political theory 2002 hammer 124 49

http://ptx.sagepub.com/Political Theory

http://ptx.sagepub.com/content/30/1/124.citationThe online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/0090591702030001006 2002 30: 124Political Theory

DEAN HAMMERHannah Arendt and Roman Political Thought : The Practice of Theory

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Political TheoryAdditional services and information for

http://ptx.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://ptx.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

What is This?

- Feb 1, 2002Version of Record >>

at Vienna University Library on November 15, 2011ptx.sagepub.comDownloaded from

POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002Hammer / HANNAH ARENDT AND ROMAN POLITICAL THOUGHT

HANNAH ARENDT ANDROMAN POLITICAL THOUGHTThe Practice of Theory

DEAN HAMMERFranklin and Marshall College

Arendts work shows a continual intellectual engagement with theRomans. She refers to the political genius of Rome as legislation andfoundation.1 She suggests that the one political experience which broughtauthority as word, concept, and reality into our historythe Roman experi-ence of foundation has been almost entirely lost and forgotten.2 Shedescribes the Romans loving care of the world which underlay their dis-tinctive concept of culture.3 She attributes to Cicero the inspiration forAugustines love of philosophy, the source of Hegels view of philosophy asreconciliation to the disunity of the world, and the basis for the view of philo-sophic training as critical for cultivating the mind for judgment.4 She creditsto the Romans an awareness of forgiveness that was a wisdom entirelyunknown to the Greeks (HC, 243). She traces back the faculty of makingpromises, fundamental for the stability of the world, to the Roman legal sys-tem (HC, 243). She argues that the early Christians consciously shaped theirconcept of immortality after the Roman model, substituting individual lifefor the political life of the body politic (HC, 315). She opens The Life of theMind with a quote from Cato and begins the fifth chapter of On Revolutionwith a selection from Virgil. And she looks to the Romans in her elevation ofcourage as a political virtue, in her discussion of freedom, and in her notion oftradition.5

Yet these connections remain largely unexplored. Instead, disputes aboutArendts indebtedness to the ancients are more often fought on the terrain ofAthens. Macauley notes an instance when Arendt seems to prize the Romanperspective over the Greek, adding parenthetically, somewhat untypi-

124

AUTHORS NOTE: My thanks to Thomas Banks, Kerry Whiteside, and the reviewers for thisjournal for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay, and to Marina Lutova and MichaelKicey for their research assistance.POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 30 No. 1, February 2002 124-149 2002 Sage Publications


cally.6 OSullivan suggests that although Rome stands high in Arendtsestimation, it is the life of the Greek polis (as theorized by Aristotle),which constitutes the focal point of all her thought.7 Kateb speaks only of thephilosophical incapacity of the Romans that makes it extremely arduousto rescue the original meaning of political action.8 Villa, in his wide-rangingcollection of essays, takes note of Arendts beloved Greeks but makes nomention of the Romans.9 And indicative of the desire to Hellenize not justArendt, but a Western philosophic tradition, Springborg omits any influenceof the Romans on Arendt. She places Arendt in a tradition that includesMachiavelli and Montesquieu who she describes, in a surprising claim, asguided by the desire to legitimise the Western nation-state as heir to thepolitical institutions of Athens.10 This requires ignoring not just the essaysand passages in Arendt when she talks about the distinctive contributions ofRome, but both Machiavellis and Montesquieus stated and demonstrableelevation of Rome over Greece.

Canovan, in broadening the scope of discussion, notes quite rightly thatwe need to abandon the conventional picture of Arendt judging modern pol-itics in the light of a straightforward and unambiguous theory of actionderived chiefly from an idealisation of Athens.11 But even when scholarshave noted Arendts mention of the Romansmost notably her discussion ofRoman notions of tradition, authority, and culturethey have been reluctantto assign conceptual form to Roman thinking and, related to this, to explorethe significance of their influence on Arendts thought.12 As Canovan writes,The Romans had been too lacking in the sparkling creativity of the quarrel-some Athenians to be able to articulate their own political discoveries. Asevidence, she cites a statement by Arendt that I like Greek antiquity but Inever liked Roman antiquity.13

True enough. Arendt may not have derived visceral pleasure from readingthe Romans. But in the passage that Canovan cites, Arendt goes on to say thatthe reason she read the Romans was precisely to understand the inspirationfor Montesquieu and Machiavelli (who do excite her). More than a specificconcept, the importance of the Romans for Arendt, like for Machiavelli andMontesquieu, is that they provide a way of thinking about politics that givesform to political ideas. That is,what the Romans said was seen as tied inextri-cably to how it was said. To draw on an image from Wittgenstein, like thestrength of the thread that does not reside in the fact that some one fiberruns through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibers, soArendt sees the concepts of the Romans as emerging through the twisting andintertwining of the particulars of political life.14 When Arendt looks to theRomans, a tradition that is itself quite diverse, it is not as a form of nostalgia inwhich she wishes to renew the thread of tradition [that] is broken, but as a

Hammer / HANNAH ARENDT AND ROMAN POLITICAL THOUGHT 125


model of how we might discover the past for ourselves from the fragmentsthat remain (LM, 1:212; CC, 204). In Virgil, Arendt sees the poetic enactmentof a legendary past. This poetry appears as a form of political thinking thatserves as a paradigm for how we might start something anew from the frag-ments of the past. In the Roman historiographic tradition, Arendt identifies aform of writing in which the animating forces of politics are given formthrough the impressions, reactions, and conclusions of political actors. Thereaders of history, in turn, become spectators who participate in this livingpast. Finally, Arendt identifies in Cicero a notion of philosophic thinking thatis surprisingly contemporary in its feel. For Cicero, like for Arendt, the tradi-tions of the past have disintegrated, creating a longing to escape the disunityof the world. Cicero advances a notion of philosophic training that both curesthe despairing mind of its ills by pointing to a realm beyond and prepares themind, as well, for a care and cultivation of the world.

Cicero, Virgil, and the Roman historiographers play a critical role inArendts thinking, I will suggest, not because of their association with anyone concept or practice, but because they provide a way of thinking thataddresses a deeper conceptual issue: how political theory might address thePlatonic separation of knowing and doing (HC, 225). By bringing Arendtinto a long overdue conversation with the Romans, we gain insight not onlyinto what Arendt saw as the distinctive contributions of the Romans to howpolitical thinking can participate in the task of building a common world, butalso into how we might, in turn, read the Romans as political thinkers.

VIRGIL

When Arendt speaks about the separation of knowing and doing, she isaddressing a view of philosophic thought, beginning with Plato, that not onlyprivileges contemplation over action but also separates knowing from doing.For Plato and philosophy to follow, doing becomes the execution of a schemeof knowing. The danger of the separation of knowing and doing, Arendtargues, is that it leads to the disappearance of an authentic understanding ofhuman freedom in political philosophy (HC, 225). Doing, as it is placedunder the command of knowing, becomes an instrument of an idea. Lost inthe instrumentalization of action is the spontaneity of beginning that is at thecore of human freedom.

Since action, insofar as it is free, is neither under the guidance of theintellect nor under the dictate of the will, an enormous abyss opens up(WF, 152; LM, 2:207). The abyss, for Arendt, is a temporal more than a spa-

126 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2002


tial metaphor. It is a gap that arises with the interruption of the sequence ofcause and effect. All action, for Arendt, has an element of arbitrariness to it,as it could as easily have been done as not done (LM, 2:207). This arbitrari-ness is a particular problem in the paradigmatic form of action, the act offounding in which a We is constituted in the darkness and mystery of abeginning without a prior cause (LM, 2:202). Founding exemplifies the free-dom associated with action as it begins, inserting something new into theworld, but is not caused. Yet founding, if it is to be successful, turns into acause of whatever follows (LM, 2:210). The act of foundation, thus, createsa perplexity in two ways. First, foundation must be able to justify its ori-gins, even as it appears without a cause. And second, foundation must allowfor the freedom of future action, even though it is a cause (LM, 2:202,209-10).

