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From Classicism to Neoclassicism: Cicero, slavery, and fictions of personhood in the writings of Charles Brockden Brown

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From Classicism to Neoclassicism: Cicero, slavery, and fictions of personhood in the writings of Charles Brockden Brown

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Content FROM CLASSICISM TO NEOCLASSICISM:

CICERO, SLAVERY, AND FICTIONS OF PERSONHOOD

IN THE WRITINGS OF CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN

by

Olanna Carla Mills

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)

August 2010

Copyright 2010 Olanna Carla Mills
ii 
Dedication

To my parents,
Olvin and Anita Mills
iii 
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge Peggy Kamuf at the University of Southern
California for her insightful comments, suggestions, and helpful responses during each
stage of this process. It was under her direction and guidance that this dissertation was
written. I am grateful for her engaged readings of each chapter, which prompted many
revisions. I am particularly thankful for the time that she spent working with me while
writing. My special thanks to John Carlos Rowe and Thomas Habinek, whose expertise is
much appreciated. Their willingness to raise provocative questions as well as discuss and
revisit many of my arguments helped me to develop a substantial dissertation. My thanks
to Claudia Moatti, Susan Lape, Natania Meeker, and Judith Jackson-Fossett for their
assistance as well.
My cohorts and friends at the University of Southern California—Sarah Blake,
Iva Bozovic, Amy Braden, Teresa Gilliams, Amelia Hardin, Lucas Herchenhoder,
Rebecca Jambin, Imani Johnson, Michelle Har Kim, Shao-ling Ma, Pashmina Murthy,
Reina Prado, Uli Rider, Ruth Robbins, Rick Snyder, Samuel Solomon, Jeanine Staples,
Chiara Sulprizio, Jody Valentine, Linda Wootton, and many others—steadily provide a
wonderful intellectual and collegial community. I am especially thankful for the enduring
support of ReJOYce in Jesus Ministries, the Mills family and my partner, Paul
Christopher Fitzgerald. It is a pleasure to offer this second dedication in loving memory
of my father, Olvin Mills who died in 2006.
iv 
Table of Contents
Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract v

Introduction: Introduction 1

Chapter One: How Were Slaves “Persons”?
The Place of Iniuria, Slavery, and Roman Law
in Cicero's Pro Roscio Comoedo 13

Chapter Two: Vir Bonus Dicendi Peritus:
The Reception of Cicero in the Nineteenth Century 48
Voices of Authority 50
Cicero and Nineteenth-Century Neoclassical Thought 64
Cicero, Race, and Romanitas 72

Chapter Three: Over the Republic, Cicero and the New World:
The Ciceronian Motif in Charles Brockden Brown’s
Wieland 88
Table 1: Blacks as a Percentage of Philadelphia's
Population, 1720-1820 105
Two Patriae: Negotiating Roman Provincial Identity
in Cicero's Pro Cluentio 126

Chapter Four: A Ciceronian Shadow: Towards a Reading of
“The Death of Cicero, A Fragment” 146

Conclusion 183

Bibliography 187
v 
Abstract
From Classicism to Neoclassicism: Cicero, Slavery, and Fictions of Personhood
in the Writings of Charles Brockden Brown argues that the person of Cicero and the
medium of Ciceronian oratory are useful for thinking about and working through the
unsettled notions of personhood, law, and the racialization of slavery in the U.S. during
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The questions taken into consideration
from a three-pronged analysis. The first works out the specific concerns in law regarding
the legal notion of iniuria and its impact on the definition of the slave's status in ancient
Rome. The second discusses the important details of Cicero's political ascent as a
statesman and orator in antiquity and describes how thinking about Cicero became
widespread and broadly diffused during the post-Revolutionary period in the U.S..
Finally, the third form of thought that governs my inquiry is the examination of the
persistence of the Ciceronian motif within the fictional narratives of Charles Brockden
Brown. Viewing each of these questions in light of the specific legal crisis over race and
racial identification, my dissertation explores how the appropriation of Cicero is being
used to broaden, challenge, and foreclose notions of personhood and racial hierarchies in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the U.S.
1 
Introduction
In 1845 Edgar Allan Poe published “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor
Fether” in the Philadelphia periodical Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine. The
story follows an unnamed narrator who visits a certain “Maison de Santé or private mad-
house” in southern France known for a revolutionary new method of treating mental
illnesses called “the system of soothing” (Poe, 726-7). The treatment avoided all
punishments and did not confine its patients (728-9). For the inmates were not forced to
wear hospital gowns, but instead were “permitted the privilege of roaming to and fro at
will” (728). To the narrator's surprise, the “system of soothing” is abandoned on account
of one “singular” incident when the patients had been “excited to rebellion” and
overthrew the doctors and nurses and usurped their positions, “locking them up as
lunatics” (742). As part of their revolt, the patients introduced the doctors to a new
system, a treatment called “tarring and feathering,” which was developed by a certain
“Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” (741-2).
While touring the hospital grounds, the narrator encounters men, for example,
“who fancied themselves chickens,” “chimpanzees,” “ourang-outangs,” or “big black
baboons” (729, 742). These instances of depersonalization, lead Joan Dayan to refer to
the Gothic locale of this tale as “a cross between a mad-house and a plantation” (Dayan,
108). Indeed, with patients thinking themselves a “tea-pot,” a “small slice of Cordova
cheese,” “a frog,” and “a pinch of snuff,” in the midst of this allegory of a slave uprising,
the narrative ushers the reader into an inquiry concerning the paradoxes necessary to
sustain the status of slaves as chattel (Poe, 732-4). Whether depicting a “fellow who
2 
went mad with the idea that he was a pumpkin” or a “person who had taken into his head
that he was a donkey,” these portrayals thematize the moveable status of property in
persons (732). Moreover, it is interesting to note that within this catalogue of persons as
things, the narrator includes another “extraordinary personage”:
Bouffon Le Grand—He grew deranged through love, and fancied himself
possessed of two heads. One of these he maintained to be the head of Cicero; the
other he imagined the head of Demosthenes. It is not impossible that he was
wrong; but he would have convinced you of his being in the right; for he was a
man of great eloquence. He had an absolute passion for oratory, and could not
refrain from display. (734-5)

Caught in between the Roman model of elite male personhood and the Hellenic model,
understood by the nineteenth century as an emblem of racial purity, Poe's narrative enacts
the uncertainty that grows out of an attempt to appropriate Cicero as a suitable oratorical
model to respond to the social realities of living in racialized slave society. Distorted and
relived as a two-headed spectacle, this invocation of Cicero and Demosthenes dramatizes
the difficulty that accompanies the appropriation of ancient oratorical figures to animate
or maintain scenes of mastery and servility in a mid nineteenth century context. This
unusual reimagination of Cicero and ancient elocution has its basis in the changing place
of the Roman model in American life during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Recent scholars of the neoclassical period agree that Ciceronian ideals of proper
speechmaking dominated eighteenth century American education. Indeed, as Caroline
Winterer points out, “above all other ancient orators, Revolutionary Americans idealized
Cicero as a model of eloquence and style and also as the ideal citizen whose incorruptible
morals protected the Roman republic from tyranny” (25). And this reading extends to the
well established view of the period that Richard Lounsbury observes in Ludibria Rerum
3 
Mortalium, namely, that “Ciceronian oratory was not something one received or enjoyed
only, it was something one did” (361). Oratory, then, retained its ancient function as an
embedded bodily practice especially important for training a class of gentleman within
early American culture. In 1787, John Adams affirmed in his Works that “as all the ages
of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united than Cicero,
his authority should have great weight” (4:259). Moreover, Thomas Jefferson wrote a
letter to Peter Carr on August 19, 1785 in which he recommends “Cicero's orations,
philosophies, and epistles as part of “the first stage of [Carr's] historical reading” in
preparation for public office (1012). Mary Rosner, in a related way, confirms Winterer's
observation concerning Cicero's prominent place in American pedagogy. She maintains
that his rhetorical writings are “the staple” of neoclassical education during the late
eighteenth century. In “The Two Faces of Cicero,” she casts Cicero in the role of the
ideal rhetorician whom young middle and upper class boys were taught to recite,
translate, and imitate (251). “Cicero,” she suggests, “was identified as an excellent
theorist and model practitioner of oral discourse” (251). Furthermore, contemporary
critics such as James Farrell, also claim that an unbroken line of continuity exists
between models of personhood from antiquity and early American contexts. His work on
the Revolutionary conspiracy rhetoric of John Adams concludes that Adams is “thinking
of himself as New England's Cicero, laboring to save the colony from the treachery of
latter-day Catilines” (72). To be sure, as these reading suggest, classical education
distinguished elite males in early American society from members of the non-landowning
classes. And the benefits of the classical tradition were especially obvious in Roman
4 
oratory as Cicero and Quintilian insist on the link between rhetoric, virility, and political
statesmanship, and such views were reiterated in the late eighteenth century. But these
accounts overlook the contradictions that grow out of the literature of the period as a
result of the ways in which the Ciceronian model of the free elite male had to be qualified
and transformed.
As the necessity to separate what had been constituted as different races became
the primary social issue of the period, Cicero emerges as an ambivalent figure. The
problem of expatriation, or where to put African Americans, or how to gradually remove
them from the southern United States, had been debated approximately forty-five years
before Poe's short story was written. In 1800 Gabriel Prosser's conspiracy to murder the
inhabitants of Richmond was discovered, and this prompted the Virginia legislature to
find a place to contain emancipated slaves and free negroes. In 1801 Thomas Jefferson
wrote a letter to James Monroe in which he refers to a description of persons “who
brought on us the alarm, conspiracy, insurgency, rebellion and on themselves the tragedy
of 1800”— and then considers where they might be shipped. It is worth mentioning that
for the first two pages of this letter Jefferson never identifies those he calls “these rebels,”
“that race,” “those under consideration,” until he finally turns to the most “probable and
practicable retreat for them” (1078). Only then does he mention the word blacks. To be
sure, the unsaid carries great significance and clearly designates the persons he means.
Indeed, the letter goes on to say that “they would not be welcome anywhere within the
limits of the United States or on its northern boundary or on its western and southern
frontiers” (1079). He continues to think about the characteristics of the nation, and
5 
maintains that he wants it “kept pure,” with no “blot or mixture on that surface” (1080).
Moreover, in a letter written to Jared Sparks on February 4, 1824, Jefferson goes further
to explain how “people of color” can be colonized in the most cost efficient way to their
owners. “How” he ponders, can “the getting rid of them be cheaply done when the
possessors of them must be paid for their property?” (1484). His recommendation is that
infants be left with their mothers “until the proper age of deportation” (1487). The letter
concludes by admitting that the “separation of infants from their mothers, too, would
produce some scruples of humanity” (1487). Taken together, then, Jefferson's remarks
characterize a kind of racist thinking that developed in America during the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
In fact, as I discuss in chapter two, the rising sectionalist tensions in the wake of
Nat Turner's rebellion of 1831, the South Carolina slave uprising that left over sixty
people dead, caused southerners to embark on a studied defense of slavery and to fashion
a regional classical identity increasingly distinct from the Roman model. Turing to
antiquity as a precedent, they invoked ancient Greece, especially Athens, as a slave-
holding society that successfully established the racial exclusivity that Roman civilization
had not. When justifications for slavery were needed, southern nationalists began to turn
to the writings of Aristotle and Herodotus as they shifted from environmental to
biological justifications of black inferiority. For example, Josiah Priest, asked in his
Bible Defense of Slavery (1853), “If Herodotus showed negroes with black skins and
wooly heads, how is it not to be shown that they were not always so?” (12).
Demosthenes soon rivaled Cicero as the ideal, manly orator because he represented “the
6 
unshakeable conviction that the Greek city-state is of “pure” Hellenic origin” (Winterer,
72). So although the person of Cicero and the medium of Ciceronian oratory continued
to play a significant role in shaping the image of citizen-men necessary to the American
public, particularly in the area of American gentlemanly education, among proslavery
diatribes of “natural negro inferiority,” Cicero represented a civilization that posed a
challenge to the irrationalities of the attempt to classify races based upon color.
In the chapters that follow, I will take into consideration the ways in which the
appropriation of Cicero changes and effects the ideology of race thinking in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In many ways, the Ciceronian model throws a
wild card into the discourses that sought to maintain a rigid racial divide, but at the same
time it forces American legal, poltical, and literary texts to take on a different shape. I
will make Cicero my still point and move back and forth through various considerations
of different kinds of personhood that define ancient Rome and America as slave-holding
societies. By foregrounding a model of slaveholding that worked more towards
integration than towards the direction of hardening racial distinctions so that one's race
became synonymous with the status of slaves, this dissertation aims to contribute to a
renewed interest in comparative studies of race, law, and literature.
The goal of chapter one, entitled, How Were Slaves “Persons”? The Place of
Iniuria, Slavery, and Roman Law in Cicero's Pro Roscio Comoedo is to identify and
discuss the ways in which Cicero's prosecutions conspire with Roman law to enshrine the
dual status of the slave as part-thing, part-person. Upon the examination of certain
juridical texts, it becomes apparent that Roman law, due in part to its sophisticated
7 
attempt to designate specific categories of persons, citizens, and property in a
nonracialized society is able to successfully manage the contradictions that grow out of
an attempt to tackle the problematic status of persons as things. On the one hand, the
slave in law and advocacy is presented as one who can claim iniuria through the master
and therefore is treated as a person by implication. On the other, this rhetoric can be
retracted, and in this secondary revision the slave moves from person to property. The
ambiguous status of the slave, situated on the margins of society, collides with Roman
law and introduces a destabilizing presence into the construction of social categories that
define this highly stratified society. The primary texts that will be taken into
consideration include, but are not limited to Cicero's Pro Roscio Comoedo, the Institutes
of Gaius, Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis, the Sententiae of Paulus, and the Digest of
Ulpianius.
The second chapter, “Vir Bonus Dicendi Peritus:” The Reception of Cicero in the
Nineteenth-Century examines the ways in which the uncertain status of the slave troubles
the ideology of the orator in ancient Rome. At once excluded and included within the
legal order, the category of the slave, in its very separateness, also introduces a certain
anxiety into the conventions of thought and behavior that inform the construction of the
vir bonus within Roman rhetorical writings. The chapter then moves further to trace how
the appropriation of the Ciceronian motif of the ideal orator, revealed through moral
probity and political authority, informs British and American rhetorical standards during
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when raged similar debates centered on
the status of slaves as persons. The third part of the chapter sets out to understand how
8 
Cicero as a symbol of Romanitas functions within nineteenth-century political, legal, and
scientific discourses that sought to maintain the racial divide. It argues that the
appropriation of Cicero in this context presents certain difficulties to scholars of the
period who were thinking about race, chiefly because Cicero's writings also carry the
baggage of late republican and imperial Roman associations of cultural admixtures,
which in the view of later scholars led to Rome's decline. The texts that govern the focus
of my inquiry include Cicero's Brutus and De Oratore, E.L. Magoon's Living Orators in
America, Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), William
Forsyth's Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero (1865), Anthony Froude's, Caesar: A Sketch
(1879), James Hannay's The Classics in Translation (1867) John Lawson's Lectures
Concerning Oratory (1758), and curious portions of The American Slave Code and The
American Law of Slavery: 1810-1860 along with Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, and
Richard Whatley's Elements of Rhetoric (1828).
In the third chapter, Over the Republic, Cicero and the New World: The
Ciceronian Motif in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, I posit that what is most
striking about Brown’s first published novel, Wieland; Or the Transformation: An
American Tale” (1798), is the persistence of the Ciceronian motif and its bearing upon
our understanding of the merits of ancient oratory as an instrument of social
apprenticeship for members of the land-owning, slave-owning class in the late eighteenth
century. Indeed, the novel details the horrible events that befall Clara Wieland and her
bother Theodore's family with the arrival of the mysterious Carwin at their estate in
Schuylkill. Carwin's biloquial abilities are curiously linked to the pejorative view of
9 
Ciceronian elocution. That is to say, Carwin's verbal trickery calls attention to the ways
in which the practice of ancient oratory also operates through lies, deceit, misdirection,
and exaggeration. This notion is further expressed in a moment in the novel in which
“the merits of the Oration for Cluentius,” a Ciceronian defense of a man accused of
poisoning his murderous stepfather are being discussed. Much of the criticism of
Brown’s novel concerning the inclusion of this oration is characterized by a certain
contradictory strain. Bill Christopherson, for example, interprets this scene as referring
to “a classical example of domestic violence” (32). He maintains that “the allusion to the
oration is a condemnation of Clara's fratricidal impulse” (33). Conversely, Roberta F.
Weldon suggests that “we should read Wieland as a family tragically destroyed, like the
Roman model, by patriarchal insanity and false morals” (12). Marcia Nichols argues that
“the sophistic arguments Cicero makes in this oration exemplify what bothered Brown
most about the legal system” (459). And, standing apart from these claims, Alan Axelrod
declares that “there is nothing in the Defense of Aulus Cluentius that bears directly upon
Wieland” (80). But the reading that I put forth seeks to contribute to these analyses as it
maintains that the Pro Cluentio can be understood as a reflection upon the impact of
incorporation of local Italian communities into Roman citizenship. As such, this oration
is explicitly and implicitly concerned with how to negotiate relations with outsiders at the
height of Roman colonization. This negotiation is of direct interest to Brown’s narrative
because his writings also engage with a similar struggle during the late eighteenth century
as the United States attempts to define its national boundaries.
10 
In other words, while Brown’s fictional narratives are ostensibly about anxieties
of the aftermath of the American Revolution, I would like to suggest that Wieland's
reference to Cicero and the Pro Cluentio also link Brown’s text to broader social and
political debates around notions of citizenship and personhood that were widespread
during the period. However, the further revelation of Wieland, itself rooted in the
specific concerns of American practices of colonization and the racialization of New
World slavery, throws into harsh relief the inadequacy of models from antiquity to
interpret the reality of the young republic. Theodore's veneration of Cicero as the
perfectus orator, the Roman embodiment of eloquentia and skillful verbal persuasion
foreshadows his vulnerability to Carwin's biloquism, which incites him to murder.
Carwin's talents connect him with Cicero without the moral probity and uprightness by
which he might regulate his powers of persuasion. The association of Carwin with
Cicero ameliorates his character at the same time as it underscores its weaknesses owing
to the text's uneasy identification with the Roman model. Ultimately, this chapter
concludes that the association of Carwin with the ancient orator is also part of a broader
pattern of ambivalence between Brown’s fictional narratives and Cicero as the nation's
adopted cultural model. Not only does the identification of Carwin with Cicero fail to
vindicate Carwin, it also fails to elevate Cicero. Put in another way, his association with
the biloquist diminishes his status as a neoclassical model. The texts with which this
chapter engages also include Cicero's Brutus and Pro Cluentio, The American Slave
Code, as well as The American Law of Slavery: 1810-1860.
11 
The fourth chapter, A Ciceronian Shadow: Towards a Reading of “The Death of
Cicero; A Fragment” further explores Brown’s attempt to disengage with the Ciceronian
model of elocution as a site for generating elite male personhood in the new republic. It
argues that the effort to kill off Ciceronianism is made literal in the historical short story,
“The Death of Cicero; A Fragment” in which the final moments of Cicero's brutal death
at the hands of the soldiers of Antonius” are narrated by his slave Tiro. Such a reading
suggests that Brockden Brown’s invocation of Cicero is not an attempt to render
important his narratives set in provincial early America. Rather, by foregrounding the
issue of slave oratory his text complicates the issue of slave-persons as property in a way
that does not allow for any narrow delineation of slavery and mastery. Furthermore, the
chapter seeks to bring out the ambivalence that admirers of Cicero—the perfectus orator,
advocate, master, vir bonus, Pater Patriae, and statesman—had to betray through writing
in an American context. This vexed relation concerning the Roman orator is familiar in
Brown’s writings due in part to a growing awareness of the irreconcilable tensions
between models of personhood from antiquity and the racial character of New World.
The texts that frame the discussion within this chapter are Charles Brockden Brown’s
essay titled, “On the Merits of Cicero” (1805) and “Ciceronians” (1805).
For Brown’s narratives, a synthesis between ancient and New World models of
personhood is not possible. The inadequacy of the Roman model to interpret the social
realities of living in an American slave society inform the effort of Brown’s Ciceronian
texts to abandon Cicero, but this killing off is not complete and the Ciceronian motif is a
persistent theme in Brown’s fiction. Charles Brockden Brown’s texts, like Theodore
12 
Wieland share a regard for Cicero as he is the “darling author,” but at the same time
question the extent to which this model can withstand the contradictions that characterize
living in post-Revolutionary America (25). By describing a Roman republic that has
fallen, Brown’s narratives further underscore that the new nation also suffers from a
societal condition of disorder and decay, which at its core remains diseased.

13 
Chapter One
How Were Slaves “Persons”? The Place of Iniuria, Slavery, and
Roman Law in Cicero’s Pro Roscio Comoedo
It”s not just the work, but knowing you”re a slave, and nothing can
alter it. (Plautus, Amphitryo)

The first work of slavery is to mar and deface those characteristics
of its victims which distinguish men from things, and persons from
property. (Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom)

There was no more conversation that day.
(Melville, Benito Cereno)

This chapter emerges out of an attempt to think about the kind of harm done to various
slave classes as they undergo the strange metamorphosis from persons into chattel. As
things personal and moveable, mere merchandise on the market, slaves become a special
type of property. “Slaves” according to the American Slave Codes of 1853, “are deemed,
sold, taken, and adjudged in law to be chattels personal, in the hands of their owners and
possessors, their administrators and assigns, to all intents, constructions, and purposes
whatsoever. Their relation to society and civil government is, accordingly, the relation of
brutes” (Goodell, 290). It is fair to say that this statute makes explicit the power of the
law to codify an approach to forced labor that renders slaves as nonpersons, animated
property, “brutes” in their relation and effect upon society. But what are we to make of
the type of injury that is inflicted at this site of conversion in which the social and civic
components of personal identity are annihilated? A nuanced approach to this question
requires an engagement with the intersection of various histories—legal, rhetorical, and
cultural, which conspire to form the genealogy of the term injury.
14 
The discursive history of injury discloses that the definition of the term is derived
from a legal concept in Roman law. The concept of iniuria emerges from a set of
provisions in the Twelve Tables (449 B.C.E.) designed specifically to protect free
citizens from certain types of bodily harm and verbal contempt.
1
As the jurist Paulus
maintains in the Sententiae, “ Iniuriarum actio aut lege aut more aut mixto iure
introducta est. Lege Duodecim Tabularum de famosis carminibus, membris ruptis et
ossibus fractis” (Paulus, 5.4.6-8). (“The action of iniuria was introduced either by statute
or by morality or by mixed law; by the law of the Twelve Tables, concerning defamatory
poems, broken limbs and broken bones”).
2
The Corpus Iuris Civilis classifies acts of
iniuria that include poking out the eye of another, entering someone”s house with a
disorderly mob, beating up a person, outraging the corpse of an ancestor, making lewd
advances to a matron, and, in general, anything “done to bring a person into ridicule or
contempt” (infamandi causa) (47.10.15.25). One injures another by harming his or her
body, dignity or name; by wounding him or her physically or verbally (47.10.1.1-2).

1
The provisions do not form one single delict of physical injury, but three separate delicts each
dealing with a specific type of physical assault. Though mentioned briefly in Justinian (4.4.7)
these are more adequately described by Gaius (3.223). For example, a damaged limb, or part of
the body either maimed or destroyed would result in a penalty in the form of the infliction of a
like wound on the offender unless he was able to agree with the victim upon the terms of
recompense. If a bone was broken a financial penalty was imposed; 300 sesterces in cases where
the victim was a freeman and 150 where the victim was a slave. For all other type of iniuriae,
trifling physical assaults of which a blow or slap in the face are examples, the penalty was 25
sesterces. See also, Lex Duodecim Tabularum, Tabula VII and A. Watson “Personal Injuries in
the XII Tables” 213-222.
2
The late classical jurist Julius Paulus was a student of Cervidius Scaevola; he served as an
adessor to the Praetorian Prefect Papinian. Along with Ulpian, he then served on the Council of
Septimius Servus (193-211 C.E.) and under Alexander Severus (222-235 C.E.). The Sententiae,
attributed to Paulus, are a collection of excerpts from the writings of Paulus and possibly other
jurists; the collection was assembled in the late third century. For a discussion on the jurist
Paulus, see Bruce Frier 179.
15 
The jurists of the third century C.E. were invoking the term iniuria in order to
bring together two distinct wrongs under a single delict. This delict set out to protect and
provide recompense for “any act that deliberately inflicts physical harm and verbal
insult” upon a person (Ulpian, 47.10.1.2). What these distinct wrongs have in common,
notes Ulpian, is that “each constitutes a deliberate affront to the individual; the one to his
body, the other to his dignity or social standing” (47.10.1.2). The core of the offense,
then is not bodily damage per se but the affront (contumelia): “the treating of another
with contempt...in order to render him hated, ridiculous, or contemptible (infamandi
causa)” (4.4). Put in another way, iniuria “brands disgrace on its victim: as when a
person is struck, whipped, beaten...defiled by words that insult or lessen his good name”
(47.10.1.1-2). As such, for words or deeds to be actionable, they must be uttered and
carried out with malice (47.10.15.25; 47.10.5.9; 47.10.3).
As the etymology of the term suggests, iniuria marks an act committed against
ius, against law, right, and accepted privilege. Woven into the terms” history is an aspect
of psychical injury: the prevailing definition of iniuria emphasizes its association with
written or oral insults that intentionally and publicly diminish a person”s honor, instances
in which the blow is struck verbally, symbolically, rather than physically, corporally.
During the late republican period, Roman law offered redress for mediate as well as
direct injury. The Digest records that “a person may suffer injury either on his own
account or through others—on his own account when the injury is done to the pater—or
mater familias; through others…when done to a person”s children, slaves, wife or
daughter-in-law—for the injury concerns all members of the household when directed at
16 
one within the sphere of their protection and love” (47.10.1.3). In addition to this, a
considerable part of the material on iniuria in the Corpus Iuris Civilis revolves around the
process of how an attack on one person becomes, in the view of the law, an injury to
someone else. For example, Roman law viewed harming the corpse, coffin, or honor
(fama) of the deceased as a form of mediate injury to the heirs. While the deceased were
beyond the reach of suffering measurable loss, a person could injure the living by abusing
their dead (47.10.1.4-5).
Moreover, it is worth mentioning that Roman legal texts make a distinction
between two levels of iniuria: one minor (levis), the other grave (atrox), which emerges
as a legal category during the republic. As the Digest explains, “any iniuria may be
deemed atrocious by reason of its place or timing, or the person insulted. An iniuria
becomes more atrocious in respect to the person when committed against a magistrate
(cum magistratui) or a parent or patron” (47.10.7.8). For Roman law, the defamation of a
public person differs from the defamation of other categories of persons only with respect
to its victim. The Digest treats the defamation of magistrates as a subcategory of iniuria
and says nothing of the content. According to this view, then, it would be no less
injurious to call a magistrate a murderer than a thief. What matters is that the words were
spoken to or written about—a “public person,” and on these grounds constitute a political
offense (47.10.7.8). Under Augustus, atrox iniuria is conflated with other pre-existing
republican laws dealing specifically with the defamation of magistrates, but this early
imperial legislation of iniuria leaves faint traces in the Corpus Iuris Civilis.
17 
The Digest treats iniuria primarily as a delict or misdeed, not a crime. It is
conceived of as harming another”s renown (existimatio) as a result of the ridicule,
dishonor, contempt, insult or mockery contained within a “malum carmen”
(47.10.15.29). In another passage, the Digest explains that giving a defamatory petition
or accusation (libellus) to public persons in authority is prohibited (47.10.13.1-2). It also
notes that pressing legal charges against an elected official in order to harass him
(vexandi…causa) falls within the scope of iniuria (47.10.13.3-4). The specific kind of
harm inflicted by iniuria is defined as infamia or disgrace (47.10.15.27). To bring
disgrace upon someone in Roman law is to render him the object of “hatred, ridicule, and
contempt,” but as Adolf Berger points out, infamia also designated a specific legal status.
He remarks “persons condemned for certain kinds of crime or vice were judged infamous
and, as such disabled from holding public office, from serving as accusers or advocates in
court” (500). Infamy in this context, then, implies both shame and social disgrace.
Furthermore, the inclusion of infamia as part of the Praetor”s Edict on iniuria marks out
the broad legal scope of iniuria as a model of regulation that treats verbal offense as the
counterpart to bodily harm. The central point here is that Roman law not only forbids
words designed to make someone contemptible in the eyes of others, but also words that,
if proven credible, could strip their victim of honor as it is one of the many protections
granted to legal persons.
The legislation on iniuria in the Codex dates from the fourth and fifth centuries,
and deals primarily with late imperial legislation criminalizing this misdeed. It locates the
core of iniuria as calumny (47.10.3-4; 47.10.15.29-30). For an understanding of the
18 
notion of iniuria during the Augustan period, the writings of Suetonius and Tacitus
provide the most succinct accounts, especially Book I of the Annales of Tacitus, which
describes how sometime between 8 and 12 C.E., Augustus
resuscitated the Lex Maiestatis, a statute which in the old jurisprudence had
carried the same name but covered a different type of iniuria—betrayal of an
army; seditious incitement of the populace; any act, in short, of official
maladministration “diminishing the majesty of the Roman people” (male gesta re
publica maiestatem populi Romani minuisset). The first to take cognizance of
written libel (de famosis libellis) under the statute was Augustus; who was
provoked to the step by the effrontery with which Cassius Severus had blackened
(diffamaverat) the characters of men and women of repute in his scandalous
effusions. (1.27)

The prosecution of Cassius Severus for committing an act of iniuria that could be
construed as treason does not, on the face of it, make sense legally. For it is well known
that verbal attacks on the princeps and his family were prosecuted from the earliest years
of the empire. The charge against Severus, however, was not that of defaming either
Augustus or the domus Augustana, but written defamation of leading Roman citizens—a
political offense but not treason. Tacitus uses the verb “diffamaverat” for Severus”s
attacks, which is derived from defamo, to slander, but the ancient sources do not
characterize Severus as a poet or an anecdotist; rather what is mentioned by Quintilian as
a characteristic of this rhetorician is that he charged a friend of Augustus, a certain
Aspernas Nonius, with poisoning. Quintilian also refers to Severus as the leading
accusator of his period, renowned and feared for the harshness of his prosecutions, a rival
of who had claimed to excel Cicero (XI.1.56). Moreover, the Institutio Oratoria suggests
that Cassius Severus undertook a number of prosecutions less for “just or necessary
reasons” than his “sheer delight in accusation” (accusandi voluptas) (11.1.57). The
19 
central point here is that a wrong done by Severus not only disgraced members of the
Roman elite, but also dishonored Rome and seems to resemble the Digest”s logic of
mediate injury mentioned earlier, which allows a wrong done to a member of one”s
household to be litigated as iniuria to the paterfamilias. It is clear that the Roman law of
iniuria assumed that both the direct and indirect victims were persons.
The concept of iniuria is also documented by the jurist Gaius, whose writings date
from C.E. 150-180.
3
His Institutes, a text in four books, was used as the basis for
Justinian”s Institutes. The Corpus Iuris Civilis was commissioned by the emperor
Justinian in the early sixth century and published in C.E. 533-34. Scholars agree that this
late and complex work is a compilation of thirteen centuries of Roman jurisprudence.
The Corpus itself falls into three main parts: the Institutes (Institutiones), the Digest
(Digesta) (or Pandects), and the Code (Codex). The second and principal part of the
Corpus, the Digest, codifies excerpts from the jurists of the late republican and imperial
periods. Both Gaius and Justinian trace the law of iniuria back to the set of provisions in
the Twelve Tables designed specifically to protect free citizens from certain types of
bodily harm. In its developed form however, this legal concept expanded to include a
wide range of intentional wrongs:
Iniuria autem committur non solum, cum quis pugno puta aut fustibus caesus vel
etiam verberatus erit, sed etiam si cui convicium factum fuerit, sive cuius bona
quasi debitoris possessa fuerint ab eo, qui intellegebat nihil eum sibi debere, vel
si quis ad infamiam alicuius libellum aut carmen scripserit composuerit ediderit
dolove malo fecerit, quo quid eorum fieret, sive quis matrem familias aut

3
The Institutes of Gaius is the only work of classical jurisprudence that survives in its original
form. The single manuscript was rediscovered in Verona in 1816 by B.G. Niebuhr. Gaius also
prepared an expanded seven-book edition of the Institutes, titled the Res Cottidianae or Aurea.
See Bruce Frier.
20 
praetextatum praetextatamve adsectatus fuerit…et denique aliis pluribus modis
admitti iniuriam manifestum est. Patitur autem quis iniuriam non solum per
semet ipsum, sed etiam per liberos suos quos in potestate habet: item per uxorem
suam, id enim magis praevaluit. Itaque si filiae alicuius, quae Titio nupta est,
iniuriam feceris, non solum filiae nomine tecum iniuriarum agi potest, sed etiam
partris quoquoe et marti nomine…Poena autem iniuriam ex lege duodecim
tabularum propter membrum quidem ruptum talio erat: propter os vero fractum
nummariae poenae errant constitutae quasi in magna veterum paupertate. Sed
postea praetores permittebant ipsis qui iniuriam passi sunt eam aestimare, ut
iudex vel tanti condemnet, quanti iniuriam passus aestimaverit, vel minoris, prout
ei visum fuerit. Sed poena quidem iniuriae, quae ex lege duodecim tabularum
introducta est, in desuetudinem abiit: quam autem praetors introduxerunt in
iudiciis frequentatur. Nam secundum gradum dignitatis vitaque honestatem
crescit aut minuitur aestimatio iniuriae. (4.4, 1-2, 7)

Iniuria is committed not only when someone is struck with a fist or with clubs, or
even flogged; but also when a verbal attack is made on him; when his goods are
seized like a debtor”s by someone who knows he owes him nothing; when
someone writes, makes up or publishes a defamatory book or song, or
intentionally procures its writing, composition or publication; or when someone
follows about a young lady or a youth or a girl…also of course in many other
ways. 2 Someone can be the victim of iniuria not only in his own person but also
through his children if they are still within family authority, also through his
wife—that being the view which has prevailed. If you commit an act of iniuria
against someone”s daughter, who is married to Titus, an action can be brought
against you not only for the daughter herself but also for both the father and the
husband. 7 Under the Twelve Tables the penalty for this delict was, for a
damaged limb, retaliation; and for a broken bone, a sum of money appropriate to
the great poverty of the people of those times. Later the praetors began to allow
victims to put their own value on the wrong. The judge could condemn for the
victim”s valuation or for such lesser sum as seemed right to him. The penalties of
the Twelve Tables have fallen into disuse, while the praetors” system is
frequently applied in the courts. The valuation of iniuriae rises and falls
according to the victim”s social standing and honor. (Justinian 4.4, 1-2, 7)

These examples, which appear in the opening paragraphs of Justinian”s compilation attest
to the broadening of the concept to denote not only bodily harm, written accusations and
vocal abuses, but “all wrong conduct,” any willful infringement of right that intentionally
inflicts measurable loss by violating a legally defensible boundary of personhood (4.4).
And perhaps it is for this reason that the concept of iniuria is interpreted under the Lex
21 
Aquilian statute as “outrage,” namely, “outrage to one”s dignity” with the requirement
that the act not only be wrongful, but that it inflict measurable loss (damnum) (II.A-B, E).
By extension, the double force of iniuria provides a legal framework for thinking about
the ways in which chattel slavery—the paradigmatic condition of loss, the conversion of
people into property, the dissolution of self and identity—constitutes the ultimate injury.
This is not to suggest that the condition of slavery itself constituted iniuria in Roman law,
of course, it did not. Rather by examining the shifting discourse of the jurists, I hope to
understand precisely what kind of personhood Roman law conferred upon slaves.
W. W. Buckland writes, “Slavery is the only case in which, in the extant sources
of Roman law, a conflict is declared to exist between the ius gentium and the ius
naturale" (1). He suggests that this conflict arises because the condition of slavery itself
was “inconsistent with the idea of all men being equal under the Law of Nature” (1). The
laws of slavery, in his view, are “the most characteristic part of the intellectual product of
Rome” (iv). For, “there is scarcely a problem which can present itself, in any branch of
law, the solution of which may not be affected by the fact that one of the parties to the
transaction is a slave, and outside the region of procedure, there are few braches of law in
which the slave does not prominently appear” (iv). That slavery played a significant part
in the development of Roman law is understandable due to the critical role slaves played
in sustaining the economy. As Orlando Patterson observes, “slaves along with land were
the major sources of wealth in ancient Rome. Of the two, land was without a doubt more
important; but slaves were the more flexible and problematic” (29). As a group, the
Roman jurists distinguished between the customs and institutions that were adopted and
22 
enforced in any given city-state or kingdom (ius civile) from customs and institutions that
all nations (clans, peoples, gens) observed. Once it became possible to think and speak of
slavery as a violation of a person's natural rights, scholars traced the antecedents of this
line of thought back to Cicero and to the jurists represented in Justinian's Digest. But
there is no indication of reservations about the institution of slavery itself; rather, what is
found in Roman law is the codification of distinct rules about the conditions under which
different categories of slave-persons are considered property.
As if to illustrate this observation, Book I of the Institutes of Gaius points out:
Omne autem ius, quo utimur, vel ad personas pertinet vel ad res vel ad actions.
Ac prius de personis videamus… Summa itaque division de iure personarum haec
est quod omnes homines aut liberi sunt aut servi. 1. Et libertas quidem est, ex qua
etiam liberi vocantur, naturalis facultas eius quod cuique facere. Libet, nisi si
quid aut vi aut iure prohibetur. 2. Servitus autem est constitutio iuris gentium, qua
quis dominio alieno contra naturam subicitur. (1.2.12; 1.3.1-2)

All our law is about persons, things, or actions. We turn to persons first... The
main classification in the law of persons is this: all men are either free or slaves.
1. Liberty- the Latin “libertas” gives us “liberi”, free men—denotes a man”s
natural ability to do what he wants as long as the law or some other force does not
prevent him. 2. Slavery on the other hand is an institution of the ius gentium; it
makes a man the property of another, contrary to the ius naturale. (Gaius 1.2.12;
1.3.1-2).

