With her monograph, Julia Mebane tells the story of the Roman res publica’s evolving body and makes a compelling argument for how this evolution allowed political thinkers to come to terms with the autocracy of the Principate. M. marshals ample evidence to show that the human body was not just a convenient vehicle for the expression of power dynamics, but that it fundamentally shaped how Romans conceived of those dynamics. Observing shifts in political speech invoking the body allows M. to shed ‘new light on an age-old question: how the transition from Republic to Principate was perceived by those who lived through it’ (22).
M.’s introduction tackles the thorny question of how to define the Roman Republic, a community of citizens who lacked a precise term for the political system in which they operated. This lack made the language of the body necessary as a means of working around shortcomings of the legal system. The imprecision of the republican legal system also makes it necessary to determine why (and if) Romans viewed the Principate as an aberration: M. argues that ‘[i]n reimagining the shape of the body politic in response to sole rule between the 20s bce and 60s ce, they implicitly acknowledged and confronted a shift in Rome’s governing form’ (13).
Ch. 1 traces the origin of the body politic metaphor in the Roman tradition to the speech of Menenius Agrippa (494 b.c.e.), which famously assigned the plebeians the role of limbs to the senatorial stomach with which it needed to reconcile. The metaphor as illustrated in Cicero and his contemporaries demonstrates how two rival groups exist within the same corpus (39) and weighs the relative values of consensus versus conflict within that body. Despite the shock value of the rhetoric of caput populi used by Catiline according to Cicero’s Pro Murena, the image of the ‘head of the people’, combined with Cicero’s own use of medical terminology to introduce the idea of a healer of state, laid groundwork for Romans interested in figuring power through a single statesman invested with exceptional authority.
In the following chapter, M. addresses the ailing body that required Cicero’s exceptional statesman as healer. Such an approach suits a tradition of political thought that had observed organic processes of decline within communities, decline tied to discourse linking moral corruption to physical deterioration, as illustrated in Sallust and Varro. The spread of moral rot is often figured in ancient sources as a top-down process, indicting the ruling class, but also reinforcing a model where power and influence are associated with the head. The chapter addresses drastic measures the statesman as healer might undertake, including surgery and amputation — a rhetorical ploy Cicero would use to justify the removal of men like his personal enemy Clodius.
Ch. 3 extends discussion of the statesman as healer by detailing how that image was used in discourse generated during the first Principate, as Augustus emerges as the ‘prototypical healer of the body politic’ (96). We find evidence for this role in Horace’s Odes and Carmen Saeculare as well as Vergil’s Aeneid, and (more ambivalently) Ovid’s exile poetry. Livy also promotes the image of a positively configured head of state applied to figures from Rome’s early history: the head of state emerges as necessary during a military crisis (Camillus) and as a remedy for civil discord (Numa).
Ch. 4 continues to explore how the metaphor of the body politic was shaped in response to the first Principate, focusing on the Stoic impetus behind Manilius’ Astronomica, which establishes an equivalence between the guiding principle of the universe and the leadership of Rome’s guiding citizen. Under Tiberius’ Principate, Velleius Paterculus and Valerius Maximus assign the princeps the role of head of state and correlate the health of Rome’s ruler with the health of its citizen body. In Velleius we find the first explicit rendering of the princeps as caput of the res publica (144), and while the tone is celebratory, it also underscores the problem of dynastic succession, requiring figurative acknowledgement of more than one leading citizen. As M. puts it: ‘the complexity of relationships within the domus Augusta proved difficult to reconcile with the simple math of the human body’ (147).
The final chapter turns to Seneca’s De clementia. Addressed to Nero, the treatise subjects the imperial model of the body politic to explicit theorisation that relies heavily on the model of physician and patient, revealing a critical interdependence of the head and body. The same chapter considers Lucan’s Bellum civile in dialogue with Seneca’s theorised head and healer of state, articulated with relative cynicism and refusing to solve the problem of a body politic dependent on an irresolute contest to become the caput rei publicae. A brief conclusion follows, on rhetoric emerging from the year of the four emperors, allowing us to view the prominence of the head in political discourse and the extent to which that signalled the inevitability of the Principate, not as ‘an ideal institution’ but as a ‘necessary one’ (197).
M.’s work makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how the Romans grappled with autocracy. While she occasionally presses too hard for an intertextual relationship based on a single word or an exceedingly common one, she does an excellent job of recapping her argument in a way that keeps the reader aware of the larger story unfolding. The cumulative evidence is impressive, allowing her cogently to narrate the history of a potent metaphor in Roman political thought.