Arendts interest in founding relates to a larger concern of hers with therecovery of action in the modern world. The task of new generations is notunlike that of founders: they must plot a new path, starting from a past thatpresents itself only in fragments (LM, 1:212). Arendt identifies two possiblemodels of founding: one Hebrew and one Roman.15 The Israelites date theirfounding as a people back to the Creation of the universe (and of time) by aneternal God. Although the beginning is still shrouded in mystery, it is onemade mysterious by the human inability to comprehend the infinite. Creationserves not only as an origin at the beginning of time but also as the basis forfuture action. Humans are to live and act in accord with Gods will because ofthe Justness, Perfection, and Goodness of Creation (LM, 2:208).

In a world that can no longer ground its political life in Creation, though,men of action sought to understand how to prepare for an entirely newbeginning by turning not to the Israelites but to the Romans (LM, 2:210).The Romans, Arendt claims, provides a lesson in the art of foundation anda solution to the perplexities inherent in every beginning (LM, 2:210). In arather surprising claim, Arendt suggests that this solution is preeminentlypolitical and expressed in its purest form by Virgil (LM, 1:152). But inwhat way does Virgil provide any conceptual guidance to the task of founda-tion? He certainly does not develop a philosophy, if by that is meant, asArendt suggests, the science that deals with the mind sheerly as con-sciousness (LM, 1:155). Arendt specifically distinguishes Virgils poetryfrom Roman philosophy in the imperial age, which with the loss of the respublica becomes preoccupied with leaving the world through thought (LM,1:152). Nor does Virgil provide a formal theory that offers definitions andposits relations. Virgils discussion is not even meant to be universal, but islocated in a particular tradition (or traditions) that are specific to Roman cul-



tural life. And worse still, the story is not based on any verifiable historicalfacts, but weaves together, even by the Romans own admission, myth, leg-end, and poetic invention.16

It is precisely through an imaginative interpretation of old tales, Arendtsuggests, that the distance of human beginning could be reached by memory(LM, 2:203). These tales become the way in which former generations couldcome to grips with the mysterious In the beginning (LM, 2:203).Through the construction of a myth-history, Virgil provides an image offounding that organizes the Romans understanding of their past. Perhapsmore surprisingly, though, given the specifically local character of Virgilsstory, later political theorists like Machiavelli and political actors like theAmerican founders would look to this story of founding to make sense ofnew, and quite different, circumstances. As Arendt notes, the Americanfounders, in revising Virgils line frommagnus ordo saeclorum to novus ordosaeclorum, admitted that the thread of continuity which bound Occidentalpolitics back to the foundation of the eternal city had been broken (OR, 212).In portraying themselves as establishing a new Rome rather than Romeanew, the American founders saw in Virgil a paradigm of founding and act-ing by which they could understand, organize, and express the fundamentallynew experiences that they were encountering (LM, 2:203, 211, on Virgil asparadigmatic). They would begin weaving the fibers of a new thread.

One of the great contributions of the Romans, for Arendt, is that they placethe constitution of themselves as an identifiable community entirely withinthe realm of human affairs rather than in a source that stands outside history.Virgil, in consolidating founding stories that can be traced back to the thirdcentury B.C., locates Roman ancestry in Aeneas, whose wanderings after thefall of Troy bring him to Italian shores (LM, 2:211).17 The task of foundingappears, thus, not as an absolutely new beginning but as the resurgence ofTroy and the re-establishment of a city-state that had preceded Rome(LM, 2:211-12).18

Canovan suggests that in tracing their origins to Troy, Virgil and theRomans actually dodged the problems of beginning, sidestepped the frat-ricidal violence of Romulus, and concealed rather than articulated theirexperience of beginning.19 To be sure, the Romans do not stare into an exis-tential abyss. But they do not flinch from the potential violence of origins,either, as suggested by their fusing the indigenous and violent tradition ofRomulus with a newer variation on the equally violent Hellenic legend of theTrojan war.20

The Roman notion of founding, in fact, may serve as a corrective to plac-ing too much emphasis on the philosophic problem of absolutely new begin-ning, in which we ask how something comes from nothing (LM, 2:211; see



also 2:205). Although Arendt raises the issue, political founding does notseem to rest on solving this particular problem, if for no other reason than thatearthly beginnings always occur in a world that precedes us. The problem ofbeginning in a political context seems to lie more in the interruption of time,between the no more of some prior order and the not yet of a new order(LM, 2:204). In the founding legends of both the Israelites and the Romans,the interruption of time appears as the gap between liberation from an olderorder and the establishment of freedom through the constituting of a neworder (OR, 205; LM, 2:204). In this regard, the Aeneid does not dodge theproblem of beginning, but becomes precisely a story of the hiatus betweenliberationAeneass escape from the destruction of Troyand free-domthe establishment of a city (LM, 2:204). The lesson that emerges inthis recasting of old tales is that freedom is not an automatic result of libera-tion (LM, 2:204). What stood out to men of action who looked to thesefounding legends was not the marvelously colorful tales of adventure butthe process by which a yet-constituted people prepares for a new beginning(LM, 2:204). The preparation for founding is constructed by way of a reversalof Homer in which Aeneas, the vanquished, now emerges as the victor. Thewar does not result in the utter destruction for the vanquished but a new bodypolitic founded on equality and formed through a mutual promise: bothnations unconquered join treaty under equal laws forever (LM, 2:204).21

For Virgil, the founding of Rome marks the beginning of time, not as ametaphysical moment but as counting time ab urbe condita (LM, 2:213).The phrase, which roughly translates as from the founding of the city,serves as the title to Livys history of Rome and suggests, in Arendts inter-pretation of Virgil, that history begins when there are tales to tell of humansliving and acting together. Thus, the Aeneid, as Virgil makes clear in theopening verse, is a song of a man who would found a city (dum condereturbem) (A, 1.5).

What exists in the land of Rome before the founding is not nothingness.Quite the opposite; in his pastoral poem the Georgics, Virgil begins with aninvocation that orients the reader to a world that is both unfamiliar and priorto us. In the words of one Virgilian scholar, Virgil makes the very beginningof his poem address what we might call the problem of beginning, namelythat one is always beginning and that ones beginnings are always already inanother context.22 Before the founding of the city is a land of abundanceunder the reign of Saturn (G, 1.128; LM, 2:213). Those who inhabited thisland, as Virgil writes, lived a life of purity, knowing the rural gods andremaining unaffected by concerns of honor, the rules of kings, the envy of therich, the rigors of law, and the madness of the Forum (G, 2.490-512). But inthis golden age of Saturn, in which there is an abundance of natures produce,



there is no tale [numerus] of the manifold kinds or of the names they bear, nor trulywere the tale [numero] worth reckoning out; whoso will know [scire] it, let him . . . learnlikewise how many grains of sand eddy in the west wind on the plain of Libya, orcount . . . how many waves come shoreward across Ionian seas. (LM, 2:213; G, 2.537,103-8)

Arendts translation of numerus as tale is probably not completely justi-fied, for what Virgil is describing is the almost limitless numbering of speciesand varieties of plants and animals. But Arendt is correct in suggesting thatthis bucolic life, as it exists in harmony with the infinite repetition of nature,does not yield great deeds. The farmer, as he toils to the rhythm of the sea-sons, exists in anonymity.

