Banished with No Force: Exile and Metonymy in Cicero's Pro Caecina Oratio

This article explores the use of metonymic force in exilic practices during the late period of the Roman republic. This type of force is shown to be fundamentally different from the one deployed in sacratio as defined by Agamben. While homo sacer is displaced from law but remains within the reach of sovereign power, metonymic force takes advantage of one's voluntary departure into a different jurisdiction and aims to prolong and perpetuate this displacement. This paradigm is explored in two case studies brought forward in Cicero's speech Pro Caecina: aquae et ignis interdictio in Roman criminal law and deiectio in private property suits. In both cases, force is encoded―and made unaccountable―in a rhetorical way, through the reversal of contiguity relations in space and time. Finally, by looking at Cicero's own exile, the article argues that metonymic force does more than effecting displacement within discrete legal realms; it also brings a surreptitious displacement of exile's restitutive claims from one realm into another.