Roman political thought has often languished in the shadow of Greek political thought, always coming after it in survey volumes. This book therefore sets out to be the first comprehensive survey to tackle Roman political thought on its own, drawing on resurgent interest in Roman politics and political analysis to counter the view, here represented by Sheldon Wolin, that Roman political thought was derivative of Greek, and lacked the ‘theoretical originality of Plato and Aristotle’ (p. 1).
But what does it mean to speak of Roman political thought? H. answers this in two ways, first by selecting and focusing on nine major authors, almost all writing in Latin. But this ‘great man’ or ‘great books’ approach is at odds with the claim to be comprehensive. In some cases, further authors are covered in the context of the major authors who engaged with them, and brief surveys of schools – hence Polybius provides context for Cicero's analysis of the Roman Republic, and Epictetus for Marcus Aurelius’ Stoicism – but significant authors and genres are missing. For example, H. reads Seneca's De clementia as a kingship treatise on the limits of jurisdiction (pp. 278–86), but does not relate it to other instances of this important Hellenistic genre, such as Dio Chrysostom's orations.
H. secondly justifies his selections on the basis of the theme he identifies as characteristic of Roman political thought, a pragmatic approach in which the analysis of politics draws on the Romans' own experience, mourning loss of tradition and exploring the ‘extra-institutional, affective foundation of political life’ (p. 3). This focus on political psychology might explain the minimal coverage of the jurists, covered in a couple of footnotes, and could have been further supported with evidence from politician authors such as Pliny.
H.'s selected great authors write in both poetry and prose. He is right to stress the political content of Roman poetry and its commentary on political ideas and events, especially the advent of Augustus; chapters on Lucretius and Virgil here follow his earlier work on political thought in Homer in teasing out political resonances from texts that are not straightforwardly political treatises. Virgil is the more consciously political writer, although his stance towards the advent of Augustan rule has long been disputed. Here, H. points to intriguing themes, the interplay between pietas and violence that characterises Roman accounts of the city's foundation, and carefully links the Georgics and Eclogues into his overall account of a rather philosophical Virgil.
The inclusion of Lucretius’ De rerum natura enables a broader discussion of Roman responses to Epicureanism, and both the political content of the work and its influence on later writers earn it its place here. But again, Roman poetry has much more to offer the political theorist. Epics such as Ovid's Metamorphoses (with its historical final book) and Lucan's Bellum Civile have much to say about the transformation of the Roman world, and what it means to be a Roman political actor and leader. What about the challenge to conventional Romanitas mounted by lyric poets and love elegists? Or the critique of Roman political life presented in satire, that most Roman of genres?
The primacy of Cicero cannot be avoided, and a long first chapter surveys his works, taking a largely thematic approach that emphasises Cicero's exploration of social duty, virtue and justice. The survey of Cicero's work provides an introduction to many of the Roman institutions, practices and concepts that students will need to know to relate political theory to practice, moving on to more abstract concerns as the chapter progresses to explore Cicero's later, more philosophical, writing. Chronology and development are, somewhat unhelpfully, not emphasised here, in a chapter that is otherwise a useful resource for students of politics beginning a survey of Rome with its most distinctive republican thinker.
The problem of translating res publica and optimus status (pp. 30–6) introduces both the connection of Cicero's thought to that of Plato, and some of the difficulties that matching Latin text to Greek concepts can introduce. A further central theme of the book, the influence of Hellenistic Stoic ideas on Roman political thought, is also introduced here; for Cicero, H. argues, ‘cities and laws are more real … than they are for the Stoics’ (p. 42), provoking a ‘distinctive response’ organised around the practical creation of societas (p. 45).
This framework drives Cicero's analysis of the role of auctoritas, potestas, or imperium within the mixed constitution. Libertas proves more problematic; whereas contemporary republicanism argues that the republic delivers a specific form of liberty, non-domination (pp. 52–8), H. disputes the distinction between this and negative liberty (p. 55 n. 90), and thus regards it as ‘incomplete’ as a characterisation of libertas, a claim that merits much more detailed attention. Summaries of Cicero's texts are accompanied by brief quotations and section references; while there is little detailed engagement with other scholars within the text (the assault here on P. Pettit's use of Rome is more detailed than most), footnotes provide extensive and helpful references to current debates.
The transition from Republic to Empire and its meaning for Roman political actors is approached in different ways by texts in many genres, but most obviously in the historiography of the early Empire, represented here by Sallust, Livy and Tacitus. These historiographical chapters benefit from a chronological exploration of the source texts, and enable H. to develop an emerging theme, the developing response to tyranny. H. argues for the importance of Sallust as a political thinker, through his ‘problematization of the central concept of Roman life, the mos maiorum’ (p. 146) as much as for his much-noted analyses of fear and decline (pp. 148–9). The analysis of Roman manliness through the negative exemplar of Catiline (pp. 158–9) exemplifies another thread (continued with Virgil's Camilla, pp. 220–1). With more compact source material to summarise, this chapter provides a clear account of Sallust and his analysis of Roman political decline.
In reading Livy as a political writer, H. perhaps underplays the cogency of Tacitus’ more explicitly political analysis of Rome and its emperors. Arguing that Livy is writing a ‘conceptual history’ (pp. 230–2), against Walsh's characterisation of a ‘psychological history’, H. suggests that Livy's narrative gives phenomenal form to the conceptual, and communicates a series of ‘felt’ concepts, that in turn provide a remedy for the reader's political ills.
The response to tyranny drove the adaptation of Hellenistic Greek Stoicism to the political conditions of imperial Rome, and chapters on Seneca and Marcus Aurelius explore this in works where, as H. shows, the response to philosophy and the practice of politics (and the decision to abandon it) become a single enterprise. These chapters also draw together a further theme that emerged with Cicero, the Roman response to the Stoic idea of the cosmopolis.
One of the thorniest questions with works on Roman political thought is where to end, and what constitutes the final chapter of distinctively Roman thought. H. opts for Augustine, and offers a dense and detailed survey of his career and writing as a Christian response to Roman political thought, one that remains distinctively Roman in its suspicion of theory. While H. provides effective demonstration of Augustine's interest in Roman theorists, and use of a wide range of Roman authors and genres, his earlier focus on Roman Stoicism, and elision of Roman Academic thought, over-emphasises the importance of the former.
The editorial apparatus and production values of this book are disappointing. H. ranges vastly across the existing scholarship, from established classics to previous surveys to newer thinking, and 70 pages of bibliography attest to careful research and citation, but the complete absence of modern authors (and also of some ancient authors) from the main index, and very limited indexing of concepts, make it harder for readers to pursue debates and themes across the book. The separate index locorum is more thorough; a glossary of Latin and Greek political and philosophical terms would have been a helpful addition.
While H. provides some insightful close readings of his selected texts, makes interesting arguments for reading the Latin historians as political thinkers and covers the authors most likely to be encountered by students on survey courses, this is far from the comprehensive survey of Roman political thought that it sets out to be.