The arrival of Aeneas on the shores of Italy appears as the beginning oftime, not because nothing precedes him, but because he establishes a politicalworld that makes possible the enactment of tales to tell, to remember, andpreserve (LM, 2:213). In serving successfully as the basis by which futuregenerations orient themselves, and thus answering to the perplexity of howone establishes the authority of a new beginning, the Roman foundation facesa second perplexity: how, given its authoritative status, does it make possiblethe future experience of freedom? Canovan characterizes the Roman experi-ence of foundation as a once-for-all affair that establishes a political worldand leaves successive generations to carry it on rather than to repeat the expe-rience of action.23 But Canovans conclusion is in need of revision for tworeasons. First, the Roman conception of founding is distinctive and in factpoints to a significant departure from a Greek conception precisely becausefounding is not seen as a once-for-all affair. Founding appears much moreas an incremental process, in which successive founders (deincepsconditores), in Livys words, variously shape Roman customs, laws, andinstitutions.24 Second, Canovan seems to apply an impossible standard inwhich true freedom can know neither time nor history. For Arendt, freedomneed not (and, I would suggest, cannot) lie in an absolute beginning butappears necessarily in an already constituted world. In Arendts well-knownassociation of the freedom of action with natality, the birth of a child bringssomething new into the world, but there always was a world before theirarrival and there always will be a world after their departure (LM, 1:20).25

Although the association of political action with natality is most oftenassociated with Arendts discussion of Augustine, Arendt, in fact, attributesthis image to Virgil (and, in turn, to Augustines Roman heritage) (see OR,210-11). Seery argues, in his recent exploration of the concept of foundation,that Arendts use of a metaphor of birth is both unconvincingly attributed toVirgil and represents a shift in focus toward the self and away from politics,that is, toward the existential hiatus between not-living and death instead of



the political hiatus between liberation and freedom.26 Although I think thatSeery has identified Arendts own ambivalence about the potential violencethat is associated with artistic building, I am not so sure that images of birthdo not find political expression in Virgil. Arendt traces the image of foundingas birth back to Virgils fourthEclogue, which celebrates the reign of Augus-tus as the beginning of a new order (magnus ab integro saeclorum nasciturordo).27 This new order is one in which a new child and new generation (novaprogenies) are born into earth (E, 4.7-8). The birth of a new age, like the birthof a child, is not an absolutely new beginning, but is a beginning within thecontinuity of history (OR, 211). The child, like successive generations ofRomans, comes to know the glories of heroes (heroum laudes) and the deedsof his father (facta parentis) so that he may learn of valor (virtus) (E,4.26-27). As he learns of the world, he will then be ready to rule, releasing theearth from its continual dread (E, 4.14). Although Augustus follows in thetradition of the Roman founding, his birth, nonetheless, revives the world. InVirgils description of this almost miraculous transformation, when Augus-tus brings the world under his rule, slowly will the plains yellow with thewaving corn, on wild brambles the purple grape will hang, and the stubbornoak distil dewey honey (E, 4.28-30). For the Romans, as Arendt suggests,the worlds salvation lay not in Divine beginning, but in the divinity of birthas such.28 Birth appears as a miracle, both because its appearance cannot bereduced to some prior cause and also because it offers to redeem theworldto make human the natural processes of biological life. The capacityfor beginning, as Arendt argues, could have become the ontological under-pinning for a truly Roman or Virgilian philosophy of politics in whichhuman beings, new men, again and again appear in the world by virtue ofbirth (LM, 2:216-17).

Arendt speaks in the subjunctive because Virgil does not develop a phi-losophy. In Book 6 of the Aeneid, he does vividly portray an ontology inwhich birth appears as the rebirth of the soul (A, 6.748-51). But what is dis-tinctive about Virgil for Arendt is that he expresses the Roman political expe-rience in its purest form (LM, 1:152). Arendt never explains what shemeans by that. But she provides us with a hint when she juxtaposes Virgil tothe emergence of a Roman philosophic style whose aim was to teach menhow to cure their despairing minds by escaping from the world through think-ing (LM, 1:152). For Arendt, Roman philosophy, which would have anenormous influence on such important thinkers as Hegel, emerges at a pointin which the political realm was disintegrating, and there was a resulting dis-unity of man and world that gave rise to the desire to find another world,more harmonious and more meaningful (LM, 1:153). Virgil provides a pureform of political thinking because his writing does not leave this world to cre-



ate another but arises directly from the experiences of action in the world.Some sense of the close association between thinking and action in Virgilswriting is suggested by his use of condere, which means to fashion, found, orestablish. The Aeneid appears as a story of how Aeneas would build(conderet) a city, just as Romulus will found (condet) the walls of Mars andcall the people Romans, and just as Augustus will again establish (condet) aGolden Age (A, 1.5, 1.276-77, 6.792-95). In his sixthEclogue, in what is seengenerally as a self-conscious characterization of the task of the poet, Virgildescribes the ability of bards to build (condere) a story (E, 6.7). In this sense,Virgils form of thinking does not stand outside the founding of Rome todescribe it. He does not attempt to systematize what is distinctive, abstractwhat is particular, or provide a model of what does not have a cause. Instead,as an act of poetic building, the poet reenacts the founding as he brings some-thing new into the world.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

Arendt looks not just to Virgils epic construction of a Roman foundingbut also to a historiographic tradition that Arendt aptly characterizes as astorehouse of examples that the past had accumulated for the benefit ofthe present.29 Arendt sees in history, scholars rightly suggest, a repositoryof human experience by which we can find permanent human possibilitiesthat are wider than those known and expected within our own culture.30 His-toriography assumes importance as a counterpoint to what in Arendts termsis an antipolitical tradition of Western political thinking that privileges thecontemplative over the active life. Unlike philosophy, which seeks refugefrom politics, Greek and Roman historiography provide a record of the expe-riences of men of action themselves.31

Arendt is certainly reacting to a philosophic tradition in which doing ismade subordinate to knowing. It is not just that philosophy privileges con-templation over action, though, but that modern theoretical and social scien-tific approaches have made it difficult to understand how the particulars ofhuman history can even contribute to the task of political thinking. Mostobvious is a modern philosophic sense, articulated notably by Kant andHegel, that historical events, by themselves, appear accidental, meaningless,and futile.32 Kant, for example, in Idea for a Universal History, suggeststhat absent a purpose or natural design (Naturabsicht), we no longer have reg-ularity (gesetzmige) but the aimless play of nature (zwecklos spielendeNatur) in which, in Arendts translation, melancholy haphazardness (trostloseUngefhr) prevails.33 Through their philosophies of history, Kant and Hegel



sought to make events meaningful by placing them in the context of an entirehistorical process, whether of consciousness, freedom, or morality (CH, 86,also 82).

Even as Kantian and Hegelian ways of understanding the process andprogress of history have fallen into disuse, the emphasis on discerning broadpatterns remains. In her Epilogue to The Concept of History, Arendt sug-gests that through the influence of more scientific approaches, historians andsocial scientists have come to construct hypotheses about causal relation-ships between events. From this perspective, events become important asthey are seen as confirming or disconfirming evidence for more general his-torical patterns (CH, 86-87). Extending Arendts argument further, we canidentify a further distancing of the theoretical enterprise from history as polit-ical theorists in the twentieth century reacted both to older forms of specula-tive history and to the newer emphasis on methods for analyzing politicalbehavior. History, in general, and the Romans, in particular, get read out ofpolitical thought as theorists seek to ground political concepts in more sys-tematic, ahistorical approaches, in natural right, or by transcend[ing] his-tory to explore the ontological underpinnings of political life.34 There is aprofound consequence to these philosophic, theoretical, and social scientificconceptions of history that relates to Arendts overarching concern with thesubordination of doing to knowing. For Kant and Hegel, action becomescomprehensible only through reference to the unfolding of an idea. For politi-cal theorists, action becomes meaningful as it becomes an aspect, to useWolins language, of political vision.35 And for more scientific approachesto history, the event becomes the natural consequence of the hypothesis (CH,87-88). In each case, doing is made comprehensible by knowing. Lost in theprocess of history is the deed. And lost in the activity of thinking is history.

The Romans provide, for Arendt, an instructive contrast. Rather thanevents acquiring meaning through reference to some larger process, the les-son of each event, deed, or occurrence is revealed in and by itself (CH, 64).Causality and context remain important, but are seen in a light provided bythe event itself, illuminating a specific segment of human affairs (CH, 64).And, as Arendt continues, Everything that was done or happened containedand disclosed its share of generalmeaning within the confines of its individ-ual shape and did not need a developing and engulfing process to become sig-nificant (CH, 64). Through this series of characterizations, Arendt seems tosuggest that Roman historiography serves as more than a repository ofinstances but as making some conceptual contribution to political thinking.This is indicated not only by Arendts claim that some general meaningis disclosed, but also in her explicit claim elsewhere that the Romansbrought authority as word, concept [italics added], and reality into our his-



tory (WA, 136). But given the strange lack of philosophic talent by theRomans, as Arendt characterizes them at one point, what is the nature of theirconceptual contribution?36 What general meaning is disclosed in theirtelling of history?

Although Roman historiography is hardly of one voice in its method orsubstance, there is a distinctive feel to it that defies an easy answer to thisquestion and an easy comparison with other historical, narrative, or theoreti-cal approaches. A dizzying array of names and events present themselves thatseem at times to chronicle, other times to narrate, but seldom to theorize,about Roman politics. We will be frustrated if we hold the Romans to todaysstandards of historical investigation and accuracy, not because the Romansnecessarily fabricated the past, but because verifiable evidence from much ofRoman history, particularly the early republican era, is absent.37 We will bedisappointed, as well, if we bring to Roman historiography our own expecta-tions of what counts as good narration. Events are often placed next to eachother, not because they form some narrative whole but because of the influ-ence of an annalist tradition in which chronology rather than theme dictatesthe presentation.38

What the Romans do convey, as a number of scholars have noted recently,is a sense of the past as a spectacle. Events acquire meaning as they areviewed and, in turn, represented by way of the impressions, reactions, andconclusions of the spectators. Polybius, who becomes an early and influentialvoice in Roman historiography, stresses the value of vividness (emphasis)and animation (energeia) in historical writing.39 His aim is to arouse in thereader an admiration (from thaumaz) for the deeds and accomplishments ofthe past.40 Sallust remarks that it is the memory of great deeds (memoriarerum gestarum) that incites in noble men the desire for fame and glory.41Tacitus characterizes the highest purpose of the historians craft as relating toposterity those words and deeds that are conspicuous (notabilis) by eithertheir excellences or infamy.42 For Livy, history is a res gestae, a record ofdeeds worthy of memory (dignum memoria).43 Historiography is like aconspicuous monument (inlustre monumentum) by which you behold(intueri) the lessons (exempli) of every kind of experience.44 Etymolog-ically, monumentum derives from the Indo-European root *men-, to think,and the causative suffix *-yo, suggesting a meaning of something that makesone think.45 Monumentum is related, as well, to the Latin verb monere, toremind. Historiography, like a monument, stands in some way as a visiblereminder of past events that causes the reader to think (from *men-) or tobehold and contemplate (both senses are contained in intueri). Feldherrargues convincingly that in presenting historiography as a monument, Livy isnot attempting to set the events themselves before the eyes of his audi-



ence, but the visible traces that they have left behind.46 For Livy, as forPolybius, Sallust, and Tacitus, the event is illuminated less through the detailsof setting or the nuances of character, and more through the actions and reac-tions of the spectators at the time.47 The visible traces of the past do not standas a silent monument, mute to the living world, but live on as the readersbecome, in turn, the spectators.

The resonance with Arendts use of theatrical metaphors to describe polit-ical action is striking. History is mediated through the multiple perspectivesof spectators who, through their responses, lend meaning to the words anddeeds of political actors.48 The past is made vivid as it is experienced andexpressed through the gaze of the spectators. Livy, for example, who Arendtcharacterizes as the great recorder of past events, enlivens the past throughthis appeal to the senses (WA, 121). He describes the horror at the won-drous (miraculum) sight of Lucretias dead body that moves the crowd fromwhispers to indignation and, ultimately, to the overthrow of the king (1.59, 3;1.50, 3). Or Livy portrays the amazement (admiratio) at Appiusabductionof Verginia, the sight of Verginias lifeless body as Icilius and Numitoriushold it up to show (ostendere) it to the crowd, and the ensuing excitementreached by the crowd (3.47, 6; 3.48, 7; 3.49, 1).

There is an entertainment value to this presentation of the past, as manyRoman scholars have noted. But pleasure for Arendt may have a great deal todo with understanding. Nothing perhaps is more surprising in this world ofours, writes Arendt, than the almost infinite diversity of its appearances, thesheer entertainment value of its views, sounds, and smells, something that ishardly ever mentioned by the thinkers and philosophers (LM, 1:20). Thishuman experience of the vividness of the world, which Arendt calls worldli-ness, is so critical for her because it underlies the phenomenal reality ofhuman existence. As Arendt notes,

we are of theworld and notmerely in it; we, too, are appearances by virtue of arriving anddeparting, of appearing and disappearing; and while we come from a nowhere, we arrivewell equipped to deal with whatever appears to us and to take part in the play of the world.(LM, 1:20)

The loss of worldliness is important as a mass phenomenon, in whichhuman artifice is increasingly swamped by transient consumer goods andsubject to the rhythms of production and consumption.49 But the loss ofworldliness is also a theoretical phenomenon in which the living force ofour political concepts gives way to empty formalisms.50 In a particularlyrevealing passage, Arendt draws a contrast between how we have faithfullypreserved and further articulated until they became empty platitudes the dif-



ferent Greek images of authoritysuch as the statesman as healer and phy-sician, as expert, as helmsman, as the master who knows, as educator, as thewise manbut have entirely lost and forgotten the Roman experiencewhich brought authority as word, concept, and reality into our history (WA,136). We have so emptied our concepts of any connection to experience that

it is as though we were caught in a maze of abstractions, metaphors, and figures of speechin which everything can be taken and mistaken for something else, because we have noreality, either in history or in everyday experience, to which we can unanimously appeal.(WA, 137)

Through the cumulation of the living deed and the spoken word, what isnot just portrayed, but also experienced, in Roman historiography are the ani-mating forces of politics: the beliefs, ideas, habits, and principles that movehumans to act (HC, 206).51 In the rape of Lucretia and the abduction ofVerginia, to continue the examples from above, Livy traces the responses ofthe crowd that, in both cases, culminate in political action. In the case ofLucretia, Brutus inspired (auctorque) the crowd to take up arms against theTarquins whose lusts now enslaved the people (1.59, 4). The people not onlyoverthrow the king and establish a republic, but the degrading experience oftyranny unites the people in a love of their new liberty. Where freedom couldhave given way to faction, writes Livy, the severity of the tyranny led plebsand senators to unite as strongly in guarding liberty as in asserting it (2.1). So,too, Livy portrays the corruption of public institutions under the decemvirs,exemplified by Appiuss manipulation of the courts so that he rules on hisown abduction of Verginia. Appiuss public action is inspired (oritur) bythe most perverse of motives, his private lust (libidine) (3.44, 1). In con-trast, the plebeians and patricians who had been so divided by faction as tosuffer these abuses are now inspired to act, partly by the atrocity of thecrime and partly by the opportunity to regain their liberty (3.49, 1). With theoverthrow of the decemvirs, two consuls are elected who restore (renovant)the power of the tribunes to initiate legislation, the right of appeal by the peo-ple, and the almost forgotten principle of the sacrosancticity of the tri-bunes by making it a religious crime to strike a representative of the people(3.55).

In these two scenes, and other examples by other Roman historians thatare easy to find, Livy shows how the republic is authorized, both in the initialoverthrow of the kings and then in the restoration after the decemvirs. Criticalhere is that this authorization does not derive from abstractions, but is seen asarising from the inspiring principles of a people: what moves them to act. Weare not far from Arendts suggestion that authority (auctoritas) refers back to



the auctor, the author who inspired the whole enterprise and whose spiritis represented in Roman customs, laws, and institutions (WA, 122). Romanauthority, as Arendt notes, had its roots in the past, but this past was no lesspresent in the actual life of the city than the power and strength of the living(WA, 122). Arendt is pointing precisely to a Roman form of writing in whichthe animating forces of politics that inspired action are not just recounted butrelived.

