstrated in De Domo Sua and Pro Sestio. That is, until the Philippics, especially the Second Philippic, when Cicero adopted...