PHILOSOPHY AND RHETORIC IN CICERO'S "PRO MILONE"

Abstract

A. W. Lintott has recently analyzed Cicero's relationship with T. Annius Milo, elucidating the motives at the political and personal level which produced this oddly matched amicitia1). Briefly, it can be said that Cicero's hatred and fear of Clodius, his sense of insecurity after his exile, and his efforts in the post rediturn period to assume again an authoritative position in Roman politics, led him to countenance a policy of civil violence which seems poorly suited to his stated views about proper political action. Lintott shows how Cicero resolved this tension on the basis of traditional Roman notions about the use of violence (vis) in private and public conflicts, rooted in the idea of self-help in Roman litigation and extended in the Late Republic to the use of armed followers in defense of dignitas aeainst real or imagined threats2). Lintott successfully traces this historical development, and isolates Cicero's numerous appeals to the notion in the neat of political action; but he does not adequately consider the importance to Cicero personally of developing a workable philosophical ethic to justify his political views: our studies indicate that Cicero was not able to justify fully the use of extreme violence against civeSy especially homicide, until after his unsuccessful defense of Milo in 52; for it is in the published version of the Pro Milone that the jargon of factional politics, e. g., tyrannus and regnurn, is transformed into the binding vocabulary of philosophy. Failure to recognize this developmental aspect of Cicero's political philosophy in the 50's has led scholars to describe a unity in Cicero's thought, dating as early as 593), from the statements