Cosmopolitanism and the Roman Empire.

Christoph Pieper

doi:10.21825/jolcel.v5i0.16573

Abstract

My article explores the tension between idealized cosmopolitan ideas, of a single citizenry for all people in the world, and imperial Roman nationalism between the late Roman Republic and the Italian Renaissance. In the form of three case studies (and without any claim that those are representative for the development) it focusses on three important thinkers whose work shows affinity with cosmopolitan discourse, but who at the same time also explicitly reflected on the political realities they were living in: Cicero, Augustine, and Lorenzo Valla. All three favour cosmopolitan ideals over political egoism, and all three reflect on whether and how the historical reign under which they are living can live up to the philosophical or theological ideals they advocate. Finally, all three authors do not only share similar discursive patterns, but also react to each other intertextually (links will be mentioned especially between Cicero and Augustine and between Augustine and Valla). Thus, while all three are distinct in their argument and use cosmopolitan concepts for hugely different aims, the comparison can share light both on the boundaries and the discursive power of the concept in Latin literature. 

Highlights

Modern theories of cosmopolitanism come in many jackets: they can focus on culture, language, economics, age or gender.[1]
In the form of three case studies it focusses on three important thinkers whose work shows affinity with cosmopolitan discourse, but who at the same time explicitly reflected on the political realities they were living in: Cicero, Augustine, and Lorenzo Valla
The three case studies of this article have shown the diversity of cosmopolitan discourse in Latin literature

Summary

Introduction

Modern theories of cosmopolitanism come in many jackets: they can focus on culture, language, economics, age or gender.[1]. Cosmopolitan critique is suspicious of dogmatism.”[2] As a consequence, imperialism can be defined as one of its most distinct opposites, as the latter is directed towards inequality and the dominion of a minority at the costs of suppressing or even enslaving a majority of the people From this perspective the imperium Romanum, one of the most conspicuous Empires of the ancient world, seems a curious object of cosmopolitan studies.[3] Rome had subdued the Mediterranean and large parts of the known world; it had forced the inhabitants of the conquered regions to serve Rome’s armies, to pay taxes and to accept Roman state cults. 13: “Yet amid polemic and detraction, amid material corruption and disaster, for centuries the ancient cult of patriotism subsisted.” 8 I owe this formulation to the insightful remark of an anonymous peer reviewer Their argument and use cosmopolitan concepts in different discursive contexts (philosophy, theology and linguistics), they share at least one element: the rootage of their debates in Rome and its Empire, which offers them the historical and political foil for their argumentation. I hope that this comparative approach will shed light on the discursive power of the concept in the long history of Latin literature from Antiquity to the Renaissance, while not glossing over its boundaries that it reaches when being applied to these hugely diverse fields

Cicero’s struggle with Stoic cosmopolitanism

Augustine’s city of God as a cosmopolitan state?

Lorenzo Valla’s ‘res publica Romanae linguae’

Conclusion