This passage demonstrates the way in which slaves, although categorized as persons
under the law, undergo a peculiar transformation into owned objects that could be bought
and sold. Indeed, the de iure personarum seems less concerned with who the slave is
than what he is, which is to say, that in order to maintain the institution of slavery,
Roman law had to transform “a man [into] the property of another” (1.3.2). This
generates a unique set of inquiries for the jurists, the first of which pertains to language:
What nomenclature should be used in order to characterize the slave and his condition?
23 
To this question Gaius responds, “Slaves, in Latin “servi”, are so called because it is the
practice of army commanders to order captives to be sold and thus saved—save in Latin
is “servare”—instead of killed. Another Latin term for property in slaves is “mancipia”,
derived from the fact that they are captured by hand from the enemy, in Latin “manu
capiuntur”(1.3.3). “Servi autem ex eo appellati sunt, quod imperators captivos vendere
iubent ac per hoc servare nec occidere solent. Qui etiam mancipia dicti sunt, quo dab
hostibus manu capiuntur”(1.3.3). Thus both names are derived from capture in war, and
for this reason, the jurists classify slavery as part of the ius gentium. But the issue of the
status of slaves still had to be resolved. In Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson
makes clear that Roman society was highly inclusive due to the intermixture of slaves
and the freeborn population, and the longstanding practice of granting citizenship to
manumitted slaves. As a result the jurists had to find an “unambiguous way for
differentiating human beings classified as chattel from human beings classified as
nonchattel” (30). Patterson concludes that the Romans had no choice but to turn to law
for social clarification and distinction among its growing population. He locates the
problem as part of a larger attempt to sort out the principle of property ownership during
the late republic. And suggests that the “legis actio sacramento in rem was no longer
applicable for distinguishing between slave-property and other persons” towards the end
of the republic as this early expression of property ownership was one of absolutes (30).
However, in the wake of the expanding slave economy, a relative conception of property
needed to be established in order to account for relations between a slave owner with
absolute power and property in persons as things. For this reason, Patterson hints at the
24 
real problem the jurists were faced with due to the inherent conflict of slavery itself,
namely, “that all human beings can be the object of property and that, strictly speaking,
property refers to a set of relations between persons not things” (31). In search for a
solution to this problem, he strikingly points out, “the Romans invented the legal fiction
of dominium or absolute ownership, a fiction that highlights their practical genius” (31).
Dominium emphasized the categories of persona (owner) and res (thing), and by
rigidly distinguishing between corporeal and incorporeal things, the Romans
created a new legal paradigm in which there could be no room for ambiguity in
deciding what was and was not the object of property. An object could only be a
tangible thing. More important, the fiction now emerged that was to haunt
continental Western law for the next two thousand years: property was no longer
a relation between persons but a relation between persons and things. And this
fiction fitted perfectly its purpose, to define one of the most rapidly expanding
sources of wealth, namely, slaves. (31)

He identifies the three constituent elements of this new legal paradigm as persona, res,
and dominium and notes that more than just a relation between a person and a thing,
dominium, as the term suggests, refers to absolute power. And this absolute power was
not limited to the capacity to exact the full economic value of a res, or as he insists, “to
use (usus) and enjoy its fruits (fructus), as well as “to use it up”(ab-usus), to alienate it,
but perhaps most significantly…it has the psychological meaning of inner power over a
thing beyond mere control” (31). He locates the desire to possess a kind of inner psychic
power over a thing to the notion that the “thing” on the minds of the jurists “was a slave”
(31). This is made clear by the remarks of Gaius. In the Institutes he maintains: 
In servorum condicione nulla differntia est…nam apud omnes peraeque gentes
animadvertere possumus dominis in servos vitae necisque potestatem esse: et
quodcumque per servum adquiritur, id domino adquiritur. (1.3.4; 1.8.1) 
 
25 
The legal condition of all slaves is the same…We can observe the same thing
everywhere: owners hold the power of life and death over slaves, and owners get
whatever slaves acquire. (Gaius 1.3.4; 1.8.1) 
 
Even Ulpian, explaining the Latin term for freeing a slave, manumisso, writes “whereas
one who is in slavery is subjected to the hand (manus) and power of another, on being set
out of hand (manu-missio), he is freed of that power,” and adds “of course everyone
would be born free by natural ius, and manumissions would not be known where slavery
is unknown” (1.1.4). This sentiment is followed by that of Florentinus, who a few
decades after Ulpian, flatly states, “Slavery is an institution…whereby someone is against
nature made subject to the ownership of another” (1.5.4). It is this new law of property
that sets Roman slavery apart from other slaveholding societies. Indeed, as Patterson
aptly determines, “by means of the doctrine of dominium, the condition of slavery was
transformed into a consideration of powers in rem” (31). The most common conception
of the slave among the Romans became, by the end of the republic, “that of a thing—the
idea of “thingness” in law being emphasized as never before, specifically for this
purpose” (32). “The slave was,” according to Buckland, “a res, the only human res” (3).
But the question remains: under what circumstances did an action lie for a slave to lay
claim to iniuria? The answer is expressly stated in the writings of the jurist Ulpian. He
asserts that in cases of verberatio (flogging) and quaestio (torture), the feelings of the
slave himself are considered:
Si quis sic fecit iniuriam servo, ut domino faceret, video dominum iniuriarum
agree posse suo nomine: si vero non ad suggillationem domini id fecit, ipsi servo
facta iniuria inulta a praetore relinqui non debuit, maxime si verberibus vel
quaestione fieret: hanc enim et servum sentire palam est. (47.10.15.35)

26 
In anyone thus causes injury to a slave, so that it does [injury] to the master, I
believe that the master can bring a charge of this injury in his own name: in truth,
he did this not on account of an affront to the master, the injury done to that slave
should not be left unavenged by the Praetor, especially if he experienced whips or
torture. For it is well known, clear that the slave also feels this injury. (Ulpian,
47.10.15.35)

Ulpian's interpretation of iniuria confirms that while the intent to insult the master may
have been present, the damage assessed is based not upon an affront to the owner (si vero
non ad suggillationem domini id fecit), but on the grounds that there has been a
diminishment of personhood on the part of the slave.
4
In fact, it could be said that for a
slave to suffer iniuria presents an instance in which Roman law recognizes him as a
social being upon whom a measurable loss has been inflicted.
5
The jurist Gaius shows no
knowledge of the two types of action by which a slave can lay claim to iniuria. Writing
during the second century C.E. he articulates, “Servo autem ipsis quidem nulla iniuria
intellegitur fieri, sed domino per eum fieri videtur” (3.222). (“No iniuria is held to be
done to a slave himself, but is to be inflicted on the master through him”). Moreover,
Justinian echoes this sentiment as he elaborates in the Institutes:
Servis autem ipsis quidem nulla iniuria fieri intellegitur, sed domino per eum fieri
videtur: non tamen isdem modis, quibus etiam per liberos et uxores, sed ita cum
quid atrocius commissum fuerit et quod aperte ad contumelaim domini respicit.
Veluti si quis alienum servum veberaverit, et in hunc casum action propintur: at si
quis servo convicium fecerit vel pugno eum percusserit, nulla in eum actio
domino competit. Si communi servo iniuria facta sit, aequum est non pro ea
parte, qua dominus quisque est, aestimationem iniuria fieri, sed ex dominorum
persona, quia ipsis fit iniuria. (4.3.4)

No iniuria is held to be done against a slave himself, but is held to be inflicted on
the master through him. This does not happen as with wives and children but

4
See Ulpian 77 ad edictum 47.10.15.35.
5
See Buckland 82 and Barrow 46.
27 
only where something more harsh occurs, manifestly in contempt of the owner.
For example, where one person flogs another”s slave. There is an edictal action
for that. No action lies to the owner where someone abuses a slave vocally or
strikes him with a fist. When iniuria is committed against a slave held in
common, the valuation should focus not on the size of each owner”s share but on
their personal standing. It is to them personally that the iniuria is done. (Justinian
4.3.4)

The conceptions put forth by Gaius and Justinian attest to the extinction of legal
capacities of slaves in Roman law. That a slave could be defined as both fully a person
and nonperson points to the way in which the language of slavery moves back and forth
at the hands of its definers. It also demonstrates the difficulty faced by the jurists in
defining a slave legally. Whether a thing (res) or an object of moveable property (res
mobilis), the slave was not strictly treated as such under Roman law. “There was always,”
Thomas Wiedemann notes, “tension between the slave”s total rightlessness in law and the
fact that he or she was a person,” between their being “chattel slaves” and “persons,”
between their legal disabilities and their abilities as a person (9,15). On the one hand, the
slave was killed socially, deprived of birth right, property ownership, and of a voice that
counts, and, on the other hand, certain branches of Roman metaphysics such a Stoicism
maintained that the slaves' moral worth as a social being was separate from his social
rank or status.
6
Even then, the dominant view seems to have been that the slave was a

6
For a subtle consideration of the personhood of slaves consult Seneca”s De Beneficiis in which
he asks whether a slave can give a benefit to his master. He concludes that “a slave can be just,
brave, great-souled or give a benefit” (xvii.4). And cautions, “whoever thinks that servitude
penetrates the whole human being is wrong. Its better part is exempt. Bodies are answerable and
belong to masters; but the mind is under its own law, and is so free and moving that it cannot be
restrained even by this prison of the body in which it is shut, but which cannot stop it using its
power, doing mighty deeds and moving off into the infinite company with the gods. So it is the
body that Fortune has handed over to a master; this he buys, this he sells; that inner part cannot be
taken possession of. Whatever comes from this is free; further, we cannot command all things
nor are slaves compelled to obey in all things” (III.xx.1-2).
28 
special kind of property, an extension of his owner, who lacked civic rights, but
embodied certain personal attributes that rendered him a social nonentity.
According to Peter Garnsey,
The slave-owner's rights over his slave-property were total, covering the person as
well as the labor of the slave. The slave was kinless, stripped of his or her old
social identity in the process of capture, sale and deracination, and denied the
capacity to forge new bonds of kinship through marriage alliance. These are the
three basic components of slavery. (1)

Thomas Wiedemann adds, the slave's “person is absolutely under the control of another;
he is another”s property, part of the household unit to which his owner belongs” (1-2). In
his view, “a slave was legally wholly rightless” (9). The work of Garnsey holds that
chattel slavery was the case in Rome after the third century B.C.E. The “three basic
components of slavery” mentioned above seem to describe and further imply that even
under these conditions, the question of personhood, on the face of it, remains closed. For
the slave-property”s status as a nonperson is frequently misunderstood as fixed by
scholars of ancient slavery. But as Buckland cautions, “there does not seem to be a single
text in the Corpus Iuris Civilis, or in the Codex Theodosianius, or in the surviving
classical legal literature which denies personality to a slave. It is clear that the Roman
jurists called a slave a person, and this means that for them, “persona” meant human
being” (4). It should be noted that the term persona, standing alone, did not mean
persona civilis. The status conferred upon slaves was not the same kind of personhood
extended toward Roman citizens. The term persona has more than one meaning. Its
primary meaning is not the human being, but the part or role he plays in society, and
29 
therefore a number of legal texts, including the ones mentioned above, speak not of the
human being, but of the persona of the human being. As Buckland makes clear:
It is the usage of some writers to speak of two senses in which the word [persona]
is used: one technical, in which it means “man capable of rights”; the other side,
in which it means simply “man.” But if the texts be examined on which this
distinction is based, it will be found that, so far as Roman law is concerned, this
means no more than that in some texts the topic in question is such that rights are
necessarily contemplated, while in others this is not the case (4).

The central point here is that the Romans seemed to have felt that slaves might indeed be
property but they were something else, neither more nor less but other.
We can get an idea of the ways in which complex issues of personhood, slavery
and the law of iniuria were conceived and negotiated in Roman society from the orations
of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.E.). The Pro Roscio Comoedo provides the
strongest evidence to argue for a connection between these issues. Cicero”s orations in
general and the Pro Roscio in particular, also serve as one explanation for the jurists”
vacillation in their conception of iniuria and slaves. Writing during the late republic,
Cicero”s epistles, orations and philosophical treatises typically played an essential role in
the education and training of members of the Roman elite interested in entering public
life either as political statesmen, magistrates and orators. In all likelihood, the views
expressed in Cicero”s orations are representative of the notions of iniuria, slavery, and
personhood held by members of the elite class in ancient Rome. The republican period of
Roman history in which Cicero writes is characterized by a vast influx of slaves and
wealth which were beginning to give rise to a series of internal crises that undermined the
ethical code that governed the way elite citizens behaved. According the Greek
biographer Plutarch, writing in 100 C.E.:
30 
The Roman republic was most dangerously disposed towards change on account
of the irregularity in the distribution of property, since men of the highest
reputation and spirit had impoverished themselves on shows, feasts, pursuit of
office and sumptuous buildings, and riches had fallen into the hands of mean and
low-born men, so that matters needed only a slight impulse to disturb them, and it
was the power of any bold man to overthrow the res publica, which itself was in a
diseased condition. (X.4-xiii.2)

The Punic Wars (264-146 B.C.E.) are of central importance to understanding the cause of
the “diseased condition” in which the republic finds itself because they mark the
beginning of provincial acquisitions and political changes in Rome. The Punic Wars
were also the catalyst for rapid expansion and the development of new territories which
would later constitute a large part of the Roman empire. The Romans successfully
defeated the Carthaginians in 146 B.C.E., and with this victory, the republic began to
expand eastward. Pergamum was bequeathed to Rome along with Cilicia, parts of North
Africa, Macedonia, Asia Minor, and part of Gaul and Illyricum were added by 133
B.C.E. As a result, a significant portion of the war spoils began to flow into Italy, and
included in this booty were captured slaves from various regions. In 210 B.C.E. the
historian Livy reports in the Ab Urbe Condita that Rome punished the citizens of Capua
by enslaving its people (2.10). Aemilius Paullus is said to have captured 150,000 people
in Epirus in 167 B.C.E. (Bradley, 45). And, as Keith Bradley observes in 146 B.C.E.
30,000 men and 25,000 women were enslaved after the destruction of Carthage (51). It is
also important to note that the city of Delos was made a free port in 166 B.C.E., which
now made it one of the major market places for slaves in the eastern Mediterranean (44).
The Greek geographer Strabo tells how a massive slave trade sprung out of the collapse
of the Seleucid Empire, leading to a vast influx of slaves which were brought to Rome to
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be purchased by wealthy land owners who needed slave labor to work on their estates
(Strabo, 5.2). These accounts resemble the logic in the Institutes mentioned earlier,
which maintained that there was a direct connection between slavery and warfare (G.
1.3.3). By 150, Rome had gained control of over one third of the Mediterranean. The
citizens of the republic, small, autonomous farmers, were called upon to be soldiers as the
republic transitioned to empire (70 B.C.E.-30 B.C.E.).
Driven by enormous wealth, military power, and the vast influx of human
commodities, Rome began to import slaves to work on the newly acquired large-scale
estates that were confiscated from communities that had helped Hannibal. In large part,
the land was considered public land (res publica) which was taken over by the state after
political insurrection or conquest. The other source for these large-scale estates was the
displacement of farmer-soldiers of the plebeian class, who having fought to secure
Rome”s boundaries returned to Italy unwilling or unable to resume their agricultural
practices. At times their land had been expropriated by the state and given to the soldiers
of a successful military general in exchange for services rendered. But, in most cases, a
number of these farmer-soldiers had been pushed out of the market as a result of imports
and goods from the provinces which could be produced in a fast and efficient way on the
highly organized latifundium. The emergence of these latifundia led to a change in crop
production, which was now highly specialized; raising livestock and the prospects for
increased monetary profit drove members of the elite to expel small farmers off of their
land in order to develop large estates. These villae included buildings for the master”s use
when he was in residence, living quarters in the form of cells for the slaves and
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outbuildings for agricultural purposes. The intended goal of these latifundia was to
cultivate crops intensively in preparation for sale, often into distant markets. The labor,
done for the most part by slaves, was highly organized and supervised. The result was a
growing discontent among the plebeian class of landless citizens, who owned nothing,
were without arable land, and had only their voting power—a formula for instability.
The work of Yvon Thebert has demonstrated that most of the slaves used in the
agricultural villae were put to hard labor (141). He points out that, “rural slaves had little
contact with their master and were often subjected to a severe discipline designed to get
as much work out of them as possible” (141). In the De Agri Cultura, Cato makes clear
the kind of work a rural slave can perform during inclement weather (ubi tempestates
malae erunt, quid fieri possit) (31.1). The implication being that an owner must never
leave his slave-property unoccupied. It is clear that under these conditions of large-scale
production, intensive specialization of products, mainly grain and cereals, and the
widespread utilization of slave labor, a slave who is not working is costing money instead
of generating it.
Cato also provides an example of privileged slaves who were kept busy doing the
tasks entrusted to them. In an outline of the function of the vilica, the wife of the vilicus,
(a man who managed the property for a master who was occasionally present), Cato
mentions that the vilica was responsible for keeping the villa clean and supervising the
meals. She took care of the chickens, supervised the preserving of fruits and the milling
of grain (31.3). He specifies that the vilica must always be present, must visit her
neighbors as little as possible, and must decline invitations and not offer any herself
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(31.3). All of her time was occupied by her duties, and the same was true for the vilicus,
who must be the first to rise and the last to depart from the master”s quarters in the
evening (31.4). This smooth operation was aimed entirely at self-sufficiency in order to
avoid loss of time, which was, for the owner, loss of profit and earnings.
The closed system of the villa, in which the resources and energies of the familia
rustica were completely given over to productive labor, is aptly contrasted with that of
the familia urbana, where work was organized in a radically different way. As Thebert
maintains, “a number of urban slaves escaped all direct, permanent control when their
master charged them with the management of a range of businesses—shops or crafts
operations—for his benefit” (142). He characterizes the experience of slaves as
autonomous and in many ways without parallel. There was also a sense that the slaves
who occupied the house of their master assumed a wide range of specific functions as
they were “domestic servants whose main purpose was to facilitate daily life for the
master and his family” (142). They were, additionally, a visible expression of the
master's prestige by their number and the specialization of the tasks to which they were
assigned. Thebert ultimately suggests that slaves of the familia urbana were subject to
working conditions that were less harsh than their rural counterparts (142).
Many illustrations of the lessening of severe labor conditions in the familia
urbana emerge from the representation of relations between owners and slaves in the city
household expressed in Roman literature, particularly the Metamorphoses of Apuleius of
the second century C.E. This text provides a rich set of examples of the ways in which
the familia urbana may have operated. The novel is an allegory of Roman slavery as it
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tells how a certain Lucius, a man accidentally transformed into an ass, is forced to
witness and, at times, share in the miseries of slaves and destitute freemen who are turned
into nonpersons, animals at the hands of wealthy landowners. It is here that we not only
see the slave-property as animal in contrast to persons, but also the perspective of Roman
law discussed earlier that transforms slave-persons into chattel. It is interesting to note
that chattel means also cattle; the slave in this view is already part-beast. In Book I of this
tale, slaves are shown to be a part of the normal routine of a master's house. For example,
one man who is wealthy but miserly decides to dress like a beggar and keeps only one
slave (1.21). In Book II, we encounter a noblewoman who makes grand appearances in
the city attended by a large number of domestic slaves, and when she gives a dinner party
at her house the guests are served by slaves with specialized functions—some elaborately
dressed, who cut the meat and pass the dishes; others, curly haired young men, offer wine
(2.2.19). Not unlike the ornate furnishings, the crystal, gold and silver drinking cups, or
the glasses cut from precious stones which Lucius observes, the slaves are a part of the
décor of the dwelling, which they enhance by their skill and number. Among the master's
slaves are a pastry chef, a candy maker and a cook who specializes in preparing different
kinds of meat, and it is clear that they are not engaged in hard, productive labor of the
familia rustica (10.13). Later in the work, Lucius observes a dog that somehow manages
to get into the house of a wealthy landowner and bites a number of the domestic slaves,
among them a mule driver, a cook, and a private doctor (9.2). For an urban slave to be
placed in charge of these kinds of operations, along with managing shops or craft
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operations, seems to have afforded the slave some degree of autonomy and mobility as he
was not wholly subject to the direct and permanent control of his master.
By contrast the novel also draws attention to the quality of life in rural settings as
well. For example, towards the end of Book IX as Lucius speaks of the slaves he saw at
the flower mill:
Dii boni, qualesti, illic homunculi vibicibus lividis totam cutem depicti,
dorsumque plagosum scissile centunculo magis inumbrati quam obtecti, nonulli
exiguo tegili tantum modo puben iniecti, cuncti tamen sic tunicate ut essent per
pannulos manifesti, frontes literati et capillum semirasi et pedes anulati, tum
lurore deformes et fumosis tenebris vaporosae caliginis palpebras adesi atque
adeo male luminati, et in modum pugilum qui pulvisculo perspersi dimicant
farinulenta cinere sordide candidate. (9.12)

Good gods, what scrawny little men they were! The whole surface of their skin
was painted with livid welts. Their striped backs were merely shaded, not
covered, by the tattered patchwork they word: some had thrown on a tiny cloth
that just covered their loins, but all were clad in such a way that you could discern
them clearly through their rags. Their foreheads were branded, their heads half-
shaved, and their feet chained. They were hideously sallow too, and their eyelids
were eaten away by the smoky darkness of scorching murk until they were weak-
sighted; like boxers who fight sprinkled with dust, they were dirtily whitewashed
with floury ash. (Apuleius 9.12)

These quotations suggest that while the familia urbana implies a relationship between
masters and slaves that is different from the one that existed in rural settings, the
conditions within which slaves worked were in some ways less harsh. And perhaps it is
for this reason that the word familia, which included both relatives and slaves, was used
to designate all the persons placed under the authority of the potestas—the pater familias.
This is further illustrated in the Metamorphoses in the complaints of the elite but
unfortunate young girl who is kidnapped by bandits in Book IV (4.24). She laments that
she is alone, torn away from a prominent house (tali domo) with many servants (tanta
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familia) and from dear slaves born in the house (tam caris vernulis) and her venerable
parents (tam sanctis parenitbus) (4.24). The symmetrical relationship that she constructs
between the slaves and her family seems to reflect a parallel in her mind between the two
groups in the domus. But this language of affection and sentiment can be retracted, and
in this secondary process it becomes evident that such paternalistic ideology has ulterior
motives: it seems to have created the illusion that an affective cohesion existed between
bands of slaves, whose tasks depended entirely on the personal needs of the master, and
the master himself or herself. Framed this way, we can see how even the most
sentimental passages in this novel are shot through with a reminder that the members of
the ruling elite never entirely lose a sense of their rightful place, nor of the place of
slaves. As the kidnapped young girl speaks of her own fate, she describes herself like a
slave, “reduced to slavery; closed inside a stone prison; in a place of torture” (7.10-13).
The affective ties that supposedly bind her to her own slaves do not keep her from a
proper recognition of what it means to occupy a servile status.
After an examination of the implied relationships between master and slaves of
the familia rustica and the familia urbana, we can see three points have become clear:
first, there is a high degree of heterogeneity that existed among slaves in ancient Rome.
Second, the slave-property was an entity that, for the most part, had limited control over
his labor conditions, but still retained a certain degree of autonomy depending upon the
context in which he worked. Third, the status of the slave as quasi-person, part thing,
part beast introduces a complex set of social responses having to do with his embodiment
of attributes that belong to both property and persons.
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As previously mentioned, the slave who was the property of a private citizen was
included in the relationships that united the various members of the familia under the
authority of the pater familias. Under these conditions, the head of the household exerted
a different kind of authority over his slaves than over his children. In particular, his
power over his children was not transferable, however, the Twelve Tables attest that a
father could sell his children, and inversely, he could adopt a slave. In this light, his
absolute authority seems to have obliterated the differences that existed among his
dependents, all the more since both slaves and sons served as a valuable labor force. But
it must be noted that no matter how heavily the father's authority (patria potestas)
weighed on the son, he was essentially different from a slave. The son would himself
become a citizen and the head of a family unless he was sold, and this was not always the
case for a slave. Thus in the Twelve Tables, anyone judged guilty of bodily harm
(iniuria) to a member of one's familia (breaking a bone, for instance) was forced to pay a
monetary indemnity to the pater familias, whether the harm was done to his children,
slaves, wife, or daughter-in-law. The sum varied, of course, and it was double when the
victim was a free man. What is more, it is striking that the juridical approach to the
problem is the same in these cases: whatever the victim's social status, he had been
subjected to an iniuria. Harm done to a slave was considered as damage; and the guilty
party had to pay the slave's master a sum equal the slave's highest estimated market value
at the time immediately preceding the injury. Thus the slave was not only included in
provisions that covered all threats to goods, materials, or animals, but as the later jurist
Ulpian maintains, the damage inflicted upon the slave's person should be taken into
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consideration as well. It was this law of iniuria that underlay the complex affair in which
Cicero was asked to serve as the advocate for Quintus Roscius, an actor.
The date for the Pro Quinto Roscio Comoedo is variously given as 76, 68 or 66
B.C.E. As one of Cicero's earlier orations, drawn from the beginning of his career as an
advocate in civil cases, the content of this speech is agreed by scholars to be a “general
exhortation of the importance of law for the social order” (Harries, 14). By contrast Jerzy
Axer suggests that the style of the Pro Roscio Comoedo is “deliberately comic, indeed
specifically Plautine in “stylization” (14). This conclusion is not entirely unfounded as it
becomes quite clear to any reader of this oration that Cicero makes explicit use of the
themes and characters from the comedies of Plautus in defending his client, the comic
actor Roscius. One such instance occurs when Cicero compares the prosecutor, Fannius,
with the pimp Ballio from Plautus' Pseudolus (VII.20). But this reading rejects the view
of F. Klinger, for he maintains that the speech “reflects a particular stage in Cicero's
rhetorical development in which he is supposed to have competed with Hortensius by
imitating his style” (178). Even in his assessment of Ciceronian oratory, M. L. Clarke
does not take not of the ways in which the juridical concepts mentioned above inform the
so-called “special characteristics” of Cicero's speeches and oratorical writings (71).
However, there is a lacuna in the scholarship as the work of ancient historians has yet to
define and explore the ways in which the law of iniuria, the practice of slavery, and
gradations of personhood are conceived of a negotiated within this oration. It is precisely
in this area that my work seeks to intervene.
39 
The content of the oration is this: Panurgus, a slave of Gaius Fannius Chaerea,
was trained as a comic actor by Roscius with the object that Roscius and Fannius should
share in the earnings accrued from his performances. Panurgus was well received,
earning 100,000 sesterces for his skill in the dramatic arts. One day he was murdered,
and the two men, both together and individually, sued the murderer, a certain Quintus
Flavius, appealing to the law of iniuria. Cicero is arguing that his client Roscius deserves
a greater share of the financial penalty than does his partner because it is Roscius who
taught Panurgus the skill that made him especially valuable. Roscius eventually accepted
a compromise and received a tract of uncultivated land for the loss of Panurgus. But he is
not satisfied with the outcome and a lengthy suit between the joint owners Roscius and
Fannius followed, which occasioned Cicero's address to the court.
This text is interesting for the purposes of my argument for a number of reasons.
To begin with, it foregrounds the concerns of Roscius and Fannius, and in so doing,
seems to demonstrate one of the ways in which Roman slave owners represented their
own class interests. Second, the Pro Roscio Comoedo allows for an examination of
precisely what kind of world existed for the slave from the outside in. The third reason
for my interest in this text is that it presents the central paradox that operated within the
Roman slave owning experience, that is, what is the dominus to do with the personal
qualities of a slave yoked as it is to the fact of property?
Usually the victims in a murder trail come supplied with ready information about
who they are. Panurgus differs in this regard, because who he is seems less relevant than
what he is, which is to say, the murdered slave's servile status renders questionable the
40 
kind of social entity he is. To be sure, Cicero opens the oration by insisting that
“Panurgus was the slave of Fannius, and became the common property of Fannius and
Roscius” (X.27). “Panurgus” inquit, “fuit Fanni; is fit ei cum Roscio communis” (X.27).
But shortly after Cicero's primary retraction of personhood, the assassinated slave is
presented as an individual as we learn that he was regarded “Illum eruditum et perfectum
existimabant” (“an accomplished and finished comedian”) (X.29). “Nemo enim illum ex
trunco corporis spectabat, sed ex artificio comico aestimabat; nam illa membra merere
per se non amplius poterant duodecim aeris, disciplina, que era tab hoc tradita, locabat
se non minus” (“for no one judged him by his body, but valued him by his skill as a
comedian; his limbs, by themselves, could not earn more than twelve bronze coins, but
the training, which he had received from Roscius, yielded no less than 100,000
sesterces”) (X.28). So while the slave's voice does not count legally or politically, his
skills at performance do “count” in another sense. In an attempt to determine which
owner should receive financial remuneration for the iniuria inflicted upon his property,
the slave-person, Panurgus, undergoes another conversion as Cicero ushers us into the
perils of possession.
He asks: “Quid erat enim Fanni? Corpus. Quid Rosci? Disciplina. Facies non
erat, ars erat pretoisa” (“for what part of him belonged to Fannius? His body. What part
belonged to Roscius? His training. It was not his appearance, but his skill as an actor that
was valuable”) (X.28). In this scene of depersonalization, Cicero's attempt to make a
distinction between the body of Panurgus, which belonged to Fannius, and his training,
which belonged to Roscius, enacts the difficulty faced by Roman jurists in defining
41 
slaves as property in law. It seems as though we are being asked to believe that
Panurgus” renown and “skill as an actor” owed nothing to his personal qualities. In fact,
Cicero further exclaims, “Quam enim spem et expectationem, quod stadium et quem
favorem secum in scaenam attulit Panurgus, quod Rosci fuit discipulus! Qui diligebant
hunc, illi favebant, qui admirabantur hunc, illum probabant” (“what hopes, what
expectations, what enthusiasm, what favor accompanied Panurgus on the stage, because
he was the pupil of Roscius! All who were devoted to Roscius and admired him favored
and approved of the pupil”) (X.29). The way Cicero describes this slave-actor,
appreciated though he was, reveals that the public's favor was due to the fact that
Panurgus was Roscius” pupil. Not only did the renown of the teacher lead to fame for his
student, but more importantly, as Cicero's description suggests, only the efforts of the
former gave the latter any real worth. Furthermore, the parts of the slave were
dismembered and subsequently evaluated in sesterces. Cast in this light, then, the notion
that a slave could lay claim to iniuria seems to have the marks of a purely juristic
creation. The case is different with verberatio and quaestio: there, at least in the opinion
of later jurists, the feelings of the slave himself are considered. But in the Pro Roscio,
there is no sign that the action of iniuria was in any practical sense a recognition of the
slave Panurgus as having suffered loss; it is the damage done to Roscius that is
considered. The law of iniuria, then, while relatively neutral in its legal applications,
moves back and forth at the hands of its definers and conveys exclusive and inclusive
connotations in the context of slavery; suggesting that Roman slave owners themselves
were engaged in an on-going struggle between the power to construct a person out of a
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thing, or, more precisely, in the case of Roscius, give added value to the slave-property
item and the alternating process of depersonalization.
The literal depersonalization of Panurgus, figured in his dismemberment, points to
the ways in which slaves in ancient Rome are voiceless, inarticulate insofar as their effect
in the court. “Of the slave's civil position,” writes Buckland, “it may almost be said that
he had none” (82). The slaves” capacity in law is “purely derivative and the texts speak
of him as unqualified in nearly every branch of law” (82). Slaves were not able to be
bound by contract, and they could not be creditors or debtors, yet at the same time they
were capable of natural right (ius naturale). Buckland further suggests that the exclusion
of slaves from a number of actus legitimi seems to rest on the “absence of civitas than on
their slavery” (83). Gaius opined that a slave could not be a witness in a trial because
such a person must be a civis (1.119). He could not make a will, and if he became free a
will made while enslaved was still void. The Institutes also mention that slaves could not
be in any way concerned in civil proceedings, which must be, from beginning to end,
brought before the court in the name of the master (2.8.82; 2.11.13; 50. 17.107). As they
could neither file a legal claim nor be sued, judgment against a slave was null and void.
Slaves could not act as iudices, and as Buckland concludes, similarly they could not be
arbitrators. “If a slave were appointed as an arbitrator we are told that as a matter of
convenience, if he became free before decision, the parties might agree to accept his
decision. But this depends on his freedom, and is only a way of avoiding the trouble of a
new appointment” (84).  
43 
The capacity of slaves as witnesses is more complex. As a rule their evidence
was not admissible in civil cases. But Buckland suggests that the exclusion of their
evidence led to miscarriages of justice (86). Out of necessity, then, the courts had to
create a number of exceptions. The most important being that a slave “might give
evidence in matters in which they were concerned” (de suo facto) (86). Justinian
comments that whenever there were cases in which the evidence of slaves was
admissible, it was taken normally by torture (48.18.9). Indeed, it appears that it could not
be received in any other form (48.18.9). In criminal trails also the examination of slaves
is said to have been by torture (48.19.1). This perspective of law is reflected earlier in
Cicero during a striking scene in the Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino delivered in 80 B.C.E.
As previously discussed, Cicero is speaking in defense of Sextus Roscius of
Ameria, who was charged with parricide. Overshadowing the trial are the horrors of the
previous decade, that is, the Social War (90-88 B. C.), the civil wars, murders and
proscriptions which characterized the domination of Sulla and Marius, and the fear, under
Sulla the dictator of more hardships to come. It was a period in which Cicero, looking
back from 46 B.C. in the Brutus, would remember as one when the “res publica was
devoid of all law (ius) and honor (dignitas)” (227). In the case of Roscius there had
already been two slaves present, but Cicero, who as counsel for the defense, could not
call any witnesses, and did not have the power to bring them into court; nor could slaves
have been made to give evidence against their masters. The slaves had belonged to the
murdered man and were now the property of a certain Chrysogonus. It was impossible to
get their evidence but by permission of their master, and this was being withheld. Cicero
44 
in turn demands that the slaves be examined as witnesses. Pointing to the accused, he
says: 
Quid? Ii servi ubi sunt? Chrysogonum, iudices sectantur; apud eum sunt in
honore et in pretio. Etiam nunc, ut ex iis quaeratur, ego postulo, hic orat atque
obsecrat. Quid facitis? Cur recusatis? Dubitate etiam nunc, iudices, si potestis, a
quo sit Sex. Roscius occisus, ab eone, qui propter illius mortem in egestate et
insidiis versatur, cui ne quaerendi quidem de morte patris potestas permittur, an
ab iis, qui quaestionem fugitant, bona possident, in caede atque ex caede vivunt.
(XXVIII.77-8) 
 
Well? Where are those slaves? Gentlemen, they are in the house of Chrysogonus,
by whom they are highly esteemed and valued. Even now, I demand that they be
put to the question, my client begs and entreats you. What are you about? Why
do you refuse? Hesitate now, gentlemen, if you can, to decide by whom Sextus
Roscius was killed; whether it was by him who, owing to the death of his father,
finds himself in poverty and in the midst of snares, who is not even allowed the
opportunity of making an inquiry into his father's death, or whether it was those
who shirk any inquiry, are in possession of the dead man's property, who live in
murder by murder. (Cicero XXVIII.77-8)
 
This passage is particularly important as it further supports the conclusions put forth by
Buckland while also providing a broader framework for understanding the remarks of
Justinian, who maintained that slaves, when examined as witnesses were tortured, so that
their evidence might be extracted. In a separate yet interrelated way, Anthony Trollope
notes in The Life of Cicero written in 1881 that “this kind of examination of the slave is
spoken of with no horror by Cicero, nor by other Roman writers. It was regarded as an
established rule of life that a slave, if brought into a court of law, should be made to tell
the truth by such appliances” (88). Cicero explains how this means of extracting
evidence was carried out in the Pro T. A. Milone. “You had better tell the truth now, my
friend: Who was it”? The slave knows that, if he says it was so, there is the cross for him
(certa crux), or the “little horse”; but that if he will say the contrary, he will save his
45 
joints from racking” (XXII). Furthermore, Buckland also establishes that slaves were
given their liberty in order that, being free, they might not be force to tell the truth by
means of torture. This observation applies to the slaves in the Pro Milone (52 B.C.E.) as
Milo admits that his slaves could have offered evidence under torture if he had not set
them free (XXII.57-60). This notion of civic death that presents itself in the Pro Roscius
Comoedo and Pro Milone of Cicero as well as the writings of the jurists insists that there
was nothing unusual about the practice of slavery.
Civic death is one of the two opposing views adopted by the Roman slave owning
class, and it expresses itself in the idea that the slave must be kept in his proper place of
absolute civic nonentity. As previously mentioned, the slave was the only person who
could be owned. There were members of Roman society in other subordinate positions
which resembled slavery (e.g. the nexus, the auctoratus, the addictus, and others), but
none of these was like the slave, that is, a res. On the one hand, the slave is chattel, and
as Cicero's Pro Roscio Comoedo makes clear, frequently paired off in disputes about
money as a res. The slave, like any other chattel, might be the subject of ordinary
transactions, and these transactions give rise to many questions faced by the slave owning
class owing to the added value of the property item, as was the case with Panurgus. On
the other hand, the slaves” position as civic nonentity is challenged by the coexistence of
a benign, and in some ways benevolent view of slavery also offered by Cicero and the
later jurist Ulpian. This view suggests that the slave-person as animated property needs
special restraints and care. As Cicero himself points out in the De Officiis:
Ac de bellicis quidem officiis satis dictum est. Meminerimus autem etaim
adversus infimos iustitiam esse servandam. Est autem infima condicio et fortuna
46 
servorum, quibus non male praecipiunt, qui, ita iubent uti, ut mercennariis,
operam exigendam, iusta praebenda. (1.41) 
 
But let us remember that we must have regard for justice even toward the
humblest. Now the humblest station and the poorest fortune are those of slaves,
and we are not given bad guidance by those who bid us to treat our slaves as we
should our hired laborers: they must be required to work, they must be offered fair
dealings (iusta praebenda). (Cicero 1.41)
 
