Theater & the Ciceronian Invective

Though theater is often reduced into a pure form of entertainment, it played the important role of social and political commentary in both contemporary society and the ancient Roman world. The inherent quality of theater, first and foremost, as a visual spectacle characterized by the use of scenery, props, and costumes in addition to acting as an appeal to its audience’s emotions made it a very enticing strategy for aspiring orators. Cicero was one such person. Known for his heart throbbing theatrics at the peak of his political career, Cicero often implemented theatrical tactics into his political attacks through the forms of hyperbolic personae and vivid imagery to more effectively evoke the pathos of his arguments. In using his penchant for theater to craft an emphatic stage, reflective of Roman society and culture, Cicero crafts a villainous and persuasive narrative surrounding his political rivals, evoking the emotional response of his audience.

The genesis of Roman plays was deeply rooted in religion and politics. Since the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, Roman society had consistently indulged in the art of performance. As A.J. Boyle writes, the dramatic processions held by religious and political leaders before plebeian and slave audiences in the forms of sacred festivals, funerals, triumphs, sacrifices, military achievements, trials, reinstatements of magistrates, even a celebrity’s walking down the street incorporated the “self-conscious (re)-enactment of a social script.” The context of these performances differed in relation to the major religious festivals they accompanied, the main ones being dedicated toward Jupiter, Flora, Apollo, Magna Mater, and Ceres, but were united in their expression of spectacle: games, chariot racing, hunting, mimes, music, dancing, and, as later theatrical influence took hold, plays. These ceremonious performances were given an official title: ludi scaenici, meaning dramatic ‘games’ or ‘shows.’ The widespread religious and political connotations of the ludi scaenici allowed for performance to permeate into public and private, plebeian and elite factors of Roman life, further engaging its collective audience in the art of social performance (ars ludica) beyond the physical stage. The expressiveness of the ludi scaenici inherently combined with traditional Roman conventions, acting as demonstrations of hierarchical status and political power. The cultural significance of the ludi, as well as its emphasis on dramatic spectacle, translated into its offspring: plays. Therefore, Roman plays were inherently political.

Politicians also drew inspiration from traditional elements of theater to develop their political pathos. Even before Cicero’s time, Hellenistic orators employed symbolic imagery in their speeches in place of stage props, costumes, and scenery on a traditional rostra (stage). The Greek historian Polybius directly referenced these theatrical elements in an account of a politician’s funeral in the second century BCE:

When a prominent man dies, he is carried into the forum to the so-called rostra, sometimes in an upright, conspicuous position, more rarely in a reclining one. Encompassed by the whole people standing, an adult son (if one survives and is present) or another relative climbs the rostra and speaks on the virtues and achievements of the dead man. The result is that the crowd, both those who participated in the achievements and those who did not, as they recall and visualise the past, are drawn to such sympathy that the loss seems not a private one for the mourners but a public one affecting the people…The men wear togas - with a purple border if the ancestor had been a consul or praetor, whole purple if he had been a censor, embroidered with gold if he had celebrated a triumph or had accomplished something similar. The men parade in chariots, and before them are carried rods and axes and the other magisterial insignia according to the status of the offices of state held by each during their lifetime. And when they reach the rostra, they all sit in a row on chairs of ivory. It would be difficult to find a more glorious spectacle (theama) for a young man who aspires to fame and nobility. For who would not be stirred by the images of men renowned for their virtue, all together, as if alive and breathing? What could be a more glorious spectacle?

