Metaphor, Violence, and the Death of the Roman Republic

That the Roman res publica died at the end of the first century BCE is one of the Romans' most persistent stories about themselves and their state. Countless metaphors found in the works of Cicero and his contemporaries depict the way or, rather, ways in which they envisioned this death to have (repeatedly) occurred. To describe the corruption and dissolution of their traditional state, late-Republican authors fleshed out Rome's body politic with head(s), limbs, blood, guts, bones, veins, and tendons---and imagined them, over and over, as being mutilated and compromised by violence, discord, and disease. Despite the ubiquity of these images in late-Republican literature (and their presence in countless modern works as well), there have been no systematic investigations into the meanings and implications of Roman metaphors about the disintegration of their political body, nor any attempts to contextualize them against their immediate cultural and political backgrounds. The present study seeks to fill these scholarly gaps.;An initial chapter documents the rich tradition of viewing the Roman state in terms of a human body that existed in the late Republic and, based on the shared details and assumption of various "antiquarian" accounts, argues that for Cicero and his contemporaries Rome's political body was something always already divided and compromised by discord and corruption. Subsequent chapters concern themselves with political oratory and investigate the following issues: the body politic's diseases and their violent cures (Ch. 2); charges of wounding the Republic in Roman invective (Ch. 3); and the accusations of murdering the fatherland that proliferated in the aftermath of Caesar's assassination (Ch. 4). An afterword moves into the early Empire to consider the gruesome death of Rome's traditional state as memorialized in Lucan's Civil War. As a unifying pattern, this study reveals throughout that Roman metaphors about the body politic's mutilation and dissolution, more than being simply descriptive, actually participate in the divisive processes that they describe.