This view accounts for the ways in which the slave is not solely property in Roman law
as he or she retains a certain personal element. As this passage demonstrates, the
conflicted viewpoints of slavery in ancient Rome did not wholly deny the personality of
the slave. And for this reason, I am persuaded by William Fitzgerald's argument which
suggests that emotional bonds between master and slave gave rise to a degree of
“humanity” that somehow existed in ancient slavery (27-31, 47-50). Even Roscius took
Panurgus to his house as part of his familia “that he might be spoken of as one of his
pupils” (XI.31). “Una commendatio huius; qui tamen Panurgum illum, non solum ut
Rosci discipulus fuisse diceretur, domum receipt” (XI.31). In my line of thinking,
Cicero's Pro Roscio Comoedo conspires with Roman law to enshrine the dual status of
the slave-person as part thing, part beast. The flexibility that the slave introduces springs
from (but is not confined to) his embodiment of attributes that belong to both things and
persons. It also emerges from the ways in which Roman civilization held the view that
every slave was an incipient citizen. In other words, both Cicero and the jurists
understood that slaves were property, but they were intellectually open to the idea that
slaves could be incorporated into the Roman citizenry, and on this condition, Roman
slave owners knew that proper mastery would require that the personal characteristics of
their slaves be recognized. In what follows, I will examine the ways in which this
47 
complex view of mastery and slavery is appropriated in Briton and the U.S. during the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when similar debates about the status of
slaves as persons raged. I will begin by teasing out some of the important details of
Cicero's life as expressed in his oratorical writings, namely, the Brutus. Second, I will
describe how pedagogues and political figures during the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries looked upon themselves and were looked upon by their
contemporaries in comparison to Cicero as a leading orator of antiquity. This subsection
also attempts to locate the figure of Cicero within the transformations of the rhetoric of
race and slavery that were taking place in antebellum America. Third, I will consider
whether the study of ancient oratorical treatises in particular and the development of
neoclassical thought in general fostered the development of antebellum debates over race
and racial categorization or hindered it. Taken together, then, the primary question that
governs my inquiry is this: How are we to understand the ways in which the
appropriation of Cicero and the Roman model disrupts the legal and social structure of a
New World racialized slave society?
48 
Chapter Two
VIR BONUS DICENDI PERITUS:
The Reception of Cicero in the Nineteenth Century
I am no orator.
For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech
To stir men's blood. (Julius Caesar)

Let it be. Restore yourselves unto your temper, Fathers;
And without perturbation, hear me speak.
Remember who I am, and of what place,
What petty fellow this is, that opposes;
One, that hath exercised his eloquence,
Still to the bane of the nobility:
A boasting, insolent tongue-man. (Ben Jonson, Catiline)

In the previous chapter we identified and discussed the ways in which Cicero’s
prosecutions conspired with Roman law to enshrine the dual status of the slave as part-
thing, part-person. Upon the examination of certain juridical texts, it became apparent
that Roman law, due in part to its sophisticated effort to designate specific categories of
persons, citizens, and property in a non racialized society, is able to manage the
contradictions that grow out of an attempt to tackle the problematic status of persons as
things. On the one hand, the slave in law and advocacy is presented as one who can
claim iniuria through the master and therefore is treated as a person by implication. On
the other, this rhetoric can be retracted, and in this secondary revision the slave moves
from person to property. The ambiguous status of the slave, situated on the margins of
society, collides with Roman law and introduces a destabilizing presence into the
construction of social categories that define this highly stratified society. At once
excluded and included within the legal order, category of the slave, in its very
49 
separateness, also introduces a certain anxiety into the conventions of thought and
behavior that inform the construction of the vir bonus within Roman rhetorical writings.
In what follows, I will examine the ways in which the uncertain status of the slave
troubles the ideology of the orator in ancient Rome. The chapter then moves further to
trace how the shifting representation of the Ciceronian motif of the ideal orator, revealed
through moral probity and political authority and mastery, informed American rhetorical
standards during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when raged similar
debates centered on the status of slaves as persons.
7
According to Caroline Winterer,
“classical models were often invoked in early national America when persuasive public
speaking was believed essential to the body politic, to professional success, and to
gentlemanly ideals of eloquent expression” (Winterer, 25). She aptly notes, “above all
other ancient orators, Revolutionary Americans idealized Cicero as a model of eloquence
and style and also as the ideal citizen whose incorruptible morals protected the Roman

7
See Bynum v. Bostick in DeSaussure 266-68. This case involved a trust created to free a slave in
South Carolina in which Chancellor Henry William DeSaussure stated, “The condition of slaves
in this country is analogous to that of the slaves of the ancients, the Greeks and Romans, and not
that of the villains of feudal times. They are generally speaking not considered as persons, but as
things…all our statute regulations follow the principles of the civil law in relations to slaves,
except in a few cases, wherein the manners of modern times, softened by the benign principles of
Christianity, could not tolerate the severity of the Roman regulations” (266-68). This case is a
direct illustration of a jurist who tied Southern slave law to that of the Romans. DeSaussure
relied on Thomas Cooper”s volume The Institutes of Justinian, with notes by Cooper, which was
published in Philadelphia in 1812, the same year DeSaussure rendered his decision in Bynum.
Cooper”s edition was based on the translation of The Institutes by George Harris, which was first
printed in London in 1761. Another early case in which a jurist used Romanist premises was
State v. Boon in North Carolina, 1801. The action involved the killing of a slave, and Judge John
Hall ruled that slaves were outside of common law. The source from which he derived his
picture of the relationship between slaves and American law was Roman jurisprudence directly.
His analysis rested on the notion of a “pure state of slavery,” which meant complete rightlessness
in the slave and absolute power in the master (dominium). See State v. Boon 103,107;
Blackstone, Commentaries 1:423.
50 
republic from tyranny” (25). But, in my view, the appropriation of Cicero carries with it
a greater cultural significance than repeated invocations of antiquity in the New World.
To be sure, the Ciceronian motif is not static, but changeable and dynamic in the way it is
appropriated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
In keeping with this line of thought, then, how are we to understand the ways in
which notions of personhood, slavery, and iniuria as expressed in Cicero’s earlier
prosecutions are reconfigured in later rhetorical writings? A meaningful approach to this
question first requires a sustained engagement with the rhetorical writings of Cicero,
which, as I will argue, set out to keep in place the equation of eloquence and virility,
mastery and civility, in the public arena throughout Roman republican history.

Voices of Authority
Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in the town of Arpinum, south of Rome; on the
third day of January in 106 B.C.E.
8
He belonged to a locally important and affluent
family but was without political distinction in Rome. Plutarch reports that the surname
Cicero was in fact a matter of ridicule. “For “cicer” is the Latin name for chick-pea, and
[an] ancestor of Cicero, as it would seem, had a faint dent in the end of his nose like the
cleft of a chick-pea, from which he acquired his surname” (Plutarch, I.3-4). And for this

8
See Plutarch The Life of Cicero Volume VII (1986 in which he writes, “It is said of Helvia, the
mother of Cicero, that she was well born and lived an honorable life; but of his father nothing can
be learned that does not go to an extreme. For some say that he was born and reared in a fuller”s
shop, while others trace the origin of his family to Tullus Attius, an illustrious king of the
Volscians, who waged war upon the Romans with great ability. However the first member of the
family who was surnamed Cicero seems to have been worthy of note, and for that reason his
posterity did not reject the surname, but were fond of it, although many made it a matter of
raillery” (Plutarch, I.1-2).

51 
reason, the Greek biographer also mentions that upon Cicero’s decision to enter public
life as an orator and statesman, he was urged by friends and allies to “drop or change the
name,” but to this, he is said to have replied that “he would strive to make the name of
Cicero more illustrious than such names as Scaurus or Catulus” (I.5-6). It is this use of
oratory as one important site for Cicero’s production of personhood that governs the
focus of my inquiry. In what ways do the complexities of belonging to a slave society
complicate the assertion that the study of oratory furnishes an ideal pedagogy of manly
virtue? In order to answer this question, I offer a reading that seeks to understand how the
representation of the ideal orator, as put forth by Cicero and Quintilian, sets out to exploit
existing anxieties over slaves” speech and bodily practices in order to train voices of
authority belonging to the master class.
The discourse of Roman rhetoric itself has always been concerned with questions
of the definition of personhood, the projection of elite male identity, and the proper use of
speech for social advancement and civic responsibility. In Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory,
Thomas Habinek characterizes the preoccupation of rhetoric with the construction of
masculinity as “omnipresent” and asserts that “at Rome, the earliest definition of the
orator emphasizes his status as an elite male (Habinek, 65). He goes further to say that
the final book of Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria argues that the object of rhetoric is “the
formation of a Romanus sapiens: someone who combines the wisdom of a Greek sage
with the practicality of a Roman man of action” (61). For Quintilian, the ideal orator that
he hopes his students will emulate in practice is Cicero. As he declares in Book I, “We
are to form, then, the perfectus orator, who is not able to exist unless he is first a good
52 
man” (Quintilian,1.9). “Oratem autem instituimus illum perfectum, qui esse nisi vir
bonus non potest” (1.9). The concern expressed here is to forge a seamless connection
between oratorical training, ethical instruction, and the construction of elite male
personhood.
Indeed, Quintilian seems to be asserting that if a youth is well trained in the
techniques of speechmaking, then he will evolve into a virtuous man, the perfectus
orator, able to meet the demands of both public and private life. In his view, Cicero
stands alone as the perfectus orator, the embodiment of Cato the Elder's definition of the
Roman orator as a vir bonus dicendi peritus (a good man skilled in speaking). But as
Habinek cautions, this phrase carries with it a certain social significance. He notes that
the term:
vir implies not just biological maleness, but the distinctive masculinity of the free
autonomous citizen, while the supplementary adjective bonus emphasizes that he
behaves in accordance with traditional codes of conduct. As the production of
rhetorical treatise proliferates, anxiety over the reproduction of legitimate male
subjects intensifies. (65)

As this passage suggests, the perfectus orator, having been granted moral and intellectual
qualities, functions as a symbolic reminder of the possibility for the elite male to find and
sustain a place of social prominence and cultural reproduction through the proper use of
speechmaking. It is worth noting that perfectus comes from the verb perficio, which
means also to bring through to completion. This articulation frames the ideal orator
within a way of life, a set of social practices constituted through discipline and self-
knowledge. For Cicero reflects upon the process of speechmaking and the formation of
the well-born, honest man and citizen before an audience in De Oratore. He explains:
53 
Tantum autem efficitur sensu quodam ac ratione dicendi, ut quasi mores oratoris
effingat oratio; genere enim quodam sententiarum et genere verborum, adhibita
etiam actione leni facilitatemque significante efficitur, ut probi, ut bene morati, ut
boni viri esse videamtur. (2.184)

Such is the kind of sensation and order of speaking, that the speech seems to
represent, as it were, the character of the speaker himself; for by adopting a
certain mode of thought and expression, united with physical action that is gentle
and signifies ease and affability, such an effect is produced that we speakers seem
to be noble, of good habits, and virtuous. (Cicero 2.184)

Quintilian echoes this widespread notion that inner character manifests itself most clearly
in self-presentation and speech as he asserts in Book XI of the Institutio, “ut vivat,
quemque etiam dicere” (“as a man lives so he speaks”) (Quintilian, XI.1.30).
Defenders of oratory generally acknowledge that oratory is above all
performative, an act of persuasive speech in which effective delivery is an important
means of securing membership in the dominant political order. Thus, Quintilian insists:
His dicendi virtutibus usus orator in iudiciis, consiliis, contionibus, senatua, in
omni denique officio boni civis finem quoque dignum et optimo viro et opera
sanctissimo faciet. ( XII.11.1)

After employing these gifts of eloquence in the courts, in councils, in public
assemblies and the debates of the senate, and in a word, in the performance of all
the duties of a good citizen, the orator will bring his activities to a close in a
manner worthy of a blameless life spent in the pursuit of the noblest professions.
(Quintilian XII.11.1)

He further notes that the perfectus orator “iuris quoque civilis necessaria huic viro
scientia est” (“will also require a knowledge of civil law”) (Quintilian, XII.3.1), and
sternly admonishes his students not to neglect the necessary preparation for taking part in
civil life by posing the following question: “Nam qualis esse suasor in consiliis publicis
privatisve poterit tot rerum, quibus praecipue civitas continetur, ignarus?” (“For how
will the perfectus orator be able to advise either in public or in private, if he is ignorant
54 
of all the main elements that go to make the state?”) ( XII.3.1-2). By underscoring the
importance of the study of law for the formation of the ideal orator, Quintilian further
designates the practice of oratory as an important locus for the articulation of the “free,
autonomous” citizen mentioned by Habinek. Taken together, then, this material suggests
that oratory, as one site for the production of elite male personhood, brings about a social
transformation through language and involves identifying members of a political
community formed and brought into existence by the study of rhetoric. As such, each
participant becomes entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities guaranteed by
the Roman state to the elite male citizen. In other words, for ancient elocutionists
becoming rhetorical satisfactorily characterizes the individual as becoming a person.
Invested with full rights, civic responsibilities, and social capacity, the ancient
orator is well equipped to participate in public life. Upon the completion of his rhetorical
education, Plutarch points out that Cicero “was primed for a political career. For he was
naturally ambitious and was urged on by his father and his friends, and so when he gave
himself in earnest to the work of an advocate, he did not advance slowly to the primacy,
but his fame shone forth at once, and he far surpassed those who strove with distinction
in the forum” (Plutarch,V.1-4). By foregrounding Cicero’s entrance into public life,
Plutarch resembles Quintilian's insistence on the prominent role the perfectus orator
plays in the government of the state. Moreover, this entrance into political life, marked
as it is by the confluence of speechmaking and the configuration of elite male
personhood, forms the very basis of Cicero’s performance strategy in his rhetorical
writings.
55 
Not only were his orations and prosecutions venues to establish his reputation, but
as John Dugan points out in Making a New Man, “Cicero fashions a version of himself
within his rhetorical writings that is designed both to shape Roman culture during the
political, social, and intellectual ferment of the last decades of the republic, and to
position himself within that discourse” (Dugan, 3). In no text is this example of oratory
as a site that produces another knowledge, another Cicero better understood than in the
Brutus. Here, we are introduced to a different Cicero from that of the Pro Roscio
Comoedo. He is portrayed as an older, wiser figure concerned with putting forth a
historical model for the development of Roman oratory through various periods. The
purely advisory role he plays within this exchange between the young Brutus and Atticus
ushers the audience into a view of Cicero as an authority both on rhetorical history and
the conventions of behavior that shape the specific personhood of the orator.
The leading motif in the Brutus is mastery, which returns repeatedly to the issue
of eradicating slavish bodily practices from the consummate orator's delivery. This
preoccupation with mastery of the body speaks to the broader preoccupation with being a
master in a slaveholding society. The result is the setting of strict attention to the action
of the elite male speaker—to gesture, posture, facial expression, and use of voice, which
govern the conventions of behavior associated with elite men. Even Plutarch recognizes
the anxiety about the contamination of manly persuasion by servile affectations as he
recounts a scenario in which Cicero, during a rather biting jest against the orator Marcus
Gellius, accuses the other man's habits as being used of a slave. Of this, Plutarch writes:
Again, when Marcus Gellius, who was thought to be of servile birth, had read
letters to the senate in a loud clear voice, “Do not marvel,” said Cicero, “he too
56 
is one of those who have cried aloud for their freedom” (in liberatatem
reclamare). (Plutarch XXVII.5-6)

In addition to Plutarch's observation, Erik Gunderson rightly points out in Staging
Masculinity:

The movement of the orator's body through space is a carefully regulated affair.
His gestures should have boundaries; his steps should be kept within certain
limits; his left and right hands must be carefully regulated. It is not enough, then,
to successfully control one's voice and face or use the fingers on one hand
skillfully. These expressive motions must themselves be deployed within
delineated spatial boundaries. Deviations from this space can dispel the efficacy
of the stage presence of the orator as vir bonus. Within these lines he is a good
man; beyond them he is nothing or worse. (Gunderson 78-80)

What is worse than nothing? A slave. Bodily regulation, then, can be understood to
conspire with speechmaking in order to form the orator's habits of movement, gesture,
and character in everyday life. What Gunderson's claim satisfactorily characterizes is the
way in which ancient rhetorical writings put forth an analysis of speaking style that is
interwoven with an analysis of the speaker's body as a way to establish who is an elite
male and ascertain who is not. It is the interconnection of actio or delivery, the fifth
official part of oratory (after inventio, dispositio, elocutio, and memoria) with one's
character that forms the process by which the orator's personhood as an elite male citizen
is developed and expressed. The relationship forged between these two categories is also
one important means by which the orator comes to know himself. This knowledge
begins with proper use of the body, and as we shall see in the Brutus, rhetorical training
offers specific guidelines for mastery over its slackness and sluggishness. To be sure,
Cicero is concerned with reproducing patterns of behavior that belong to the dominant
class by regulating bodily practice. Consequently, Cicero’s portrayal as master proves
57 
suitable for elucidating ancient rhetoric's major preoccupation with training voices of
authority among the senatorial class and legitimizing their claim to power.
The reconfiguration of Cicero in the Brutus as a mature, authority figure with
fixed ideas about speechmaking and the appearance of the orator's body as a site of
dominance—what it does, how it looks— has become somewhat of an ambivalent figure
for nineteenth-century models of eloquence and conceptions of elite manliness and
mastery. In the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero (1865), William Forsyth characterized
Cicero as “one of the purest and most virtuous of the ancients” (Forsyth, 115). But this
view is criticized by James L.S. Davidson's review of “Forsyth's Life of Cicero” (1880)
as he pictured the ancient rhetorician as “no demi-god to be set on a pedestal for the
worship of the nations, but a man with human virtues and human weaknesses”
(Davidson, 373). Furthermore, in The Classics in Translation (1867), James Hannay
acknowledges both Cicero’s “weaknesses and the errors of his public conduct” alongside
a “thread of tenderness” (Hannay, 128). And in his sketch of Julius Caesar, James
Anthony Froude writes the orator was a “tragic combination of magnificent talents, high
aspirations, and true desire to do right, with an infirmity of purpose and a latent insecurity
of character which neutralized and could almost make us forget his nobler qualities”
(Froude, 420). “In Cicero,” he concludes, “Nature half-made a great man and left him
incomplete” (421). But before we attempt to examine the place of Ciceronianism within
neoclassical thought, we must first consider how the configuration of the orator, and the
conventions of elite bodily practice mapped out in the Brutus as well as later rhetorical
writings of Quintilian, demonstrate the ways in which free elite males of republican and
58 
imperial Rome defined their concept of personhood within and against the very class over
whom they exercised absolute political and personal power: slaves.
The Brutus; or De Claris Oratoribus is the continuation of a dialogue between
Brutus, Atticus, and Cicero that first began at Cicero’s home in Tusculum (Cicero, Brutus
V.20-1). It claims to be “about orators: when they first made their appearance, and who,
and of what sort they were” and is regarded by scholars as having been composed early in
the year 46 B.C.E. (“quod mihi nuper in Tusculano inchoavisti de oratoribus: quando
esse coepissent, qui etiam et quales fuissent”).
9
As a continuation of the three books of
De Oratore, Cicero’s Brutus is noteworthy, in the first place, in that he has chosen for an
interlocutor a friend whom he has known only late in life, that is, the young and attentive
Brutus. Plutarch reminds us that it was when Cicero went to Cilicia as governor at the
age of fifty-six, that he was introduced by Atticus to Brutus (Plutarch, XLII.2-3). As a
result, his next three treatises, the Orator, the Tusculan Disputations, and the De Natura
Deorum, include Brutus as a central figure and member of the Roman nobilitas in need of
guidance to meet the demands of both public and private life. By positioning himself as
one who will put forth a history of eloquence in Rome and Greece before it, the mature
Cicero acquires yet another discursive presence, namely, as auctor in the sense that
originates from the verb augeo signifying one who enlarges, confirms, or gives to a thing
its completeness and efficient form. Similarly the term auctor, being a correlation of
auctoritas, also gestures to Cicero’s role as legal owner, as applied to various forms of
property including slaves, and to his general level of prestige. Taken together, then,

9
For a discussion of the broader social and political context in which the Brutus was conceived,
see John Dugan 172.
59 
Cicero in this sense may be viewed— as advisor, patron, master— with manifest
auctoritas.
Cicero’s authority to authorize is expressed here in his history of Roman oratory.
Among the Greek rhetoricians, Cicero valorizes Demosthenes and Isocrates, but the
development of Roman eloquence is charted almost on an evolutionary course, beginning
with Marcus Cornelius Cethegus and Cato the Elder, and moving towards its full
blossoming in Antonius, Crassus, Caesar, Calvus, Hortensius, and Cicero. The treatise
begins with “the first Roman for whom there is extant record of his eloquence” that is
Marcus Cornelius Cethegus (“Quem vero exstet et de quo sit memoriae proditum
eloquentem fuisse et ita esse habitum, primus est M. Cornelius Cethegus”) (Cicero,
XIV.58). Cicero comments on the way in which Ennius adds the attribute of “the sweet-
speaking tongue” (suaviloquenti ore) to Cethegus” list of extraordinary qualities in the
ninth book of the Annals. By attributing the eloquence of Cethegus to a bodily orifice,
that is, the mouth, Cicero signals the way in which oratory is, in fact, an embodied
experience. To this Cicero adds, “at hic Cethegus consul cum P. Tuditano fuit bello
Punico secundo” (“this Cethegus was consul with Publius Tuditanus in the second Punic
War”) (Cicero, XV.60). As consul, the orator proclaims his place in the social order both
to himself and to his fellow citizens, which takes us back to my earlier point that the elite
orator, by means of the study of speechmaking, is granted access to the dominant political
order. Marcus Cornelius Cethegus, then, makes Cicero’s ideal rhetorical training an
effective means of forming civic personhood in the body, the primary site for the elite
orator's development and refinement of his person.
60 
By contrast to Cethegus, whose skill at persuasion led to praise as “flos delibatus
populi” “the choice flower of his people,” improper style displayed by a series of
unrefined motions can lead to a so-called “corruption of eloquence” (vitio) (Cicero,
LXXX.279). Hence, Cicero warns Brutus not to “Frons non percussa non femur, pedis,
quod minimum est, nulla supplosio” (“smite your brow, slap your thigh, or at least stamp
your foot”) (Cicero, LXXX.279). This admonition is echoed by Quintilian who boldly
declares that students of rhetoric, pushed too early into extemporaneous speaking, tend to
develop artificial habits of self-presentation, taking no purpose (Quintilian, 2.4.15). (“Ita
cum iam formam rectae atque emendatae orationis accipient, extemporalis garrulitas nec
expectata cogitatio et vix surgendi mora ciruculatoria vere iactationis est”) (Quintilian,
2.4.15). They tend to take on a slavish appearance through this kind of exuberant
gesticulation and crude vocal tricks (Quintilian, 2.4.16). He further attacks “the
fragmented speech and uneducated straightforwardness of barbarians and slaves”
(Quintilian, 2.11.7). And makes clear that vivid gestures intended to express thought,
such as scratching the scalp (Quintilian, 11.3.121), shaking the head to the right shoulder
in confusion (“fit et ille gestus, qui, inclinato in humerum dextrum capite, brachio ab
aure protenso, manum infesto police extendit”) (Quintilian, 11.3.119), shifting from foot
to foot (“est et illa indecora in dextrum ac laevum latus vacillatio alternis pedibus
insistentium”) (Quintilian, 11.3.128), and the coarse expression of emotion, such as
jumping up and down with happiness (“pedis supplosio”) (Quintilian, 11.3.128), or
slapping the thigh (“femur ferire”) (Quintilian, 11.3.123), are the slave's characteristics.
Even then, as these examples hint, oratory retains certain suspect traces that belong to the
61 
weak and servile classes, which late republican and imperial rhetorical texts seem
anxious to cover over.
Indeed, Quintilian's comments, fortified by what appears in Plautine comedy,
suggest that these gestures were not only present on the stage, but as Kathleen McCarthy
points out in Slaves, Masters, and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy, “were the
slave character's special property” (McCarthy, 181). In Act I of the Miles Gloriosus, for
example, the next door neighbor to the braggart soldier Pyrgopolynices, Periplectomenus
describes a series of gestures deployed by the cunning slave Palaestrio in the act of
plotting a scheme. The slave turns to the side in an exaggerated tilt, counts on the fingers
of his right hand, slaps his thigh, snaps his fingers, shifts around, shakes his head, and
finally jumps up and down triumphantly (Plautus, 8). In short, he behaves precisely as
the orator should not. To be sure, Quintilian quotes Cicero in the De Orator as the
authority on this subject. In Book XI of the Institutio he remarks:
Facit enim aliquid et totius corporis motus, adeo ut Cicero plus illo agi quam
minibus ipsis putet. Ita enim dicit in Oratore: Nullae arguitiae digitorum, non ad
numerum articulus cadens, trunco magis toto se ipse modens et virili laterum
flexione. (XI.3.122)

Indeed, Cicero holds that the body is more expressive than even the hands. For he
says, “There must be no quick movements of the fingers, no marking time with
the finger tips, but the orator should control himself by the poise of the whole
trunk and by a manly inclination of the side.” (Quintilian, XI.3.122)

Only by avoiding such movements that belong to servile classes, will the orator succeed
in productive elite manliness and mastery (Quintilian, VII.6.75). As Erik Gunderson
observes of Quintilian in his work, titled, Staging Masculinity, “bodily excellence cites
and performs the authority of the good man. The orator's body will be good precisely
62 
because it reveals the goodness of the orator himself” (Gunderson, 62). For Quintilian
himself reminds us at the outset of his treatise that “Nam frequens imitatio transit in
mores” (“repeated imitation passes into habit”) (Quintilian, I.11.3). This insistence on
maintaining a clear distinction between the slave and the vir bonus can also be read as an
attempt to conceal signs of instability within the very notion of personhood as a social
category within a slave society.
In a related way, the description of Cicero’s son-in-law Gaius Calpurnius Piso in
the Brutus provides an apt contrast to Quintilian's list of oratorical vice. Here, the
combination of Piso's diction and deportment lead Cicero to offer praise of his overall
character:
Studio autem neminem nec industria maiore cognovi—quamquam ne ingenio
quidem qui praestiterit facile dixerim C. Pisoni genero meo. Nullum tempus illi
umquam vacabat aut a forensi dictione aut a commentatione domestica aut a
scribendo aut a cogitando; itaque tantos processus efficiebat ut evolare, non
excurrere videretur; eratque verborum et dilectus elegans et apta et quasi
rotunda constructio; cumque argumenta excogitabantur ab eo multa et firma ad
probandum tum concinnae acutaeque sententiae; gestusque natura ita venustus ut
ars etiam quae non erat, et e disciplina motus quidam videtur accedere…alia
enim de illo maiora dici possunt, nam nec continentia nec pietate nec ullo genere
virtutis quemquam eiusdem aetatis cum illo conferendum puto.
(LXXVIII.272)

For zeal and industry I have never known anyone—no, nor for talent either, who
surpassed my son-in-law Gaius Piso. There was never a moment when he was
not occupied either with pleading in the forum or with rehearsal at home, whether
of writing or of planning; his progress was so swift that he seemed to fly rather
than to run; his words were carefully chosen, his sentences compact and periodic;
his argument was varied and convincing, his ideas shrewd and neatly put; his
bodily movement and gesture had a natural grace, which gave the impression of
art and training, though that was not the case…for I could truthfully name other
and greater qualities in him than these; in fact for self-control, for devotion, or
indeed for any other virtue I do not think that anyone of his time could be
compared with him. (Cicero LXXVIII.272)

63 
Later in the treatise, Cicero reveals the details of his own rhetorical education. He tells
Brutus and Atticus about his training under the direction of Molon of Rhodes, who
helped to develop his vocal range, habits, and style. “Quibus non contnentus Rhodum
veni meque ad eundem quem Romae audiveram Molonem applicavi…Is dedit operam, si
modo id consequi potuit ut nimis redundantis nos et supra fluentis iuvenili quadam
dicendi impunitate et licentia reprimeret et quasi extra ripas diffluentis coerceret” (“I
went to Rhodes and attached myself to Molon, whom I had already heard at Rome.... He
made it his task to repress if possible the redundance and excess of my style, which was
marked by a youthful impetuousness and lack of restraint”) (Cicero, XCI.316). The
result is described as follows: “Ita recepi me biennio post non modo exercitatior sed
prope mutatus. Nam et contentio nimia vocis resederat et quasi deferverat oratio
lateribusque vires et corpori mediocris habitus accesserat” (“Thus I came back after two
years” absence not only better trained, but almost transformed. My voice was no longer
over-strained, my language had lost its froth, my lungs had gained strength and my body
had put on weight”) (Cicero, XCI.316). In several significant ways, then, the Brutus
represents oratory itself within an alternating imagery of dominance, weakness, and
servility that is decidedly corporeal. Through rhetorical training, as prescribed by Cicero
and Quintilian, the young elite male is further acculturated to the naturalized
configurations of authority and inferiority associated with different classes within a slave
society.
Notably absent from the Brutus is a sustained discussion of the concept of iniuria.
In fact, the term is not discussed in this treatise of mastery. The significance of this
64 
omission is the way that it exposes how the legal delict of iniuria works against the social
conventions that regulate the behavior of mastery and deportment associated with elite
men. The charge of iniuria, with its evaluations of victimhood and its assessments of
harm, requires that one submit to the law and therefore undermines the view of traditional
dominance and authority characteristic of the senatorial class of slave owners. This legal
concept, then, is incompatible with the ideals of virility, mastery, and dominance
expressed by Cicero in his rhetorical writings, and for this reason is overlooked within
the Brutus. As Thomas Habinek perceptively notes in “Slavery and Class,” “the rivalry
between slaves and citizens leads the latter to place a rhetorical and psychological
premium on the one possession that distinguishes their condition from that of slaves,”
that is, “their authoritative voice, potential to speak truth to power, and male potency”
(386). It is precisely this notion of rhetorical discourse as one of mastery and the figure
of Cicero as perfectus orator rather than the legal concept of iniuria, that appealed to late
eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Americans as they sought models of personhood
from antiquity in order to craft national and regional identities.
Cicero and Nineteenth Century Neoclassical Thought
During the late eighteenth century writers “looked at Cicero’s rhetorical treatises
and speeches and followed tradition by calling him a reliable source on ancient rhetors,
and extraordinary speaker himself, a model stylist” (Hannay, 128). As Caroline Winterer
remarks in The Culture of Classicism, “Ciceronian ideals of public speaking
predominated in eighteenth-century America. But while the intricacies of Ciceronian
diction might be reserved for the college-educated, the Ciceronian motif of the perfectus
65 
orator captured the attention of larger segments of society.”
10
She goes on to discuss the
ways in which neoclassical tastes in America were shaped by the “lack of any
disciplinary specialization in classical scholarship” (Winterer, 27). In fact, her work
indicates that:
The best-stocked classical libraries in eighteenth-century America belonged not to
colleges but to private individuals.
11
Possibly the grandest of all classical
libraries in the colonial period belonged to the Quaker merchant James Logan
(1674-1751). At a time when Harvard's library housed only 3,000 books, Logan's
contained more than 400 volumes of classical writing alone out of a total of 2,651
volumes. Likewise, the private library of the Virginia planter WilliamByrd of
Westover rivaled Logan's in size, and Byrd, like many southern gentlemen, such
as Thomas Jefferson, thought of classical learning as an essential component of
the South's composite agrarian gentleman, Cicero Cincinnatus. (Winterer 27)

Moreover, thinking about Cicero was already widespread and diffused during this period.
For example, Winterer points out that “Ciceronian models of diction and style informed
American oratorical standards when persuasive public speaking was believed to be
essential to the body politic, to professional success, and to gentlemanly ideas of eloquent
expression” (Winterer, 25). Along with a renewed interest in competing models of
personhood from antiquity at the beginning of the nineteenth-century, interest in Cicero
did not decline. Cicero reinterpreted was adopted and used in various contexts. Taking
this background into consideration, Winterer notes:
Before 1750 only ministers and magistrates had the authority to speak in public,
but with the proliferation of print, increasing literacy rates, and the growth

10
See Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism in which she cites Joseph Warren”s address
in Boston in 1775 to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Boston Massacre. She mentions
that he not only “filled his speech with keywords of republican ideology from Cicero”s
orations—virtue, vice and corruption—but he addressed his listeners wrapped in a Ciceronian
toga” 26.

11 See Frederick B. Tolles “Quaker Humanist” 418-19; Richard Beale Davis Colonial Southern
Bookshelf 9 and Robert A. Ferguson Law and Letters in American Culture 295.
66 
of an independent, well-demarcated public after 1750, Ciceronianism flourished
as an essential element of civic life in America. The power of Ciceronian oratory
to persuade and move was clear not only in overtly political speeches and church
sermons, but also in the coffeehouses, clubs, private societies, and salons that
proliferated after the mid-eighteenth century. These more private venues, though
conducive to a different, more intimate style of sociability than public oratory,
nevertheless revealed the prevalence of Cicero as one of many models of classical
inspiration in American culture. (Winterer 25)

Mary Rosner agrees with Winterer's findings as concerns Cicero’s place in American
pedagogy, for she characterizes his rhetorical writings as “the staple” of neoclassical
education in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century (Rosner, 251). In “The Two
Faces of Cicero,” she cites the ancient orator as one of the model rhetoricians that young
middle and upper-class boys came to recite, translate, and imitate. “Cicero,” in particular
“was applauded for his diction, propriety, harmony, and force. He was identified as an
excellent theorist and a model practitioner of oral discourse” (251). And, both professors
of rhetoric as well as their students “cited Cicero as an authority for style and form”
(251).
In 1758, John Lawson, author of Lectures Concerning Oratory said, “Cicero, has
polished every Thing to so high a Lustre, and hath ranged them with such Skill, that they
appear in the most advantageous Light, and even Trifles in him are Things of Value”
(Lawson, 56-7). Hugh Blair, whose Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783)
declared that Cicero was the foremost authority on rhetoric, argued that he “might be
studied by every speaker at the Bar to great advantage” (Blair, II.78). And Richard
Whatley, author of the nineteenth-century Elements of Rhetoric (1828), used Cicero’s
rhetorical writings as models for style and as sources for rules that govern delivery.
67 
But the primary social concern of nineteenth-century America was the necessity
to separate what had been constituted as two races—and, in some cases fantasized as two
species even as they mixed.
12
This meant that the very idea of the free male citizen-
gentleman as a category of personhood had to be qualified. To this end, multiple
strategies were employed. One such strategy seems to have worked by power of
association, a succession of ideas and images from antiquity which were concretized in
the figure of the American orator as a kind of continuation of the Ciceronian ideal.
In 1849 E. L. Magoon's Living Orators of America was published. This work set
out to provide a genealogy of American orators and their styles in terms of the Ciceronian
tradition. He also compared their speaking styles and bodily deportment to the specific
guidelines given by Quintilian in the Institutio Oratoria and discussed above. For
example, in describing the oratorical style of Daniel Webster, Magoon notes:
Webster is excited, but never distorted, and in this respect, he, of all moderns
most strikingly resembles the best model of Ciceronian style. He is animated and
excited, but in all this variety of exhilaration there is a power of self-control
manifest and supreme. The great writer, statesman, patriot, and orator, whom we
have thus considered, is now in the zenith of his fame and strength. (Magoon, 59-
64)

In his discussion of another neoclassical orator Edward Everett, Magoon continues to
draw the parallel between American elocutionists and Cicero. Quite artful in his
descriptions, Everett's style is compared to the “gracefulness of Cicero” and to this,
Magoon draws on section XCVI.316 from Cicero’s Brutus or De Claris Oratoribus in
which Cicero describes his training as an orator under the direction of Molon of Rhodes.