Immediately, Polybius’s meticulous staging of the procession establishes the setting of his performance: the dead noble is carried down into the forum, the political and cultural center of the republic and symbolic epicenter of social performance. The man is brought up to the rostra—literally meaning stage—and is established as a character playing a role in a larger social demonstration. Using the tragic act of one man’s funeral, Polybius conjures a mass evocation of sympathy from the crowd gathered before him, directing a large-scale emotional appeal beyond the private affairs of the dead man’s family and to the masses indirectly perceiving the dramatic scene through his words. As the deceased man’s image is consecrated, Polybius introduces another facet of theater: costume. Costume, like staging, is used as a reflection of Hellenistic culture in social performance. The men directing the funeral are dressed in unique togas, whose color and design reflect their hierarchical standing in Roman society. He further embellishes the glorious narrative of status using yet another theatrical technique: props. The officers’ parading of the rod and axes (fasces) are yet another demonstration of empirical strength. The ivory seats, located at the highest point of the stage, shamelessly display wealth and rank. Promoting the honorable values of military prowess and patriotism, Polybius’s laudable description of the consul and praetor’s purple and gold garments and their valuable insignias, symbols of the greatly-celebrated high rankers, incentive the hopeful youth in his audience to dedicate their lives to Rome in pursuit of similar fame and glory. Polybius’s dramatic direction of this funeral, as he put it, is no less than the most glorious spectacle.

The Roman forum: a hub of political and theatrical life

Likewise, theatrics played a crucial role in defining the Ciceronian style of oratory. To construct a persuasive political stage for his audience, Cicero exerts his power as a politician and metaphorical playwright to shape the characterizations of his political targets—his actors—so that they settle perfectly within his mirrored narrative of Roman society. Drawing from theatrical motifs to evolve his own political rhetoric, Cicero constructs theatrical ‘masks’—objectifications of human traits—for his actors in a flourished spectacle, declaring them the hero or vice of his political fantasy. The Romans called masks personae, the general Roman word for ‘the self’. The fascinating connotation of personae as a merging of theatrical performance and one’s intrinsic identity was displayed prominently in politics, as a Roman could don one persona in a private setting and switch swiftly to another under political pressure. Besides self-fashioning, personae was also a weapon used against others. Just as a playwright may mold a persona to his character, transforming their actor’s self-identity into an instrument for social and political rhetoric, the same occurred in Ciceronian rhetoric. 

More specifically, Cicero employed a specific structure of oration called the Republican crisis style. Laura Samponaro identifies the crisis style as an extension of Cicero’s theatrics, in which he models the plot progression of his accusatory speeches in a specific structure that simultaneously highlights the vices of the subject of his attacks and paints Cicero himself as the hero of the republic. This Republican crisis style begins with an inversion of reality, typically demonstrated through an inversion of one’s gender or motives. He “suspends reality to offer his audience alternative facts.” This marks the beginning of Cicero’s attack, in which he revisions the existence of a ‘mirrored’ Rome—a similar but fictitious version of Roman reality carefully crafted around a manufactured persona. The accused is placed in the very center of this other reality, and fact and blended with fiction. Then, Cicero “redirects” the narrative and “turns an upside-down world right,” rectifying it with what he constitutes as “truth,” and in doing so makes himself the virtuous hero that cleanses the Republic of its wicked inversion.  

In the Philippics, Pro Caelio, and In Verrem, Cicero’s political rivals act as foils to Cicero’s heroism as part of the crisis style, hyperbolically embodying all the impudicus, vorax, ignavia, cupiditas, tyrannis, and infidus in the whole republic. These inflammatory verbal degradations and public shamings are known as the ‘Ciceronian invective,’ which Cicero strategically deploys to intensify the emotional reactions (pathos) of those receiving it—either the target of his attacks or the observant audience. Let us take a look at this strategy in action: Cicero’s dehumanization of Antony arises repeatedly as a motif of the Second Philippic. About halfway through his speech, Cicero brings up the subject of the Lupercalia, cleverly manipulating the connotations of the festival as both a celebration of Rome’s founding brothers and, less honorably, lust and banditry, to characterize Antony as a literal lupercus, “a wolf in sheep’s clothing, whose transgressive nature requires subduing.” 

