Politeness and Politics in Cicero’s Letters (review)

In Politeness and Politics in Cicero’s Letters, Jon Hall employs a selection of Ciceronian texts in order to examine both the tense verbal negotiations of this period and the ways in which such negotiations depended upon the successful deployment of verbal display. Now, it is not news that Cicero was a man interested in, and dedicated to, the compelling use of words; nor is it news that the late Republic was a world shot through with tense verbal negotiations; nor indeed is it news that many of these negotiations hinged upon complex expectations of appropriate verbal display. Indeed, the past decade or so of Ciceronian scholarship has been marked by a handful of excellent studies focusing on precisely this author, and precisely these issues (Krostenko 2001 and Dugan 2005 come to mind).

What is news—or rather, what is refreshingly new about Hall’s work, and what makes this book crucial to the current state of Ciceronian and late Republican socioliterary studies—are Hall’s identification of the letters (rather than the speeches or technica) as an intersection of Cicero’s social, political, and literary aspirations; his argument that epistolary politeness, in its many forms of expression and reception, constituted an axis around which these aspirations revolved; and his application to Cicero of a literary and tonal sensitivity often reserved for analyses of poetic works. Beyond being merely convinced by his overarching thesis, I found it so compelling I had to wonder why I had not thought of it before.

Hall begins with an Introduction in which he presents an explanation of both the importance of the concept of politeness as an interpretive tool and why Cicero’s letters present fertile ground for such interpretation. Hall next presents the three categories of politeness he has identified as the most useful in an analysis of Cicero’s letters—Affiliative Politeness, the Politeness of Respect, and Redressive Politeness—and explains both why he has labeled them as he has and how they function in the world of the late Republic. The remainder of the Introduction brings a broad readership—from Ciceronian specialists to scholars working in the late Republic to a more general audience interested in epistolography—up to speed and onto the same page. The next five chapters (“Doing Aristocratic Business,” “From Polite Fictions to Hypocrisy,” “Redressive Politeness,” “Politeness in Epistolary Conflict,” and “Politeness and Political Negotiation”) move from the “most commonly deployed strategies of politeness” (27) to the manipulation of such strategies and, finally, the role of verbal politeness in times of both personal and political tension and strife. The final chapter, which focuses on correspondence written after Caesar’s assassination, turns to ways in which state crises bring out the more sinister side of verbal politeness.

The progression is a logical and compelling one. While Hall limits his examination to a relatively small selection of the letters (a good choice, as a larger selection would risk giving this book the sense of a mere survey), those chosen are chosen thoughtfully and serve as convincing representatives of a much larger phenomenon. The refreshingly brief conclusion rounds things out without engaging in summary or remaking arguments that have already been made; it is followed by an extraordinarily helpful appendix listing what Hall has identified as “common strategies” of affiliative politeness and the politeness of respect.

Although the strengths of this book are many, I should like to point to three. The first is Hall’s writing: this book was a true pleasure to read. Hall’s confident and somewhat easygoing academic style betrays not only a comfortable ownership of the sizable Ciceronian corpus but also a true enthusiasm for his project and a deep respect for the author at its center. The second strength I wish to mention is Hall’s remarkable sensitivity to Cicero’s tone. Although there are one or two places where I might read a bit more humor into Cicero’s use of verbal politeness than does...