12
See Ivan Hanniford Race: The History of an Idea in the West for a sustained discussion of the
literary, cultural, and scientific discourses concerning race thinking in the early nineteenth-
century.
68 
Magoon concludes that “Everett bears a strong resemblance to the taste and studies of the
American Cicero, in his early days, and vividly portrays the maturity which he too
attained by means of his Asiatic tour” (Magoon, 103). What these examples tell us,
among other things, is that the appropriation of Cicero’s rhetorical writings were a
significant part of the strategy to transform the fragility of personhood in the nineteenth-
century into a stable social category.
13
By offering a seemingly fixed reference point of
symbolic identification, Cicero functions as a touchstone by which the validity and merit
of American orators could be measured. The persistence of the assertion that Ciceronian
eloquence is a pathway to civility and virtue lies at the root of his appropriation in this
context. In a particularly way then, knowledge of Cicero’s rhetorical writings and the
study of Latin served the intellectual interests of the neoclassical period as it, first,
“socially marked the American orator as gentleman” and second, “it established a
community among educated Americans, a bond of intellectual communion of civilized
men” (Rosner, 258).
The record of publication of Cicero’s works in the U.S. throughout the nineteenth-
century provides further evidence that thinking about Cicero was already widespread
during this period.
14
As previously discussed, Cicero as author and rhetor contributed to
the works read in universities; and as a stylist, he dominated collections by private

13
See E. L. Magoon Living Orators of America for further comparisons of Cicero and Henry
Clay, George McDuffe, Lewis Cass, Thomas Hart Benton, William C. Preston, Thomas Corwin
as well as other orators from antiquity.
14
For a detailed record of the popularization of Cicero during this period, see Mary Rosner 251-
58. Rosner notes that in the nineteenth-century, Cicero moved far beyond the university. In
addition to being cited in the standard rhetorical texts, Cicero became a popular subject for
biographies as well as the center of debate in the nature of historical writing.
69 
individuals. Indeed, Cicero was also the subject of articles, histories, and biographies.
For example: Charles Brockden Brown’s historical short story, “The Death of Cicero, A
Fragment” (1799-1800); newspaper articles describing the recovery of Cicero’s rhetorical
writings (e.g. “The Missouri Intelligencer” March 11,1820); John Henry Newman's
historical sketch entitled, The Personal and Literary Character of Cicero (1824); brief
studies of Cicero as a political figure by essayist Thomas De Quincey and historian E. S.
Beesly; a play in verse known as Cicero: A Drama (1847) written by Henry Bliss; several
editions of Cicero’s letters, and the publication of full length biographies such as
Anthony Trollope's The Life of Cicero, which was published both in London in 1880 and
in New York in 1881. The Jesuit Librarian Catalogue also identifies James Leigh
Strachan-Davidson's Cicero and the Fall of the Roman Republic (1894) and A. D. Jones'
translation of Gaston Bossier's Cicero and His Friends (1897).
In addition to these works that attest to the popularization of Cicero during this
period, J. H. McIlvaine's Introduction to a New System of Rhetoric (1871) notes two
different publishing dates in New York for the complete works of Cicero in Latin, and
one in Boston in the late eighteenth century. He further identifies twelve additional
publishing dates in New York for Cicero’s selected works in Latin during the nineteenth-
century, along with eleven dates of publication for his selected works in English from
New York (McIlvaine, 508-9). While McIlvaine points out that some of these re-
printings of Cicero “are schoolbook editions, usually consisting of a series of orations
prefaced by a brief critical or biographical essay along with an appended glossary, most
of these editions resemble Quintilian's figuration as the perfectus orator” (508). For
70 
example, John Holmes' The Art of Rhetoric Made Easy: A Collection of Exercises
Translated from the Writings of Cicero Only, for School boys to Re-Translate into Latin
(1739), which ran into seven editions in the nineteenth-century cultivated an image of
Cicero as the embodiment of the vir bonus dicendi peritus.
In An Essay on Elocution and Punctuation (1748), John Mason appeals to the
authority of Cicero by asserting that it was “Cicero who divided Oratory into five parts”
(Mason, 4). This assertion sets the tone for John Ward's A System of Oratory (1759) in
which he advises, “the method of forming the best system of oratory is to collect it from
the finest precepts of Cicero and Quintilian, and other celebrated authors” (Ward, 15).
Thomas Sheridan, citing only a few specific orators in A Course of Lectures on Elocution
(1762), paraphrases Cicero to further his argument that effective delivery transforms the
untrained speaker into a man of great renown. He writes, “Cicero in De Oratore,
mentions an instance in which Quintus Varius, whom he represents as utterly rude, and
ungraceful in his manner, to the last degree; yet as one who had obtained a great weight
at Rome, by his power of speaking” (Sheridan, 129).
Another mention of Cicero appears almost fifty years later when Gilbert Austin
praises him as an “irrefutable source” in his Chironomia; or A Treatise on Rhetorical
Delivery (1806). “Cicero,” he observes, “considers good delivery not only to be
conducive to the improvement of the voice in clearness, or strength and sweetness; but
also seems to imply that it is the true criterion of the speaker's character, knowledge of
himself and of the language” (Austin, 38). This invocation of Cicero’s view takes us
back to my earlier point in the Brutus, namely that the interconnection of actio with one's
71 
character forms part of the process by which the orator's personhood as an elite male
citizen is developed and expressed. A similar overarching epistemological paradigm is
stressed here, that is to say, the study of rhetoric for the late eighteenth century and early
nineteenth-century orator is one important means by which the student of rhetoric comes
to know himself as belonging to a particular class of persons—free, male, and citizen.
The redeployment of Cicero as part of American pedagogy underpins a sense of
belonging to a privileged class along with the arrogations that were supposed to stem
from it. As noted by Hugh Blair in Lectures on Rhetoric (1783), “throughout all of
Cicero’s rhetorical works there run these high and sublime ideas of Eloquence, which are
fitted both for forming just men, and for creating that enthusiasm for the Art, which is of
the greatest consequence for excelling in it” (Blair, 262). The appropriation of Cicero as
part of late eighteenth century and early nineteenth-century pedagogy grew out of a need
to distinguish between members of the landed class of gentlemen and plantation gentry as
a category of legal persons and those who are not. What these endless citations of Cicero
allude to, are the ways in which the larger culture of patriarchy and slavery encourage,
and even depend on, these divisions. Even though, as we have discussed in the previous
chapter, the conditions of and philosophies behind slavery in ancient Rome and America
differed in many ways, as evidenced by the legal concept of iniuria, tracing the
appropriation of Cicero can still expand our understanding of the ways in which concrete
ideas about personhood are developed and expressed in the nineteenth-century.

72 
Cicero, Race, and Romanitas
Standing apart from these discussions of Cicero as a apt model of an elite pedagogy of
manly oratory, Cicero as a symbol of Romanitas works in a different way within
nineteenth-century political, legal, and scientific discourses that sought to maintain the
racial divide. His appropriation in this context presents certain difficulties to scholars of
this period who were thinking about race chiefly because Cicero’s writings also carry
baggage of late republican and imperial Roman associations and cultural admixtures,
which in the view of later scholars, led to Rome's decline. What is most astonishing in
the rethinking of Cicero in the nineteenth-century is the ambivalence he introduces into
different discourses of the period. On the one hand, Cicero’s rhetorical writings serve the
intellectual interests of the period by demonstrating how persons and privilege might be
defined within a slave society. On the other, the appropriation of
Ciceronian oratory as a product of Roman culture became a site of contestation for race
thinkers who cherished notions of blood purity in defining persons. In either case, the
appropriation of Cicero foregrounds the notion that the very idea of personhood is
unsettled within a slave society.
As I have already noted, the primary social issue of late eighteenth and early
nineteenth-centuries in America was the necessity to separate what had been constituted
as two races even as they mixed. As early as 1788 the division between the racial
categories of black and white was substituted for the distinction between the civil
categories of slave and free, which had been instituted by The American Slave Code
(XXIII). It reads, “From the first settlement of the colony of Virginia all negroes, Moors,
73 
and mulattoes, except Turks and Moors in amity with Great Britain, brought into this
country, by sea or by land, are slaves; and, by the uniform declaration of our laws, the
descendants of females remain slaves to this day” (XXIII.272). This article explicitly
points to the racial systematization that would characterize New World slavery. It is also
significant in that it marks a point of departure from the model of Roman law and the
Roman orator for the antebellum South. As Alan Watson maintains in Slave Law in the
Americas:
The legal situation of the English colonies and of the slaveholding states in the
United States that developed from them was to prove very different from that of
other countries. There was no slavery in England, hence there was no slave law
in England. And there had been no reception of Roman law. Certainly, Roman
law was at times made use of in England, but there was no tradition of relying on
it for legal development. Thus Roman slave law in whole or in large measure
could not be automatically taken over by the slaveholding states in America. A
law of slavery had to be made from scratch. The law came into being bit by bit,
either by statute or judicial precedent. The statutes on slavery, as on other matters,
were made in the local legislatures and were more geared to local conditions.
(Watson 63-4)

These remarks are not meant to suggest that Roman law played no role in the shaping of
American judicial culture, of course, which is not the case.
15
For Watson himself points
out that “whenever American judges were faced with the task of creating slave law when
there was no statute in point, it became common practice, especially from the late
eighteenth-century onward to turn for guidance to Roman law, often through the medium
of Thomas Cooper's edition of the Institutes of Justinian published in 1812” (65). But the
primary interest of the Southern courts was to create a legal system devoted to
maintaining racial hierarchies that would justify slavery, and for this reason the Roman

15
See the Virginia case of Commonwealth v. Turner in Michael H. Hoeflich, “American Judges
and Roman Law” 8 Law and History Review 1990.
74 
model fell into disuse. For it lacked the very category of race as a condition for
enslavement. Instead, Southern legislatures developed “numerous statues based upon
racial difference and imposed even greater restrictions on slaves and free blacks”
(Watson, 65). One such statute that served as a model for the law of slavery in other
states comes from South Carolina in 1690. It is derived not from Roman law, but from a
statute of Barbados, an Act for the governing of Negroes established in 1688. Redefined
as the Act for the Better Ordering of Slaves, the first section of the South Carolina statue
reads:
And if any negro or Indian slave shall offer any violence, by striking or the like,
to any white person, he shall for the first offense be severely whipped by the
constable, by ordering of any justice of peace; and for the second offense, by like
order, shall be severely whipped, his or her nose slit, and face burnt in some place
with a hot iron; and for the third offense, to be left to two justices and three
sufficient freeholders, to inflict death, or any other punishment, according to their
discretion; Provided, such striking or conflict be not by command of or in lawful
defense of their owner's persons. (Statutes at Large of South Carolina I.55)

The contrast between the law of South Carolina and that of Rome should be noted. In
Roman law, violence by a slave against a free person is not mentioned as a specific
offense filtered through a racialized lens. At most, the low status of the offender would
increase the injury to the victim, who might thereby lay claim to greater damages for the
suffered loss if he filed suit according to the actio iniuriam under the Lex Aquilia. The
iniuria here is racially marked as it is inflicted by “any negro or Indian slave striking a
white person” (I.55). And the slave is disabled by statutory law, “severely whipped, his
or her nose slit, face burnt in some place with a hot iron,” condemned or put to “death” to
keep societal (or civilized) order (I.55). As an illustration, this statute reveals the way in
which American slave law relied on a conventional rhetoric of racial hierarchies in its
75 
development. The very insistence on maintaining this kind of structure of difference
created a disjunction between American slave law and the Roman model.
The turning away from the Roman model demanded a new legal system of codification
based upon racial categories. In 1817, The American Slave Code recorded the comments
of Justice Thomas Matthews of Louisiana as he reflected on this process:
By what authority, when, and how did Roman law become established in the
American states, we are not informed, since the Courts of the South will be
careful not to allow Roman law to define negro slavery. Whence, then, is the
origin of negro slavery? And how does it appear to have been legalized? Negro
slavery exists and can only exist through municipal regulations. Africans have so
long been recognized as slaves in our law, that it would be as great a violation of
the rights of property to establish a contrary decision at the present day and as
useless to investigate the manner in which they originally lost their freedom.
(The American Slave Code XX.264-5)

Put in another way, Justice Matthews” remarks suggest that out of the nation's struggle to
institutionalize “negro slavery” and its codes, the demand to justify the condition of
enslavement as reserved for certain persons in society became ever more necessary. In so
doing, Southern courts found that Roman law could not be so easily forced into the
service of the racist ideology that underwrote New World slavery. Instead, nineteenth-
century legislatures developed visible proofs of distinction backed up by repressive laws
which became more stringent as intermediate classes of persons, who had been born of
interbreeding threatened notions of racial purity. Indeed, one only had to demonstrate
how these persons, even if freed, were still slaves according to a lasting defect: “negro”
blood. Thus, The American Slave Code asserts, “Every negro is presumed to be a slave.
This is the general doctrine in all the States, and the application of this rule also refers to
cases where the person is a mulatto, or some other grade approximating to a white person
76 
or person of color” (XXIII.272). And who is a mulatto? In State v. Davis and Hanna of
December of 1831, the Supreme Court of South Carolina responded to this query by
ruling, “When there is a distinct and visible admixture of African blood, the person is to
be denominated a mulatto, or a person of color. And the fact of color may be known only
by inspection” (XXIII.276-7).
The American Law of Slavery: 1810-1860, as compiled by Mark V. Tushnet,
clarifies precisely what form this “inspection” must take. In order to identify the
perpetuity of a drop of black blood, the suit for freedom brought by Abby Guy in Daniel
v. Guy, which ran from 1855 to 1861 in the Arkansas Supreme Court, is a useful
example. The case argues on two fronts: color and blood, what ostensibly can be
observed and what is invisible. During the first part of the trial we learn that Robert
Daniel acquired Abby Guy from a certain Judith Lehiffe, a widow from South Carolina
who had relocated to Arkansas in 1837. Abby Guy is described as a “bright mulatto”
who had been held as a slave for a number of years by Daniel (Daniel v. Guy, 19 Ark.
121). However, in 1844 Daniel awarded freedom to Abby Guy, so she began to live
apart from Daniel, the defendant, and was treated by her neighbors as white. Eleven
years later, the defendant retook possession of Guy as a slave, and she remained as such
from 1856 to 1861. But Guy filed a suit against Daniel and sought damages for being
held unlawfully as a slave from 1856-1861. As part of the cross examination, Abby Guy
was presented to the jury for inspection and observation by several physicians.
16
Each
claimed:

16
See Daniel v. Guy, 19 Ark. 121 (1857), Daniel v. Guy, 23 Ark. 50 (1861).
77 
To have read physiology and testified as experts on the physical
appearance of blacks, stating that “the negro hair never runs out” but
may become straight after three generations and that “the flat nose
remains observable for several descents.” During the inspection of the
plaintiff, she took off her shoes and stockings so that the jury could
examine her feet. The physicians noted that the feet furnish
means of distinguishing negro blood or descent.
(Daniel v. Guy 19 Ark. 121)

The jury found that Guy was a free person, but the judgment was reversed on appeal
because the trial justice instructed the jury that if Guy was “less than one fourth negro”
she was presumed to be a slave (Daniel v. Guy, 19 Ark.121). Ultimately, the Arkansas
Supreme Court held that if a person held as a slave had “mixed blood,” he or she should
be “presumed to be a slave, that being the condition generally of such people in this State
no matter whether she was one half, fourth, or eighth negro” (Daniel v. Guy, 19 Ark.
121).
As this ruling attests, “people of mixed blood” were generally reclassified as
mulatto or mule, the sterile product of the cross between a horse and a donkey. The
mongrel name reminded this intermediate class of persons that they were hybrid: the
offspring of what had been fantasized as two species, black and white. Moreover, with
each new generation, racial distinctions were placed under further strain as other
intermediate classes of persons, “a shade of color darker than that of a mulatto,” entered
the schema (Nichols v. Bell, 46 N.C. 32). New divisions had to be made and other
methods invented to identify this category, class, or genus as slaves even if “reputed to be
free” (Nichols v. Bell, 46 N.C. 32).
The case between Albert Carr and Edward Bell illustrates this problem. In 1853
the Supreme Court of North Carolina was asked to intervene in a property dispute
78 
between Edward Bell and Albert Carr. The property in question was a certain Sam
Nichols whom Edward Bell had hired out to Carr under a labor contract claim. Carr
returned Nichols, but seven months later decided to take the slave back. In an attempt to
establish that Nichols was in fact a slave, and that he belonged to Edward Bell, the Court
relied on a new kind of racial distinction that rested upon gradations of complexion. As
the records indicate, Nichols “was neither black nor white, but was of a brown color,
between that of an African and a mulatto, and that neither of his parents could have been
a white person” (Nichols v. Bell, 46 N.C. 32). But at the same time, he was “reputed to
be a free person” (Nichols v. Bell, 46 N.C. 32). Whether he was awarded freedom
remains uncertain, however; what is known is that Bell requested that the jury receive the
following instruction, that is, “in the case of persons a shade of color darker than that of a
mulatto, the law presumes they are slaves” (Nichols v. Bell, 46 N.C. 32). Chief Justice
Nash affirmed that instruction. He reviewed similar cases over the course of fifty years
and noted that they also distinguished between “a black and a yellow complexion,” and
ruled that the “presumption rests upon the African color; that is a decided mark of a
slave” (Nichols v. Bell, 26 N.C. 32). Finally, Nichols was returned to Bell whom he was
required to serve. The remarks of the Chief Justice suggest that the appearance of
“African color” now carried into shades stood as the justification for the subjugation of
those so tainted. The term “color” here, applied liberally and indiscriminately to those
persons of even the most distant and diluted African descent allows us to consider
precisely what kind of persons end up being redefined slaves in law, signaling what is not
materially present: not only race, but ideology. In departing from the Roman legal
79 
model, then, Southern courts relied on another ideology of difference based upon
assumptions of the nature of color as a template of a racial pattern which sought to prove
that blacks were a degraded race of slaves.
In addition to the effort among law courts to maintain the racial divide, political
discussions concerning race mixing as a source of contamination were taking place in the
early to mid nineteenth century as well. These debates coincided with disputes over the
removal of blacks from America. In particular, the fear of slave rebellions prompted by
the Virginia slave uprising in the summer of 1800, David Walker's Appeal of 1830, and
Nat Turner's rebellion of 1831, fueled arguments for racial purity and expatriation.
17
In
1801, Virginia politician George Tucker suggested in a Letter to a Member of the
General Assembly of Virginia, on the Subject of the Late Conspiracy of the Slaves; with a
Proposal for Their Colonization that the “race question” in Virginia was “an eating sore”
that was infecting the body of the state and impeding the “progress of humanity” (Tucker,
33). In order to suppress future slave rebellions, he proposed that all blacks should be
sent to Africa, the West Indies, or even the unsettled western region of the United States.
The nation's debate over slavery was advanced by what Tucker referred to as a “spirit we
have to fear, a spirit of unrest that could wake the state with violent attacks;” and the only
answer to this unrest is “the removal of negroes” (Tucker, 34).

17
The increasing attack on the institution of slavery during the 1830”s came from Northern
abolitionists as well as insurgent slaves. In response, Southern white ideologues including judges,
lawyers, and politicians developed more explicitly a racial justification for slavery. For a detailed
analysis of the ways in which racial distinctions are built into the law, see Ariela J. Gross, Double
Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom 72-98.
80 
The rhetoric of racial separatism continued during this period. For example, in
1820 a Virginia proposition of expatriation was put forth by James Madison. He
reflected on this initiative in his essay entitled, “James Madison's Attitude toward the
Negro.” In this work, Madison proposed that free blacks should be forced to leave the
United States on the grounds that “the repugnance of the Whites to their continuance
among them is founded on physical distinctions, which are not likely soon if ever to be
eradicated” (Madison, 76). Similarly, in 1826 Thomas Jefferson supported Madison's
proposition by stating:
I consider the expatriation of negroes to the governments of their own
color as entirely practicable, and greatly preferable to the mixture of color
here. To this I have great aversion. (Jefferson 137)

It is also worth noting that Jefferson also drafted a bill while in Virginia in 1786 which
proclaimed that “a marriage between a white person and a negro, or between a white
person and a mulatto, shall be null” (Jefferson, 557). This anxiety over the threat of
contamination by black blood is echoed by congressman William L. Smith of South
Carolina (1797) as he asserted that “a mixture of the races would degenerate the whites,
without improving the blacks” (Jordan, 544). Congressman Smith goes on to say, “If
negroes would intermarry with the whites, then the white race would be extinct, and the
American people would be a mulatto breed” (Jordan, 544). The period's struggle to
delineate racial boundaries also marks a shift in models of personhood suitable for the
planter class. What was once an attitude of qualified acceptance of the appropriation of
the Ciceronian model now gave way to one of growing hostility. This unease was in part
due to the ways in which Roman civilization emphasized a model of universalism, a
81 
“mingling of races, cultures, languages, and religions” that resisted the binary
categorization of a color-based slave society developing in America (Habinek, 21).
Cicero as the ideal citizen, statesman, and orator was also the product of a civilization
that was not concerned with the so-called “unnaturalness” of racial and cultural
amalgamation, and for this reason his image coexisted uneasily with the rhetoric of
racialism in the nineteenth century.
Central to the discourses on race was the “evidence” put forth by racial scientists
which sought to prove that blacks and whites belonged not to different races but to
different species. Examples such as Samuel George Morton's Crania Americana (1839),
Josiah Nott's essay, “The Mulatto a Hybrid: Probable Extermination of the Two Races if
Whites and Blacks Are Allowed to Intermarry” (1843), and John Campbell's text, Negro-
Mania: Being an Examination of the Falsely Assumed Equality of the Various Races of
Men (1851) conspired with the language of politicians to insist on a fixed relationship
between racial identity and an individual's phenotypical characteristics. By converting
biological inquiry into an ontological fact, that is, equating blackness with savagery and
whiteness with civility, these publications maintained uncomplicated racial divisions of
blacks from whites by arguing that racial mixture was “unnatural” (Campbell, 149).
18
In
America, then, the degrees of difference between races became pronounced, constructing
a racial schema that placed “blacks” in a single category, setting them apart from

18
For an elaboration of Morton”s pseudoscientific theory of polygenesis, see Crania Americana
115-261. Also for a detailed outline of Josiah Nott”s designation of species and the laws of
hybridity, see “The Mulatto a Hybrid: Probable Extermination of the Two Races if Whites and
Blacks Are Allowed to Intermarry” 252. Moreover, Joseph Campbell”s Negro-Mania (especially
58-65 and 146-50) offers a succinct cultural and biological analysis of the fertility of the offspring
issuing from blacks and whites.
82 
members of the dominant culture. Racial scientists like Morton, Nott, and Campbell used
these categories to suggest that nonwhites constituted a different species. This model of
absolute difference served as evidence that interracialism was in fact, “a crime against
nature” (Campbell, 150). And, although these debates continued during the postbellum
period, in antebellum America, where one drop of negro blood separated slave from
master, proof of pure bloodlines was an anxious necessity.
In The Politics of Latin Literature, Thomas Habinek suggests that this way of
thinking about racial admixture as contamination is the logical corollary to particular
ideas about racial purity that had been exported to America by the work of German
historian Barthold G. Niebuhr (1776-1831).
19
In 1813 Niebuhr combined ethnography
with history and philology to bring about a fundamental reinterpretation of the history of
ancient civilizations as a critical history of the races.
20
In this view, Rome was “a natural
collection of close affections among those who were of kindred blood and color”
(Niebuhr, 1.78). He interpreted the disputes between patrician and plebian classes as
arising from original differences of race and blood. Niebuhr also locates the conflict

19
For a meaningful discussion of modern notions of antiquity see Thomas Habinek”s “Latin
Literature and the Problem of Rome” in The Politics of Latin Literature 15-33.
20
See Ivan Hanniford Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Hanniford claims that in
addition to Niebuhr, three major writers made fundamental contributions to the developing idea
of race and racial purity in the nineteenth-century. He briefly summarizes the different
articulations and emphases of these writers as he notes, “In England, John Mitchell Kemble
argued that blood, race, ennoblement, rank, and a notion of freedom and civil society derived
from masculine personality stretching back to the fifth century C.E. had made the English what
they were. In France, Hippolyte Adolphe Taine associated the spirit of the French national
character with the superiority of the North over the South. And, Ernest Joseph Renan elevated the
national history of the Celts, who, though dispossessed by the Industrial Revolution, were
endowed with the fixed disposition, condition and character of a race remaining pure from all
admixture” 236.
83 
between the Latins and the Etruscans as arising from race, and accounts for the early
history of Rome as one that is characterized by a series of tribal differences as racial
divisions. For example, he mentions that there were “differences in blood among the
early Latins,” and refers to “the power of the Tuscan blood when searching for evidence
of Latin blood in the tribes” (1.290). “The Romans themselves,” he concludes, are
“formed by the inter-mixture of different tribes” and this diversity is a source of
“everlasting corruption impeding the progress of man” (1.78). Niebuhr invokes the
Greek grammarian Apion, the son of Poseidonius, as the product of a culture that retained
racial purity. “Apion,” he notes, “belonged to a people who had kept themselves
unmixed; and from him the contempt for such as were without ancestry is intelligible”
(Niebuhr, 1.6, n.1). Niebuhr's reading implies a kind of racial antagonism on the part of
the Greeks, which may or may not be adduced from their writings. Nonetheless, for the
purposes of my argument, his conclusion is significant in that it signals the introduction
of figures from Hellenic culture as sources of competitive models of personhood in the
nineteenth-century. With the theme of race and race mixture applied to the interpretation
of antiquity, Cicero soon emerges as a problematic figure for training the plantation
gentry of the America as a master class.
Niebuhr's work also encouraged American race thinkers and proponents of
classical rhetoric in the mid nineteenth century to consider Greece as a congenial
exemplar for the South. As Caroline Winterer makes clear, “its warm climate, its
latitude, and its small, independent poleis evoked in many ways the rural and sparsely
populated South” (Winterer, 68). Moreover, Greek slave labor supported a landed,
84 
cultivated leisure class of statesmen, much as Roman slavery had done, but at the same
time it successfully established and sustained the racial exclusivity that Roman
civilization had not. When justifications for slavery were needed in the 1840s Southern
nationalists began to turn to Niebuhr's Romische Geschichte as well as the writings of
Aristotle and Herodotus as they shifted from environmental to biological explanations of
black inferiority. For example, in 1850 and with reference to Aristotle's Politics, the
University of Mississippi president George Frederick Holmes recorded in his
Observations that “Nature has clearly designed whites for freedom and blacks for
slavery— and with respect to the latter, slavery is both just and beneficial” (Holmes,
193). Holmes also published an essay entitled “Niebuhr” in 1855 in which he praised the
German historian as:
A great man who stood out in an age of insincerity and pretension. He advanced
the primacy of popular history and culture. By highlighting the racial antipathies
and struggles in antiquity, he has provided a scientifically accurate history of
ordinary peoples who constituted a dominant race. (Holmes 508, 530)

As this passage suggests, Holmes credits Niebuhr with having written a history in which
racial and ethnic hierarchies are central to establishing a means of control in a slave
society. The emphasis on the emergence of a “dominant race” not only “contributed to
the shift in historical writing toward a social history that slid into racist ideology” as
Eugene Genovese suggests, but also conspired with ideas put forth by other proslavery
apologists to sustain the potent image of Greece as a racially pure civilization (Genovese,
266). In privileging the Greeks as the so-called “dominant race,” Holmes goes onto
suggest in “Niebuhr” that Southerners “not be content with seeking Rome, but the single
85 
city of the Athenians for the purist fruits of this” (Holmes, 530).
21
Similarly, Josiah
Priest, in an effort to prove the immutability of blackness over time, recruited Herodotus
as he asked in his Bible's Defense of Slavery (1853), “If Herodotus showed negroes with
black skins and wooly heads, how is it to be shown that they were not always so?”
(Priest, 12). Demosthenes soon rivaled Cicero as the archetype of the manly, ideal orator
because he represented “the unshakeable conviction that the Greek city-state is of “pure”
Hellenic origin” (Winterer, 72). Consequently, as part of his defense of slavery and
racial extermination, Thomas Carlyle's Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question
(1849) prescribes the study of Demosthenes as part of the proper course of study for
members of the plantation gentry because his style of oratory “indurates the mental
constitution, gives it muscle and energy, makes it like iron, girds the intellect with power,
and teaches it to concentrate its energies” (Carlyle, 77). In other words, the shift in
oratorical models during the early to mid nineteenth century grew out of the need to
protect the interests of the slave-owning class who sought to maintain a racial division
between masters and slaves. The appropriation of the Ciceronian model of personhood
carried with it associations of racial intermixtures that threatened to disrupt the slaves”
legal and social status as nonwhite. Therefore, it was feared among proslavery apologists
that the widespread appropriation of the Roman orator as a conducive model for
producing members of the plantation gentry might result in a racially ambiguous slave

21
See Eugene Genovese The Mind of the Master Class, 279. It is worth noting that both Niebuhr
and Holmes recommend reading Cicero as his writings preserved elements of Greek culture and
offered a stylistic model for the study of Latin. This gesture resembles the logic of American
pedagogues who resisted wholly abandoning the study of Ciceronian elocution and further points
to the symbolic flexibility of Cicero during this period.
86 
society in which the narrowly delineated racial categories put forth by American law
courts, racial scientists, politicians, and legislators faced collapse. So although Cicero
and Ciceronian oratory continued to play a significant role in shaping the image of
citizen-men necessary to the American public, especially in the area of American
pedagogy, among antebellum proslavery diatribes of “natural negro inferiority,” Cicero
represented a civilization that posed a challenge to the irrationalities of the attempt to
classify races biologically.
To recapitulate, then, we have discussed two concepts in this chapter which make
up a single argument concerning models of personhood in the nineteenth-century. As we
have seen during the first part of this chapter, the unstable status of the slave in
republican and imperial Rome troubles the ideology of the orator. Indeed, both Cicero
and Quintilian put forth the study of oratory as that which furnishes an ideal pedagogy of
manly virtue, but each achieves this end by relying on the effacement of bodily practices
that belong to the very group over whom elite men exercised the most power: slaves. In
so doing, rhetorical education maintained its function as the craft of the virile and the
dominant. This ideology of domination both appeals to and is criticized by different
discursive communities of the late eighteenth and early to mid nineteenth-centuries
interested in qualifying and transforming categories of persons.
In the case of the appropriation of Cicero, we have seen how he is at best an
overdetermined figure with multiple and complex representations that arise at the
intersection of various discourses. Tracing the redeployment of his rhetorical writings
involves confronting the dismissals, compromises, and tensions that characterize notions
87 
of personhood within a slave society. Ciceronian oratory and advocacy foreground this
incongruence not only because the institution of slavery is an unstable, internally
contradictory, and fractured system, but because “personhood” —the social and civic
components of personal identity— is so as well. The question of legal rights, citizenship,
and how to live in a state in which not all persons are men (e.g. women, slaves,
foreigners) and not all men are citizens— is the primary problem both in the late
eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries of America and in republican Rome. Even though
the nineteenth century experienced this problem as emerging in tandem with rigid
constructs of race, various discursive communities of this period still recognized the ways
in which the figure of Cicero and the writings of Cicero simultaneously engage with and
dismiss these issues. As a result, the representations of Cicero within late eighteenth and
early nineteenth-centuries are often conflicting, depending on whom consults his writings
and for what purpose. I thus now turn from examining the appropriation of Cicero within
nineteenth-century neoclassical thought and among race theorists to literary works
written by Americans themselves. In the chapter that follows, I will ask how the figure
of Cicero and the ideology of the perfectus orator functions as a motif within another
type of discourse of personhood formation. Here, Charles Brockden Brown’s novel
Wieland: Or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798) and his historical short story
“The Death of Cicero, A Fragment” (1799-1800) will serve as primary sites for my
inquiry. At stake in this investigation is the very concept of personhood and the meaning
of race as stable social and legal categories.
88 
Chapter Three
Over the Republic, Cicero, and The New World:
The Ciceronian Motif in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland
The votaries of Cicero...formed a sort of fraternity, in
which, strictly speaking, Cicero was a divinity, an
object of worship.
(Charles Brockden Brown, “Ciceronians”)

What will history say of me six hundred years hence?
I am more afraid of that than of the opinions of my
contemporaries. (Cicero, Letter to Atticus)

And still the eloquent air breathes— burns with
Cicero. (Byron, Childe Harold, IV, v.112)

The preceding chapter set out to examine the ways in which ancient elocutionists,
namely Cicero and Quintilian, conceived the study of oratory as that which furnishes an
ideal pedagogy of manly virtue by relying on the regulation of bodily practices that
belonged to the very group over whom elite men exercised the most power: slaves. In so
doing, rhetorical education maintained its function as the craft of the socially dominant.
Within this ideology of domination and virility Cicero’s two-sided nature emerges and is
alternately expressed within Roman rhetorical treatises as perfectus orator and master
with manifest auctoritas. This duality both appeals to and is criticized by different
discursive communities of the late eighteenth and early to mid nineteenth-centuries
interested in qualifying and transforming categories of persons within a racialized
slaveholding society. One such critic of the appropriation of Ciceronian elocution as an
apt site for generating elite male personhood in the new republic is Charles Brockden
Brown.
89 
Born into a merchant family on January 17, 1771 in the proprietary colony of
Pennsylvania, Charles Brockden Brown is credited with being the first American novelist
to “bring the Gothic style across the Atlantic.”
22
Indeed, as John Carlos Rowe rightly
observes, “Brockden Brown’s Gothic romances draw much of their interest and power
from their settings in the unstable political landscapes of eighteenth-century Europe and
North America” (Rowe, 25). He calls attention to the lacuna within the critical attention
given to Brockden Brown’s fiction by arguing in favor of a reading that would not
overlook the “colonial disturbances” and “anxieties” so fundamental to Brown’s
narratives (26). And he urges readers “not to ignore the inherently colonial and imperial
character of eighteenth-century American society.”
23
Therefore he indicts Brown for
participating in the “shabby history of U.S. colonialism” (28, 43). Such a reading would
dovetail with Jared Gardner”s, for example, in Master Plots: Race and the Founding of
an American Literature 1787-1845, when he argues that American literary nationalism
was in many ways an effort to “develop a national narrative that aimed to secure to white
Americans an identity that was unique (not European) but not alien (not black or Indian),

22
See Caleb Crain, Wieland; or The Transformation: An American Tale and Other Stories (New
York: Random House) xi and Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Baltimore,
Johns Hopkins University Press 1957); Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of the American
Romance (Chicago, University of Chicago Press 1980); Leslie A. Fielder, Love and Death in the
American Novel (Chicago, Stein and Day 1960); David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American
Renaissance (Cambridge, Harvard University Press 1988). On literary influence, see Robert D.
Hume, “Charles Brockden Brown and the Uses of Gothicism: A Reassessment,” Emerson Society
Quarterly 66 (1972), 10-18.
23
For a thoughtful discussion of the role of Brockden Brown’s fiction in American imperialism
see John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to WWII 26-
52.
90 
and that American novelists played a central role in helping to shape this narrative”
(Gardner, xi).
David Kazanjian in The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial
Citizenship in Early America similarly maintains that “Brown’s work—echoing U.S.
Indian policy as well as the emerging fields of ethnography and archaeology—represents
Native Americans as idealized, disembodied forms whose assimilation is the always
incomplete precondition for the transformation of white settler colonials into national
citizen-subjects” (Kazanjian, 5). In keeping with these approaches, I posit that what is
most striking about Brown’s first published novel, Wieland; Or the Transformation: An
American Tale (1798), is the persistence of the Ciceronian motif and its bearing upon our
understanding of the merits of ancient oratory as an instrument of social apprenticeship
for members of the land-owning, slave-owning class in the late eighteenth century. In
other words, I argue that while Brown’s fictional narratives are ostensibly about the
anxieties of post-Revolutionary America, in what follows, I will suggest that Wieland is
also obsessed with the figure of Cicero—what it means to be rhetorical, what it means to
be a master, a citizen— in this new republic.
As previously discussed, European and American novelists of the nineteenth
century “looked at Cicero’s rhetorical treatises and speeches and followed tradition by
calling him a reliable source on ancient rhetors, and extraordinary speaker himself, a
model stylist”.
24
According to Caroline Winterer, “Ciceronian ideals of public speaking,
predominated in eighteenth-century America, and revealed through the grace of speech

24
James Hannay, “The Classics in Translation,” Cornhill 16 (1867) 128.
91 
the moral probity and authority of the speaker” (Winterer, 25). She goes on to suggest
that the Ciceronian motif of the ideal orator was widespread and broadly diffused in
American culture. “In the classroom,” she asserts, “students studied Cicero in
conjunction with Hugh Blair”s Lecture on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, which after it first
appeared in American colleges in 1783 was a staple until well into the nineteenth
century” (26). Moreover, recitations of Cicero’s rhetorical writings “formed habits of
oral interchange in the classroom” (26). Taken together, then, she concludes, “above all
ancient orators, Americans of this period idealized Cicero as a model of eloquence and
style and also as the ideal citizen whose incorruptible morals protected the Roman
republic from tyranny” (25). This view that rhetorical education not only frames the
student within a way of life and a set of cultural practices, but also functions as an
important means of securing membership in the dominant social order is the continuation
of a kind of thinking that developed in antiquity, which scholars of ancient rhetoric
generally acknowledge. For example, in Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory Thomas Habinek
points out:
During periods of imperial expansion in antiquity, rhetorical training intensified
the respect for tradition, role playing, verbal alacrity, and mental gymnastics that
characterized ancient elocution more generally. But it also effected its own
distinctive transformation of the student, differentiating him in both degree and
kind from those who had not studied rhetoric. Because this transformation often
entailed a permanent migration from one culture to another (e.g. Egyptian to
Greek, Spanish or Gallic to Roman), and because it encompassed attitudes,
practices, and beliefs, indeed, the student”s very sense of self, it is helpful to
regard rhetorical training not just as acquisition of knowledge, but more generally
as a process of acculturation. (Habinek 61)

As this passage suggests, the discourse of Roman rhetoric itself has always been
concerned with questions of the definition of personhood, the projection of cultural
92 
identity, and the proper use of speech for social advancement and civic responsibility. In
fact, in the preface to his Institutio Oratoria, or Oratorical Training, Quintilian, writing
during the last decades of the first century C.E. summarizes the intended goals of Roman
rhetorical instruction in this way:
Oratorem autem instituimus illum perfectum, qui esse nisi vir bonus non potest,
ideoque non dicendi modo eximiam in eo facultatem sed omnis animi virtutes
exigimus. Neque enim hoc concesserim, rationem rectae honestaeque vitae, ut
quidam putaverunt, ad philosophos relegandam, cum vir ille vere civilis et
publicarum privatarumque rerum administrationi accommodatus, qui regere
consiliis urbes, fundare legibus, emendare iudiciis possit, non alius sit profecto
quam orator. (I.9)

I am proposing to educate the perfect orator, who cannot exist except in
the person of a good man. We therefore demand of him not only
exceptional powers of speech, but all the virtues of character as well. I
cannot agree that the principles of upright and honorable living should, as
some have held, be left to the philosophers. The man who can really play
his part as a citizen, who is fit for the management of public and private
business, and who can guide cities by his counsel, give them a firm basis
by his laws, and put them right by his judgments, is surely no other than
our orator. (Quintilian I.9)

The perfectus orator whom Quintilian hopes his students will emulate in practice is
Marcus Tullius Cicero. The concern expressed in this prefatory statement is to forge a
seamless connection between oratorical training, ethical instruction, and elite male
personhood. According to this ancient rhetorician, to train a student in the techniques of
proper speechmaking will ensure that he is “Vir ille vere civilis et publicarum
privatarumque rerum administrationi accommodatus, qui regere consiliis urbes, fundare
legibus, emendare iudiciis possit” (“fit for the management of public and private
business, and... can guide cities by his counsel, give them a firm basis by his laws, and
put them right by his judgments”) (Quintilian I.9). “ Central to his theory is the notion
93 
that the perfectus orator “will be equipped with not only exceptional powers of speech
but all the virtues of character as well” as he “cannot exist except in the person of a good
man” (vir bonus) (Quintilian, I.9) .
To be sure, Cicero himself reflects upon the interconnection of speechmaking and
the formation of the well-born, honest man and citizen in his rhetorical writings.
25
These
treatises were composed during the transition from republic to empire, a period marked
by “bloody spasms of political violence,” with the conclusion of the Social Wars between
Rome and Italy in the 90s and the beginning of a series of civil wars first between Marius
and Sulla”s supporters between 88-87 B.C.E. and 82-81B.C.E., and later between Caesar
and the Roman senatorial class from 49-45B.C.E. (Syme, 100). This turbulent period is
characterized by Sir Ronald Syme as “roiled by waves of unrest due to controversies over
land redistribution, prolonged military service, and economic distress.”
26
Within this
context, Cicero, an aristocrat from Arpinum, but of undistinguished origin at Rome, sets
out to carve a place for himself among the nobility and transform the model of the vir
bonus. “It was a scandal and a pollution if a man without ancestors aspired to the highest
magistracy of the Roman republic—he might rise to the praetorship but no higher, save
by a rare combination of merit, industry, and protection. The novus homo (in the strict

25
In De Oratore 2.184, Cicero explains: Tantum autem efficitur sensu quodam ac ratione dicendi,
ut quasi mores oratoris effingat oratio; genere enim quodam sententiarum et genere verborum,
adhibita etiam actione leni facilitatemque significante efficitur, ut probi, ut bene morati, ut boni
viri esse videamtur (“Such is the kind of sensation and order of speaking, that the speech seems to
represent, as it were, the character of the speaker himself; for by adopting a certain mode of
thought and expression, united with physical action that is gentle and signifies ease and affability,
such an effect is produced that we speakers seem to be noble, of good habits, and virtuous”)
(2.184).
26
See, Ronald Syme Roman Revolution. Oxford: Oxford UP 1939.
94 
sense of the term, the first member of a family to secure the consulate and consequent
ennoblement) was a rare phenomenon at Rome” (111).
Cicero was the “rare phenomenon” of his age. He ascended through the ranks of
an influential and highly stratified social structure to become not only a leading member
of the senatorial class, but none other than the embodiment of the vir bonus dicendi
peritus (a good man skilled in speaking) itself. Rhetorical training, then, served as one
site for social advancement in republican Rome. For even Cicero himself reminds Brutus
and Atticus in the Brutus that “multo magnus orator praestat minutis imperatoribus (“the
great orator is much more outstanding than the mediocre military leader”) (Cicero,
lxxiii.256). Moreover, as John Dugan points out, “Cicero fashions a version of himself
within his rhetorical writings that is designed both to shape Roman culture during the
political, social and intellectual ferment of the last decades of the republic, and to position
himself within that discourse.”
27
The use of oratory as a site that produces another
knowledge, another Cicero, as discussed at length in the previous chapter, is precisely
what leads to the popularization of the Ciceronian ideal as a vir bonus dicendi peritus.
He becomes a touchstone for the reproduction of members of the landed gentlemanly
class and plantation gentry in America during the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries.
But even from a comparatively favorable point of view, pedagogues of the post-
Revolutionary period thought that Ciceronian oratory retained certain suspect traces, an
air of artful extravagance that conceals its deceitful ends. Hugh Blair”s Lectures on

27
See John Dugan”s Making a New Man: Ciceronian Self-Fashioning in the Rhetorical Works.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
95 
Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) cited by Winterer, for example, lauds Cicero as his
“name alone suggests every thing that is splendid in oratory;” however, Blair also makes
clear that “in most of Cicero’s orations there is too much art; even carried to the length of
ostentation. There is too visible a parade of Eloquence” (Blair II, 285-7). This
accusation that Ciceronian eloquence often operates through charm, exaggeration, and
artificiality not only lies at the root of Blair”s influential handbook, but appears in
Quintilian”s Institutio Oratoria as well. For he himself quotes Cicero in the De
Inventione as defining “what is called rhetoric” as “artistic eloquence” (“Cicero vero eam
quae rhetorice vocetur esse artificiosam eloquentiam dicat”) (Quintilian, II.17.2).
28
And
further admits, “Ego rhetoricen nonnumquam dicere falsa pro veris confitebor”
(“rhetoric does sometimes say untrue things as if true”) (Quintilian, II.17.19). Along
with this admission Quintilian offers a series of justifications for oratorical performance
that attempt to conceal its ethically problematic condition. Pleading for rhetoric”s
legitimacy, he writes:
Uti etiam vitiis rhetoricen, quod ars nulla faciat, criminantur, quia et falsum dicat
et adfectus moveat. Quorum neutrum est turpe, cum ex bona ratione proficiscitur,
ideoque nec vitium; nam et mendacium dicere etiam sapienti aliquando
concessum est, et adfectus, si aliter ad aequitatem perduci iudex non poterit,
necessario movebit orator: imperiti enim iudicant, et qui frequenter in hoc ipsum
fallendi sint, ne errent. (II.17.27-8).

