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14 1 Cicero’s De Re Publica and the Virtues of the Statesman J. G. F. Powell In dealing with a fragmentary philosophical text such as Cicero’s De Re Publica,1 it is more than usually difficult to perform the basic tasks of scholarly interpretation: to characterize plausibly the main lines of argument and the structure of the exposition,to notice the deployment of recurring themes,to examine the relationship to any literary models and precursors, and to come to a view on the overall persuasive purposes of the work. Even with texts that survive complete, there can be a good deal of debate and disagreement about that kind of issue. What hope, therefore, for a text of which at the most reliable estimate only about a quarter survives in total and what does survive is heavily weighted toward the first half of the work? Any attempt to take the broader view risks being dismissed as hopelessly speculative. However, for this occasion I am prepared to take the risk and make the attempt. I shall try to stay clear about where the boundary lies between interpretation of what is there in the text and speculation about what is not there. I should also make clear at the beginning that while I address in Cicero’s De Re Publica and the Virtues of the Statesman   15 part the issue of Cicero’s relationship to Plato,2 I am not by and large attempting to unravel the sources of Cicero’s ideas but rather—in tune with the overall direction of Ciceronian scholar­ ship in the last twenty years—to interpret Cicero on his own terms. I start with one of the more out-­ of-­ the-­ way testimonia for Cicero ’s De Re Publica. This comes from the late-­ antique but by no means unintelligent commentary of one Grillius3 on another work of Cicero, the De Inventione. Grillius is commenting on a passage of the prologue to that work (1.4) in which the young Cicero sets out a view of the relationship between oratory and politics. He refers to a work that he calls Cicero’s politia—evidently what we know as the De Re Publica—for a characterization of the statesman, or rector rei publicae. (Clearly the word is rector, not rhetor as one branch of Grillius ’s manuscript tradition has it; the error is understandable in a work otherwise on rhetoric.) This phrase occurs notoriously in a number of places in the text of the De Re Publica and has been the subject of a good deal of controversy.As Heinze showed in 1924,4 the rector rei publicae is not a king or a dictator,nor necessarily a person with supreme political authority, nor a kind of precursor of the Augustan princeps: these interpretations, popular until recently, are misunderstandings. It is not the name of a political office or position at all; this was clear to Heinze and to Krarup.5 There has not, however, always been clarity as to what it does designate. The solution for which I have argued6 is that it is simply the name of a profession or occupation, that of the statesman or politician. Confusion has arisen from the fact that, like many such terms, it can be used either in a relatively neutral, factual sense or in an idealistic, value-­ laden sense: as for example “poet”may be used as a general cate­ gorization of anyone who writes verses or as a term of praise (especially in phrases like “true poet”) for the finest practitioners of the art. Sometimes our own language provides us with a choice between different terms for the ordinary and for the ideal: thus run-­ of-­ the-­ mill practitioners of politics tend to be called “politicians,”while we reserve “statesman” for those we admire. In Latin there was no easy way of making this distinction, nor indeed was there a convenient Latin word or phrase for either concept until Cicero invented his rector rei publicae. It will not, however, surprise us to find that Cicero mostly 16  J. G.F. Powell uses the phrase to refer to an excellent or ideal practitioner of the political art, just as the word orator in the rhetorical works (especially De Oratore and Orator) more often than not refers to an excellent or ideal orator. Now Grillius happens to preserve for us a description of Cicero ’s ideal statesman, almost certainly not in Cicero’s own words but in a close...

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