We can now begin to address one of Arendts more elusive concepts, thatof principles. Arendt invokes the notion of principles to explain how actioncan have shape and meaning without being subordinated, in turn, to particularmotives or goals (WF, 152). She draws a now well-known, but no less clear,distinction between the inspiring principle that becomes fully manifestonly in the performing act itself, the judgment of the intellect which pre-cedes action and the command of the will that initiates action (WF, 152).Disch expresses much of the scholarly frustration when she suggests thatArendt seems at once to invoke and to resist the conventional understandingof principles.52 At times, Arendt lists principles that are typically timelessand abstract ideals, such as honor, glory, virtue, distinction, excellence.53Yet at other times she will mention principlessuch as fear or distrust orhatred that are emotional responses that depend on the particular con-text.54 Furthermore, Arendt seems at times to give intellectual content to prin-ciples but then, at other times, to claim that principles can only be enacted andnot necessarily expressed.55

I certainly agree with Disch about the ambiguity of Arendts words. Butby looking at the Roman source of Arendts idea, we can better understand,perhaps, how Arendt would respond to the issues raised by Disch.56 First,principles, as they are conveyed in Roman historiography, necessarilyaddress the emotions. In Livys history of Rome, what moves people to actare not abstract ideals, but horror, anger, delight, and excitement that arearoused by the spectacle of deeds and the persuasion of words. The principlesarticulated by Roman historiographers are, themselves, the products of ahighly contextualized tradition in which the community vests its identity.Tradition defines not only why something is virtuous, distinct, or honored, aswell as feared, distrusted, or hated, but also provides the emotional basis foradherence to these principles.

Second, principles can be articulated but only as a sequence of actions andnot through abstract formulation. The reason for this is that the Roman way ofconveying political concepts is not to describe them as things in themselves,but to display (ostendere) them to the eyes of the mind (oculis mentis).57The unseenthe animating forces of politicsare made visible to the mind



as we are made spectators who view, respond, make connections, and drawconclusions about how and why something happened.

And third, the importance of principles lies in how they perpetuate a com-mon world by simultaneously making a past alive in the present and by mak-ing a contemporary audience participants in a past. The art of politics,Arendt notes, teaches men how to bring forth what is great and radiant (HC,206). The insistence on the living deed and the spoken word as the greatestachievements of which human beings are capable, Arendt continues, wasconceptualized in Aristotles notion of energeia (actuality), which desig-nates activities that do not pursue an end and leave no work behind (HC,206). The work, in this case, is not what follows and extinguishes the pro-cess but is imbedded in it; the performance is the work, is energeia (HC,206). What the Roman historians convey for Arendt is this sense of actuality,as the portrayal of great words and deeds in which the meaning of the event isboth imbedded in the performance of the act and also experienced, again, bythe spectator. The conceptual importance of Roman historiography lies in itsability to convey, as it is experienced by the reader, the animating forces ofpolitical action that arise from within history, circumstance, and humancharacter.

CICERO

Lest we be left with the impression that the past always shone with radi-ance for the Romans, we need only encounter Ciceros note of despair that hesounds in the fifth book ofDeRepublica. The republic had been passed downlike an extraordinary painting (sicut picturam egregiam) whose colors werealready fading with age (iam evanescentem vetustate). But the current gen-erations had neglected to renew (renovare neglexit) the original colors oreven to have taken the care to preserve its form or outermost outlines (sed neid quidem curavit, ut formam saltem eius et extrema tamquam liniamentaservaret).58 What is lost for Cicero is precisely a vivid sense of the past: theanimating forces of political action by which the commonwealth wasfounded and preserved. Now, these republican customs have so fallen intodecay (obsoletos) that they are no longer even known, much less practiced.

Ciceros lamentation is of interest to us for two reasons. First, Ciceroseems to speak to what is, for Arendt, a quite modern concern: the loss of tra-dition by which individuals orient themselves in the world. It is in the contextof a fragmented world that Arendt identifies in Cicero the notion of philoso-phy as animi medicinaa cure for the despairing mind through a flightfrom the world (LM, 1:152).59 Second, Cicero seems to identify a way in



which philosophy, as it results in cultura animia cultivation of the soulmay also return us to the world.

Arendt suggests in Life of the Mind that philosophy had found a kind offoster home in Rome during the last century before Christ, and in that thor-oughly political society it had first of all to prove that it was good for some-thing (LM, 1:158). One such path of usefulness, written against a sense of adisintegrating public realm, was that philosophy could teach men how tocure their despairing minds by escaping from the world through thinking(LM, 1:152). Philosophy becomes the animi medicina, as Cicero writes inTusculan Disputations, the art of healing the soul.60 Philosophy, as articu-lated by Cicero and, in turn, adopted by such thinkers as Hegel, appears not asa response to reasons need but has an existential root in unhappiness(LM, 1:153). The disintegration of reality and the corresponding dis-unityof man and the world creates a need for another world, more harmoniousand more meaningful (LM, 1:153). Cicero, Arendt argues, would discoverthe thought-trains by which one could take ones way out of the world (LM,1:157).

Arendt, in pursuing this thought-train, turns to the sixth book of DeRepublica, which contains Ciceros well-known Scipios Dream. In thissection, Cicero relates a dream by Scipio Aemilianus in which his adoptedgrandfather, Scipio Africanus, tells him that he will destroy Carthage andthen, if he can escape assassination (which he does not), must return to Romeas dictator to restore the commonwealth.61 The highest place in the heavens,Scipios ancestor reminds him, is reserved for those who have preserved,aided, or enlarged (conservaverint, adiuverint, auxerint) the common-wealth.62 As Arendt quotes from Cicero,

For the highest god who governs the world likes nothing better than the assemblies andthe intercourse of men which are called commonwealths; their governors and conserva-tors return to heaven after having left this world. Their job on earth is to stand guard overthe earth.63

Humans are given life, Cicero continues, so that they might inhabit earth andperform their duty to the community.64

Although the gods favor a devotion to things of the earth, no commensu-rate human reward can make up for the toiling and suffering. For whatfame can you gain from the speech of men, asks Africanus the Elder, orwhat glory that is worth the seeking?65 As Africanus lifts Scipio into theair, they look back toward the ever-shrinking earth. Through a process ofwhat Arendt refers to as relativization, Cicero shows how the earth itself andthe things of the earth (such as fame and glory, life and death, and the passage of



time) now appear insignificant in its place in the cosmos. For Arendt, Ciceroprovides perhaps the first recorded [example] in intellectual history of howthinking means following a sequence of reasoning that will lift you to aviewpoint outside the world of appearances as well as outside your own life(LM, 1:160).66 Ones assent upon dying will be still more rapid if the spirit,while still confined to the body, contemplates what lies outside it anddetaches itself, as much as possible, from the body.67

Although thinking points outside the world as it provides some comfortfrom the vicissitudes of earthly life, thinking also points us back to the world.For Cicero, philosophic life is never in the place of political action. Devotionto the public realm is tied specifically to the promise of heavenly rewards, asthe spirit occupied and trained in such activities will have a swifter flight tothis, its proper home and permanent abode.68 But there is a more interestingand subtle connection between the philosophic and the earthly life, one thatArendt locates in the notion of culture that, as word and concept, is Romanin origin (CC, 211). Culture derives from colereto cultivate, to dwell, totake care, to tend and preserve (CC, 211). Cicero, suggests Arendt, is thefirst to extend the metaphor of cultivating nature to matters of spirit andmind (CC, 212). As Cicero writes, Just as a field, however good to ground,cannot be productive without cultivation (cultura), so the soul (anima) can-not be productive without teaching. Cicero refers to this cultivation of thesoul (cultura animi) as philosophy.69

In drawing out the meaning of cultura animi, Arendt contrasts it explicitlyto a Greek attitude. The Greeks tended to consider even agriculture as partand parcel of fabrication, as belong to the cunning, skillful, technicaldevices with which man, more awe-inspiring than all that is, tames and rulesnature (CC, 212-13). The Romans, on the other hand, adopted an attitudeof loving care toward nature and the world so that by tending to the things ofthe world, they might cultivate a dwelling place for people (CC, 212-13).70This attitude toward worldly things includes not just tending to nature andtaking care of the monuments of the past, but also respecting the least use-ful and most worldly of things, the works of artists, poets, musicians, philoso-phers, and so forth (CC, 213). Ciceros cultura animi takes on a larger con-notation, then, as something like taste or sensitivity to beauty (CC, 213).We are reminded of Livy when Cicero writes that the cultivated mind occu-pies a stance like a spectator at an athletic contest who is attracted to the festi-val neither to win glory nor material gain, but came for the sake of the spec-tacle (visendi) and closely watched (perspicerent) what was done and how itwas done.71

Arendt carries the contrast between the Greeks and the Romans still fur-ther, suggesting that the Greek conception of philosophy as the speechless



beholding of some unveiled truth may tend more toward inactivity thanlove of beauty (CC, 214). Moreover, as Arendt asks,

Could it be that this right love of beauty, the proper kind of intercourse with beautifulthingsthe cultura animiwhich makes man fit to take care of the things of the world andwhich Cicero, in contradistinction to the Greeks, ascribed to philosophyhas somethingto do with politics? (CC, 215)

Answering this question leads Arendt into her well-known association ofthe faculty of judgment with taste, a discussion she pursues later in her Lec-tures on Kants Political Philosophy. Taste, which indicates what for Cicerois the discriminating, discerning, judging elements of an active love ofbeauty, underlies what Arendt meant by judgment (CC, 219). Yet, the stanceoccupied by those exercising taste is that of the spectator who is not involvedin the act but is always involved with fellow spectators (LK, 63). In quot-ing from Ciceros On the Orator, Arendt writes, For everybody discrimi-nates [dijudicare], distinguishes between right and wrong in matters of artand proportion by some silent sense without any knowledge of art and pro-portion (LK, 63). Such a discriminating sense occurs not only for picturesand statues but also in judging the rhythms and pronunciations of words,since these are rooted [infixa] in common sense (LK, 63). As McClure notesin her thoughtful exploration of these Ciceronian pearls in Arendtsthought, the faculty of judgment, for Cicero, is rooted in commonsense.72 Judgment does not admit of formal rules but rests on the sort oftacit knowledge that characterizes ones participation in ongoing culturalpractices.73

But there is a still greater role that Cicero plays in Arendts understandingof taste and judgment. The sensitivity to beauty that is cultivated throughphilosophic training creates culture: the mode of our intercourse withour worldly products (CC, 218). Culture offers its space of display to thosethings whose essence it is to appear and to be beautiful (CC, 218). Theproducts of politics, words and deeds, share with art the need of some pub-lic space where they can appear and be seen (CC, 218). Like art, what is atstake in politics for Arendt is not knowledge or truth but

judgment and decision, the judicious exchange of opinions about the sphere of public lifeand the common world, and the decision what manner of action is to be taken in it, as wellas to how it is to look henceforth, what kind of things are to appear in it. (CC, 223)

Both politics and art similarly face a futility in which their products, if left tothemselves, come and go without leaving any trace in the world (CC, 218).Only by bestowing beauty, the very manifestation of imperishability, can



the fleeting greatness of word and deed endure (CC, 218). Culture indi-cates a public attitude of sensitivity to and care for beauty that ensures theenduring greatness of human action and the survival of politics.

Arendt comes to this conclusion about the relationship between politicsand art by way of a seemingly odd discussion about the ancient tensionbetween the artist, as maker, and the statesman, as doer. The suspicion of thepolitical actor is that the artist brings into the public realm a utilitarian atti-tude in which all things are judged according to their function or utility(CC, 215). This philistinism, as Arendt describes it, bears directly on hermore weighty characterization in The Origins of Totalitarianism of Himmleras a philistine. Himmler, who was more normal, that is, more of aphilistine, than any of the original leaders of the Nazi movement, defined thenew type of man as one who under no circumstance will ever do a thingfor its own sake. 74 The cultivated mind, as described by Cicero, bears polit-ical significance in a modern age because of the general invasion of the men-tality of fabrication into the political realm, an invasion that appears in itsstarkest form with totalitarianism (CC, 217). The cultivated mind resists theforces of philistinism as it appreciates without desiring to own, judges with-out placing a price, and is disinterested without being uninterested.

CONCLUSION

I began by suggesting that for Arendt, the Romans provide a method ofpolitical thinking that speaks to the contemporary world. At first glance, sucha claim seems somewhat problematic because of the distance, not just in timebut more importantly in belief, between the Roman and modern world. TheRoman context is one in which political authority is reinforced by a living tra-dition that transmits the past and religion that sanctions a piety toward thispast (see OR, 118; WA, 120-23). Lost in modernity is the thread of tradition(CC, 204; LM 1:212) by which individuals orient their lives. We are faced,Arendt suggests, with the abyss of pure spontaneity by which we aredoomed to be free by virtue of being born, no matter whether we like free-dom or abhor its arbitrariness, are pleasedwith it or prefer to escape its awe-some responsibility by electing some form of fatalism (LM, 2:216-17). Theresolution to this impasse between a lost certainty and an intolerable spon-taneity is, as Arendt suggests toward the end of her second volume ofThe Lifeof the Mind, the faculty of Judgment (LM, 2:217).

The recovery of judgment is an elusive task, though. It cannot be taught orrest on theories and ideas but needs to be cultivated through immersion in theinfinite improbabilities of earthly existence (WF, 171). How exactly Vir-



gils poetry, Livys historiography, and Ciceros philosophy accomplish thistask is nowhere explicitly addressed by Arendt. But, like so much of herwork, intimations abound.

The contribution of Virgils poetry to political thinking is expressed mostclearly in Arendts essay on Hermann Broch. Consumed with a desire tobring certainty to human affairs, Broch sought first to find a new mythosthat could represent the universe in its totality. Later, Broch would look to anew logos in which human experience would become knowable as a systemof laws, axiomatic propositions, and verifiable facts. Brochs disillusionmentwith poetry, Arendt suggests, stems from his sense that it is unable to provideanswers to questions of human existence that have the same coercive force asthat possessed by mythos on the one hand and logos on the other.75

The problem of poetry for Broch is exactly its contribution for Arendt: itimposes no binding edicts (HB, 118); it does not have the compellingcharacter of themythoswhich it serves (HB, 118); and it lacks the cogencyof logos (HB, 119). Since poetry is not subject to the dictates of logic or reli-gion, it employs neither the incontrovertibility of logical argument nor thefinality of religious belief (HB, 119). Where Broch, in The Death of Virgil,would sacrifice the Aeneid for the sake of knowledge, Arendt suggests thatpoetrys contribution to cognition lies in its use of metaphor (HB, 116). Meta-phor conveys the oneness of the world by establishing connections that aresensually perceived in [their] immediacy76 while simultaneouslyplung[ing] us into the depths of human contradiction, contingency, andcomplexity (HB, 130). The poet, as crafter, stands apart from the doer. Butpoetry, nonetheless, plays a critical role in conveying, without once-and-for-all explaining, the experience of action:

[the] infinitude of intersecting and interfering intentions and purposes which, taken alltogether in their complex immensity, represent the world in which each man must cast hisact, although in that world no end and no intention has ever been achieved as it was origi-nally intended. (HB, 147-48)

Livy and Roman historiography play an important role, as well, in politi-cal thinking. Where poetry is (in Arendts Heideggerian moments) acousticas it brings forth a world by naming it,77 historiography is visual as it presentsreaders with the visible traces of human words and deeds. By displayingevery kind of experience (omnis exempli),78 Livy points to how a world dead-ened by processes can be enlivened by the movement of words and deeds. Webecome witnesses not just to the monuments of the past but to the animatingprinciples that move people to act. Similar to the Romans, Arendt, in Men inDark Times, makes us spectators in the lives and works of men and



women that illuminate, even in the darkest of times, the possibility and prin-ciples of human action.79 The terms most central to her argument lack cleardefinition precisely because they derive their meaning from the uncertaintyand variety of human affairs. She does not formalize theories and conceptsbut seeks to identify the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that illu-minates the concepts that have been lost.80

Absent an ability to judge, our encounters with the enlivening aspects ofpoetry and history become indiscriminate sensory experiences. The philo-sophic life described by Cicero, as it teaches us a love of beauty, cultivates anappreciation and sensitivity for these aesthetic renderings of human experi-ence. The ability to discriminate, to form judgments of beauty, has implica-tions for our relationship toward the world as well. The philosophic life, asArendt suggests in extending Cicero, shapes an attitude in which oneknows how to choose his company among men, among things, amongthoughts, in the present as well as in the past (CC, 225-26).

For Arendt, the cultivated mind answers both to the problem of the con-suming nature of modern individuals and of political judgment. Only whenthe different parts of the world appear indistinguishable can everything beindiscriminately devoured. The ability to distinguish brings with it, forArendt, a corresponding desire to care for and preserve the things of theworld. She is not seeking in her writing to prove but, like what Cicero con-veyed to Montesquieu, to instill a feel for what it means to cultivate theworld.81 Her work, like the writings of the Romans, is an attempt to locate inthe past the elemental quality of human artifacts that grasp and move thereader (CC, 203). The point for Arendt is not that we become Romans;rather, it is that their practice of political thinking gives practice to the mind sothat each generation might discover and ploddingly pave anew the path ofthought (LM, 1:210).

For Arendt, we are first and foremost phenomenal beings who areequipped to deal with whatever appears to us and to take part in the play ofthe world (LM, 1:22). The problem of modernity, at least in part, is that wehave lost that sense of play as we have subjected the world to the life pro-cesses of production and consumption. Yet, Arendts plea for us to thinkwhat we are doing (HC, 5) seems to flounder on a paradox: thinking, as itdeals with invisibles, threatens to remove us from the world. And, in fact, ourWestern philosophic tradition seems only to further alienate us from thisworld of Appearing as it holds out the promisea false one for Arendtof aworld of true Being. Political theory, taking its cue from this philosophic tra-dition, is similarly unable to address human worldlessness as it proceedsfrom abstractions. Arendts call for us to think what we are doing, thus,requires not only restoring action to this world but also finding an adequate



home in the world for thinking (LM, 1:23). The Romans offer just this possi-bility for Arendt by showing how political thinking can arise from, andevoke, a world that is sensually perceived. By seeing and hearing, the politi-cal thinker can restore the lost movement of thought and judgment to themodern world.

NOTES

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958),195 (hereafter, HC).

2. Hannah Arendt, What Is Authority? Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin,1968), 136, also 121-22 (hereafter, WA). On the Romans and authority, see Arendt, On Vio-lence, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harvest, 1972), 142; and On Revolution (New York:Penguin, 1965), 201 (hereafter, OR).

3. Hannah Arendt, The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance,BetweenPast and Future, 212-13 (hereafter, CC).

4. Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. J. Scott and J. Stark (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1996), 14; The Life of the Mind, ed. Mary McCarthy (New York: Harvest,1978), 1:153 (hereafter, LM); Crisis in Culture, 211-19; and Lectures on Kants Political Phi-losophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 63-64 (hereafter, LK).

5. Hannah Arendt, What Is Freedom? Between Past and Future, 156, 167 (hereafter,WF); Tradition and the Modern Age,BetweenPast andFuture, 25; andOnRevolution, 117.

6. David Macauley, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Place: From Earth Alienation toOikos, Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology, ed. David Macauley (New York:Guilford Press, 1996), 117.

7. Noel OSullivan, Hannah Arendt: Hellenic Nostalgia and Industrial Society, Contem-porary Political Philosophers, ed. Anthony de Crespigny and Kenneth Minogue (New York:Dodd, Mead, 1975), 229.

8. George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman &Allanheld, 1983), 7.

9. Dana Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 132.

10. Patricia Springborg, Hannah Arendt and the Classical Republican Tradition, HannahArendt: Thinking, Judging, Freedom, ed. Gisela Kaplan and Clive Kessler (Sydney, Australia:Allen & Unwin, 1989), 15.

11. Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cam-bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 138.

12. Examples of this reluctance include Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 147; Leah Bradshaw,Acting and Thinking: The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (Toronto, Canada: University ofToronto Press, 1989), 46; Michael Gottsegen, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (Albany:State University of New York Press, 1994), 98-99; Dagmar Barnouw, Visible Spaces: HannahArendt and the German-Jewish Experience (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,1990), 26-27; Patricia Bowen-Moore, Hannah Arendts Philosophy of Natality (New York: St.Martins, 1989), 135-40; Phillip Hansen, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 50; and John McGowan, Hannah Arendt: AnIntroduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 34, 65, 94. I would point to



three exceptions. Kimberly Curtis, in her excellent discussion of the Roman founding in OurSense of theReal: Aesthetic Experience andArendtianPolitics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1999), suggests the potential conceptual contribution of this attention to the past:

Human perception gains depth when our efforts to comprehend something becomeflushed with and enlarged by the resonances of others efforts. . . . The experience ofdepth is important because the histories that render human experience meaningful pro-vide us newcomers with touchstones as we make our way in a new and strange time, in anas yet unstoried wilderness. (Pp. 111-12)

McClure identifies the influence of Cicero in Arendts discussion of judgment in Lectures onKants Political Philosophy (Kirstie McClure, The Odor of Judgment: Exemplarity, Propriety,and Politics in the Company of Hannah Arendt,HannahArendt and theMeaning of Politics, ed.Craig Calhoun and John McGowen [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997],53-84). And Seery explores the influence of Virgil on Arendts notion of founding (John Seery,Castles in the Air: An Essay on Political Foundations, Political Theory 27 [1999]: 460-90).

13. Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 143, n. 165, quoting Hannah Arendt, On Hannah Arendt,Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn Hill (New York: St. Martins,1979), 330.

14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (NewYork: Macmillan, 1953), par. 67.

15. See Seery, who develops more fully a distinction between what he called an Edenic andconstructivist tradition of foundation (Castles).

16. Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, trans. B. O. Foster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1925), Praef. 6-7.

17. See Erich Gruen,Culture andNational Identity in RepublicanRome (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 1992), 6-51.

18. On the theme of refounding in Livy, see Christina Kraus, No Second Troy: Topoi andRefoundation in Livy, Book V, Transactions of the American Philological Association 124(1994): 267-89.

19. Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 223.20. See Virgil,Aeneid, inEclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, revised

G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1.275-77, 6.777-79, 6.876,8.342 (hereafter, A); Virgil, Georgics, in Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, 1.498-501 (hereafter, G);Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, 1.4-10; and Gruen, Culture and National Identity, 6-51.

21. See also Arendt, On Revolution, 187, 210; and Virgil, Aeneid, 12.190-91.22. William Batstone, Virgilian Didaxis: Value and Meaning in the Georgics, The Cam-

bridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1997), 131.

23. Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 147.24. Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, 2.1, 2; Cicero, De Re Publica, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 2.2; see T. J. Luce,Livy: TheComposition ofHis History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 230-49.

25. See Arendt, Love, for her earliest statement of natality and the world.26. Seery, Castles, 482.27. Virgil, Eclogues, in Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, 4.5 (hereafter, E); Arendt, On Revolu-

tion, 210; see also Virgil, Aeneid, 6.792-95.28. Arendt,OnRevolution, 211;Life of theMind, 2:212; see Cicero,DeRePublica, 1.7, 12.29. Hannah Arendt, The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern, Between Past and

Future, 64-65 (hereafter, CH).



30. Margaret Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt,Brace, and Jovanovich, 1974), 11.

31. Ibid., 12. Unfortunately, Canovan does not pursue the possible importance of Roman his-toriography to Arendts thought. In fact, in a section that Canovan devotes to Arendts essay,The Concept of History, Canovan discusses only the ancient Greeks and makes no referenceto the Romans (Ibid., 100-5).

32. See Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,trans. Lewis White Beck, On History, ed. Beck (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 12-13;and Arendt, Concept of History, 83, 85.

33. Kant, Idea, 13; and Arendt, Concept of History, 85.34. On systematic, ahistorical approaches, see William Galston, Political Theory in the

1980s: Perplexity Amidst Diversity, Political Science: The State of the Discipline II, ed. AdaFinifter (Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 1993), 27-53. On naturalright, see Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Glencoe, IL: FreePress, 1959). On ontological underpinnings, see Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuityand Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 19.

35. Wolin, Politics, esp. 17-21.36. Arendt, What Is Freedom? 166.37. Critical assessments are provided by Ernst Badian, The Early Historians, Latin Histo-

rians, ed. T. A. Dorey (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 1-38; and R. M. Ogilvie, A Commentaryon Livy: Books 1-5 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1965), 5-7. More sympathetic assessments are pro-vided by P. G. Walsh, Livy: His Historical Aims andMethods (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1963), chaps. 5-6; Walsh, Livy, Latin Historians, 115-42; T. J. Luce, Livy: TheComposition of His History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Charles Fornara,The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press,1983), chap. 3; Timothy Cornell, The Value of the Literary Tradition Concerning ArchaicRome, Social Struggles in Archaic Rome: New Perspectives on the Conflict of the Orders, ed.Kurt Raaflaub (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 52-76; Jrgen vonUngern-Sternberg, The Formation of the Annalistic Tradition: The Example of theDecemvirate, Social Struggles, 85; and John Marincola, Authority and Tradition in AncientHistoriography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 76-79.

38. Walsh, Livy, 129.39. Polybius,TheHistories, 6 vols., trans. W. R. Paton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1922), 12.25h, 3.40. Ibid., 8.1, 4.41. Sallust, The War with Jugurtha, Sallust, trans. J. C. Rolfe (London: William

Heinemann, 1931), 4.6.42. Tacitus, The Annals, trans. John Jackson (London: William Heinemann, 1925), 3.65. On

Tacitus and spectacle, see Elizabeth Keitel, Foedum Spectaculum and Related Motifs in TacitusHistories II-III, Rheinisches Museum fr Philologie 135 (1992): 342-51.

43. Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, 7.2, 2.44. Ibid., Praef., 10.45. Gary Miles, Livy: Reconstructing Early Rome (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,

1995), 17.46. Andrew Feldherr, Spectacle and Society in Livys History (Berkeley: University of Cali-

fornia Press, 1998), 6.47. On Polybius, see James Davidson, The Gaze in PolybiusHistories, Journal of Roman

Studies 81 (1991): 10-24. On Tacitus, see Keitel, Foedum. On Lucan, see Matthew Leigh,Lucan: Spectacle and Engagement (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997). On Livy, see



Mary Jaeger, Livys Written Rome (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); andFeldherr, Spectacle. On the Roman republic generally, see Fergus Millar, The Crowd in Rome inthe Late Republic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).

48. On the influence of dramatic elements in Roman historiography, see F.W.A. Walbank,History and Tragedy, Historia 9 (1960): 216-34; Dirk Pauw, The Dramatic Elements inLivys History,ActaClassica 34 (1991): 33-49; T. P. Wiseman, The Origins of Roman Histori-ography, Historiography and Imagination: Eight Essays on Roman Culture (Exeter, UK: Uni-versity of Exeter Press, 1994), 1-22; Walsh,Livy, 50-66, 178-79; Walsh, Livy, 130-32; Ogilvie,Commentary, 17-22, 219; and Erich Burck, Die Erzhlungskunst des T. Livius (Berlin, Ger-many: Weidmannsche, 1964), 176-95. Some caution is necessary in drawing comparisonsbetween Roman historiography and theater. Historians such as Polybius and Livy distinguishbetween the historians and playwrights craft (see Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Praef. 6; 5.21, 9;Polybius, Histories, 2.56-63; and Feldherr, Spectacle, chap. 5). Moreover, often lacking is dra-matic versimilitude, in which careful attention is paid to the unique details of a situation. Instead,we often see employed something like a type-scene, to borrow a phrase from oral poetry, inwhich events take place in a narrow range of highly regularized settings, private house (domus),battlefield, senate house (curia), forum, assembly space (comitium) (Feldherr, Spectacle,165-69). See also Andrew Walker, Enargeia and the Spectator in Greek Historiography,Trans-actions of the American Philological Association 123 (1993): 367; and Burck,Erzhlungskunst,197).

49. Villa, Politics, 134.50. Arendt, Tradition, 26.51. See also Curtis, who suggests that Arendts very unique contribution to the possible

source of authority in our times was telling a tale that brings before us the beauty of thefounders beginning (Curtis, Our Sense, 106).

52. Lisa Disch,Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 1994), 37.

53. Ibid.54. Ibid.55. Ibid., 37-38.56. On the Roman source for principles, see Arendt,OnRevolution, 212-13. Scholars have

rarely noted the Roman origins of principles. They have looked (quite sensibly) toMontesquieu (Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 171-75; Kateb, Hannah Arendt, 12), who got the ideafrom the Romans, to possible existential connections (Lewis Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman,Existentialism Politicized: Arendts Debt to Jaspers, Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed.Hinchman and Hinchman [Albany, NY: SUNY, 1994], 161-62), or have attributed no genealogy(Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political [Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-sity Press, 1996], 281, n. 118; Villa,Politics, 140; Disch,Hannah Arendt, 37-38; and Gottsegen,Political Thought, 33-35). Exception: Bowen-Moore, Hannah Arendts Philosophy, 27-28.

57. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (London: William Heinemann, 1920),8.3, 62.

58. Cicero, De Re Publica, 5.1, 2.59. See Cicero,TusculanDisputations, trans. J. E. King (London: Heinemann, 1966), 3.3, 6.60. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 3.3, 6.61. Cicero, De Re Publica, 6.12.62. Ibid., 6.13.63. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:159; and Cicero, De Re Publica, 6.13.64. Cicero, De Re Publica, 6.15, 16.65. Ibid., 6.20.



66. See especially Cicero,DeRePublica, 6.29. We might be surprised that Arendt associatesthis form of thinking with Cicero rather than Plato. But Arendt sees Plato as addressing invis-ibles that are present in the visible world (Life of the Mind, 151).

67. Cicero, De Re Publica, 6.29.68. Ibid. See also Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 1.14, 32.69. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 2.4, 13. Arendt cites this as Tusculan Disputations 1, 13

in The Crisis in Culture (296, n. 5). This incorrect citation is likely due to a printing error at thetop of the page of her edition of theTusculanDisputations, which incorrectly identifies that pageas Disputations, I rather than Disputations, II.

70. The inclusion of the Romans in Arendts discussion of attitudes toward nature and culturerevises significantly Canovans suggestion that Arendt owes a great deal of her view of natureto the ancient Greeks (Hannah Arendt, 107; see also Politics as Culture: Hannah Arendt andthe Public Realm, Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, 179-210, where Canovan makes no men-tion of the Romans). This association leads Canovan to attribute to Arendt a view of nature asbarbaric (Hannah Arendt, 107), of humans as vulnerable islands threatened by the ragingtides of nature (HannahArendt, 13), and of our attitude toward nature as one of wrenching sub-stances from their natural context, dominating and destroying, and asserting ourselves aslord of creation (Political Thought, 56). In invoking the Romans, though, Arendt suggests anattitude toward cultivating nature (and, in turn, toward culture) that is quite different from that ofthe Greeks. In his discussion of nature and earth, Macauley positions Arendts argument againstthe Greeks, Marx, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School and mentions Arendts discussion of theRomans in only one paragraph later in the essay (Hannah Arendt, 105, 116-17). For a moreextended discussion of Arendts concept of nature, see Kerry Whiteside, Worldliness andRespect for Nature: An Ecological Application of Hannah Arendts Conception of Culture,Environmental Values 7 (1998): 25-40.

71. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 5.3, 9. See Arendt, Crisis in Culture, 219.72. McClure, Odor, 70-71.73. Ibid., 71.74. Hannah Arendt,TheOrigins of Totalitarianism, 2d ed. (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books,

1958), 322, 338.75. Hannah Arendt, Hermann Broch: 1886-1951,Men inDark Times (New York: Harvest,

1968), 119 (hereafter, HB).76. Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940, Men in Dark Times, 166.77. Arendt, Walter Benjamin, 203-6.78. Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Praef. 10.79. Hannah Arendt, Preface, Men in Dark Times, ix.80. Arendt, Preface, ix.81. Montesquieu, Discourse on Cicero, trans. William Ebenstein, Ebenstein, Political

Thought in Perspective (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 89-90.

Dean Hammer is an associate professor in the Department of Government at Franklinand Marshall College ([email protected]). He has published in a variety of jour-nals in political theory, philosophy, and classics. His book,The Iliad as Politics: The Per-formance of Political Thought, is forthcoming fromTheUniversity ofOklahomaPress.



political theory 2002 hammer 124 49

Documents

political life

political virtue

political experience

political genius of

compolitical theory

roman model

roman legal system hc

hammer hannah arendt