[Opponents of rhetoric] allege also that rhetoric makes use of vices, which
no art does, in speaking falsehoods and exciting emotions. But neither of
these is disgraceful when it is done for a good reason; therefore it is not a
vice either. To tell a lie is something occasionally allowed even to the
wise man, and as for rousing emotions, the orator is bound to do this if the

28
De Inventione 1.6
96 
judge cannot be brought to give a fair judgment by other means.
(Quintilian II.17.27-8)

For Quintilian, then, upright outcomes appear to justify deceitful oratorical means.
Moreover, he closely identifies Cicero with the use of eloquence “to speak falsehoods
and excite emotions” in which factual evidence is readily sacrificed to the demands of
elegant performance. For example, he maintains:

Item orator, cum falso utitur pro vero, scit esse falsum eoque se pro vero uti: non
ergo falsam habet ipse opinionem, sed fallit alium. Nec Cicero, cum se tenebras
offudisse iudicibus in causa Cluenti gloriatus est, nihil ipse vidit. (II.17.21)

Similarly an orator, when he substitutes a falsehood for the truth, knows it
is false and that he is substituting it for the truth; he does not therefore
have a false opinion himself, but he deceives the other person. When
Cicero boasted that he had cast a cloud of darkness over the eyes of the
jury, in the case of Cluentius, he saw clearly enough himself. (Quintilian,
II.17.21)

It is precisely this idea that regardless of the nature of one's character, oratorical training
in the Ciceronian fashion relies on the (mis)use of voice and “auricular deception”—
which at best leads to an ethically troubling position, and at worst to dangerous
practices—that occupies the central theme of Brown’s novel.
29
Ciceronian oratory, as
one site for generating elite male personhood, undergoes a process of vilification in
Brockden Brown’s novel. For his text points to the danger of being inculcated into an
ideology of so-called “manly virtue” through the process of exemplum, repetition, and
performance that is embedded in the technicalities of ancient oratorical practice in an
American context.

29
See also John Carlos Rowe 25-53.
97 
Indeed, the plot, structure, and characters of Wieland dramatize the problem of
knowing where voices come from and this gesture exposes the weakness of Quintilian”s
view that a youth trained in the techniques of speechmaking will seamlessly evolve into a
virtuous man. Moreover it throws into harsh relief certain social frictions that arise when
trying to identify and negotiate sites of personhood formation within the development of
the early American republic, colonization, and racial identification in the late eighteenth
century. Collapsing the discrete categories of truth and deceit as delineated by Quintilian,
Ciceronian rhetoric as appropriated embodies a kind of linguistic indeterminacy, a
misdirected rhetoric that marks for Brown the extent to which rhetorical ornament may
corrupt its practitioner. The demonization of Ciceronian oratory is figured in the vicious
eloquence of Carwin, the biloquist (or ventriloquist), and Ciceronian exemplar to whom
Clara refers as “the double-tongued deceiver,” whose ability “to speak where he is not”
incites a madman to murder (Brown, 208, 233).
The novel's dramatic action details the horrible events that befall Clara Wieland
and her bother Theodore”s family. The elder Wieland, Clara and Theodore”s father, was
a German immigrant who became a missionary; he came to America prior to the
American Revolution with the conviction to introduce Christianity to the indigenous
people. When he fails at this task, he retreats to a temple that he built on his estate in
Schuylkill. One evening, while worshipping God in his reclusive temple, he
spontaneously combusts, after which his health slowly deteriorates and he dies. His
children inherit his property and Schuylkill is divided equally between the two of them.
Soon, Theodore marries their childhood friend, Catharine Pleyel, and they have four
98 
children. In the following scene, the mysterious Carwin arrives at Schuylkill and Clara
observes:
His pace was a careless and lingering one...His gait was rustic and awkward. His
form was ungainly and disproportioned...His garb was not ill adapted to such a
figure. A slouched hat, tarnished by the weather, a coat of thick grey cloth, cut
and wrought, as it seemed by a country tailor...constituted his dress. I listened to
his dialogue in silence. The voice was not only mellifluent and clear, but the
emphasis was so just, and the modulation so impassioned that it seemed as if a
heart of stone could not fail being moved by it. (Brown, 49)

After Carwin's arrival, Theodore begins to hear voices and Catharine's brother, Henry
Pleyel, soon hears them as well. In fact, though doubtful at first of the voices that the
men claim to hear, Clara also reports that she too hears a strange voice. With the arrival
of Carwin occurring at the same time as manifestations of these voices, the novel
suggests that the voices may be caused his biloquistic abilities. The next morning, Clara
finds Catharine in her bed dead. Shocked, she sits in her room until Theodore arrives and
threatens Clara. Clara then learns that Theodore's children have also been murdered. In
episodes that follow, Clara finds out that the murderer is her brother, Theodore and he
claims to have been acting under divine orders. Clara suspects, however, that Carwin is
the source of Theodore”s madness. Carwin then reveals to Clara that he is a biloquist (or
ventriloquist). He admits that he was the cause of the ignoble voices, but denies that he
told Theodore to commit the murders. The younger Wieland, having escaped from
prison, arrives at Clara's house and attempts to murder her. He finds Carwin with Clara
and engages in a final confrontation with him. Carwin tells Theodore that he should not
have listened to the voices, and in response, Theodore commits suicide, full of remorse
for what he has done. In the final moments of the novel, Clara refuses to leave her house
99 
on Schuylkill until it burns down. She then goes to Europe with her uncle, advisor
Thomas Cambridge and eventually marries Pleyel. And Carwin returns to the
Pennsylvania countryside.
Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland has been criticized by scholars of American
literature for its “loose and unbalanced structure.”
30
Indeed our narrator, Clara Wieland
herself makes the following admission: “What but ambiguities, abruptness, and dark
transitions can be expected from the historian who is at the same time the sufferer of all
these disasters?” (Brown, 147). The “disasters” to which Clara refers are a series of
homicidal acts committed by her brother, Theodore, first against his family, and
ultimately against himself. In an effort to make sense of this catalogue of gruesome
events, scholars “agree that this symbolic action represents the potential (or actual) self-
destructiveness of colonial society on the verge of Revolutionary War” (35). These
crimes also raise questions about “the savagery or civilization of European and Native
American inhabitants” as citizens in the early American republic (35). In fact, these
claims are supported by Brown himself, who, in the preface to Edgar Huntly (1799)
urges writers of American literature to “address the condition of our country” suggesting
that “the field of investigation, opened to us by our own country, should differ essentially
from those which exist in Europe.”
31
Among the many topics open to writers in America

30
James Russo, “The Chimeras of the Brian”: Clara”s Narrative in Wieland, Lazer Ziff in “A
Reading of Wieland” explains the novel”s faults in this way: “To be sure, Brown was a hasty,
careless writer, and rather than go back and revise his novel he wrote a number of deus ex
machina explanations” 53.
31
Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, ed. Sydney J. Krause
and S.W. Reid 3.
100 
are, in his view, “incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of western wilderness,” the
very themes he explores in his writings.
32
Indeed, at the outset of his fist published novel
Wieland, composed in 1798, but set in “between the conclusion of the French [and Indian
Wars] and the beginning of the Revolutionary War,” we see details of this sub-text in the
events leading up to the elder Wieland's decision to leave England and purchase an estate
in Schuylkill, Pennsylvania (Brown, 6). According to Clara:
One Sunday afternoon, his eye was attracted by a page of this book, which, by
some accident, had been opened and placed full in his view. The words, “Seek
and ye shall find,” were those that first offered themselves to his notice. His
curiosity was roused by these so far as to prompt him to proceed. As soon as he
finished his work, he took up the book and turned to the first page. The further he
read, the more inducement he found to continue. A Bible was easily procured,
and he ardently entered on the study of it. His progress towards the formation of
his creed was rapid. Along with the reading of the scriptures, and other religious
books, became once more his favorite employment. His ancient belief relative to
the conversion of the savage tribes, was revived with uncommon energy. The
North-American Indians naturally presented themselves as the first objects for this
species of benevolence. (Brown 10-12)

What first seems to be an ordinary evangelizing mission “revived with uncommon
energy” leads to a deeply disturbing inquiry. It is as if the elder Wieland is misguided by
what he reads, misled by the command, “Seek and ye shall find.” As he takes “up the
book and turn[s] to the first page,” he crosses over into false worship (10-12). He makes
a journey to a new place as part of this Christianizing mission where words and events no
longer mean what he thought. For, we are “quickly informed that his efforts to convert
the savage tribes were met with no permanent success” as they “opposed themselves to
his progress” (Brown, 11). This passage also suggests that for Brockden Brown, words

32
Monthly Magazine and American Review 3 (1800) iii and “On the State of American
Literature,” Monthly Magazine and American Review 1 (1799) 16.
101 
like savage, tribes, North-American, and Indians contribute not only to making fiction,
but become indices of an unsettling social history that John Rowe recounts. He notes:
In the last half of the eighteenth century, several settlements of “Christian” or
“praying” Indians were established in eastern Pennsylvania, western Ohio, and
New York... Colonists also thought that Christianizing Native Americans was a
means of pacifying them. By adopting the economic, social, and religious
organization of European settlers, such Native Americans might peacefully
coexist with colonists in an early version of “separate-but-equal” ideology.
(Rowe 34)

In other words, the mask of Christian virtue only temporarily disguises, on moral and
religious grounds, the notion that these “savage tribes” are in need of conquest, defense,
and protection. As Rowe further explains, the inhabitants of these settlements were
vulnerable to “several incidents of unjustified violence by European settlers” (34). He
cites “the massacre of peaceful unarmed Conestoga Indians in Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
by the so-called Paxton Boys in December 1763” as an example of the kind of brutality
experienced by certain groups of Native Americans living in these settlements during the
mid eighteenth century.
33

To be sure, the bad consciousness that accompanies the destruction of indigenous
peoples is also bound up with the issue of color in Brown’s novel, as he brings to the
surface the unresolved issue of race and racial classification figured in the blackening of
the elder Wieland”s body as he is mysteriously “scorched” and “bruised” in his temple
upon the return of his failed civilizing mission. According to Clara:

33
See, Rowe Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism for a meaningful discussion of the effects of
the “Paxton Boys” massacre upon various political debates concerning the status and safety of the
Native American in the wake of colonial violence that were taking place in the Pennsylvania
legislature during this period 34-37.
102 
a very bright spark was seen to light upon his clothes. In a moment, the whole
was reduced to ashes. Now he was naked, his skin throughout the greater part of
his body was scorched and bruised, He was removed to his chamber, and the
requisite attention paid to his wounds, which gradually became more painful. A
mortification speedily shewed itself in the arm, which had been most hurt. Soon
after, the other wounded parts exhibited the like appearance...Such was the end of
my father. (Brown 18-9)

This display of the elder Wieland's blackened body, “reduced to ashes” is treated not
merely as the result of being struck by lightning, or by a violent blow, but as an infection
as if to render visible the effects of attempting to convert native peoples by displaying
how one can be contaminated by their customs and values, which are destructive if not
disgusting. Covered with festering wounds and “removed to his chambers” to receive
care, the elder Wieland appears to have caught a disease, as if he were unable to resist
being corrupted. By dwelling on the elder Wieland's weakened state (a spectacle at
which members of the dominant culture would shudder) rather than the pain and
suffering of the socially subordinate “who oppose themselves to his progress,” the novel
further points to the necessity for racial separatism (Brown, 11). Even the supernatural,
then, has its basis in historically accurate scenes of servitude and colonization.
Moreover, this concern with maintaining the division between races, even as they
mixed, also speaks to the primary social issue of this period, which, according to Robert
S. Levine in was “submerged in the late eighteenth century, but made explicit in the
nineteenth century,” that is “a belief in the white racial identity of the nation” and the
“desire for a distinctively American literature and nation grounded in Anglo-Saxon
103 
whiteness.”
34
As Clara Wieland herself suggests, the identity of the land-owning class in
the new nation was already established alongside the racialization of slavery. In relaying
the details of the purchase of her father's estate on Schuylkill, she notes that he selected
“a farm within a few miles of the city and set himself down to the cultivation of it. The
cheapness of the land, and the service of African slaves, which were then in general use,
gave him who was poor in Europe all the advantages of wealth” (Brown, 12). Although
this is the novel's only explicit mention of slavery on the Wieland estate, the detail is
significant in that it ties the family's wealth and leisure to unfree labor and the
development of the slaves' legal and social status in the early republic as nonwhite. In
fact, as previously recalled in 1788, the division between the racial categories of black
and white was substituted for the distinction between the civil categories of slave and
free, which had been instituted by The American Slave Code (XXIII). It reads, “All
negroes, Moors, and mulattoes, except Turks and Moors in amity with Great Britain,
brought into this country, by sea or by land, are slaves; and by the uniform declaration of
our laws, the descendants of females remain slaves to this day” (XXIII.272). This article
explicitly points to the racial systematization that would characterize New World slavery.
The history of blacks in Philadelphia from the founding of Pennsylvania through
the War of 1812 falls into three major periods. The first is known as the slave era, which
ranged from 1682 through the 1760s when 20 and 30 percent of the city”s work force was

34
See Robert Levine's Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American
Literary Nationalism 6.
104 
enslaved.
35
Slaves were relatively inexpensive, and both indentured and wage servants
were cheaper alternatives. As Ira Berlin notes, the “wills of Northern slaveholders listed
their slaves with other high status objects like clocks and carriages rather than with land
or agricultural implements” (Berlin, 47-8). He also points out that slave holding
remained steady during the late 1760s and 1770s even as a influx of European
immigrants and the turmoil of the Revolution began to arise. Indeed, Pennsylvania
“became a net exporter of slaves” (50).
In 1780, the passage of a bill for the gradual abolition of slavery ushered in a
second period of the history of blacks in Pennsylvania as a large free African American
community formed in Philadelphia. According to scholars of American history, for a
brief period, racial tolerance and equity seemed possible, but this “golden age” soon
ended (Klepp, 475). During the nineteenth century, Philadelphia”s black community
faced increasing discrimination in housing, education, and jobs.
36
Unemployment and
poverty characterized the third period of the history of blacks in Pennsylvania, which
began approximately in 1805.
During the years that followed the French and Indian War, 1754-1763, as Susan
Klepp points out in Seasoning and Society, virtually all African Americans brought to
Philadelphia were slaves imported from the Caribbean or southern British colonies. She
notes that the health of these slaves was affected by the cold winters in Philadelphia

35
Ira Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland
North America,” American Historical Review, LXXV (1980) 47.
36
See Dubois, Philadelphia Negro and Edward R. Turner, The Negro in Pennsylvania: Slavery—
Servitude—Freedom, 1639-1861 (Washington DC: McGraw Hill, 1973.)
105 
along with the exposure to New World diseases. In addition to these factors, many were
infirmed when they arrived, suffering from “yaws, stomach disorders, distemper, the flux,
dropsy and malnutrition” (Klepp, 476). The northern slave system also made family
formation difficult as it “isolated African slaves in white households, which was
insufficient for the survival of the population” (476).
In P.M.G. Harris' “The Demographic Development of Colonial Philadelphia in
Some Comparative Perspective,” printed in The Demographic History of the
Philadelphia Region, 1600-1820, we are able to examine the percentage of blacks in
relation to white, land-owning population during this period.

Table 1
Blacks as a Percentage of Philadelphia's Population, 1720-1820
Population
Year White Black % Black
1720 5,317 623 10.5
1730 6,812 688 9.2
1740 7,847 873 10.0
1750 11,705 1,031 8.1
1760 17,432 1,324 7.0
1770 27,448 1,354 4.7
1780 30,674 1,014 3.2
1790 41,946 2,150 4.9
1800 61,728 6,083 9.0
1810 80,043 8,944 10.0
1820 109,386 10,659 8.9

When the elder Wieland”s efforts to proselytize Native Americans is considered
alongside these data, one may recognize that the Wieland”s family establishment in the
early United States, like European settlement in general, was part of a larger, ongoing
106 
project of imperial expansion and colonial profiteering. Although Clara does not mention
African slavery again, there is no indication in the rest of the novel to suggest that the
Wieland's ever stop owning slaves. Though not explicitly stated as such, the residents of
the Hut on their property in chapter 27 may be African slaves as well (Brown, 229). The
central point here is that throughout the period of the novel's action, slave-owning
continued to take on a civic and racial character within the broader culture of early
America.
37

As part of the enjoyment and luxury that slavery could create, the Wieland”s built
a hillside temple, which seems to resemble a distinctly neoclassical pavilion that
Clara describes in this way:
At the distance of three hundred yards from his house, on the top of a rock whose
sides were steep, rugged, and encumbered with dwarf cedars and stony asperities,
he built what to a common eye would have seemed a summer-house. The eastern
verge of this precipice was sixty feet above the river which flowed at its foot. The
view before it consisted of a transparent current, fluctuating and rippling in a
rocky channel, and bounded by a rising scene of corn-fields and orchards. The
edifice was slight and airy. It was no more than a circular area, twelve feet in
diameter, whose flooring was the rock, cleared of moss and shrubs, and exactly
leveled, edged by twelve Tuscan columns, and covered by an undulating dome.
This was the temple of his Deity. (Brown 13)

The establishment of this neoclassical pavilion, dramatically “edged by twelve Tuscan
columns” “exactly leveled,” and covered by an “undulating dome” probably made of
marble, also makes visible the taming of the “rugged” American landscape, which is

37
This reading of Brown’s fiction is not meant to suggest that an investment in so called “white”
literary American nationalism was uncritically accepted by all whites. I am persuaded by
Levine”s argument that a larger project would take into consideration the ways in which specific
texts composed by “black and white writers together participated in the development of American
literary nationalism, even as they experienced race in the United States in fundamentally different
ways” 1-15.
107 
another important theme central to our understanding of the place of Ciceronianism
within this novel (Brown, 13). For Clara repeatedly presents her situation through
metaphors drawn from the conditions of the American wilderness. At the beginning of
the novel she pictures herself placed on a “dreadful precipice” by “a series of events
unparalleled in the experience of any other human being ( 6). Later, she sees herself set
at “the brink of danger” (189). Moreover, the news of her brother”s atrocious acts
threatens to push her to “the brink of some abyss” into which “Theodore has already
fallen” (180). And, when Henry Pleyel suspects that Clara and Carwin are engaged in an
affair, he interferes saying, “Should I see you rushing to the verge of a dizzy precipice,
and not stretch forth a hand to pull you back?” (129). In a related way, the building of
this pavilion is also significant in that it is in this place where the elder Wieland formerly
worshiped the Christian God at “noon and at midnight” that the bust of Cicero is set up
by Theodore Wieland in the moments following his father”s bizarre death and failed
civilizing mission (13). Regarding this conversion of the temple, Clara remarks:
The temple was no longer assigned to its ancient use. From an Italian adventurer,
who erroneously imagined that he could find employment for his skill, and sale
for his sculptures in America, my brother had purchased a bust of Cicero. We
hired the same artist to hew a pedestal from a neighboring quarry. This was
placed in the temple, and the bust rested upon it. Opposite to this was a
harpsichord. This was the place of resort in the evenings of summer. Here we
sang, and talked, and read, and occasionally banqueted. Here the performances of
our musical and poetical ancestor were rehearsed. Here my brother's children
received the rudiments of their education; here a thousand conversations, pregnant
with delight and improvement, took place; and here the social affections were
accustomed to expand and the tear of delicious sympathy to be shed. (Brown 25)

As we read of the intoxicating delights of neoclassical learning in the pavilion within the
context of New World slavery and the destruction of native peoples, we see how the
108 
novel attempts to represent the refined amusements of reciting poetry, singing, and
feasting coexisting easily alongside such savage horrors. But, chafing away at the
unreality of this edifice is a subtle critique of the merits of ancient techniques of eloquent
persuasion as a means to train the master class. This line of inquiry is foregrounded by
the inclusion of the bust of Cicero in the center of this hillside temple.
There have been essentially two critical interpretations of Brown’s relation to
classical sources in general and Cicero in particular. One approach suggests that
Brockden Brown is trying to enhance the importance of his narratives set in provincial
early America by appropriating the Ciceronian motif of the perfectus orator and adapting
it as part of the background of his fiction thereby importing a classical foundation for
American literature in the New World. Charles E. Bennett's “Charles Brockden Brown:
Man of Letters” and Caleb Crain's Introduction to Wieland are examples of this
interpretation. For Bennett, “Cicero was a popular classical author and thus a symbol of
learning, especially for lawyers in this period. Crain suggests that upon Brown’s
decision to study law in 1787, he began his careful reading of Cicero, “the profession's
patron saint” (Crain, xvii). Scholars of the second approach recognize that Brown is a
close reader of Cicero, but maintain that his work is an attempt to demonstrate how the
misappropriation of Roman rhetoric can lead to a political situation that American might
want to avoid. Endless fighting among petty monarchs and the hemorrhaging of power
within a privileged class often results in the ruining of the state. Here the research of
Alan Axelrod in Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale and Christopher Looby in
Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States are
109 
useful for thinking about this issue.
38
But for the purposes of my argument, the
displacing of the elder Wieland's Deity in favor of the bust of Cicero, combined with the
spectacle of the elder Wieland's blackened body and Clara's reference to the family's use
of “African slaves” at the outset of the novel, suggests that the concepts of servitude and
mastery, which are deeply inscribed in the Ciceronian model and the heritage of classical
learning, are also bound up with the rhetoric of racial separatism in America. Put in
another way, the significance of the bust of Cicero and the persistence of the Ciceronian
motif in Brown’s narrative is to display the unsettling links between the development of
neoclassicism in early America and the problems of race and racial classification.
Out of the ground of bondage of New World slavery comes a twisted nostalgia, a
cruel analytic of Ciceronian elocution and the legacy of Roman universalism in the new
republic.
39
Cicero in this context— is the anti-ideal, a figure of counterfeit eloquence,
soiled by its seductive and destructive qualities. Furthermore, what seemed like
manageable contradictions and unsettled notions of personhood expressed in the oratory
that developed within a non-race based or color-based slave-holding society are turned
upside down when imported to America. This is due in part to the need to build rigid
racial distinctions into the social and legal order and ensure the slaves' permanent status

38
Alan Axelrod, presents a dissenting view on any close connections between the two writers,
Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale (Austin: University of Texas Press,1984) 80 while
Christopher Looby, “The Very Act of Utterance”: Law, Language and Legitmation in Brown’s
Wieland” in Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) argues that the reference to Cicero is “a veiled
critique of the verbal nature of the social contract underpinning an American political system that
lacks historical foundations” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press UP, 1996) 145-202.
39
For an elaboration of the concept of Roman universalist thinking, see Thomas Habinek, The
Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity and Empire in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998) 3-15.
110 
as nonwhites. American notions of mastery, then, had to qualify, transform, and
ultimately disengage with the Ciceronian model of personhood in order to produce a
servile class of nonpersons who would remain slaves long after their bondage had ended.
What is most striking about Brown’s fictions, for example, Wieland and “The
Death of Cicero” are the ways in which the intersection of these ideas is represented.
40

The appropriation of Ciceronian discourse becomes very perplexing within a society in
which racial distinctions must be upheld as a way to separate persons from things, civility
from barbarism, and masters from slaves. This difficulty is expressed in the theme of
disembodied voices and in the problems that arise for each character when attempting to
reconnect speech with the proper body. For example, after Carwin arrives to the
Wieland”s estate and is found “lurking in Clara's chamber,” Clara hears “a whisper” that
she believes “was uttered by the girl who lived with [her] as a servant” (Brown, 54). The
quality of the voice was “distinct, hoarse, and uttered so as to shew that the speaker was
desirous of being heard by someone near, but, at the same time, studious to avoid being
overheard by another” (56).
Furthermore, Carwin's verbal trickery is associated with seduction and the
corruption of young maidens, which suggests that Ciceronian elocution in an American
context can lead to such ignoble acts. It is also persuasive as it suggests to Theodore,
“Thy children must be offered—they must perish with their mother” (145). But

40
Jared Gardner, for example, in Master Plots suggests that “racial constructions are pivotal for
Brown’s writings as in all early national culture. Anxieties about aliens were conflated with
anxieties about race, and ultimately it was race that enabled Americans to recognize common
interests in each other, to recognize each other as Americans.” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1998) 56.
111 
Theodore like Clara cannot place the voice, and Carwin misleadingly maintains that he
arrived at Clara”s house after the murder of Catherine and the children had taken place.
He repeats the claim that “he prompted none to slay” (167). And this further confuses
Clara, for she also hears a “cry, loud and piercing” while resting in the pavilion (81).
Shuddering, in response, Clara “dashed herself against the column, and yet beheld
nothing” (82). Moments later she notices the “mysterious countenance and dubious
character of Carwin” (85). After a scene of confrontation, Carwin claims that he
“intended no harm” in using his biloquial abilities, but the murders of Catherine and the
children cannot protect him, nor could such deeds be construed as benevolent (90).
Taken together, then, not only does the identification of Carwin with Ciceronian
elocution fail to vindicate him, but it also fails to elevate the Roman model in the
American context. The association of the figure of Cicero and the medium of Ciceronian
oratory with the biloquist diminishes his status as an apt site for the construction of elite
male personhood in this novel.
Moreover, prior to Carwin's arrival to the Wieland's estate, the reader is presented
with a scene of Theodore's performance of Cicero before his family in the pavilion. As
Clara remarks:
The chief object of his veneration was Cicero. He was never tired of conning and
rehearsing his productions. To understand them was not sufficient. He was
anxious to discover the gestures and cadences with which they ought to be
delivered. He was very scrupulous in selecting a true scheme of pronunciation for
the Latin tongue, and in adapting it to the words of his darling writer. His favorite
occupation consisted in embellishing his rhetoric with all the properties of
gesticulation and utterance. (Brown 25)

112 
What is interesting about this passage is its implicit reference to Cicero’s remarks
concerning the sanitization of oratory in the Brutus. Indeed, Cicero tells the young
Brutus and Atticus that:
Caesar autem rationem adhibens consuetudinem vitiosam et corruptam pura et
incorrupta consuetudine emendat. Itaque ad hanc elegantiam verborum
Latinorum—quae, etiam si orator non sis et sis ingenuus civis Romanus, tamen
necessaria est—adiungit illa oratoria ornamentia dicendi, tum videtur tamquam
tabulas bene pictas collocare in bono lumine. (lxxv.261)

Caesar however corrects defective and corrupt usage by restoring it with
principle to pure and uncorrupt usage. He joins them to a careful selection
of Latin words—a necessity whether you are a true Roman citizen, orator
or not— the distinctions of oratorical style arrange a well painted picture in
good light. (Cicero lxxv.261)

Notice the selection of the noun rationem and the participle adhibens to mark a type of
restorative linguistic theory put forth by Caesar and recorded by Cicero. The repetition
of these terms is reminiscent of an earlier sentiment expressed by Cicero as he sets out to
establish a kind of touchstone that would assign a type of rule or direct referent to
language and meaning and would prevent meaning from escaping (“Quo magis
expurgandus est sermo et adhibenda tamquam obrussa ratio...”). In section lxxiv.259 of
the Brutus, he notes:
Confluxerant enim et Athenas et in hanc urbem multi inquinate looquentes ex
diversis locis. Quo magis expurgandus est sermo et adhibenda tamquam obrussa
ratio, quae mutari non potest, nec utendum pravissima consuetudinis regula.
(lxxiv.259)

For as to Athens, so to our city, there has been an influx of many impure speakers
coming from different places. It has created a situation which calls for a purge of
language and the invoking of a theory as an objective control or touchstone, not
subject to change like the easily distorted rule of common usage. (Cicero
lxxiv.259)

113 
Cicero’s concern with maintaining a certain mastery over the techniques of voice and the
regulation of speech is expressed in this passage. But Theodore's effort in “selecting a
true scheme of pronunciation...and adapting it to the words of his darling writer” is
overturned with the arrival of Carwin (Brown, 25). No longer is the assumption that “the
embellishment” of Ciceronian rhetoric with “all the properties of gesticulation and
utterance” able to forge a seamless connection between the “true citizen” and the “orator”
with manifest auctoritas (Brown 25; Cicero lxxv.261). Instead, Carwin's biloquistic
abilities as the Ciceronian anti-ideal lead Theodore to believe that he has “mistaken the
sounds, and that his imagination has transformed some casual noise into the voice of a
human creature” (Brown, 55). In other words, Theodore's weakness for the Roman
orator also foreshadows and reveals his susceptibility to the voices of Carwin.
Let us recall an earlier scene in the novel in which Clara herself attests to
Carwin's skillful use of verbal persuasion as an orator. When she first saw Carwin, he
appeared to be “rustic,” “ungainly,” and “disproportioned” (Brown, 49). But then he
spoke, and Clara remembers that “the voice was not only mellifluent and clear, but the
emphasis was so just, and the modulation so impassioned that it seemed as if a heart of
stone could not fail to be moved by it. A form, attitude, and garb were instantly created
worthy to accompany such elocution (Brown, 51). Clara instantly becomes fascinated
with his image and voice. In her view, Theodore's voice and Pleyel's “were musical and
energetic,” but Carwin's surpassed theirs as “it was wholly new” (Brown, 50-1). To be
sure, Cicero is characterized in a similar way during this period. In inciting “especially
softer passions,” Hugh Blair observes, “Cicero is very successful. For no man knew the
114 
power and force of words better than Cicero” (Blair, 2.204). And if we consider this
observation in relation to the way Clara describes Carwin's narratives as “constructed
with so much skill, and rehearsed with so much energy,” then we can confirm that
Carwin is cast as the Ciceronian exemplar in this novel (Brown, 71). Blair continues to
strengthen this association by commenting that the structure of Cicero’s sentences “is
curios and exact to the highest degree” (2.205). “Full flowing, never abrupt, Ciceronian
eloquence (whether that of Cicero or Carwin) is “too dazzling by its beauties,” its rhetoric
“at times showy rather than solid” (Blair, 2.206). As these examples suggest, Hugh Blair
repeatedly singles out Cicero and the Pro Cluentio for careful analysis and
simultaneously praises and interrogates Cicero for his “very remarkable talent of
narration” (Blair, 2.281-98).
In addition, Clara Wieland's captivation with Carwin's voice resembles her
brother's admiration for Cicero as the perfectus orator. In a moment of reflection, she
speaks of Carwin's oratory in the following way:
Those narratives that were most coherent and most minute, and, of consequence,
least entitled to credit, were yet rendered probable by the exquisite art of this
rhetorician. (Brown 71)

Carwin is strangely identified with the figure of Cicero and Ciceronian oratory as
expressed in the Pro Cluentio as the ideal and anti-ideal of eloquentia. For Clara herself
admits that although she appears to be moved by Carwin's speech, even then “the
inscrutableness of his character, and the uncertainty whether his fellowship tended to
good or evil, were seldom absent from our minds” (Brown, 73). Moreover, during the
scene of their confrontation in chapter 24, Theodore interrogates Carwin and discovers
115 
that he is the individual who “counterfeited the voice of an angel” and demanded the
sacrifice of Theodore's wife and children (Brown, 200).
Manifestations of disembodied voices continue to trouble the characters in this
novel. There are two occurrences in Clara's bedroom, once at the close of her dream of
the pavilion, and again at the river for the purpose of deceiving Pleyel. In addition to
these instances, Theodore experiences two manifestations of the disembodied voice at the
pavilion and one in the hallway of his home. But by the time Clara's uncle and advisor,
Mr. Cambridge, points out that it was “the previous and unseen agency of Carwin to have
indirectly but powerfully predisposed Theodore's deplorable perversion of mind,” it is too
late (Brown, 180). This sort of failed eloquence gives way to horror and violence that
spins out of control. Indeed, it is the difficulty of knowing where voices come from in
Wieland that disables the construction of Cicero as the perfectus orator and as a site for
generating the ideal citizen-rhetor in the early republic, and transforms his model into an
emblem of all suspect communications.
Pressing this notion of the value of Ciceronian elocution even further, Clara
directs the reader”s attention to an earlier moment in the novel in which “the merits of the
Oration for Cluentius,” a Ciceronian defense of a man accused of poisoning his
murderous stepfather, are being discussed in the pavilion (Brown, 31). According to
Clara:
One afternoon in May, the blandness of the air, and brightness of the verdure,
induced us to assemble, earlier than usual in the temple. We females were busy at
the needle, while my brother and Pleyel were bandying quotations and syllogisms.
The point discussed was the merit of the oration for Cluentius, as descriptive,
first, of the genius of the speaker; and, secondly, of the manners of the times.
Pleyel laboured to extenuate both these speeches of merit, and tasked his
116 
ingenuity, to shew that the orator had embraced a bad cause; or, at least, a
doubtful one. He urged, that to rely on the exaggerations of an advocate, or to
make the picture of a single family a model from which to sketch the condition of
a nation, was absurd. (Brown 31)

As a symbol of verbal deceit and persuasion, the Pro Cluentio reinforces the pejorative
view that Roman orators operate through lies, exaggeration, and craftiness. To be sure,
Ciceronian eloquentia is exerted in this speech in the most sordid fashion as it
successfully argues for the acquittal of a guilty man. As previously mentioned, Cicero’s
boast of having thrown dust into the eyes of the jury in his defense of Cluentius is related
by Quintilian in Book II of the Institutio.
41
Scholars of American literature often
interpret this scene as referring to “a classical example of domestic violence”
(Christopherson, 32-3). This view is stressed by Bill Christopherson, for example, in The
Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown’s American Gothic when he interprets
“the allusion to the oration as a condemnation of Clara's fratricidal impulse”
(Christopherson, 33). Conversely, Roberta F. Weldon argues in “Charles Brockden
Brown’s Wieland: A Family Tragedy” that “we should read Wieland as a family
tragically destroyed, like the Roman model, by patriarchal insanity and false morals”
(Weldon, 12).
42
Marcia Nichols suggests in “Cicero’s Pro Cluentio and the Mazy
Rhetorical Strategies of Wieland” that “the sophistic arguments Cicero makes in this
oration exemplify what bothered Brown most about the legal system” (459). And finally,
standing apart from these claims, Alan Axelrod, in Charles Brockden Brown: An

41
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 2.17.21
42
See Roberta F. Weldon, “Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland: A Family Tragedy” Studies in
American Fiction I, 2 (1984) 12.
117 
American Tale declares that “there is nothing in the Defense of Aulus Cluentius that bears
directly upon Wieland” (Axelrod, 80).
Much of the criticism of Brown continues in this contradictory strain. But I am
not entirely persuaded by such readings because the Pro Cluentio is widely understood
among ancient historians as a reflection upon the impact of the incorporation of local
Italian communities into Roman citizenship. As such, this rhetorical treatise is explicitly
and implicitly concerned with how to deal with outsiders at the height of Roman
colonization. Delivered in 66 B.C.E., the Pro Cluentio belongs to the decades following
the Social Wars between Rome and Italy. One outcome of these wars was the extension
of Roman citizenship to the Italians, which gave rise to the competing claims between
local provincials and members of the Roman elite that this oration seeks to work through.
This negotiation is, in my view, of direct interest to Brown because his writings also
engage with a similar struggle during the late eighteenth century as the United States
attempts to define its national boundaries. The novel's reference to the Pro Cluentio, then,
links Brown’s fictional narrative to broader social and political debates around notions of
citizenship and personhood that were widespread during the period of the drafting of the
Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.
43

43
See also Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to WWII in which
Rowe asserts, “Engineered by the Federalists in hopes of gaining political advantage over the
Republicans in response to the XYZ Affair, the Alien and Sedition Acts were directed overtly at
the French, whose harassment of U.S. shipping and U.S. retaliation from 1798 to 1800 constituted
our first undeclared war. Indeed, popular fears of Jacobin subversives or wandering Bavarian
Illuminati in North America disguised the more practical commercial and mercantile conflicts the
United States had with France and England in this period” 26.
118 
Jared Gardner carefully delineates the series of events that inform the passage of
these legislative acts:
The Alien and Sedition Acts grew out of the debates that had framed attempts to
define the nation's identity since the Constitutional Convention, debates that
generated fantasies of an internal enemy—often rhetorically painted in warpaint
or blackface— directed by an external power seeking to undermine the very
foundations of the young nation. The immediate impetus for the Alien and
Sedition Acts was the infamous XYZ Affair of 1798, in which France's
representatives made it understood that unless certain loans were made available,
American shipping would be captured and the nation isolated. During the XYZ
Affair the problem of defining a national identity took on a newfound urgency.
The crisis led to what was, in effect, a battery of tests designed to determine who
was the alien. (Gardner 56-7)

These methods of identification began with the Naturalization Act of 1798, in which the
Federalists set out to make American citizenship more difficult to acquire. This law was
followed by the passage of two other forms of legislation targeted at the identification of
aliens, namely the Alien Enemies Act and the Alien Friends Act.
44
In fact, the need to
enforce these laws conspired with other fears and doubts about the possible threat of an
internal enemy, ultimately leading to the drafting of the Sedition Act, “which made
seditious writing a crime against national identity and allowed for a visible sign of the
alien in disguise to be located in acts of writing” (Gardner, 57). Moreover, thinking
about the relationship between the alien and citizen is an important element of Brown’s
fictional narratives. Indeed, Brown’s preoccupation with these issues is evidenced by the

44
See Gardner, Master Plots in which he defines the Alien Enemies Act as “giving administration
power only over the citizens of nations at war with the United States” and the Alien Friends Act
as designed to indentify “the more dangerous population of aliens who had disguised themselves
as friends of America” 57. It is also worth noting that there were “no successful prosecutions
under the Alien Friends Act. The force of the prosecutions came to fall predominantly not on
aliens, but upon citizens, those who had disguised themselves as Americans and were supposedly
conspiring with external powers to overthrow legitimate institutions of the nation” 63.
119 
characterization of the so-called alien in his first political pamphlet, “An Address to the
Government of the United States on the Cessation of Louisiana to the French” (1803),
which is quoted by Gardner. In this treatise, Brown locates the weakness that makes the
United States vulnerable to foreign invasion in the “motley character of the people.”
45

The alien took essentially two forms: “the rebellious black and the conspiring Irishman”
(60). Gardner also notes that this formulation is drawn from contemporary histories of
the period such as Abbe Barruel”s The Bavarian Illuminati.
46
Barruel describes, “the
plague that flies on the wings of the wind to infect America” as follows:
Their apostles have infused their principles into the submissive and laborious
negroes; and St. Domingo and Guadeloupe have been converted into the vast
charnel houses for their inhabitants. They are still sufficiently numerous to raise
collections and transmit them to the insurgents of Ireland; thus contributing
toward that species of revolution which is the object of their ardent wishes in
America. (Stauffer 227)

The figuration of the threat of the alien as bound up with vivid racial metaphors of slave
uprisings and insurrectionary Irishmen is also foregrounded in John Carlos Rowe's
reading of Brown’s narrative as he suggests that “Brown’s fiction plays upon the
contemporary fears of political subversion that led to the passage of the Alien and
Sedition Acts of 1798” (Rowe, 26). He observes that this legislation “represented popular
resentments toward a wide variety of social and political groups” (26). Rowe concludes
that “it was the Irish who came to epitomize the alien for the Federalists” (26).

