Cicero and the Spectacle of Power

Abstract

On the second day of January 63 B.C. Cicero, with the full dignity of a consul, appeared in the Forum to address the Populus at acontio(assembly). This occasion, when he voiced his opposition to the agrarian legislation moved by the tribune Rullus and his colleagues, can be remembered because a text of the speech has survived asDe lege agararia II. His words were apparently persuasive, since the bill was defeated in the subsequent voting of the tribal assembly. Eloquence was Cicero's greatest political asset and theDe lege agraria IImight be read as testimony to the power of words alone. Yet while it might be tempting for a literary critic to imagine that ‘when he stood before his audience, Cicero had at his disposal only words and the stylistic genius to construct from those words arguments that would shape men's opinions and move their hearts’, the words and genius, although powerful as political weapons, operated in conjunction with the physical presence and ideological pre-eminence that the consul brought to the Rostra. There Cicero engineered persuasiveness by presenting a congruence between his verbal argument and his dignity as speaker. Since knowledge of Rullus' legislation is wholly dependent upon Cicero's representation of it, Cicero's speech might best serve then to illustrate what this embodied rhetoric suggests about the relations between a political actor and those who heard and saw him.