Cicero's Pro Archia has historically been taken as a bona fide expression of humanism. In this article, I demonstrate how this reading of the Pro Archia has allowed the political and cultural tensions in the speech to remain hidden. Cicero's vision of Archias as an idealized amalgam sanitizes both the poetic and the cultural identity of his Syrian client in favour of a projection which combined generic “Greekness” with a politicized invocation of the Roman poet, Q. Ennius. Contextualizing the Pro Archia within its contemporary political moment reveals that Cicero is consciously constructing a narrative of Archias as a “good immigrant.”
In 167 BCE, L. Aemilius Paullus celebrated a triumph in Rome following the defeat of King Perseus of Macedon at the Battle of Pydna in the previous year. All of the accounts of the procession enumerate the incredible volume of booty that was paraded into Rome—wagons loaded with shields, weapons, statues of gods and men, golden bowls, livestock, luxury goods. Perseus himself, the defeated king, marched in this procession, as did his two sons and a daughter. Plutarch writes that ‘the children of Perseus were led along as slaves’: τὰ τέκνα τοῦ βασιλέως ἤγετο δοῦλα (Aem. 33.6), and that they were accompanied by their tutors who wept, taught the royal children to beg, and stretched out their hands to the Romans, who are here called ‘spectators’ (θεατάς, ib.). Perseus himself comes next, dressed in the black of mourning. Plutarch goes on to give a psychological picture of Perseus—he is dumbstruck and gaping, unable to process how his life had been turned upside down (34.1). Because Perseus could not face suicide, Plutarch says, ‘he converted himself into part of his own spoil’ (34.2).
The Roman attitude toward the Ethiopian as expressed in scattered passages is far less kindly than the Greek. The usage in Terence and the Auctor ad Herennium which imply a vogue for Ethiopians is probably in imitation of Greek usage. How early the Roman attitude crystalized into racial feeling it is hard to say, and as those who express it are chiefly satirists one must be careful in drawing conclusions. Nevertheless in the absence of an expressed good will and in the face of references which have a superior or contemptuous tone it is evident that the Romans had no special affection for Ethiopians at Rome, however romantically they may have spoken of the races of distant India. The earliest passage in which they are spoken of slightingly seems to be in Cicero—cum hoc homine an cum stipite Aethiope, Cicero, De Sen., 6. The word does not occur in all the manuscripts and the Oxford and Teubner texts omit it entirely. In notes it is translated ‘blockhead’ and the statement made that in antiquity the Ethiopians were synonymous with stupidity, a conclusion obviously drawn from the passage and the modern attitude toward them. Even if the word was actually used by Cicero, this passage alone is basis for such a theory.Mrs. Beardsley (op. cit., pp.119–120), in my judgement, is wrong in her conclusion that the Roman attitude toward the Negro crystallized into racial feeling. In support of her view that the Romans referred to the Ethiopians at Rome in a superior and contemptuous tone, Mrs. Beardsley includes the following passages: (1) Cicero, Red. in Sen., 6.14 (cited incorrectly as De Sen., 6); (2) Martial, VI, 39, 6; (3) Juvenal, II, 23. Cicero, Red in Sen., 6.14…cum hoc homine an stipite Aethiope…, as Mrs. Beardsley admits, does not appear in all the manuscripts and is omitted in the best established texts. A consideration of the context leads me to believe that the editors (Oxford, Teubner, Loeb) are right in rejecting Aethiope or stipite Aethiope and in reading stipite. Nevertheless, the appearance of the variant indicates that the author of the reading used Aethiope in a derogatory sense. (It is possible that the pejorative meaning of aethiops was a medieval development.)In these two excerpts, Grace Hadley Beardsley and Frank M. Snowden, Jr., discuss the appearance of the word Aethiops (‘Aethiopian’) in Cicero's Post reditum in senatu 14. Beardsley, whose intellectual project was motivated, as Maghan Keita and, more recently, Najee Olya have discussed, by racial animus and who sought to find evidence of Greco-Roman anti-Blackness that was both consistent with, and therefore a legitimizing exemplum for, contemporary anti-Blackness in 20th-century America, took Cicero's words as ‘the earliest passage in which [Aethiopians] are spoken of slightingly’ at Rome—doing so cautiously, given the fact that most editors had deleted it from the text. Frank M. Snowden, Jr.—whose own work W.E.B. Du Bois explicitly contrasted with Beardsley—responded to Beardsley's assertion that Post reditum in senatu contained evidence of anti-Blackness with scepticism, ultimately doubting the legitimate textual presence of the term and interpreting its presence instead as an artefact of hostile scribal intervention. Indeed, both Beardsley and Snowden discuss the fact that Aethiope does not occur in all of the Cicero manuscripts. While it is true that none of the authoritative textual editions print Aethiope at Post reditum in senatu 14, the textual apparatus nonetheless demonstrates clearly that the term appears in the manuscript tradition more often than it does not:stipe P1: etiope P2stipe uel ethiope Guel aethiope stipe E1esope H
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