45
Gardner maintains that “a positive description of what it meant to be American was not easily
arrived at; clearer was what the (white) American hoped he was not: he was not black, red, or
British...But of course, Americans look like Europeans, so what was needed was a way to make
the alien look like something else” 63.
46
Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati. (New York: Russell and Russell)
227.
120 
Many of those active in the 1798 Irish Rebellion were believed to be in exile in
the U.S., and the professed affinities between the United Irishmen in this country
and the pro-French revolutionaries in Ireland sparked widespread hostility
towards this immigrant population. Both Carwin in Wieland and Clithero Edny in
Edgar Huntly are associated with Ireland, the American “wilderness” and the
“savagery” of the Native American. (Rowe 26)

The central point here is that the accounts given by Gardner and Rowe confirm how fears
and anxieties about aliens coexisted with the emergence of a certain kind of thinking
about race. And it is precisely this insistence upon racially marking the alien in the late
eighteenth century that conflicts with the Roman republican model of citizenship and
colonization expressed in the Pro Cluentio, creating a disjunctive history of American
literature, and further kills off the Ciceronian ideal.
Before turning to a sustained exploration of the Pro Cluentio, one should
examine the ways in which the rigors of this kind of racial classification existed during
the period in which the dramatic action of the novel is set. Here, the language of
American colonists exchanged between British subjects residing in England and America
will be taken into consideration as examples of the ways in which writings of this period
display that the language of citizenship in America depended absolutely on the existence
of the utter servility of black nonpersons.
In his Letter to the People of Pennsylvania composed in 1760 Joseph Galloway,
sought tenure for colonial judges in America as a means to establish equal rights between
what he called the citizens of “Old Britain and New Britain” (Galloway, 38). To be
denied this, noted the Loyalist, “is to be reduced to the condition of the black slave”:
If an impartial and independent administration of justice is once wrested from
your hands, neither the money in your pockets, nor the clothes on your backs, not
your inheritances, nor even your persons can remain long safe from violation.
121 
You will become slaves indeed, in no respect different from the sooty Africans,
whose persons and properties are subject to the disposal of their tyrannical
masters. (Galloway 38-39)

As this quotation suggests, the prospect of being reduced to a black slave is shameful
and this accounts for Galloway's scornful description of fellow Americans who were not
convinced that they deserved the same rights and privileges as their counterparts in Great
Britain. He further refers to those of a dissenting view as “abject Americans,” “traitors,”
and “enemies” and associates them with a “slavish condition” equivalent to the status of
“the poor African” in Jamaica (Galloway, 36-37).
Six years later, New England clergyman Jonathan Mayhew expressed a similar
sentiment when he claimed that the black “slaves in Boston rejoiced at the halting of that
parliamentary procedure, which threatened [American colonists] and their posterity with
perpetual bondage and slavery.”
47
Similarly, in 1774, the Methodist pastor, Samuel
Sherwood reminded his parishioners that “Connecticut”s respectable free men” had no
desire to be “in the condition of the poor tenants and slaves in a neighboring province.”
48

On August 24 of the same year, George Washington, in an letter to Bryan Fairfax,
admonished other colonists not to abandon their rights because that would be an
admission that the social condition of whites in early America was similar to the vast
majority of blacks.

47
See Jonathan Mayhew”s sermon “The Snare Broken” in Political Sermons of the American
Founding Era 1730-1805. (Indianapolis: Library Fund) 13.
48
Samuel Sherwood, “Scriptural Instructions to Civil Rulers” in Political Sermons of the
American Founding Era 1730-1805. (Indianapolis: Library Fund).
122 
The crisis arrived, when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition,
that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us tame and abject
slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway. (Washington 242)

Indeed, the rare and special relationship between the colonists and “abject slaves” based
on the bond of property becomes the medium by which the claims of civic rights are
made. It is therefore fitting that Richard Wells, a Philadelphian Quaker, banker, and
abolitionist, sought to explain the behavior of American political leaders by drawing
upon images of slaves. In 1775, he remarks in The Middle Line: Or, An Attempt to
Furnish Some Hints for Ending the Differences Subsisting Between Great-Britain and the
Colonies upon the primary grievance of Americans in the colonies:
What security have we, that they will not one day portion amongst themselves,
our fair inheritances, and force us into their new claimed fields, like African
slaves, to till the soil? but here my heart recoils, and smites my guilty bosom,—
fain would I cast an impenetrable veil round my countrymen, and hide this horrid
simile: but I trust that we are gradually removing the prejudices which support the
savage custom that prevails amongst us. I say what security have we, that shall
protect us against their laws, when we have no voice in the faming them? we have
none: we are degraded far beneath the rank of English subjects, we descend to the
humiliating condition of dependants upon English subjects, and hold our lives and
fortune but at their command. (Wells 25)

The “horrid simile”— “like African slaves”—invoked in this pamphlet makes the point
that the dreaded image was daily before their eyes and suffused their political claims
against the British. So even though Wells “trust[s] that we are gradually removing the
prejudices which support the savage custom that prevails among us,” the fact remains that
there is a curious way in which notions of civility and savagery draw upon contemporary
practices of slaveholding in everyday life (Wells, 25). To be sure, Wells' awareness of
the ways in which the prevalence of the analogy of between the colonists and chattel
slavery drew upon constant experience is shared by John Dickinson. Lauded as the most
123 
“prolific” of the American colonists, this member of the Pennsylvania Assembly wrote
that Parliament's right to “have full power and authority to make laws and statutes of
sufficient force to bind the colonies, and his Majesty's subjects in them in all cases
whatsoever”— was “a sentence of bondage against white Americans,” a palpable effort
“to brand us with marks infamously denoting us to be their property, as absolutely their
cattle” (Dickinson, 469-470). It was “the galling yoke,” to Dickinson, because it sought
“to make a property of the free-born sons of America.”
49

Ezra Sampson, in A Sermon Preached at Roxbury-Camp, was preoccupied with
the perils of slavery when he summarized for “in a word we must be slaves, learn to
grovel in the dust, and from thence look up to our imperious masters, in order to receive
from their gripping hands, the scanty pittance which they might please to afford us”
(Sampson, 18). A similar assertion is made by Boston”s Committee of Correspondence
established in 1764. According to the Votes and Proceedings, the Committee maintained
that “many of the colonists have been free from Quit Rents; but if the Breath of a British
House of Commons, can originate an Act for taking away all our Money, our Lands will
go next; or be subject to Rack Rents from haughty and relentless Landlords who will ride
at ease, while we are trodden in the Dirt. The Colonists have been branded with the
odious Name of Slaves” (Votes and Proceedings, 12). However, it is the remarks of the
publicist Arthur Lee in response to the dangers of Parliament's encroachments that bear

49
The Political Writings of John Dickinson, Esquire, Late President of the State of Delaware, and
of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 2 vols. (Wilmington: Bonsal and Niles, 1801) 469-470,
495-496.
124 
directly upon our understanding of the persistence and insistence of this comparison. In
the Farmer's and Monitor's Letters, he writes:
I see already men torn from their weeping and distressed families without hope,
without redress, never to return, by an unrelenting, lawless crew, unbridled by our
own civil and legislative authority, and wantonly cruel in the execution of
despotic power. I see every endearing tie of father, husband, son and brother, torn
asunder, unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved. I see my weeping country, worn down
with reiterated sorrows and alarms. Alas! Shall we look tamely on while the yoke
is fixed upon us? Shall we thus devote ourselves to the hateful insults of petty
authority; to be hunted like beasts of prey; our liberty, our happiness given up to
Ministers, who having grown savage in the exercise of despotism, shall contrive
for us new hardships, new oppressions and tyrannize without measure,
without fear, without mercy. (Lee 78)

By foregrounding scenes of familial disorganization, followed by images of unending
generational suffering and lament, allusions to exploitation to laborers, the branding of
persons who aspire to be free, and the extinction of a people's liberties are clearly
evocations of New World slavery. What is interesting about this pamphlet, however, is
the way in which the language of racial oppression in early America is functioning as a
widespread cultural analogy in order to secure the status of the land-owning class. Even
those granted the status of citizens are caught in contradictions when they tried to explain
the nature of depth of libertas. By drawing upon this present experience of racialized
slavery, the language of early American colonists confirms that the rigors of racial
classification and the permutations of mastery, slavery, and citizenship work together to
foment an unsettling history which informs Brockden Brown’s fictional narratives.
50

50
The Boston-Evening Post, September 29, 1746; The Maryland Gazette, December 14, 1775;
The Massachusetts Spy, or, Thomas”s Boston Journal, January 28, 1773; The Pennsylvania
Chronicle, February 11, 1768; and The Massachusetts Gazette, July 7, 1763; Nov. 24; Dec. 22,
1768. Furthermore, Americans of the mid eighteenth century viewed advertisements listing
African slaves among other valued property items. Newspapers such as The Boston-Evening
125 
In addition, what is striking about the language of the colonists is that the word
“black” or African calls up a catalogue of images that further debase the racially marked
slave. For example, Richard Wells, in A Few Political Reflections Submitted to the
Consideration of the British Colonies By a Citizen of Philadelphia, discloses why the
American colonists insisted on their rights as Englishmen overseas, but in so doing he
draws on an analogy between black slaves and white settlers. “What” he asks, “could
Great Britain wish from us more than we freely gave? For whom have we toiled in this
once uncultivated wilderness? For whose benefit do we rise up early, and lie down late, is
it not for Great Britain? Without those English rights, black and white humanity in
America would be at the same social level. Both would be chattel slaves in cruel
shackles, chained feet, branded by irons” (Wells, 12-13).
Wells” imagery of blacks in “shackles” “branded by irons” was far from atypical.
For John Allen, in An Oration, Upon the Beauties of Liberty. Or the Essential Rights of
the Americans, posed the following query to the earl of Dartmouth in 1763. “How would
your Lordship like to be fetter”d with irons, and dragg”d three thousand miles like
African slaves, in a Hell upon water?” It is worth noting that “Hell upon water”
mentioned here refers to a warship as indicated in a footnote by Allen in describing the
transport of many Africans as prisoners of war during the transatlantic slave trade. These
passages enact the ways in which the language of slavery is further invoked in various
and particularized contexts not as a far-fetched but permanent feature of early America. I
 
Post, September 29, 1746; The Maryland Gazette, December 14, 1775; The Massachusetts Spy,
or, Thomas”s Boston Journal, January 28, 1773; The Pennsylvania Chronicle, February 11, 1768;
and The Massachusetts Gazette, July 7, 1763 featured slaves alongside “horses, mules, sheep,
hogs, dogs, cattle, household furniture, and plantation tools.”
126 
have turned to this widely used cultural phenomenon of representing claims for
citizenship by drawing upon the condition of blacks as property in the mid-eighteenth
century, in order to point to the ways the history of the formation of the categories of
“citizen” and “person” in early America, as in Brown’s novel are best understood when
presented in terms of race-based enslavement. My intended aim in what follows is to
explore the implications of Brockden Brown’s rejection of a model of colonial expansion
of a different sort, that is, the argument made for the incorporation of newly subjugated
peoples into Roman citizenship made by Cicero in the Pro Cluentio. Only then can we
begin to arrive at a notion of personhood that demolishes such rigid racial distinctions
that characterize conceptual oppositions such as master and slave, colonized and
colonizer, and civility and barbarism in the American context.

Two Patriae: Negotiating Roman Provincial Identity in Cicero’s Pro Cluentio
In 66 B.C.E. Cicero was asked to defend a certain Aulus Cluentius Habitus, a
leading citizen of the town of Larinum charged with having committed two crimes:
bribery and murder by poison. In the first instance, Cluentius is believed to have bribed
the members of the jury to condemn the elder Oppianicus in a previous case. But the
second charge is levied against him on three accounts. Cluentius is first accused of
having murdered by poison a fellow member of the nobilitas, Vibius Cappadox, whom
Cicero claims died a natural death. He is further charged with attempting to poison the
present prosecutor, Oppianicus the younger, and with poisoning the elder Oppianicus,
whose “death was caused by poison given to him in bread by one M. Asellius his friend,
127 
and that Cluentius instigated the deed” (“Oppianicum veneno necatum esse, quod ei
datum sit in pane per M. Asellium quendam, familiarem illius, idque Habiti consilio
factum esse dicitis”) (Cicero, LXI.169). Prior to this, the elder Oppianicus set out to
increase his wealth and property by forming an alliance with the defendant”s affluent and
terrifying mother, Sassia, whose husband Aulus Aurius, he had murdered (“Sassiam in
matironium ducere, Habiti matrem, illam, cuius virum A. Aurium occiderat, concupivit”)
(IX.26). Cicero refers to Sassia as an “unnatural woman” in section IX.27 and further
remarks that:
Nam Sassia, mater huius Habiti—mater enim a me in omni causa, tametsi in hunc
hostili odio et crudelitate est, mater, inquam, appellabitur, neque umquam illa ita
de suo scelere et immanitate audiet, ut naturae nomen amittat: quo enim est
ipsum nomen amantius indulgentiusque maternum, hoc illius matris, quae multos
iam annos et nunc cum maxime filium interfectum cupit singulare scelus maiore
odio dignum esse ducetis. (V.12)

Sassia, mother of my client Habitus—yes, as a mother I must refer to her
throughout this case—his mother, I say, although she behaves towards himwith
the hatred and cruelty of an enemy: nor shall the recital of her monstrous crimes
ever deprive her of the name which nature has bestowed upon her; for the more of
love and tenderness the very name of mother suggests, the greater will be the
desestation which you will hold to befit this, the unheard of outrage of that
mother, who at this very moment, as for many years past, is longing for the
destruction of her son. (Cicero V.12)

This passage supports the claim made by Thomas Habinek in Ancient Rhetoric and
Oratory, when he suggests that “Cicero’s main strategy in the case is to suggest that
Oppianicus is in cahoots with Sassia,” to bring about the downfall of the Cluentii “whose
estates they seek to control” (Habinek, 33). But he notes that what is striking about the
episodes at Larinum is the way in which the central figures and events of this individual
Italian town “become entangled in the larger affairs of Rome and Italy” (33).
128 
It is precisely the incorporation of Italy”s inhabitants into the Roman republic that
interests me. Indeed, the specific incidents of the Pro Cluentio that thematize conflicts
over citizenship, personhood, and law indicate that late republican Rome was
experiencing the beginnings of a new sense of Roman identity as a plural concept, which
is being worked out through the medium of Ciceronian oratory as well as through the
person of Cicero himself. Adopting this perspective, we can determine precisely what
kind of argument is being made by Brown concerning the specific social phenomenon of
Romanization during the late Roman republic, which would continue well into the
imperial period. That is to say, how are we to understand the relationship that exists
between the cultural needs of the landed aristocracy in late eighteenth-century America
and the appropriation of models of personhood from antiquity within Brown’s first
published narrative? Is it possible to unpack the lasting after-effects of such different
responses to the question of outsiders within? In either case, at stake in this in this
inquiry is the possibility of conceiving a moment of American history differently.
Ancient historian Emma Dench argues that “the process of Romanization is
understood as the appropriation of Roman cultural and political motifs on the part of
Italians, interpreted in the most extreme version as a growing desire on their part to
become Romans” (Dench, 166). She observes that the period from the end of the third
century B.C.E. up to the Social Wars sees the most progressive Romanization of Italy.
The Pro Cluentio, having been delivered in 66 B.C.E. falls into the decades after the
Social Wars, but this does not mean that the cultural exportation of Romanitas had
diminished. In fact, Dench rightly observes that local communities experienced the
129 
incorporation into Roman citizenship in a number of ways, “ranging from the
construction of administrative buildings and civic centers to the regular adoption of the
practice of dating by Roman consulships, the erection of honorific monuments to Roman
patrons in the campus in Italian towns, the increasing emphasis on the use of wealth in
private contexts, along with the trappings of urban civilization, such as baths and
aqueducts in remote areas of the Central Apennines” (174). The town of Larinum is an
Apulian city, thirty-two miles south-east of modern Ternoli. Its ethnicity is disputed by
ancient authors and modern historians alike as many attribute its foundation to the several
different peoples who had occupied south-east Italy. Most scholars, however, identify
Larinum as culturally Oscan but the complexity of this issue is shown by the city”s
bronze coinage. As Kathryn Lomas explains, “one issue, roughly dated 268 B.C.E. is
Campanian in type, with a head of Apollo, while the second group from 250 B.C.E. is of
Apulian type with an Oscan legend, and the third group from 217 B.C.E. uses the Roman
uncial standard but with an Oscan inscription.”
51
Accordingly, the date for the
Romanization of Larinum is unsettled as well. Not unlike other Oscan settlements,
scholars traditionally assumed that the Romanization of Larinum largely post-dated the
Roman conquest, but as Lomas points out, “recent excavation shows that there was a
substantial pre-Roman city on the site, developing between the fourth and second
centuries BC” (110). Her research suggests that this small Italian town probably sparked
Rome”s interest during the Samnite wars and became a Roman ally until its revolt on the
outbreak of the Social Wars in 90 B.C.E. (110).

51
See, Cicero the Advocate ed. Jonathan Powell and Jeremy Paterson 109.
130 
In 80 B.C.E. the Social Wars came to an end and Larinum became a Roman
municipium. Cicero himself makes mention of the inhabitants of Larinum in one of his
epistles to Atticus. He writes of their “Pompeian sympathies” during the Civil Wars
(Cicero, 7.12). Additionally, N. Stelluti observes that there is a substantial amount of
Latin funerary epigraphy from Larinum, but notes that of the families involved in the Pro
Cluentio, “there is no trace of the Aurii or the Magii but the Cluentii were still present
during the empire, as attested by the epitaphs of the freedwoman Cluentia Cypare, wife of
Autustalis Gn. Petronius Restitutus, and Cluentius Priscianus, possibly also a freedman.
There is also an epitaph of the mid-first century BC, of Didia Decumana, daughter of
Barbus, set up by her daughters Oppianica and Billiena” (Stelluti, 28-9). M. Torelli
locates the most direct epigraphic evidence for Larinum in the period after the Social
Wars. It comes from a fragmentary text upon which is written “a dedication to Sulla,
naming him the patron of the city.”
52
The dedication to Sulla is significant in that it
further supports Cicero’s view of the orderliness that Roman law is able to impose upon
the chaotic and horrifying events at Larinum expressed in the oration. For example, in
section LIII.146-148 of the Pro Cluentio Cicero reminds the jury:
Tu mihi concedas necesse est multo esse indignius in ea civitate, quae legibus
contineatur, discedi ab legibus. Hoc enim vinculum est huius dignitatis, qua
fruimur in re publica, hoc fundamentum libertatis, hic fons aequitatis: mens et
animus et consilium et sententia civitatis posita est in legibus. Ut corpora nostra
sine mente, sic civitas sine lege suis partibus, ut nervis et sanguine et membris, uti
non potest. Legum ministri magistratus, legum interpretes iudices, legum denique
idcirco omnes servi sumus, ut liberi esse possimus...Quid sibi autem illi scribae,
quid lictores, quid ceteri, quos apparere huic quaestioni video, volunt? Opinor
haec omnia lege fieri totumque hoc iudicium, ut ante dixi, quasi mente quadam

52
M. Torelli, “One New Inscription concerning Sulla from Larinum” Athenaeum NS 51 (1973)
336-54.
131 
regi legis et administrari. Quid ergo? haec quaestio sola ita gubernatur? Quid
reliquae quaestiones? Circumspicite omnes rei replicae partes: omnia legum
imperio et praescripto fieri videbitis. (LIII.146-148)

You must concede to me that it is a far greater shame, in a state which rests upon
law, to depart from law. For law is the bond which secures these our privileges in
the res publica, the foundation of our liberty, the fountain-head of justice. Within
the law reposed the mind and heart, the judgment and the conviction of the state.
The state without law would be like the human body without mind—unable to
employ the parts which are to it as sinews, blood, and limbs. The magistrates who
administer the law, the jurors who interpret it—all of us in short—obey the law to
the end that we may be free...What, indeed, is the meaning of those clerks, of the
lictors, of the other officers whom I see in attendance in this court? I take it that
all this is the result of the law, and that this whole trial, as I said before is under
the direction of the law as of some controlling mind...What of the courts I have
not mentioned? Look round on all the departments of the res publica; you will
find them every one under the governance of the laws. (Cicero LIII.146-148)

This passage is significant in a number of ways. It is fitting to mention that Cicero’s
reference to the law here is linked not only to the regulations that govern participation in
the political and social life of Rome, but is bound up with the role of law in shaping
interactions within the local community of newly subjugated peoples. In addition to this,
what is implied as well is the codification of Roman municipal and colonial laws that
developed during this period. Texts conventionally described by scholars of ancient law
as “municipal charters” of which the largest surviving examples are the lex Tarentina and
Tabula Heracleensis are examples of this kind of codification. Each text contains a
different section from a number of Roman laws on municipia and coloniae, and the
applicability of each set of clauses to the specific local situation varies depending upon
the individual town. The creation of municipia involved a high level of intervention on
the part of the Roman state and its officials, in terms of the choice of which communities
should become municipia, the location of administrative centers within the surrounding
132 
territory, the cultural, political, and legal impact of the new relationship with Rome had
to be taken into consideration. However, while the creation of municipia implied a
significant degree of involvement of the Roman state, in terms drafting individual
constitutions, and in passing laws concerning municipia, Rome did not deny the pre-
existing cultural, political, and legal character of a given territory (Dench, 175). For
example, the lex Tarentina suggests that a concern to tie the local magistrates to the
individual town as a way to uphold the dynamics of local society was an essential part of
proper administration.
53
The law, then, is one of the many ways in which local tensions
and rivalries are reconfigured and actively fostered in the process of incorporation into
the Roman state.
It is also possible to argue, as Emma Dench suggests, that this kind of legislation
conspires with other institutions and practices “to enhance rather than diminish a sense of
local particularism within a given municipality” (176). To this I would add that the most
important feature of these statutes is the fact that each attests to the ways in which the
Roman legal model is explicitly concerned with retaining a sense of legal personhood for
individuals of a newly acquired territory. Indeed, as Cicero himself makes clear in this
passage when he refers to the attempt made by Accius to prosecute Cluentius under a
statue which applies only to senators. Cluentius, however, is a member of the equestrian
order, so it is on these grounds that Cicero argues for Cluentius” acquittal since one
cannot “tamper with the law, on which all of Rome”s institutions rest” (Cicero, LIV).

53
For the text and translation, see M. Crawford “Italy and Rome from Sulla to Augustus” in CAH
1996: No. 15, especially II.26-31 and 32-8.
133 
Clearly coexisting with these claims of legal personhood is the interesting case of
the Martiales of the temple of Mars at Larinum. Our only information about them is
Cicero’s intriguing but incomplete account of how Oppianicus tried to establish their
freedom and Roman citizenship in the Pro Cluentio. He says:
Martiales quidam Larini appellabantur, ministri public Martis atque ei deo
veteribus institutis religionibusque Larinatium consecrati: quorum cum satis
magnus numerus esset, cumque item, ut in Silicia puermulti Venerii sunt, sic illi
Larini in Martis familia numerarentur, repente Oppianicus eos omnes liberos
esse civesque Romanos coepit defendere. Graviter id decuriones Larinatium
cunctique municipes tulerunt. Itaque ab Habito petiverunt, ut eam causam
susciperet publiceque defenderet. Habitus cum se ab omni eius modi negotio
removisset, tamen pro loco, pro antiquitate genereis sui, pro eo quod se non suis
commodis, sed etiam suorum nunicipum ceterorumque necessariorum natum esse
arbitrabatur, tantae voluntati universorum Larinatium deesse noluit. Suscepta
causa Romamque delata magnae cotidie contentiones inter Habitum et
Oppianicum ex utriusque studio defensionis excitabantur. Erat ipse immani
acerbaque natura Oppianicus: incendebat eius amentiam infesta atque inimica
filio mater Habiti. Magni autem illi sua interesse arbitrabantur hunc a causa
Martialium removeri. (XV.43-44)

There were at Larinum certain persons called Martiales, the official priests
of Mars, dedicated to the service of the god by local regulations and
religious ordinances of great antiquity. Their number was considerable:
moreover, as is the case with numerous priests of Venus in Sicily, these
priests of Mars at Larinum were regarded as belonging to the household of
the god. But despite this Oppianicus suddenly began to maintain the plea
that they were free men and Roman citizens. This was a great blow to the
Town Council of Larinum and all the townspeople; so they asked Habitus
to take up the case and contest it in the public interest: and although he
had kept aloof from such matters, still he was unwilling to disappoint the
strong and unanimous wish of Larinum, in consideration of his position,
the antiquity of his family and his feeling that he had not come into the
world to serve his own interests but also those of his fellow townspeople
and other friends. The case came into court and was taken up in
Rome, and there was great disputation between Habitus and Oppianicus,
so keen was each to make a good cause. It was the nature of Oppianicus to
be ungovernable and violent, and his madness was further inflamed by the
hatred and enmity of Habitus” mother against her son. They then thought
it dispensable to detach my client from the case of the Martiales. (Cicero
XV.43-44)
134 

On what conditions did Oppianicus proclaim their freedom and citizenship? The fact that
the Martiales could be compared to the Venerii in Sicily suggests that they could have
been some intermediate or ambiguous class of persons such as serfs, but this is
problematic for two reasons. The first is that in the view of Roman law the person was
either slave or free. Moreover, there was then no Latin word that had the meaning of
“serf.” For this reason, I am persuaded by Von Premerstein's research in “Clientes”
which suggests that “the Martiales were former slaves given to the temple of Mars by
manumissio sacrorum causa.”
54
If this is the case, then, Oppianicus possibly believed
that the Martiales should have the same status as clients, which implies citizenship.
Cicero informs us in his Verrine Orations that the provincial governor Verres used the
Venerii as servi publici, so it is likely that the Martiales were of similar status as well,
especially since a similar comparison is being invoked here.
55
At any rate, the incident to
which Cicero refers in the Pro Cluentio seems to be prompted by his need to demonstrate
the moral depravity of Oppianicus, who had joined the Sullan forces during the Social
Wars and secured the position of Quattuorvir of Larinum by force during Sulla”s victory.
The trail mentioned by Cicero that was “taken up in Rome” occurred in 74B.C.E. as a
result of Oppianicus” announcement that the Martiales were free men and Roman
citizens (Cicero, XV.43-44) . The “Town Council of Larinum and all the townspeople”
persuaded Cluentius to act in their behalf (XV.43-44). And, although Cicero introduces
this incident as part of the catalogue of Oppianicus” vices, he says nothing of the

54
Von Premerstein, “Clientes” in PW, Vol. IV, p.42.
55
Verrine Orations, III, p. 50, 55, 86, 89.
135 
outcome. He instead tells the jury that the two were arguing the case at Rome, and then
sidesteps the issue and slips into a discussion of Oppianicus” “great love of money,”
Sassia's intense hatred for her son, and an account of how Oppianicus tried to poison
Cluentius (Cicero, XV.45). It is fitting to conclude that Oppianicus was not outraged or
publicly disgraced by the decision of the court at Rome, or by the response of the
Decurions and residents of Larinum and that his inclination to put forth such a claim was
more reasonable than Cicero wanted to admit. For the purposes of my argument, then,
the case of the Martiales also shows that the result of Romanization at Larinum was not
necessarily a situation in which local distinctiveness in the form of a particular cult
practice would not have been not entirely lost or compromised, though the incorporation
into Roman citizenship. It also shows how the people of Italy were profoundly involved
in shaping different aspects of Roman law.
In a related way, Cicero goes onto to recount the details of a similar case
concerning notions of citizenship while visiting Asia. In section XI.32 of the Pro
Cluentio, he states:
Memoria teneo Milesiam quandam mulierem, cum essem in Asia, quod ab
heredibus secundis accepta pecunia partum sibi ipsa medicamentis abegisset, rei
capitalis esse damnatam: nec iniuria, quae spem parentis, memoriam nominis,
subsidium generis, heredem familiae, designatum rei publicae civem sustulisset.
(XI.32)

I remember a case which occurred when I was in Asia: how a certain woman of
Miletus, who had accepted a bribe from the alternative heirs and procured her
own abortion by drugs, was condemned to death: and rightly, for she had cheated
the father of his hopes, his name of continuity, his family of its support, his house
of an heir, and the res publica of a citizen-to-be. (Cicero XI.32)

136 
What this passage confirms is the way in which Roman notions of personhood have
multiple focal points. That is to say, locations in Italy, but also the Ionian city of Miletus
on the western coast of Anatolia were often sites for new social and cultural
arrangements. Perhaps it is for this reason that Emma Dench concludes that one of the
most noteworthy “inventions of the late republic was an interest in the concept of Rome
as a multi-ethnic city and the res publica as a multi-ethnic state” (Dench, 176). In any
case, the broader concern expressed by Cicero above is not that this woman of Miletus
was executed for abortion, for clearly that was not the reason. But rather, she was put to
death for depriving the res publica of a potential citizen. In leaving no choice of action
for the unborn child, her decision supersedes all questions of right. The right for every
person to be invested with civic, social, and legal capacity is part of the official policy of
Roman expansion. Indeed, this is the leading principle on which the republic is founded,
and necessarily must be the case in all countries where slavery is allowed. Accordingly,
Cicero’s concern is to enforce Rome's official policy and set limits to the strange logic
that prompted this woman of Miletus to “cheat the father of his hopes, his name of
continuity, his family of its support, his house an heir, and the res publica of a citizen-to
be” under the guise of care for the alternative heirs (Cicero, XI.32). Whether Cicero
imagines potential citizens as playing a key role or a supporting role in the maintenance
of the state, and as essentially upholding a conservative status quo or not, his emphasis on
the possibility of the legality of personhood shows that he understood the kind of order
that practices of imperial expansion, colonization, and slavery demanded.
137 
In keeping with the idea that the Roman republic was able to manage the
contradictions that grow out of colonization by adopting an ideology of incorporation that
did not deny the pre-existing political, legal, and social characteristics of the local
community, we should note that Larinum, lies in the territory of the Frentani, peoples
who might most obviously be associated with the austere values of Central Apennine
peoples mentioned earlier, becomes in the Pro Cluentio the setting for an urban sex
scandal, infanticide, extortion as well as for exemplary Italian uprightness and
worthiness. Indeed, while Oppianicus and Sassia are engaged in their wild, anti-social
escapades, Cicero lauds Cluentius as a “Ut virum optimum atque innocentissimum
plurimisque mortalibus carissimum” (“good and innocent man, beloved and cherished by
so many of mankind” (Cicero, LXXI.202). Cicero also reminds the jury that Cluentius is
descended from a man “who in character, reputation, and nobility of birth was by far the
most eminent man, not only in the township of Larinum to which he belonged but to the
whole district and neighborhood” (“A. Cluentius Habitus fuit, pater huiusce, iudices
homo non solum municipii Larinatis, ex quo erate, sed etiam regionis illius et vicintatis
virtute, existimatione, nobilitate facile princeps”) (Cicero, V.12). Thus, it is not
surprising that Cluentius' “noble” and “venerable” local supporters, who have elected him
to the town council in absentia are portrayed by Cicero as weeping for the unfairness of
the charges brought against him (Cicero, XIV.42). Coexisting within this honorable
portrayal of Cluentius are images of Sassia. For she is characterized as “being wooed by
Oppianicus, not by the wedding gifts of her betrothed, but by the murder of his children!”
(Cicero. IX.28). The central point here is that the city of Larinum offers a picture of the
138 
coexistence of various models of elite behavior within one Italian town, now co-opted by
Rome. Cicero’s depiction of Cluentius points to the degree to which Roman tendencies
to incorporate and accommodate allow members of the landed aristocracy to retain and
negotiate their equestrian rank, both in their own localities and at Rome, which further
confers a sense of distinction, marking the newly conquered individual as a person.
During this period of expansion, then, new members of the nobilitas from local territories
are already conceived of as potential Roman citizens.
Kathryn Lomas observes this cultural phenomenon and explains that members of
the Italian elite fall into two categories, “either pursuing social promotion and political
prominence at Rome—gaining membership of the Senate and standing in office at Rome,
like Cicero himself, or like Cluentius and Oppianicus, who were wealthy and socially
prominent, interacting with the highest levels of the Roman elite, but without seeking to
gain senatorial status and political power in Rome” (Lomas, 110). However, Emma
Dench warns that there are many reasons to avoid thinking of Romanization as a linear
process of convergence, by which the Italian nobility sought entry into the senatorial
order, but it is also clear from the Pro Cluentio that political integration was one of
several paths open to newly conquered Italian nobles. And this is due in part to the novus
homo ideology which Cicero himself shares.
As mentioned in the earlier part of this chapter, Sir Ronald Syme designates
Cicero “as a novus homo and a rare phenomenon of his age” (Syme, 110-11). To be sure,
Cicero had to ascend the ranks of a socially stratified society by means of oratorical
prowess alone. Even though he descended from an affluent family in the town of
139 
Arpinum, south of Rome; like that of Marius before him, Cicero was without political
distinction in Rome itself. While Cicero often identifies Cato the Elder as a novus homo
like himself and Marius, his own writings of the late republic emphasize that the
importance of moral probity as one of the central means by which the novus homo gains
entry into the political elite in Rome. For example, Cicero reflects upon the conditions of
social mobility for the novus homo in the Pro Cluentio when he poses the following
query to the jury:
Etiam querimur saepe hominibus novis non satis magnos in hac civitate esse
fructus? Nego usquam umquam fuisse maiores, ubi si quis ignobili loco natus ita
vivit, ut nobilitatis dignitatem virtute tueri posse videatur, usque eo pervenit,
quoad eum idustria cum innocentia prosecuta est. Si quis autem hoc uno nititur,
quod sit ignobilis, procedit saepe longius, quam si idem ille esset cum isdem suis
vitiis nobilissimus. (XL.112)

