Hannah Arendt and Roman Political Thought

Abstract

A rendt's work shows continual intellectual engagement with the Romans. She refers to the genius of Rome as legislation and foundation.' She suggests that the one political experience which brought authority as word, concept, and reality into our history-the Roman experience of foundation has been almost entirely lost and forgotten.2 She describes the Romans' loving care of the world which underlay their distinctive of culture.3 She attributes to Cicero the inspiration for Augustine's love of philosophy, the source of Hegel's view of philosophy as reconciliation to the disunity of the world, and the basis for the view of philosophic training as critical for cultivating the mind for judgment.4 She credits to the Romans an awareness of forgiveness that was a wisdom entirely unknown to the Greeks (HC, 243). She traces back the faculty of making promises, fundamental for the stability of the world, to the Roman legal system (HC, 243). She argues that the early Christians consciously shaped their concept of immortality after the Roman model, substituting individual life for the political life of the body politic (HC, 315). She opens The Life of the Mind with quote from Cato and begins the fifth chapter of On Revolution with selection from Virgil. And she looks to the Romans in her elevation of courage as political virtue, in her discussion of freedom, and in her notion of tradition.5 Yet these connections remain largely unexplored. Instead, disputes about Arendt's indebtedness to the ancients are more often fought on the terrain of Athens. Macauley notes an instance when Arendt seems to prize the Roman perspective over the Greek, adding parenthetically, somewhat untyp-