Olivia Elder, University of Oxford
In this paper I explore the theme of enslavement in Cicero’s early speeches (81–66 BCE) and argue that Cicero instrumentalizes this theme to serve his rhetorical and political ends.
Cicero’s early speeches took place in a period when slavery was an especially prominent and urgent political issue. The period 135–71 BCE saw a series of three major wars against enslaved people (Shaw 2001); the Spartacus slave war, fought between 73 and 71 (and with echoes afterwards: Stampacchia 1976), was particularly close in space and time. Several of Cicero’s speeches – Pro Tullio in 71, In Verrem in 70, Pro Caecina in 69 and Pro Cluentio in 66 – center on events in rural Italy and Sicily, i.e. in the same geography as these conflicts with enslaved people (on these speeches’ background see Frier 1983; Russo 2014). More broadly slavery was an intrinsic part of the Roman Republic’s social and economic structures, a fact emphasized in recent scholarship (Padilla Peralta and Bernard 2022; Flower 2022).
Yet despite these connections of space and time, Cicero’s speeches remain surprisingly neglected evidence for attitudes to and practices of enslavement (Čulík-Baird 2022; 2023 are two recent exceptions on specific case studies).
In this paper I show that enslavement is a strikingly visible theme throughout Cicero’s early speeches and contend that Cicero manipulates contemporary norms and attitudes surrounding enslavement to construct his arguments.
I concentrate on three modes of engagement with slavery in the speeches. First, I analyze Cicero’s descriptions of enslaved people as agents, showing how Cicero plays on tropes and prejudices to stage their roles in his narrative of events. For example, he uses the trope of the servus callidus (‘cunning slave’) to contrast the two enslaved men Strato and Diogenes in Pro Cluentio; the contrast between these two enslaved men forms a key plank of Cicero’s defense. Second, I examine Cicero’s depictions of enslavers. Cicero puts under scrutiny several of his free protagonists’ treatment of enslaved individuals: I focus on the examples of Verres (In Verrem), Sassia (Pro Cluentio) and Sulla (Pro Roscio). I argue that these three offer different models of enslaving and that Cicero uses these different models as a proxy for status and character. Third, I examine instances of slavery as metaphor that run across the speeches (e.g. In Verrem 2.3.102; Pro Roscio 140; Pro Cluentio 146). Drawing on recent work on slavery as metaphor in other contexts (especially Lavan 2013) I show how this metaphor reflects uncertainties and varieties of contemporary thinking about enslavement. These uncertainties and varieties are part of what makes enslavement an effective rhetorical tool for Cicero.
In his engagement with slavery in his early speeches, Cicero both reflects and responds to his immediate historical context; the contemporary salience of enslavement gives Cicero’s treatment of the theme political and rhetorical bite. This Ciceronian evidence exposes contemporary attitudes towards enslavement and shows how slavery – and enslaved individuals – were staged and exploited in late republican rhetoric, law, and politics.