And after this, do we often lament that our state has too little to offer to a novis
hominibius? Never, I maintain, has a state offered so much as does ours, wherein
if a man of humble birth shows in his life a character such as to support the high
standing which rank confers, his advancement is dependent only on hard work
and a blameless record. Indeed a man who has nothing but humble birth
to support him often goes further than he would, had he the same
defects though born of high degree. (Cicero XL.112)

For Cicero, then, the moral high ground of “new men” like himself is comparable to the
distinctive political and ideological place for Italian elites newly incorporated as Roman
citizens. Moreover, with the acquisition of new territories and peoples, the shape of
Roman society came to be altered irrevocably, but at the same time, the Romans
developed a legal and social infrastructure to manage cultural difference. In this way, it
is possible to read the novus homo ideology as one possible way of presenting oneself as
a member of the elite class; by extension then Cicero’s representation of Cluentius as
bonus (“good”) and honesti (“upright”) seems to suggest that he is facilitating the
140 
accommodation of Cluentius by the Roman upper class. This is not to suggest that
Cicero himself does not constantly negotiate his own role as he sees others doing the
same. Rather, by representing himself in a number of different ways, such as: vir bonus
dicendi peritus, the perfectus orator with manifest mastery and auctoritas, an advocate,
Cicero ascends through the ranks of an influential social structure to become by 63
B.C.E. not only a leading member of the conservative forces, but none other than the
Pater Patriae itself.
Part of the value that the writings of Cicero introduce into discussions of
Romanitas stem from Cicero’s own notion of the two patriae, which he formulated
directly in connection with later republican expansion and in response to the question of
how to deal with outsiders within. For example, in the De Legibus, he writes:
Ego mehercule et illi et omnibus municipibus duas esse censeo patrias, unam
naturae, alteram civitas...sed necesse est caritate eam praestare, quae rei
publicae nomen universae civitatis ese; pro qua mori et cui nos totos dedere et in
qua nostra omnia ponere et quasi consecrare debemus. Dulcis autem non multo
secus est ea, quae genuit, quam illa, quae excepti. Itaque ego hanc meam esse
patriam prorsus numquam negabo, dum illa sit maior, haec in ea contineatur.
(II.5)

All men from the municipia have two patriae, one by birth and one by
citizenship...But that which is the common citizenship must stand first in our
affection in the name of the state; for it is our duty to die for this and to give
ourselves completely, to consecrate ourselves and offer up everything we have.
But that into which we were born is not less sweet to us than into which we were
adopted. And so I will never deny that this [Arpinum] is my patria, although the
other [Rome] is greater, and includes this one within it. (Cicero II.5)

In the aftermath of the bitter Social Wars between Rome and the Italians, ending with the
extension of Roman citizenship to all Italians, the competing claims of existing loyalties
and the new concerns that grew out of incorporation into the Roman state, created a series
141 
of questions for Cicero about the nature of personhood and citizenship, and how to
reconcile these ideas with the profound changes in the relationship of Italian municipia
and coloniae and Rome. The passage cited from the De Legibus sums up the essential
dilemma of the Italian nobilitas in the first century B.C.E. The concept of dual
citizenship, of belonging to two patriae formulated by Cicero towards the end of the
republic points to a way of conceptualizing Roman attitudes towards citizenship that was
regularly exercised and exploited by the Roman poltical elite. According to Plutarch,
Cicero was the first member of his family to pursue a poltical career outside of Arpinum.
As a result he was deeply concerned with the current debate about how to reconcile a
commitment to retaining the local particulars of one's individual town with a poltical
career which required increasing incorporation into the Roman elite. Indeed, it is
precisely because of Cicero’s Italian origins and the way in which he negotiates between
these and his identification with the Roman elite and the newly conquered Italian
nobilitas that give added value to his rhetorical writings as cultural texts. In response to
the specific tensions that grow out of this period of Roman history, the final events of the
Pro Cluentio fit neatly into the attractive orderliness imposed by Roman law. Cicero
calls for a public recognition of the full social and civic identity of Cluentius. He asks the
jury:
Conservate A. Cluentium: restituite incolumem municipio: amicis, vincis,
hospitibus...Vestrum est hoc, iudices, vestrae dignitatis, vestrae clementiae: recete
hoc repitur a vobis, ut virum optimum atque innocentissimum plurimisque
mortalibus carissimum atque iucundissimum his aliquando calamitatibus
liberetis, ut omnes intellegant in contionibus esse invidiae locum, in iudiciis
veritati. (LXXI.202)

142 
to deliver Aulus Cluentius, restore him still a citizen to his town: give him back to
his friends, his neighbors and associates, whose enthusiasm you
behold...Yours, gentlemen, is the duty; yours as men of honor and humanity; and
rightly do we require you to free at last from these disasters a good and innocent
man, beloved and cherished by so many of mankind; that thereby all men may
know that public meetings are the place for prejudice, courts of law for truth.
(Cicero, LXXI.202)

That Cicero is intellectually open to anyone becoming a Roman citizen, which includes
within it the possibility of being defined as a person legally, is expressed in the final
moments of the Pro Cluentio. As previously recalled, Brown read Cicero’s oration in an
edition of Hugh Blair's influential rhetorical handbook titled Lectures on Rhetoric and
Belles and Lettres (1782) while studying law in Philadelphia in the early 1790s.
56
Blair's
handbook was the standard text for students of legal oratory in the late eighteenth century
and he singles out Cicero’s speech “as one classical model for the contemporary young
lawyer to emulate” (Nichols, 460). However, as we discussed earlier in this chapter,
Ciceronian elocution undergoes a process of vilification in Brown’s fiction as it is
misappropriated by our Ciceronian anti-ideal, Carwin, the biloquist, whose ability to
“speak where he is not” prompts Theodore to murder. Indeed, if any oration were ever
biloquial or double-tongued it is Cicero’s Pro Cluentio. Hugh Blair's observation that the
speech is very long and complicated is accurate. Moreover, the murderous, dysfunctional
family of Cluentii is the most obvious connection between the oration and Wieland. It is
clear that Cicero’s client, Cluentius, accused of murdering his stepfather, Oppianicus,
who in turn is accused of a wealth of crimes, including fratricide resemblances certain
elements of the plot of Brown’s narrative. But there are more subtle allusions within

56
See Marcia Nichols “Cicero's Pro Cluentio and the Mazy Rhetorical Strategies of Wieland”
460.
143 
each text. Cicero, at one point imagines his client being consumed by a “perniciosissima
flamma” or a (“most devouring blaze”) that threatens the entire community, and at
another, describes the doomed Oppianicus as on the edge of a precipice (Cicero, V.12-
13). Brown’s novel appropriates these figures of speech in its use of consuming fires
(e.g. the charred body of the elder Wieland) and the imagery of the precipice (e.g. Clara,
Carwin, and Pleyel repeatedly present their situations through metaphors drawn from the
American landscape and wilderness). Furthermore, the theme of madness appears in both
texts as well. Cicero’s oration alleges that Sassia is driven by amentia or furor
(“madness”) to destroy her son. Wieland relocates the source of madness from mother to
father, and, as such madness becomes the driving force that destroys father and son. In
addition, most of the murders described in the oration are committed by poison;
metaphorically, Carwin poisons the mind of Theodore Wieland. It is Carwin”s “fiery
image” and “shrill voice” that accosts Theodore from the stairs the night in which he
embarked upon a murderous rampage (Brown, 90). It is Carwin”s rhetorical ability that
is frequently described as a misguided Ciceronian eloquence. As Clara herself observes,
“No man possessed a larger store of knowledge, or a greater degree of skill in the
communication of it to others. Hence he was regarded as an inestimable addition to our
society,” yet his corrupt speech suggests that he is Theodore”s “betrayer” (Brown, 208).
In the final scene of the novel, Clara exposes Carwin as the one whom “counterfeited the
voice and face of an angel for the purpose of destroying thee and me” (Brown, 208). In
so doing, the text suggests that Ciceronian elocution during the late eighteenth century is
associated with verbal deceit, and destruction, but as I have demonstrated in this chapter,
144 
Cicero’s language of abundance is also the language of insufficiency as it fails to
designate racial hierarchies— the very rules for American concepts of slavery and
mastery. As Jared Gardner reveals, “American literature of the late eighteenth century
comes to be defined not only by its cultural uniqueness, but also by its defense of a model
of racial purity” (Gardner, 3-4). Filtered through a racialized lens, the figure of Cicero
and Ciceronian oratory, gleaned from the Roman republic as a site for generating
personhood among members of the American land-owning class, works in a dangerous
way as we saw on the Wieland's estate. Under the weight of the guilt that accompanies
the destruction of native peoples, the horrors of the African slave trade, as well as the
broader political and social issues which led to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts
of 1798, the characters in Brown’s novel seem at a loss.
When justifications for racial otherness were needed, the Roman model of
republican expansion as worked through the medium of Ciceronian elocution is at first
admired and then betrayed through writing in an American context. To label something
“Ciceronian” becomes effectively to summon up unfavorable images of deceitful and
counterfeit eloquence inappropriate for maintaining the complex network of images for
civility and savagery that characterize Brown’s novel as American literature. The
appropriation of Ciceronian oratory in an American context effectively calls up the social
frictions between various classes and races of people that every day interaction does not
and cannot resolve. Standing apart from the way in which ancient elocution and Roman
law seemed to manage societal contradictions by further initiating young men into their
place as members of the landed elite, as evidenced by the closing remarks of Cicero’s Pro
145 
Cluentio, nothing is resolved in Wieland. Clara fails to recognize Carwin's culpability in
the destruction of her family in time, Theodore “plunges Clara”s penknife into his own
neck” after murdering his wife and their two children, as well as attempting to kill Clara,
and Carwin returns to the wilderness from whence he came (230-1). But, in the wake of
these tragedies, “Brown’s novel,” Gardner notes, “remains fundamentally, if confusedly,
committed to the idea of an American identity,” only on the condition that Cicero is, in
some sense, given a proper burial.
57
In the chapter that follows I will examine Brown’s
historical short story “The Death of Cicero, A Fragment” in order to understand precisely
what form this killing off of Cicero might take.

57
Gardner 64.
146 

Chapter Four
A Ciceronian Shadow: Towards a Reading of
“The Death of Cicero, A Fragment”
I learn that Caesar, a long time after Cicero’s death,
paid a visit to one of his daughter's sons; and the boy,
since he had in his hands a book of Cicero’s, was
terrified and sought to hide it in his gown; but Caesar
saw it, and took the book, and read a great part of it
as he stood, and then gave it back to the youth;
saying, “A learned man, my child, a master of words
and a lover of his country.” (Plutarch, Life of Cicero,
XLIX.4)

Chance has given us Cicero in his night-shirt.
(Anthony Trollope, The Life of Cicero, I.395)

The previous chapter endeavored to make the case that what is most is most
striking Charles Brockden Brown’s first published novel, Wieland; Or the
Transformation: An American Tale (1798) is the persistence of the Ciceronian motif and
its bearing upon our understanding of the merits of ancient oratory as an instrument of
social apprenticeship for members of the land-owning, slave-owning class in the U.S.
during the late eighteenth century. Upon the examination of Wieland in light of specific
debates concerning notions of citizenship, personhood, and colonization it became clear
that while Brown’s narratives are ostensibly about the anxieties of post-Revolutionary
America, his writings are also preoccupied with the figure of Cicero as well as what it
means to be rhetorical, what it means to be a master, and a citizen in the early American
republic. Viewed in this way, Cicero’s language of abundance and extravagance is also
the language of insufficiency as it fails to designate a racial hierarchy that can stand firm
147 
in the face of colonial violence, American slavery, and the destruction of native peoples.
At the same time, however, Cicero operates as a vehicle for exploring the complexities
that grow out of specific efforts to locate and identify models of personhood and mastery
during this period of American expansion.
In keeping with the recent critical attention by scholars of American literature, I
recognize that there is no single articulation of U.S. imperialism and a distinct literary
tradition. Rather, such developments encompass events that include the American
Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution as crucial to American
ideas of colonization. What I would like to suggest is that while late eighteenth-century
American imperialism had a range of perspectives and numerous advocates, opponents,
and practitioners, the appropriation of Cicero during this period also brought a renewed
attention to the dynamics of race and race-based slavery as a constituent of the new
nation. As such, the writings of Charles Brockden Brown further sought to understand
the relation between Ciceronian elocution and models of personhood for members of the
gentlemanly class in America.
As Roman legal and rhetorical models suggest, the creation of municipiae and
coloniae involved a high level of intervention on the part of the Roman state in terms of
which communities should become municipia. Nevertheless, in forging individual
constitutions and in passing laws, Rome did not deny the pre-existing cultural, political,
and legal administrative centers of a given territory (Dench, 175). In other words, the
Roman imperial model did not rely upon retraction of the personhood of colonized
peoples to maintain its regime. Moreover the Roman republican period marks a shift in
148 
ancient practices of colonization as it “reflects a new understanding of the world,”
specifically the beginnings of a new sense of Roman identity as a plural concept being
worked out through the medium of Ciceronian oratory (172). Cicero’s Pro Cluentio with
its multiple focal points and locations in Italy and beyond, which include but are not
limited to the events in Larinum, Rome, and Asia Minor, gestures to a kind of thinking
that is classically Roman, namely, the idea that any newly conquered person can
potentially become accepted into the Roman citizen body. Standing apart from this
model, the practices of colonization, slavery, and imperial expansion in early American
society depended upon attempts to categorize, name, label, and classify colonized and
enslaved peoples according to the degrees of color between black and white. Within this
context, in which racial distinctions must be upheld and maintained, Cicero as the
perfectus orator emerges as a problematic figure for he cannot be invoked as a direct
antecedent of New World slavery. As a critic of the appropriation of Ciceronian
elocution as an apt site for generating elite male personhood within a racialized
slaveholding society, Charles Brockden Brown’s Tironic account of “The Death of
Cicero, A Fragment” connects to an implicit commentary on slavery, racism, and
colonization as well as other nefarious practices of the early nineteenth century. To be
sure, this text thematizes the ways in which Roman slavery complicates the issue of
persons as things in a way that does not allow for any narrow delineation of mastery and
slavery. Its portrayal of Tiro brings about a slippage between degrees of civility and
savagery, caught as it is in the contradictions between the Roman model and the
American reality.
149 
“The Death of Cicero, A Fragment” tells the story of Cicero’s last days as he is
pursued by the henchmen of Marcus Antonius, member of the Second Triumvirate. After
declaring Cicero an enemy of Rome due to the publication of his Philippics, Antonius
persuades Octavian and Lepidus, additional members of the Triumvirate, to order his
execution. At first, the narrative appears to be a laudation of Cicero’s devotion to
Stoicism, in particular the notion of Stoic valor, since the orator, weary from flight,
resigns himself to death in spite of the pleadings and objections posed by his slave Tiro.
Rather than acquiesce to Tiro's requests, Cicero orders his attendants to put away their
swords, and he willingly prostrates himself before a certain Papilis Laenas, whom Cicero
once defended in court, executes him on the order of the Triumvirate. According to
Plutarch's parallel Lives, Antonius ordered that Cicero’s hands, his tongue, and head be
placed individually upon the Rostra for Romans to view. It is from the same Rostra that
Cicero had delivered the Philippics, a series of speeches against Antonius and his wife
Fulvia. Brown’s story, however, begins in medias res and is essentially a complete story,
so this begs the question, why he chose to call it “A Fragment.” Scholars of American
literature have suggested that Brown probably intended to include it as part of a larger
project on Cicero’s life.
58
To be sure, this narrative betrays more than an interest on
Brown’s part in acknowledging the emotionally unsettling and dramatic final moments of
Cicero’s life, rather what I find compelling is the way in which the text overturns the
Ciceronian model of elocution and casts, Tiro, the slave, in the role of the orator. With
Tiro telling the story to Atticus, one might conclude that Brown is ambivalent about the

58
See Peter Kafer Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of the American Gothic,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
150 
extent to which the final moments of Cicero’s life conferred a dignified death. Viewing
these issues in light of early nineteenth-century debates about race and slavery, this
chapter will attempt to flesh out some of the broader legal and social issues that inform
Brown’s decision to kill off the Ciceronian model of elocution.
Traditional accounts of the development of early American literature applaud
Brown’s efforts to break away from the British literary past and produce a distinctive
literature. For example, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression
in the Age of Emerson and Whitman celebrates the emergence of Brown’s narratives as
the origin of a canon-forming American literature. Regarded as preserving liberal culture
from the “crass materialism and shallow rationalism of American capitalism,” Brown’s
writings are credited with marking the inception of a national literature that will
“ultimately flourish and reach its fullness of a truly communal voice in the works of
Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman” (Matthiessen, 84). However, recent critics such as
John Carlos Rowe interestingly argue that Brockden Brown, as a canonical writer,
moves instead towards a different sort of telos; namely the spread of U.S. imperial
expansion into Mexico, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Within this darker scheme, as
Rowe points out, early American writers like Brown offer “subtle endorsements of the
imperial policies of the young republic as it expanded westward” (Rowe, 50). This
reading sets out to revise the understanding of Brown’s narratives put forth by
Matthiessen by drawing attention to the full scope of Brown’s efforts as an essayist,
editor, historian, and fiction writer during this period. In so doing, I will foreground the
central concerns about the role of race, slavery, and the removal of indigenous peoples
151 
that were being discussed within legal and political circles of the early nation. In this I
will follow Peter Kafer's suggestion that Brown’s works serve as a “touchstone for
understanding” the “cultural transformations and conflicts of the early republic” (Kafer,
x-xvii). I aim to contribute to these analyses by pointing to the ways in which classical
contexts are in conversation with race and citizenship in early nineteenth-century
America.
In 1800 Charles Brockden Brown published “The Death of Cicero, A Fragment”
as part of a second printing of his novel Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep Walker. In
his prefatory remarks Brown notes that the “more suitable” topics for the American novel
are “the incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of western wilderness” (Brown, 4).
He continues, “for a native of America to overlook these, would admit of no apology.
These, therefore are the ingredients of this tale” (4). Scholars of American literature have
yet to determine the extent to which the inclusion of Brown’s short story on Cicero, as
part of this edition, is related to the novel's project as a meditation on how the very
concepts of race, civility, and savagery play an important role in the formation of
personhood and the development of early American literature. To be sure, the re-telling
of Cicero’s flight and demise in “The Death of Cicero” has much to say about this
particular linkage as it invokes the complex status of persons as materials in ancient
Rome and Ciceronian oratory and questions the adequacy of these models from antiquity
to interpret the reality of the New World. Within this final chapter, then, this dissertation
comes full circle, returning to its founding query, that is, the attempt to think about the
ways in which unsettled notions of personhood, law, and slavery in the nineteenth
152 
century are being conceived and negotiated through the medium of Ciceronian oratory
and the figure of Cicero. It seeks to bring out the ambivalence that admirers of Cicero—
the perfectus orator, advocate, master, vir bonus, Pater Patriae, and statesman—had to
betray through writing in an American context.
According to the Roman imperial historian Tacitus, Cicero was slain on
December 5, 43 B.C.E.
59
He was in his sixty-fourth year. There is a wide range of
material on Cicero’s death. In fact, in the ancient sources alone, one finds lengthy
narrative accounts by Livy, Velleius, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch and Cassius Dio as
well as a number of brief references recorded in various declamation exercises,
fragments, and passages from Greek and Roman rhetoricians of the late republic and
early principate.
60
It is worth noting some of the details of the accounts given by Livy,
Plutarch, and Cassius Dio in order to better discern how Charles Brockden Brown’s
fictional narrative simultaneously engages with and departs from this material.
In Book 120 of Livy's Periochae the account of Cicero’s final moments alternates
between Cicero’s resignation to and bravery in death. Writing during the principate, Livy
describes Cicero as growing “weary of both flight and life” and characterizes the
perfectus orator as being surrounded by “loyal slaves who were ready to fight for him
bravely and faithfully” (Livy, cxx). In contrast to Plutarch”s biography written in the
following century, Livy sets out to preserve Cicero’s image of mastery. He recounts how

59
See Publius Cornelius Tacitus, A Dialogue on Oratory 17.2
60
For a detailed analysis of the evidence concerning Cicero”s death and its function within
ancient declamation exercises, see Erik Gunderson Declamation, Paternity and Roman Identity:
Authority and the Rhetorical Self. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.
153 
Cicero ordered his slaves to put down their weapons and “endure with patience whatever
an adverse fate should compel” (cxx). As if to illustrate that point, “Cicero leaned out of
the litter and offered his neck unmoved, his head was cut off” (cxx). Marking the violent
end of the Roman republic alongside the disorder that leads to the principate, Cicero’s
dead body is later resurrected in the writings of Plutarch.
For Plutarch, it is Cicero’s unrestrained “love of power,” “craving for honor,” and
“hatred for Antonius” that leads to his downfall. In his account, Cicero’s death comes
about because he first refuses an invitation to join Antonius in the Senate and then
accuses the triumvir of having mounted a plot against him (Plutarch, XLIII.2-6). On
these grounds, “Antonius was indignant at the implication” and in retaliation, “sent
soldiers to bring Cicero or burn down his house” (XLIII.7). However, it was not until
Antonius, Lepidus, and Octavius formed the Second Triumvirate in 43 B.C.E. that
Cicero’s name made it to the top of the list of men “who must be put to death” (XLVI.2-
6). Once the soldiers arrived, Cicero, “looked straight at the murderers. His haggard
appearance and unshaven face, wasted with anxiety, caused most of them to hide their
own heads while Herennius murdered him” (XLVIII.3-6). The execution of Cicero, here,
was carried out by a centurion named Herennius, who "cut off his head and his hands" by
Antonius' command. Then the head and hands were to be placed over the ships” beaks
on the Rostra, a sight that made the Romans shudder” (XLIX.3).
Plutarch's Life of Cicero strategically transforms the image of the rhetorical
Cicero, a man of eloquence and nobility, into a historical Cicero brought down because of
a tragic flaw, namely, an unbridled desire for renown. “Wasted with anxiety,” “haggard,”
154 
and “unshaven,” Plutarch”s biographical sketch renders Cicero impotent and strips him of
his role of master with manifest auctoritas (XLVII.3-6). In addition, Cicero’s physical
dismemberment enacts the metaphorical assault he directed at Antonius' honor. It can
also be understood as a gesture that makes literal the end of Ciceronian eloquence as the
Plutarchan account is regarded by scholars of ancient rhetoric as explicitly based on
Tiro's version of Cicero’s death.
61
Moreover, it signifies the diminishing the role of the
orator during the principate when political decision-making resided in the figure of the
emperor. Cicero himself anticipates this transition in the Brutus when he remarks, “Sic
Q. Hortensi vox exstincta fato suo est, nostra publico” (“The voice of Hortensius was
silenced by his own death, mine by the death of the republic”) (Cicero, XCVI.328).
Cicero was unable to master the rules of a new imperial regime, thus the figuration of his
mutilated body in Plutarch's iteration thematizes the ailing condition of the late republic,
which was already being ripped apart by a series of wars and disputes over the vast
importation of wealth in the form of land and slaves. The spectacle of Cicero’s
dismemberment, then, is being invoked here as a metaphor for the republic's poor health
without a possible cure.

61
See Matthew B. Roller, “Color-Blindness: Cicero”s Death, Declamation, and the Production of
History” in (Classical Philology 92, 1997) 119. See also William C. McDermott, “M. Cicero and
M. Tiro” in Historia: Zeitschrift fur Alte Geschichte, (Vol. 21, No. 2, 1972) 269. As McDermott
points out, “The vivid details of Cicero”s assassination were already well known in the Augustan
age, and they have all the indications of an eye-witness account. Moreover in the three accounts
extant there are only minor inconsistencies. Certainly then the account is based largely on Tiro.
He could have questioned those who were present, but I think it more likely that he accompanied
Cicero on that fatal day. He then may have been with those slaves who, according to Livy and
Plutarch, were ready to defend their master.”
155 
The late imperial historian Cassius Dio (c. 155 C.E. or 163 C.E.-229 C.E.) stages
Cicero’s death in a way that emphasizes the bodily undoing of ancient rhetoric. For
Cicero is dismembered at the outset of his account, which exposes the limits of Roman
oratory as embedded in bodily practice and weakens the attitudes of social mastery that
accompany the orator's physical deportment. For example, Cassius Dio reports:
When the head of Cicero was brought to the triumvirs (for he was captured and
killed while fleeing), Antonius heaped many bitter reproaches on it, and then
ordered that it be put in a more conspicuous place than others on the Rostra, so
that in the place where Cicero had been heard speaking against himself it might be
seen, together with the right hand, as that also had been cut off. Before it was
removed Fulvia took the head in her hands, and after abusing it with bitter words
and spitting upon it, placed it on her knees, opened the mouth, drew out the
tongue, and pierced it with pins that she used in dressing her hair, all the time
heaping disgusting epithets upon it. (Cassius Dio xlvii.8)

Cassius Dio departs from the accounts given by Livy and Plutarch and condemns Cicero
for his explicit cowardice as “he was captured and killed while fleeing” (xlvii.8). He not
only inverts the notion that the orator's skillful elocution corresponds to social dominance
by turning him into an emblem of ultimate powerlessness in the wake of Antonius' “bitter
reproaches” and Fulvia's “bitter words” and “disgusting epithets,” but also uses this scene
of Antonius' rage to translate this event into a symbol of Ciceronianism as failed
eloquence, which is concretized in Fulvia's decision to “open [his] mouth, draw out [his]
tongue, and pierce it with the pins she used to dress her hair” (xlivii.8). Taken together,
these examples demonstrate that the relationship between ancient Greek and Roman
writers and the death of Cicero is vexed. Each text becomes an interface that marks the
movement of Cicero from individual elite male orator to the archetypal perfectus orator,
who represents everything that is “good” and “right” about Rome (e.g. patriotism,
156 
erudition, mastery, dignitas, pietas, gravitas, and so on) to subverter of the state, a
transgressor, and rival of Antonius. Thus, Charles Brockden Brown’s encounter with the
shifting narratives of the ancient world concerning Cicero would have been complex.
As previously recalled, Brown began his careful reading of Cicero and Ciceronian
lore under the instruction of Robert Proud between his tenth and sixteenth year.
62
He
was taught “cherish Cicero” while studying law in 1787, but soon found that the
prescriptions of ancient oratory as a discipline failed to designate a racial hierarchy
suitable for maintaining social roles in a New World slave society.
63
In Brown’s
narrative, Cicero’s mutilated body dramatizes the inadequacy of models from antiquity to
interpret the social, political, and economic conditions of the new nation. The Revolution
had allowed America to escape the corruption of England's commercial society, but with
the growth of its own capitalist economy and its reliance on the practice of slavery, the
new republic soon faced a similar threat. Attempting to reconcile the classical notion of a
republic with the reality of American society in 1800, the dismemberment of Cicero in
Brown’s text articulates the culture's contradictory response to the appropriation of
Ciceronian oratory as a means to instruct. Indeed, with the rise of free blacks in the
North and the failed conspiracy of 1800 led by Gabriel Prosser, which was designed to
murder the residents of Richmond, along with the influx of 2,000 free refugees from
Saint Domingue to Philadelphia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,

62
John McCarthy, Fantasy and Reality: An Epistemological Approach to Wieland. New York:
Bern and Lang 1974.
63
See Alan Axelrod, Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale, Austin: University of Texas
Press 1983.
157 
the land-owning class was deeply concerned over the possibility of social unrest. As a
result, Brown’s fictional narratives struggled to understand what “America” could
possibly mean, especially in terms of a literature which was distinctively American.
The stakes are considerable for Brown’s short story as his primary concern is to
identify models of personhood from antiquity suitable to educate members of the new
nation in the proper duties of living in a modern republic. Describing himself as a “story-
telling moralist,” Charles Brockden Brown believed that his fictional writings would be
useful in reforming society.
64
But, as previously discussed, the inability to stabilize the
dictates of ancient rhetorical education in a racialized slave society gives way to a
narrative that is torn between two opposing views towards slavery, race, and
colonization. As such, Cicero’s “severed head” is one way in which Brown’s text
attempts to resist the emplotment of Roman elocution. For Tiro himself admits that as he
“gazed upon the mutilated figure, his power of utterance suspended” (Brown, 222).
Moreover, Tiro explains:
My master, perceiving the approach of the tribune, held forth his head as if to
facilitate the assassin's office. One blow severed the devoted head! No sooner
had it fallen, than the troop set up an horrid shout of exultation. Laenas grasped
the hair and threw the head into a large bag, held open by one of his companions
for that purpose. All passed in a moment. Nothing but the headless trunk,
stretched upon the floor of the litter, which floated in blood remained. (Brown
221-2)

Despite the repeated invocations of Cicero in the nineteenth-century American context,
the restaging of his dismemberment enacts the very difficulty of fully representing Cicero
as an exemplary model within Brown’s writings. Let us recall, the establishment of the

64
See Charles Brockden Brown, “Walstein's School.” The Rhapsodist and Other Uncollected
Writings. Edited by Harry R. Warfel (New York: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1943) 135.
158 
pavilion or temple that Theodore Wieland built. It was sacred to Cicero, whose bust he
purchased from an “Italian adventurer” and placed it upon a “pedestal opposite the
harpsichord” (Brown, 24). Theodore's devotion to Cicero is similar to the elder
Wieland's fierce loyalty to the Judeo-Christian God. He “collected all of the editions and
commentaries that could be procured,” employing “months of severe study in exploring
and comparing them” in order to “settle and restore the purity of the text” (25). Indeed,
“the chief object of Theodore's veneration was Cicero” and “even the divinity of Cicero
was contested” among the Wielands' neoclassical society (25-6). But just as Wieland
associates Ciceronian elocution with Carwin's biloquistic abilities in order to diminish his
status as a cultural model, the inability to synthesize ancient and New World ideas about
citizenship and personhood push Cicero off of his pedestal in this text as well.
Stripped of any natural configurations of authority, the reader is given an
unsettling image of Cicero in the piece's final scene as “nothing but a headless trunk,
stretched upon the floor of the litter, which floated in blood remained” (Brown, 222). To
be sure, the fragment acknowledges the ambivalence of the text's dénouement, which
leaves the narrative open ended. Tiro is entirely uncertain about the nature of Cicero’s
response to death. “He should have seen escape as his duty,” Tiro asserts, “he thwarted
or frustrated the measures conductive to his safety” (222). Only to conclude that Cicero
had been right to “serenely wait for death, and encounter it with majestic composure”
after all (223). In either case, the text's uneasy examination of Cicero as the perfectus
orator renders him as the ideal and anti-ideal of Roman eloquence. And this pattern of
159 
ambivalence in “The Death of Cicero” concerning the Roman model continues to emerge
within this short story.
The narrative's depiction of Cicero as intelligent, firm, and courageous coexists
with an image of a weakened Cicero, “owing, probably, to the deadly sickness with
which the tossing of the billows never failed to afflict him” (Brown, 211). To be sure, at
times Brown’s narrative distorts Quintilian's model, which asserts that proper control of
the elite male orator's body is a display of one's rights and privileges as a vir bonus with
manifest auctoritas and mastery. In so doing, Cicero’s frailty seems to suggest that the
state of ancient elocution in an early nineteenth-century American context has been
relegated to a diseased condition. It reveals the ways in which the rigors of American
slave law do not allow for the transmission of Ciceronian oratory and Roman notions of
slavery. Furthermore, Cicero’s reversal of fortune also underscores the text's
ambivalence concerning this very issue. For example, upon the arrival of Cicero and his
servants to Circoeum, Tiro remarks:
Every one's eyes were fixed upon those venerable features. To behold one, so
illustrious, one that had so lately governed the destinies of mankind, seated on the
pinnacle of human greatness, and encompassed with all the goods of fortune, thus
reduced to the condition of a fugitive and out-law, stretched upon the bare earth,
in this wretched hovel, affected all of us alike. Every bosom seemed to swell with
the same sentiment, and required the relief of tears. (Brown 212)

Transformed from the powerful to the victimized, Cicero, formerly “seated on the
pinnacle of human greatness” is at once “reduced to the condition of a fugitive and out-
law” on account of the upheaval and instability of the late republic (Brown, 212). In
conjuring this dimension, Brown’s narrative invites the reader to further examine the
final moments of Cicero’s life as an allusion to the crumbled glories of Rome and
160 
particularly to the unsuitability of Theodore”s revered Cicero as a model of personhood
formation. It calls attention to oratory”s suspect traces, to its ability to lead to endless
infighting among political elites. And further reminds us of the pejorative view of
Ciceronian elocution as a kind of verbal persuasion that is at best politically troubling,
and at worst a dangerous practice. Cicero’s death in an insurrection on account of his
Philippics, then, does not bode well for American neoclassicism symbolized in the
Wieland”s neoclassical enlightened republic on Schuylkill.
Moreover, Brown’s short story cannot rest with the possibility of a Cicero who
“wast crushed in the ruins of Rome” (Brown, 223). For the text quickly restores Cicero
to his role as the exemplary model of Roman patriotism and “saviour of Rome and of
Italy” (214). In the scene that follows, Tiro continues to plead with Cicero to agree to his
plan of escape. “Nothing was easier than to have fled to the shore; to have embarked in
the Sicilian vessel, and quickly to have moved ourselves beyond the reach of our
enemies,” the slave maintains (222). He asks whether Cicero is “willing to sacrifice”
Rome “to parricides and traitors” by “inviting infamous assassins to his bosom” (218). In
so doing, Tiro subtly calls attention to Cicero’s honorific title Pater Patriae (“Father of
the Fatherland”), which was conferred upon him by the Senate in 63 B.C.E. in
recognition for the suppression of the Catiline conspiracy. Only this is challenged by the
current condition of “his wretched life,” “skulking from ungrateful foes, among rocks and
woods,” which suggests a certain resignation on Cicero’s part. Nevertheless, Cicero
concludes, “all that remains is to die with firmness and with dignity” (214). This
decision displays the orator”s bravery as an upright, well-bred, and virtuous man.
161 
In spite of being alienated and threatened, Cicero is portrayed as a benevolent
slaveholder as well. During a moment of reflection, Tiro describes his “beloved master”
as looking upon his slaves and attendants with “an air of inexpressible benignity”
(Brown, 212). As if to console them, Cicero remarks:
My friends, be not discomposed. My life has been sufficiently long, since I have
lived to reap the rewards of virtue. Those evils must indeed be great, which
would not be compensated by these proofs of your affection. I need extort from
you no other testimony of the equity and kindness of my treatment of you, than
the fidelity and tenderness with which you have adhered to me in my distress.
(Brown 212)

By characterizing Cicero as one who treats his slaves with “equity and kindness,” this
passage foregrounds a very personal element of Roman slavery, that is, Cicero’s unique
relationship with Tiro, and thereby softens certain attitudes that social mastery is
governed by dispassion and insensitivity. According to Roman historians, the date of
Marcus Tullius Tiro's birth is uncertain. From Jerome it can be dated to 103 B.C.E.,
which would make Tiro slightly younger than Cicero, but in Epistula VII.II to Atticus,
Cicero refers to Tiro as a young man in 50 B.C.E. Since Tiro's writings are not extant,
this issue remains unresolved.
65
What is known, however, is that Tiro was raised as a
slave in Cicero’s household in Arpinum and came with Cicero’s family to Rome.
Whether or not Tiro was a slave born in the home (verna) or purchased at an early age is
uncertain, but his responsibilities while living with Cicero included taking dictation,

65
See Jerome, Chronological Tables 194.1.
162 
checking Cicero’s references, revising passages of various orations, and managing
Cicero’s financial affairs.
66

William C. McDermott observes that Cicero mentions Tiro in sixty-three letters
and many of these epistles are addressed to Tiro himself (McDermott, 260). He also
points out that in one of the first references, namely, Epistula XIX, Cicero notes that he is
dictating to Tiro (“Hoc inter cenam Tironi dictavi”) (McDermott, 262). Atticus is
reported to have consulted Tiro in order to inquire about the dowry of Cicero’s wife,
Terentia, which not only supports the claim that Tiro was entrusted with managing
Cicero’s financial matters, but also serves as an indication of his close involvement with
Cicero’s personal affairs (Cicero, 12.19.4). Cicero also recounts, in Book XVI of
Epistulae ad Familiares that Tiro, “while resting at the Tusculan villa, looked for a new
tenant-farmer, arranged for more water from a neighboring aqueduct, and was
cataloguing some books” (16.18.20). The central point here is that by citing these
indications of Tiro's gracious servile contributions I do not mean to deny or minimize the
harsh conditions of Roman slavery. Rather I am trying to isolate a way of thinking about
servitude which allows for the conferral of personhood upon those excluded from certain
rights granted to Roman citizens without rendering them unfit for claims to individual
privileges. Such thinking accounts for Tiro”s exchange with Atticus, but it is also made
clear by his role as literary assistant and editor of Cicero’s writings during this period.
Moreover, as McDermott concludes, “Tiro was thoroughly trained intellectually”
and this was in fact quite common, for “Atticus also trained his slaves as secretaries and

66
For a sustained discussion of Tiro, see William C. McDermott, “M. Cicero and M. Trio” in
Historia: Zeitschrift fur Alte Geschichte (Vol. 21, No. 2, 1972) 259-286.
163 
for other useful occupations” (McDermott, 264). By offering a different version of
servitude, Roman civilization presents an alternative way of seeing persons as property
that American patricians could not deny. Having been educated in the classical tradition,
Brown’s text betrays an awareness of the ways in which the Roman model comes back
and asserts itself despite so much difference between both slave-holding societies. In
“The Death of Cicero,” then, Tiro functions as part of this broader pattern of ambivalence
that shows itself in Brown’s writings concerning the extent to which the Roman model is
suitable for maintaining social roles between masters and slaves in America. The text's
designation of Tiro as narrator is another attempt to kill off Ciceronian rhetoric despite its
elevated status in the nineteenth-century. Brown's act of killing off Cicero has its basis in
the language of late eighteenth-century and early to mid nineteenth-century American
slave law. In fact, section VI.318 of The American Slave Code reads, "Chattels are not
educated! And if human beings are to be held in chattlehood, education must be withheld
from them." If we follow the logic of American slave law, where the slaves' literacy is
both illegal and outlawed, then we will better discern precisely what kind of personhood
Brown's epistolary narrative envisions for slaves.
In 1740 the Supreme Court of South Carolina passed an act prohibiting the
education of slaves. It states:
Whereas having slaves taught to write, or sufferint them to be employed in
writing, may be attended with great inconveniences; Be it encacted, that all and
every person or persons whatsoever, who shall hereafter teach or cause any slave
or slaves to be taught to write, or shall use or employ any slave as a scribe, in any
manner of writing whatsoever, hereafter taught to write, every such person shall
for every such offense, forefit the sum of one hundred pounds current money.
(The American Slave Code, Section VI.319)
164 
By insisting upon the infliction of a penalty upon those persons who "teach or cause any
slave or slaves to write" or "use any slave as a scribe," The Code's prohibition points to
the inability of the law to prohibit such instruciton. As part of a strategy concerned with
maintaining the subordination and degredation of enslaved persons, The Code reveals that
the central theme of the slaves' oratory presented in Brown's Tironic account of Cicero's
death was already being addressed by American slave law. Furthermore, various
restrictions on slave gatherings and the infliction of punishment on those who helped
slaves for the purpose of "mental instruction" became more sever at the turn of the the
century. For example, in 1800 The Code records another act put forth by the Supreme
Court of South Carolina regarding the education of slaves and free blacks. It maintians:
That assmeblies of slaves, free negores, mulattoes and mistizoes, whether
composed of all or of any such description...and a portion of white persons meet
together for the purpose of mental instruction, in a confined or secret place, are
declared to be an unlawful meeting; and magistrates are hereby requried to enter
such confined places and break doors, if resisted, and to disperse such slaves and
free negroes; and the officiers dispersing such unlawful assemblage may inflict
such corporal punishement, not exceeding twenty lashes, upon such slaves and
free negroes as they may judge nedessary for deterring them from such unlawful
assemblage in the future. It shall not be lawful for any number of slaves, free
negroes, mulattoes, or mestizoes, even in company with white persons for the
persons, to meet together for the purpose of mental instruction, either before the
rising of the sun, or after the going down of the same. (The American Slave Code,
Section VI.320)

What is striking about this scene is the violence that accompanies this episode of
instruction. The permission ot "break doors" and "inflict corporal punishement, not
exceeding twenty lashes" indicates that laws so rigorous and excessive were needed to
defend the interests of the ruling planter class. The increasing severity of the law over
time reflects that these statues were ineffective and therefore the penalties had to be
165 
increased. In 1819, the commonwealth of Virginia, for example, established that "twenty
lashes" must be inflicted upon slaves "at any such school or schools for teaching them
reading or writing" (VI.320). Besides the laws that govern each state, towns and cities
often developed ordinances on this subject by consulting the laws that proceeded it. A
Savannah ordinance in 1820, for instance, ruled that "every person who shall keep a
school or teach reading or writing is subject to a fine of thirty dollars, or to be imprisoned
ten days, and whipped thrity-nine lashes" (VI.321). Or, North Carolina in 1823, where
this law is qualified so that the fine is reported to be "two hundred dollars" if a white
person teaches a slave to read or write, or sell or give him any book," but if the offender
is black, the penalty is thirty-nine lashes, or imprisonment" (VI.321). And, in Louisana,
"the penalty for teaching slaves to read and write" is "one year's imprisonment" (VI.322).
In other words, by examining the language of The American Slave Code we are able to
see how the laws that sought to prohibit the literacy of slaves were interrelated in order to
ensure the social support of enslaved Africans so that "they would then be on a level with
the beast of the field" (VI.323). But, Brockden Brown's shift to Roman society for the
dramatic action of his narrative shows an awarness of a lesson that the Romans
understood, which American patricians could not ignore, namely, that it is folly to think
about denying literacy and orality to a slave.