He does not disguise his feelings, conscript fathers; it is clear he is moved, he sweats, he grows pale. Let him do what he pleases, except being sick, as he was in the Portico of Minucius. What defense can there be for such disgraceful conduct? I long to hear, by way of understanding where his rhetorician's big fee is represented, that is to say, where the Leontine land shows a return. Your colleague was seated on the rostra, clad in a purple gown, on a golden chair, with a crown. You mount up, you approach the chair - if you were Lupercus, yet you should have remembered you were consul too - you display a diadem. There is a groan all over the forum. Whence came the diadem? For you had not picked up something cast away, but had brought it from your house, a crime rehearsed and fully planned. You persisted in putting it on his head amid the lamentations of the people; he amid their applause persisted in rejecting it. You then, traitor, were discovered to be the one man who, while establishing a tyranny and willing to have your colleague as our master, were at the same time making trial of what the Roman people could bear and endure (2.34.84-85).

This scene is arguably the most performative out of the whole Second Philippic, characterized by impressive imagery through the use of costumes, staging, and props. Caesar, adorned in purple and gold, the symbolic colors of victory, is seated upon the raised stage, immediately establishing his persona of honor and high status. Dramatically contrasting the glorious Caesar, Antony, from below, proceeds up towards him in the shameless manner of a half-dressed luperci. Cicero then introduces two symbolic props: the coronatus and diadema, the former a signifier of the highest empirical authority and the latter as a superficial label of nobility and class. Antony places it upon Caesar’s head, the crowd in the forum boos. The foolish Antony, however, ignoring their protest, persisted, only to be rejected by his consul and idol, driving the masses to explode in ridicule. Cicero claims that Antony—if not simply unable to perceive social propriety—contrived this plan to undermine Caesar’s authority and elevate his own, only to be so incompetent that the forum, the center of politics, the symbolic culmination of Roman culture, and a literal representation of the entire Roman people, may ridicule his actions. Cicero painted this scenario using such particular language and vivid imagery for his audience—those who were not physically present at the event themselves—that he has essentially created a new reality (again, in light of the crisis style), effectively incentivizing his audience in taking on the Ciceronian invective against Antony.

The Ciceronian invective and the personae of greed and shame play no greater role than the one they play in the Second Philippic. Over the course of his attack on Marc Antony, Cicero assigns Antony both the tragic and comedic mask, painting him as an utterly one-dimensional evil—yet, at the same time, mentally foolish—that threatens the very survival of the republic. The relations between Antony’s beastly persona and the collective will of the republic in jeopardy, as Cicero dictates, grow increasingly tense. Cicero especially hyperbolizes Antony’s insatiable, inhuman ‘greed,’ comparing him to the mythological whirlpool monster Charybdis:

What Charybdis was ever so voracious? Charybdis, do I say? Charybdis, if she existed, was only one animal. The Ocean, I swear most solemnly, appears scarcely capable of having swallowed up such numbers of things so widely scattered, and distributed in such different places, with such rapidity. Nothing was shut up, nothing sealed up, no list was made of anything. Whole storehouses were abandoned to the most worthless of men. Actors seized on this, actresses on that; the house was crowded with gamblers, and full of drunken men; people were drinking all day, and that too in many places; there were added to all this expense (for this fellow was not invariably fortunate) heavy gambling losses. You might see in the cellars of the slaves, couches covered with the most richly embroidered counterpanes of Cnæus Pompeius (2.27.67).

Cicero’s intentional simile comparing Antony to Charybdis again displays the artificial nature of the Republican crisis style, which relies heavily on mythological allusions and metaphorical inversions to persuasively establish Antony as the center of the broken Roman reality. Creating an image of destruction and disorder through Charybdis and indirectly effeminating Antony with the feminine title, Cicero offers himself up as the solution, the bringer of order back to the republic. He continues to build upon the setting of his inverted Rome, tactfully removing statehouses and respected government buildings and isolating the downside of society: gambling houses and slave cellars. The prop of the richly embroidered counterpanes is misplaced in a dirty cellar, another threatening inversion of Rome’s reality. Cicero also references mimae, low-status actors and actresses. The actors are placed alongside the dregs of society: drunkards, gamblers, and Antony’s own effeminate pimps, whom Antony is grouped together with. Charybdis and Oceanus serve as hyperboles: the larger-than-life religious creatures send fear into the masses due to their social context, creating the image of a vortex threatening to “engulf Cicero and the civilized world.”

Similarly, the theatrical motif of greed is also prominent in In Verrem. In In Verrem, one of his earliest trials, Cicero made a series of accusations against Gaius Verres, who had allegedly extorted sacred offerings and abused his authority as the governor of Sicily. Due to being one of Cicero’s earlier works as a novus homo, In Verrem is far tamer than the Philippics in language and hyperbole, but uses many of the same character clichés as Cicero’s later works, particularly in decreeing Verres a shameless and sacrilegious plunderer. In Verr. 5. 12-14, Cicero sarcastically refers to Verres as “most admirable general and defender” of the very provinces that he steals resources from, characterizing him much in reference to the miles gloriosus character trope in Roman comedy. He further elaborates in 5.18 that the man standing before the court is not a man who is being tried as a “tolerable praetor, “ but a “praiseworthy general,” again sarcastically undermining Verres’s political authority by revealing that his actual status is one grade below what Verres thinks he himself is. Towards the end of the In Verrem V, Cicero presents a long apostrophe towards the gods, listing out each of their names—Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, Diana, Ceres, Hercules, and etc. He creates a long crescendo detailing all the sacrilegious injuries that Verres had inflicted upon the consecrated honor of the Roman gods and goddeses, again emphasizing his complete disregard for social propriety.

In Verrem also presents an interesting case of subtle political costuming that Cicero uses to undermine Verres’s dignity. In Jon Hall’s analysis of Cicero political costuming, he uses the example of sordes—soiled mourning garments—to explain how Cicero uses costumes to achieve a dramatic effect. Sordes were by practice mourning clothes, but also carried connotations of impudicus and poverty, allowing for politicians to use it to lower themselves to the plebeians’ level in a supplicatory and pitiful appeal to the masses. In some occasions, politicians would literally don the sordes as a political stunt, “combining a massed street protest in sordibus with an attempted public supplication of the consul and a provocative senatorial decree[.] Cicero and his allies extended and enlivened familiar forms of showmanship.” In In Verrem, Cicero makes a grand show of exploiting Verres’s wearing of sordes in the court, using its miserable effect on his relationship with his son to draw out more disgust for Verres’s behavior:

This boy, who had been robbed of all his father's property and wealth by Verres' wicked and abominable pillagings, came into court, if for no other reason, then at least so that he might see the man, whose actions had kept him for many years in shabby poverty, dressed in clothes that are a bit shabbier still (54-55).

Clodia

The comedic cliché of misinterpreted or inverted social roles comes up again in Cicero’s Pro Caelio, in which he uses the motif of shame to degrade Clodia. Cicero’s obscene humor  becomes the most apparent when he redirects his attacks onto Clodia, Clodius’s wife:

Imagine a woman with no husband who turns her house into a house of assignation, openly behaves like a harlot, entertains at her table men who are perfect strangers, and does all this in town, in her suburban places, and in the crowded vacation land around Baiae ; in fine, imagine that her walk, her way of dressing, the company she keeps, her burning glances, her free speech, to say nothing of her embraces and kisses or her capers at beach-parties and banquets and yachting-parties, are all so suggestive that she seems not merely a whore but a particularly shameless and forward specimen of the profession…(Cic. Cael. 49)

Cicero’s obscene depiction of Clodia with the persona of a meretrix, or prostitute, degrades her contrastingly noble status. He more specifically describes her as meretrix incessus—hostile prostitute. He ridicules her impropriety and shamelessness, highlighting her failure to live up to the reputation of her noble ancestors. He sets the stage in the domus, a symbol of family and motherhood. The traditionally secluded and humble domus is rudely disrupted by the crude Clodia, who opens it up to anyone and everyone, resulting in Cicero’s phrase: ex libidinosa domo—the lustful home (Cael. 55). Clodia’s donning of the persona of the hostile prostitute thus solidifies her as a comedic clichè: a woman that acts like a whorish man and rejects social norms and decency.