Tiro, the noble and highly educated slave, is repeatedly associated with the
virtuous deeds and skillful speech that characterize free men. For example, his bravery is
displayed within the opening scenes of the narrative. Indeed, as part of Cicero’s flight,
his servants set out to cross an angle of the forest in Circoeum, but as they continue,
166 
Chlorus, a slave from Cicero’s Cuman Villa makes his way into the company and warns
“that the army of Brutus had revolted, and that a diligent search was being made for
Cicero” (Brown, 213). In the wake of this “mournful news,” Tiro and the other slaves
determine that the best course of action is to “defend [their] master at the expense of
[their] own lives” (213). Moreover, after learning that twenty soldiers of Antonius”
command violently rushed into Cicero’s villa at Arpinum, “striking their swords against
the furniture and pictures,” Tiro designed a plan “to procure a vessel which might carry
[them] without delay to Sicily” (216). Even though he admits that “these tidings shewed
the magnitude and nearness of the danger,” Tiro nevertheless, “calls some of the most
faithful servants together, and charges them to guard the safety of their master” (216). In
addition, Tiro sees to it that Cicero’s litter “was surrounded with sixteen domestics well
armed. All of them had been, during many years, personal attendants on their lord, and
were eager to shed their blood in his defense” (219). To be sure, Tiro's brave attempt to
divert the assassins from their design to murder Cicero is yet another instance that
displays how the socially inferior in Rome could nevertheless overcome their so-called
vices and gain qualities that belong to the dominant class through the advancement of
rhetorical education. Tiro's actions, then, may be seen to stand not in opposition to
virtuous deeds of the Roman elite, but alongside it.
Worthy of his master's lessons in great oratory, Tiro addresses this epistolary
narrative to Atticus, an established member of the Roman nobilitas as well as an
interlocutor in Cicero’s Brutus who often visited Cicero at his villa in Tusculum. He tells
Atticus:
167 
The task of relating the last events in the life of my beloved master, has fallen
upon me. His last words reminded me of the obligation, which I had long since
assumed, of conveying to his Atticus a faithful account of his death. Having
performed this task, life will cease to be any longer of value. (Brown 209)

As we discussed in chapter two, slaves who speak like free men are rare. Thus Quintilian
insists that properly educated elite men speak well and responsibly as opposed to the
continuous flow of random talk which characterizes the language of slaves. But what we
have in this passage thematizes a certain Janus-like duality as Tiro's speech is presented
as being the product of both a close association with Cicero, his “beloved master,” as
well as a person who is properly educated and capable of assuming responsibility for a
particular task, that is “of conveying to his Atticus a faithful account of Cicero’s death”
(209). This quotation confirms that Roman rhetoric could effectively transform a thing
into a person, when necessary. Even Quintilian demands that slaves and freedmen,
despite the realities of their social status “should become models of elite manhood.”
67

This is especially true for those charged with the function of a tutor (paedagogus) or
grammarian (grammaticus) as their role is crucial in the development of a Roman youth.
In fact, when confronted with the necessities that put slaves in control over certain
aspects of education for young elites, Roman rhetoricians chose to “re-make their natures
to emphasize that under proper supervision slaves can become perfect exemplars of
manly responsibility.”
68
To be sure, Tiro is one such exemplar. His “supplications and
remonstrances” are so persuasive that Cicero “makes no resistance,” and agrees to be

67
See Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 2.2.3-4 and Columella, Rural Life, (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1941) 1, 5-6.
68
See William Fitzgerald, Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2000) 69-114.
168 
placed in the litter and led into the garden in order to escape being overtaken by the
soldiers (219). When he perceives that his “master's resolution is beginning to falter,”
Tiro takes an assertive stance as he declares:
I called up the images of his brother, his son and his nephew, of Cassius, Brutus
and Pompeius. I painted the effect which the tidings of his death would produce in
them...and with their humiliation and terror, I contrasted the exultation of his
enemies, to whose malice he was thus making himself a voluntary victim. (Brown
218-9)

Absent of the kind of “brutality” and “slavish reserve” that is supposed to characterize the
speech of the servile classes, Tiro's skillful elocution complicates the vocal practices
associated with slaves (Dugan, 192). As McDermott points out, “Tiro was extremely
learned. With Cicero as his magister, he had a comprehensive training in literature and
philosophy, and learned enough in the areas of rhetoric and oratory which Cicero had
received to make him a fluent writer” (275). In addition, by reminding the reader of
Cicero’s close relationship with Pompey, who fought against Julius Caesar to preserve
the republic as well as the deeds of Marcus Iunius Brutus, the most famous of Caesar”s
assassins and descendant of Lucius Iunius Brutus, the founder of the Roman republic in
509 B.C.E., Tiro sets out to praise Cicero’s commitment to republican ideals, only to
raise doubts prompted by the basis of his loyalty as he is now “making himself a
voluntary victim” of those who oppose the state (219). This inability to praise Cicero’s
actions further exhibits the pattern of ambivalence of the text's relation to the Roman
model. In many ways Tiro's difficulty enacts the way in which the text is simultaneously
attracted and disturbed by Cicero.
169 
What is more, the examination of the appropriation of models from antiquity that
inform the nation's culture is further carried out in Brown’s narrative as it attempts to
explain precisely what kind of relationship existed between Tiro and Cicero in the ancient
world. Their bond is uniquely characterized around sentiments of friendship, affection,
and esteem. For Cicero often refers to him as “my dear Tiro” or “my friend” and Tiro
treasures Cicero as his “beloved master” (209, 212, 214). Moreover, Cicero treats Tiro
with special restraints and care. For example, after the soldiers of Antonius are recalled,
Tiro rushes into Cicero’s chamber and awakens him with the fatal news. “On recovering
his recollection, and finding [Tiro] beside him,” Cicero, “looked at [him] and said: How
is it with thee, my Tiro? With me all is well. I have slept soundly, and am prepared to
meet the worst” (217). The supposed view of the cunning slave and exasperated master
in undone here. Tiro is depicted as possessing positive qualities of personhood such as
honesty, devotion, and loyalty yoked as it is to the fact that he is property.
Cicero also responds favorably to Tiro for he is comforted by “finding Tiro beside
him,” and further recognizes the slave as a rational being (217). This moment takes us
back to an earlier point I expressed in chapter one, that is, whether a thing or a person, a
slave was not strictly treated as such in Roman law. Moreover, Brown’s narrative
discloses an awareness of this aspect of Roman slavery, and in staging this moment as
part of his account of Cicero’s death, the Ciceronian model calls into question the
working dichotomy of American slave law, which construes slaves as a degraded race of
black nonpersons. Roman slavery, then, did not rely upon the juridical decimation of
personhood that The American Slave Code understood as domestic slavery. Tiro is
170 
regarded as a slave, but he nevertheless retains positive qualities that add to his value as a
special property item within Cicero’s familia. On these conditions, then, Tiro's
uniqueness should be examined in terms of his attachment to Cicero.
Tiro's loyalty and devotion to Cicero are displayed in various scenes within the
narrative. For example, upon his departure from Astura, Tiro maintains that Cicero “was
too much absorbed in reflections connected with his fallen fortunes, to think of food”
(212). Therefore, Tiro “determines to travel to Circoeum” in order to purchase the
necessary items, as well as “ascertain what danger was to be dreaded from this quarter”
(212). For he admits that “the task of consulting and deciding for the welfare of Cicero
and his servants, had entirely devolved upon him” (212). And, by performing this
“charge” with “circumspection and zeal,” Tiro is portrayed both as belonging bodily to
his master and as having a will of his own (212). This moment is not so much about
Tiro”s education and training, but about the intimate knowledge a slave may have about
his master. Tiro is aware of Cicero’s weakened emotional state, “absorbed” as he is “in
reflections of his fallen fortunes,” and this knowledge prompts Tiro make decisions that
will benefit Cicero. In rendering this historical account in a nineteenth-century context,
one cannot deny that Tiro is treated as a person even if he is not accorded the full rights
or status of citizens in Roman law.
In a separate but related way, the reality of the Roman model asserts itself once
again within another scene of devotion. This occurs during the moments that follow the
assassins' discovery of Cicero’s whereabouts. Upon their arrival to his villa, Tiro takes
up arms, and resolves that “it is his duty to save Cicero” and is “willing to preserve his
171 
life even at the hazard of offending him beyond forgiveness” (220). Standing before the
soldiers of Antonius with upright posture and an unwavering gaze, Tiro “prepared to
conduct himself not agreeable to Cicero’s directions,” leads Cicero to put a halt to his
insubordination as he exclaims, “What! Am I fallen so low as to be trampled on by
slaves? Desist, this moment!” (220). This episode reveals a similar problem that Cicero
encountered when making a case for iniuria in the Pro Roscio Comoedo, namely, that
one cannot unravel the knot of complicity and reciprocity that exists between one that
calls himself a master and the one who responds as slave without dealing with the
stratification of Roman society. Cicero’s command, then, restores the dominant order and
thereby reinforces the position, place, and rank that accompanies each social role. It also
demonstrates how certain contradictions and unsettled notions about personhood are
irreducible within both slave-holding societies.
What is more, Tiro's slavishness mutates into more acceptable qualities of
fidelity and obedience within another scene of attachment. His concern here is to ensure
that Cicero, as the preserver of the state, takes flight before his demise. For Tiro himself
maintains, “with the life of Cicero, methought, was entwined the existence of Rome”
(221). Thus in a moving speech, he entreats his master with reverence, and remarks:
I could no longer forbear, but while the tears flowed down my cheeks, I pulled
him by the arm towards the door, and exclaimed: O! Heaven! Does Cicero love
his enemies better than his friends? Shall he seek death because, while he lives,
liberty is not extinguished; because the triumph of the wicked can only be
completed by his death? Has Antony merited so well at your hands, that you are
willing to die, that his ambition may be fully gratified? Is this the issue of your
warfare?...Do you now fall down at his feet, put the poniard in his hand and call
upon him to strike? Thus will mankind regard your conduct when the means of
escape are offered you, when the arms of Sicily and Greece and Asia are ready to
172 
be put into your hand, you reject the gift, you abandon the cause of your country.
(Brown 218)

Tiro's staging of passionate delivery aptly demonstrates Cicero’s account of the embodied
oratorical performance in de Oratore. By delivering his speech “while tears flowed down
his cheeks,” Tiro incorporates the techniques put forth by Cicero in this treatise.
69

According to Cicero, “the audience will not be drawn to feel the emotions until the orator
does so with the proof of his body, the signals (signa) expressed in open pain, a voice
shot through with passion...even tears arising from emotions that affect the speaker more
than his audience” (Cicero, 2.190-91). By foregrounding the question of slave oratory,
Brown’s narrative not only distorts the Ciceronian ideal of the perfectus orator, but also
exposes the inability to stabilize the dictates of ancient Roman oratory in a nineteenth
century context. Tiro's objections to Cicero’s apparent resignation to death at the hands
of Antonius” soldiers further underscores the pattern of ambivalence at work in the text.
One the one hand, Cicero is promoted as the ideal statesman, for “while he lives, liberty
is not extinguished,” but on the other, this quotation retains certain traces of a spineless,
cowardly Cicero whose retreat from Antonius, and rejection of “the means of
escape...arms...and treasures,” renders his greatest efforts vain for he has “abandoned the
cause of his country” (218).

69
According to Cicero in the de Oratore: “unless all the emotions (motus) which the orator
wishes to arouse in the [audience] seem to be stamped and burned into the orator himself, the
audience will not experience the emotion as well” (in ipso oratore impressi esse
atque...videbuntur) 2.189.
173 
In addition, Brown’s narrative hints at an awareness of the way in which the
Ciceronian model carries with it associations of cultural admixture and amalgamation.
This is expressed as Tiro recounts the details of Cicero’s flight. He remarks:
Having parted with his brother, [Cicero] went on board a vessel which lay at
anchor in the road. The master was a Cyprian, ignorant of the Roman language; a
...sailor, whose provincial jargon was luckily understood and spoken by Chlorus,
who was by birth a Cnidian. He served us as interpreter. (Brown 209-10)

By calling attention to the Cyprian's “ignoran[ce] of the Roman language” and later
seeking to amuse himself by watching Chlorus “mimic the accents of the Cyprian
sailor...in his broken Latin,” the text shows that Roman elocution does not always
reproduce patterns of aristocratic personhood that are easily managed and understood in a
way that is reminiscent of Cicero in the Brutus (210-213). When Rome was confronted
with an “ multi inquinate loquentes ex diversis locis” (“influx of many impure speakers
from different places”), Cicero turns to Brutus and Atticus and reminds them of an
anecdote involving a certain Gaius Rusius, an advocate whose position and social
standing “did not succeed in deterring him from using strange and unheard-of words”
(“ne a C. Rusio quidem accusatore deterreri potuit quo minus inusitatis verbis uteretur”)
(Cicero, lxxiv.258-59,60). To this, Brutus inquires:
Quidnam istuc est? inquit Brutus, aut quis est iste C. Rusius? Et ille: Fuit
accusator, inquit, vetus, quo accusante C. Hirtilium Sisenna defendens dixit
quaedam eius sputatilica esse crimina. Tum C. Rusius: Circumvenior, inquit,
iudices, nisi subvenitis. Sisenna quid dicat nescio; metuo insidias. Sputatilica
quid est hoc? sputa quid sit scio, tilica nescio. Maximi risus. (lxxiv.260)

What do you refer to, said Brutus, and who was that Gaius Rusius? He was a
veteran prosecutor, replied Atticus, conducting a case against Gaius Hirtilius,
whom Sisenna was defending. In the course of it Sisenna characterized certain
accusations as “sputatilica”; whereupon Rusius cried out: I am undone, judges,
unless you come to my rescue. What Sisenna is saying I do not understand and I
174 
fear he has laid a trap for me. “Sputatilica!” What is that? “Sputa” I understand,
but “tilica” I do not understand. There was great laughter. (Cicero lxxiv.260)

This passage not only reveals a certain anxiety about the contamination of Roman oratory
by foreign influence, but also suggests that Tiro, in identifying the “broken Latin” of
foreigners, seems to insist on the use of proper speech as a means for social advancement
in a Ciceronian fashion. In so doing, Brown’s text indirectly assimilates the very
configurations of authority, formal speaking, and masculinity central to defining free elite
males in Roman society, that the American context resists incorporating. And the pattern
of ambivalence that is exhibited in “The Death of Cicero” concerning the Roman model
and the person of Cicero is repeated throughout Brown’s writings. For it gestures to the
fear of not being able to stabilize the dictates of ancient rhetorical education in a
racialized slave society, in which literacy and orality are reserved only for the slave
owning class. Tiro's portrayal proves that just as Ciceronian rhetoric can transform a
youth into a Roman citizen, it can also transform a slave into a master. Erasing certain
traces of a servile class over the course of the narrative as he assumes patterns of thought,
habits and posture, gesture and speech that are reserved for the Roman elite, Tiro comes
to embody Cicero literally. Put in another way, Brown’s narrative suggests that the
appropriation of Ciceronian elocution can lead to a revision of power relations between
masters and slaves within an American context. In what follows, I will examine the
persistence of this ambivalent relation to the Ciceronian motif that informs American
culture as well as various literary works by Brown.
In 1805 Charles Brockden Brown published an essay titled, “On the Merits of
Cicero” in the May issue of The Literary Magazine and American Register. This text is
175 
also a meditation on the extent to which Cicero could emerge as a suitable cultural model
of personhood for members of the land-owning class in the nineteenth century American
context. Only in this essay, Cicero’s image as the perfectus orator is replaced by another
Cicero, namely, the “poor philosopher” whom the narrator simultaneously affirms and
negates (Brown, 203). The text begins with the narrator's reflections on a recent attempt
at reading Cicero’s Tusculanae Disputationes (c. 45 B.C.E.). Admiringly, he mentions
that he has “read the greater part of the works of Cicero through...that Cicero, however
great in other respects, was upon the whole, both in theory and practice, but a poor
philosopher” (203). Reversing the utopian image that informs the Ciceronian ideal of the
vir bonus dicendi peritus, the narrator distrusts the usefulness of Cicero as the emblem of
a “wise man” and instead pictures him as being brought down by “vanity” (204). As a
result, he puts forth a series of harsh condemnations that attempt to overturn the
Ciceronian model. He maintains:
The orator appears to me to begin with a pompous maxim, which he cannot
support, and has not the candour to resign. In endeavoring to maintain it, he falls
into pitiful evasions, substitutes brilliancy of expression for solidity of argument,
and in fact deserts the ground on which he had first set out. The dialogue is,
indeed, a complete chaos; a confused collection of assertions, not merely without
proof, but absolutely contradictory to each other; a useless detail of all the
philosophical opinions then known; a compilation of stories, real or
fictitious...and a series of repetitions, which all the eloquence of Cicero cannot
prevent from being tedious. (Brown 204)

Beneath these excessive accusations lies the implication that just as Roman oratory
functions as a sort of failed eloquence in Brown’s writings, Cicero’s brand of Roman
philosophy—tainted as it is by rhetorical ornament and “brilliancy of expression”—fails
to not produce “wise men” of “patriotism” and “benevolence,” capable of making their
176 
own decisions as citizens of the new republic. Moreover, by characterizing the structure
of the dialogue as “complete chaos,” “a confused collection of assertions, not merely
without proof, but absolutely contradictory,” and encumbered by “useless detail of all the
philosophical opinions then known,” the narrator suggests that the pursuit of Roman
philosophy leads to “futile reasoning” that throw into harsh relief a series of arguments
that it does not and cannot resolve (Brown, 204). In addition, Cicero’s vanity marks for
the narrator the extent to which rhetorical prowess may not only corrupt its practitioner,
but “disprove his title to the name of practical philosopher, or wise man” (204). He
continues to illustrate this point by calling attention to:
The vanity which Cicero betrays in quoting his own verses, and then making the
auditor enquire whose they were...is reprehensible. Vanity was a defect in the
character of Cicero too prominent ever to be entirely concealed; the manner in
which it here obtrudes itself may be ridiculous; but in other parts of his writings, it
appears in a very offensive point of view...where he acknowledges that he writes
what he was ashamed to speak; and plainly requests that [a] historian applaud his
public conduct, even beyond what he might think it deserved, and to indulge his
friendship, though at the expense of truth. (Brown 204)

This passage thematizes the disastrous consequences of American pedagogues' over
reliance on Cicero as a model of personhood for the gentlemanly class. Enabling Cicero
to perform himself and exposing the “defect” in the nature of his character, this passage
reveals the narrator”s concern that oratorical training in Cicero’s case leads to an
ethically troubling practice (204). The text shows itself wary of the enthusiasm to be
found in appropriating this figure. This reluctance is evidenced by way in which the
person of Cicero and the medium of Ciceronian oratory operate through verbal deceit, as
Cicero “writes what he was ashamed to speak,” and ethical compromise insofar as he
“plainly requests that [a] historian applaud his public conduct, even beyond what he
177 
might think it deserved” (204). Ultimately, the narrator finds Cicero “unmanly and
extravagant” (204). For one who quite literally embodied Roman virility and moral
rectitude to emerge ambiguously as Brown’s literary texts depict him, both through his
depiction as a “poor philosopher” and through his curious identification with Carwin as
well as his actions in “The Death of Cicero” fragment, suggests a growing awareness of
the irreconcilable tension between the ancient Roman model and American society.
At the same time, however, Brown’s writings are unwilling to relinquish Cicero.
In Wieland, for example, even though Theodore's veneration of Cicero is not for Cicero
the philosopher, but Cicero the orator with manifest mastery and skill at verbal
persuasion, his enthusiasm betrays an excess of admiration for the Roman orator that was
not without some basis in the culture, which I discussed in chapter two. Moreover, the
hillside temple or pavilion in which the bust of Cicero is placed, is the only edifice that
survives the fire which burns Clara's house to the ground, and this suggests that the
Ciceronian model still bears some relevance. Furthermore, with Clara's “habitation
levelled with the ground,” she is obliged to seek a new one (227). The “new” habitation,
is located “on the shore of the ancient world” where although “the memory of the past”
catastrophe did not leave her, nonetheless she remarks, “my heart was reinstated in the
possession of its ancient tranquility” (227). The temple, caging behind its neoclassical
columns, the bust of Cicero, which was initially appropriated by Theodore, Clara, and
Pleyel for their amusement as members of the land-owning class in the wake of colonial
violence and the use of African slaves, now at the end of the novel, so immediately
178 
represents the necessary emotional retreat from the from the early republic's knowledge
of its own nefarious practices.
Clara's removal to the classical world of “ancient tranquility,” then, is a necessity
for the nineteenth-century literary texts as well. The inadequacy of the Ciceronian model
to interpret the reality of the American society pushes the characters in Brown’s fiction
through a complex field of identification in search of suitable sites of personhood
formation. One such territory of paradoxical affirmation and negation concerning the
Ciceronian motif is revealed in an essay published by Brown one month following the
appearance of “On the Merits of Cicero” in The Literary Magazine and American
Register titled, “Ciceronians” (1805).
Set between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, “Ciceronians” takes a scene
from Theodore Wieland”s hillside temple in which “even the divinity of Cicero was
contested” among the Wieland”s neoclassical polity and repeats it in this text as it speaks
of a secret society whose members “formed a sort of fraternity, in which, strictly
speaking, Cicero was a divinity, an object of worship” (Brown, 206). As the narrator
continues:
In some instances, a kind of worship was paid to him; that is, a building was
erected, in the temple fashion, in which a fraternity of classical devotees
assembled, on stated days, when certain portions of his works were read, and
voices and instruments joined in echoing his praise, in presence of his statue.
(Brown 207)

This scene quite obviously resembles Theodore and Pleyel's debates and questionings of
textual purity and Latinity that took place in front of the bust of Cicero beside the
harpsichord in the temple on the Wieland estate. Only in this essay, we are presented
179 
with the unspoken possibility that the votaries of Cicero who “devoted all their studious
and contemplative hours to his works,” and “conceived all his opinions...to be infallibly
true,” are akin to Theodore Wieland's fanaticism and veneration of the Ciceronian model
(206). It is therefore no surprise that they too possess a weakness for the mannered
extravagance and artificiality of Ciceronian rhetoric that characterize its ability to
persuade. What is more, “in all matters relative to language and rhetoric, Cicero was the
master whom they served with the most superstitious fidelity” (206). The implication
here is that the behavior of the devotees is essentially servile, like other characters in
Brown’s writings who are vulnerable to the polish and ornament of ancient rhetoric, they
do not survive. For example, let us recall, how Theodore's passion for Cicero, his
“darling author” is used to suggest that his vulnerability to Ciceronian elocution makes
him a potential victim to the voices of Carwin (25). And this counterfeit eloquence first
incites Theodore to murder and then suicide. But there are dangers here, too: and, at
times one seems at a loss as to which characters are more susceptible to deception.
As if to elaborate upon this point, the Ciceronians regard the language of Cicero
“to be the only medium through which a reasonable being ought to convey his thoughts,”
so they “fled from the society of the living, as if they themselves were already dead;
buried themselves in the grave of their study, and refrained from every kind of reading,
except the works of Cicero” (206). Indeed, when ultimately, the academic study of
ancient rhetoric so weakened the bodies of the Ciceronians, they neared death, and
“appeared in their last agony to be less pleased with the hope of the presence of God, than
of meeting with this demon of eloquence” (206). This characterization of Cicero as a
180 
“demon of eloquence” is juxtaposed with the “admiration” with which the votaries
regarded him. Defining the term demon, the Oxford English Dictionary shows how the
word refers to “a certain divine principle or agency, an inward monitor or oracle.” This
definition is useful for thinking about the problem of recognizing where voices come
from in Brown’s writings as well as the idea of whether any inspired voice or utterance is
persuasive, corrupt, or benevolent. It also points to the ways in which acts of persuasive
speech undergo a process of vilification in Brown’s fiction, which exaggerate and
demonize the ancient orator's ability to persuade within an American context. By
intertwining these opposing views of Cicero and seeking to accommodate these
perspectives within his writings, Brown’s literary texts articulate the culture's
contradictory response to the perfectus orator.
Caught in between the notion that “it was not a single man who had fallen, but the
light of the world that was extinguished” and the reality that “Cicero himself was the
author of his evil destiny,” Tiro's remarks aptly demonstrate the simultaneous
acknowledgement and rejection of the person of Cicero and the medium of Ciceronian
oratory that these texts bring about in attempting to render the figure of Cicero, the ideal
Roman, law giver, slave holder, patrician, senator, advocate, and orator within an
American context. “The Death of Cicero, A Fragment” is Brown’s attempt to think about
the ways in which notions of personhood can be formed and developed within a within an
ancient slaveholding society that did not rely upon the juridical decimation of personhood
and the establishment of racial hierarchies.
181 
The growing awareness of an irreconcilable difference between ancient and New
World slavery gives way to a model of appropriation that seeks to disengage radically
from the Ciceronian model. As this chapter demonstrates, “The Death of Cicero” reveals
that the Roman model in early nineteenth-century America does not directly translate into
the concepts of slavery, mastery, and colonization that presume a connection between
being black and being a slave. Even after the gradual abolition of slavery in
Pennsylvania in 1780, the “commitment towards maintain the slave trade by certain
interested parties was strengthened” (Kolchin, 87). By calling attention to the symbiotic
relation between Cicero and Tiro, Brown’s epistolary narrative complicates the issue of
persons as property further points to the inadequacy of models from antiquity to interpret
the social conditions of the New World. In both ancient Roman law and American law,
slaves undergo a strange transformation, but in each context, the slave occupies a unique
social position and this is because each society envisions radically different kinds of
personhood for slaves.
The primary aim of American slave law was to install racial divisions, to impose
regulations and prohibit certain activities of free people of color, and to ensure that the
link between blackness and slavery remained clear even after emancipation. As such,
Brown’s fiction invokes the Roman model in some ways to challenge the rigid racial
hierarchies in nineteenth-century America. In this chapter I have examined the relation
between Charles Brockden Brown’s fictional narratives and models of personhood from
antiquity. In so doing, Cicero emerges ambiguously in Brown’s fragment, and this
pattern of ambivalence concerning the Roman model is the result of its incompatibility
182 
with the American context. Although Brown’s fiction sets out to celebrate Cicero’s moral
rectitude and eloquence as expressed in his speeches, dialogues, essays, and letters, his
Ciceronian narratives end up questioning the extent to which the model of the vir bonus
is able to maintain its idealized status as the highest exemplar of civic and patrician
values within a racialized slaveholding society. Ciceronian elocution is unable to take
root in nineteenth-century America most likely because the demands of New World
slavery and colonization were themselves so eminently racialized. The ambivalent
articulation of the figure of Cicero and the medium of Ciceronian oratory represents the
inability of models from antiquity to interpret the slave's permanent status as nonwhite in
the American context. Brockden Brown’s literary works betray an awareness of the
irreducible contradictions between ancient slavery and American slavery, and this
knowledge prompts him to kill off Cicero.
183 
Conclusion
In what way do the literary works of early America dramatize the difficulty of
representing classical idealizations of personhood within nineteenth-century scenes of
mastery and servitude? How are we to understand the ways in which the person of
Cicero and the medium of Ciceronian oratory both implicitly and explicitly operate as a
vehicle for exploring the complexities that grow out of the articulation of a neoclassical
aesthetic and the language of race and slavery? From Classicism to Neoclassicism:
Cicero, Slavery, and Fictions of Personhood in the Writings of Charles Brockden Brown
is an attempt to understand the tensions, compromises, and dismissals that arise from
these questions.
The fictional narratives of Charles Brockden Brown interestingly complicate the
working dichotomy that construes slaves as social nonentities, persons and nonpersons in
both ancient Rome and early America. Such a reading suggests that Brockden Brown’s
invocation of Cicero is not an attempt to render important his narratives in set in the new
republic, but rather calls attention to the ways in which his Tironic account of Cicero’s
death complicates the issue of slave-persons as property in a way that does not allow for
any narrow delineation of slavery and mastery. Furthermore, my dissertation brings out
the ambivalence that admirers of Cicero—the perfectus orator, advocate, master, vir
bonus, Pater Patriae, and statesman—had to betray through writing in an American
context. In addition, this pattern of ambivalence concerning the Roman orator emerges in
the literary works of other writers of the period and this is due in part to a growing
awareness of the irreconcilable tensions between models of personhood from antiquity
184 
and the racial character of America as a slave-holding society. As if to illustrate this
point, almost fifty-three years following the composition of Charles Brockden Brown’s
narrative “The Death of Cicero,” Herman Melville invoked the Ciceronian motif in his
published work of fiction, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” It appeared
in Putnam”s Magazine in November and December of 1853.
“Bartleby” is a text about justice, a certain justice that the lawyer-narrator is
striving against himself to render to Bartleby, but ends up sending the unwilling scribe to
his death out of cowardice. Cicero’s presence in “Bartleby” is more pervasive and
complex than the well known bust, especially as it relates to the most pressing conflict of
the period, that is, race-based slavery and the issues of private property in persons.
Indeed, as our narrator, Ginger Nut reports, shelved immediately behind the
lawyer”s desk rests the bust of Cicero, “made of plaster of Paris, rises six inches above
the lawyer”s head” (490). The bust is referred to twice in the story. The first reference
occurs when Bartleby surprises the lawyer by refusing to read copy or “examine a small
paper” with him (476). In response to Bartleby”s “preference not to,” the lawyer
remarks:
Prefer not to, echoed I, rising in high excitement, and crossing the room with a
stride. What do you mean? Are you moon-struck? I want you to help me compare
this sheet here—take it...I looked at him steadfastly. His face was leanly
composed; his gray eye dimly calm. Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him. Had
there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner;
in other words, had there been anything ordinarily human about him, doubtless I
should have violently dismissed him from the premises. But as it was, I should
have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-Paris bust of Cicero out of
doors. (Melville 477)

185 
By discerning nothing “ordinarily human” about his employee, interposed between the
reference to the bust of Cicero, the narrator is suggesting that Bartleby straddles the
division between person and thing. He is compared to furniture but is not furniture,
property and non-property. It is also relevant that the Cicero bust reminds us of the
ancient orator”s symbolic role as the embodiment of certain Roman cardinal virtues,
namely, gravitas and dignitas, which the lawyer-narrator seems to accept as he tries to
adjudicate Bartleby”s existence and being. In so doing, the reader is reminded of the
historical moment in which this text is composed. A period in which the issue of slaves
as property and persons was being negotiated in American law. The value of Cicero here
further symbolizes the departure of American slave law from the Roman legal model,
which treated slaves as incipient citizens and conferred a kind of legal personhood upon
various servile classes. In addition, the paradoxical Bartleby, who quite literally dies to
serve while refusing to, treats the reader to a historically accurate scene of mastery and
servitude in an American context.
The next reference to the Cicero bust comes after the lawyer-narrator finds that
Bartleby has made the office his residence. This realization prompts the narrator to
inquire of Bartleby”s background as he “feels friendly towards” Bartleby (490). To these
queries, Bartleby “prefers not to reply,” for the narrator, Ginger Nut, maintains that “he
did not look at me while I spoke, but kept his glance fixed upon my bust of Cicero,
which, then sat, directly behind me” (490). Eventually, with “the faintest conceivable
tremor of the white attenuated mouth,” Bartleby prefers to give no answer, and retires
“into his hermitage” (490). This reference is in some ways a parody of Ciceronian
186 
rhetoric. Instead of the carful itemization of the Ciceronian oration, the lawyer's
questions break down absurdly at Bartleby's refusal to answer. In other words, what I am
pointing to here is a similar kind of ambivalence in response to the representation of
Cicero in an American context that we observed within the writings of Charles Brockden
Brown. Only in “Bartleby” the reader is introduced to the ways in which American law is
also incapable of fully accommodating the Roman model. It is almost as if Melville's
short story casts its glance back to ancient Rome only to ask: What are we to do with the
absence of certain racial designation in the law? How is it that slave societies are built
without racial orders? At what point does the legal structure change? And on what
grounds? By examining the appropriation of Cicero in the fictional narratives of Charles
Brockden Brown, my dissertation contributes to the field of American literature and law
by opening up the possibility of a historical moment within the racialization of U.S.
slavery that could have been conceived of differently.
187 
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract From Classicism to Neoclassicism: Cicero, Slavery, and Fictions of Personhood in the Writings of Charles Brockden Brown argues that the person of Cicero and the medium of Ciceronian oratory are useful for thinking about and working through the unsettled notions of personhood, law, and slavery in the U.S. during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The questions taken into consideration from a three-pronged analysis. The first works out the specific concerns in law regarding the legal notion of iniuria and its impact on the definition of the slave's status in ancient Rome. The second discusses the important details of Cicero's political ascent as a statesman and orator in antiquity and describes how thinking about Cicero became widespread and broadly diffused during the post-Revolutionary period in the U.S. Finally, the third form of thought that governs my inquiry is the examination of the persistence of the Ciceronian motif within the fictional narratives of Charles Brockden Brown. Viewing each of these questions in light of the specific legal crisis over race and racial identification, my dissertation explores how the appropriation of Cicero is being used to broaden, challenge, and foreclose notions of personhood and racial hierarchies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the U.S.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Mills, Olanna Carla (author)

Core Title From Classicism to Neoclassicism: Cicero, slavery, and fictions of personhood in the writings of Charles Brockden Brown

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Degree Conferral Date 2010-08

Publication Date 07/01/2010

Defense Date 05/24/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag iniuria,Law,OAI-PMH Harvest,personhood,Race,Slavery

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kamuf, Peggy (committee chair), Habinek, Thomas N. (committee member), Norindr, Panivong (committee member), Rowe, John Carlos (committee member)

Creator Email olanna.mills@yahoo.com,omills@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3169

Unique identifier UC1190526

Identifier etd-Mills-3911 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-365596 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3169 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Mills-3911.pdf

Dmrecord 365596

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Mills, Olanna Carla

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu