One is rarely able to say that a new book promises to transform our understanding of both the Late Republic and also of one of its most important political actors, Cicero. Mouritsen’s monograph on Cicero’s beloved and sometimes exasperating boni is one such a book. Mouritsen reveals the boni in their long-hidden identity as the non-political wealthy of Rome and Italy, who both supported and endured Rome’s nobiles until it was no longer in their interest to do so. His Cicero emerges as a tragic visionary who harnessed the boni as a political force but was overcome by events when Caesar showed the boni they could enjoy otium without enduring the terrible costs concomitant with the nobiles’ unrestrained libertas.
Naturally, there are some challenges to grapple with. Mouritsen acknowledges the limitations presented by the evidence. One is lucky to have so much Cicero, and Mouritsen’s case is consequently derived mostly from his reading of Cicero. At the same time, other authors are adduced as witnesses to show that Cicero was using his terms within the range of accepted meanings. Sallust’s understanding of the relationship between property and political instability proves to be consonant with Cicero’s views. Nevertheless, Ciceronian bias does impact Mouritsen’s argument in noticeable but by no means fatal ways. One is the decentering of Pompey the Great, whom Mouritsen sees as pivotal in the post-Sullan recovery, but whose actions the author sometimes leaves incompletely interpreted. Future publications will no doubt fill that gap.
Part I of the book is devoted to identifying the boni. Chapters 1 and 2 lay out the distortions of old interpretive lenses that obscure the meaning of the term boni and thus also the significance of its usage in Late Republican authors, especially Cicero. One of these is the party view, which is typified by scholars such as Syme. Another is the view that the term was primarily a rhetorical appeal to good values. Far from just a reference to the “good guys,” Mouritsen, following Hellegouarc’h’s earlier observation, argues that the boni’s identification as men of material substance is foundational to their role in the Republic.[1] Morals are not beside the point, however. To abbreviate Mouritsen’s argument, those who are propertied are treated as positive moral agents because they are free of compromising need. It emerges that their political enemies are not the poor but rather the immoral improbi, who, though possibly wealthy, noble, or both, are defined by their insatiable acquisitiveness: cupiditas and egestas.
Chapter 3 gets into the finer distinctions of the use of the term boni in different contexts. In Cicero’s usage, boni may variously refer collectively to all wealthy elites, the equester ordo and those just below the equestrian census threshold, or exclusively the latter. Thus, one sees two tendencies in the use of boni: one that functions inclusively and brings in multiple constituencies of the propertied, from senator to middling merchant, and one that functions exclusively to refer to the wealthy below the equestrian census requirement. One of Cicero’s most interesting distinctions, and in Mouritsen’s view the most consequential for Late Republican politics, is the distinction between the nobiles and the boni, two groups whose interests increasingly diverged in the period of transition from Republic to Empire.
Chapter 4 seeks to identify those boni outside the equester ordo, and this requires Mouritsen to take up the problem of identifying the latter order, which he holds to be exclusively defined by wealth. A noticeable casualty in Mouritsen’s discussion is the equites equo publico, who, for all intents and purposes, cease to exist, except perhaps as “a small subsection,” which “may have belonged to a historic body” but was “largely defunct” by the first century BCE (p. 62). He proceeds to elucidate the significance in post-Sullan Italy of the expansion of juries to include not only the knights but also the boni, under the heretofore fuzzy term tribuni aerarii. One is glad to see it clarified. The equites equo publico await their turn.
Chapter 5 makes the argument that the boni were the primary target audience of contiones in the Forum. Mouritsen presses the point too far by suggesting that the poor were not present in large numbers, when surely many people appreciated a free public performance. The discussion focuses on Cicero’s thought in the period after Pompey’s consulship. As Cicero’s work shows, much of the crowd listening to the contiones for the lex Gabinia and the lex Manilia consisted of viri boni, inclusive of equites. One is easily persuaded that wealthy men would travel to the Forum to protect their financial interests. The economic impact of piracy and instability in the East drew wealthy people to meetings addressing these issues. What commands less attention in Mouritsen, however, is the role Pompey played in greatly expanding this target audience. Recently minted citizens among the boni viri were motivated to come support Pompey’s assignment to protect their interests yet again.
Part II of the book unpacks the complex cultural relationships between wealth, morality, and politics in Republican Rome. Chapter 6 backtracks to delve further into the cultural nexus between wealth and virtue. Chapter 7 defines vir bonus as roughly the equivalent of the European concept of the “gentleman.” Mouritsen uses Ciceronian court speeches to create a portrait of the vir bonus’ enemy, the improbus, through the latter’s characteristic vices: cupiditas, egestas, audacia, crudelitas, luxuria, licentia, and voluptas. In Chapter 8, Mouritsen shows how the identities of vir bonus and improbus impacted both discourse and action in the intersection of the private and public spheres. He analyzes Cicero’s opposition to Rullus’ agrarian legislation and his Catilinarian orations to show how Cicero played on the financial fears of the boni in the post-Sullan era and smeared his opponents as improbi both to marshal allies to his side and to benefit himself politically.
Chapters 9 and 10 discuss the vir bonus’ desire for otium, tranquillitas, and salus, and how Cicero made otium the focus of his political ideology. In Cicero’s thought, the boni viri naturally seek and are entitled to the undisturbed enjoyment of their wealth. This is otium. Cicero was able to defeat Rullus’ land bill by tying it to the memory of Sulla, which raised the specter of property theft. Seeing Cicero’s arguments through the concerns of the propertied boni rescues scholarship from the anachronistic imposition of modern left/right political debates on Roman politics. The res publica exists in no small part to protect res privata. Chapter 11 explores the flipside of Cicero’s rhetoric: the condemnation of egestas and the moral risks of aes alienum. Improbi are driven by their cupiditas, egestas, and audacia to seek after the property of others. They are more likely to get into debt (aes alienum), which inures improbi to the illegal seizure of others’ property. A vir bonus, by definition, does not get caught up in this destructive cycle.
Chapter 12 retells the familiar story of the overwhelming financial demands of Late Republican politics but does so in light of the book’s proposed socio-political framework. Desperate members of the political class are driven to take on crippling debt to maintain or restore their position in the socio-political order. Those who fail are driven into the arms of revolutionary leaders who are seen as a last hope for rescue from complete ruin—the loss of patrimonium, the loss of res privata, the inability to repay massive debt, and the resulting inevitable slide into complete socio-political obscurity. Sallust’s account of the Catilinarian revolt illustrates well the connection between egestas and seditio.
Part III concentrates on unfolding the interactions between the boni and the nobiles in the final century of the Republic. Chapters 13 and 14 explain the curious relationship between the nobiles, who dominated the consulship, and the boni, who kept electing nobiles to that high office, and its collapse. Chapter 13 documents the boni’s growing alienation from the nobilitas. By the end of the second century, the boni, though conservative by nature, were ready to try new options, as their support of Marius reveals. Denigration of the nobilitas was fashionable by Cicero’s early career, a fact Sallust confirms in his depiction of palpable hostility toward the nobiles. Chapter 14 is devoted to explaining the apparent contradiction between the nobiles’ precarious position and their political dominance. To Mouritsen, the weight of historical continuity in the old noble families, combined with a structural bottleneck of political opportunities, made it practically inevitable that the nobilitas would dominate the highest offices.
In Chapter 15, Mouritsen repays his reader’s attention to a complex argument with a straightforward historical narrative of Late Republic as seen through Mouritsen’s boni-centric lens. Mouritsen’s boni naturally opposed much of the Gracchan program, with the likely exception of C. Gracchus’ highly contentious jury reform. As faith in the nobiles was shaken, the boni were willing to abandon their support of the Caecilii Metelli for Marius. Sulla’s assault on private property, however, most defined the rest of the era. Mouritsen describes it as a “blow to the social contract,” which irreparably harmed the relationship between the nobiles and the boni. Pompey’s career was built partly on the harnessing of that grievance.
Having learned from his sins against the boni in 59, Caesar outmaneuvered Pompey by refraining from the theft of Italian property, and this robbed Pompey of his advantage with the boni at a time when Pompey’s own senatorial allies were salivating for new proscriptions. The lesson gleaned from this is that the civil-war-era boni were not motivated by abstract ideologies but their otium, the safe enjoyment of their property. They cared little about the libertas of the nobiles if their otium was unprotected. From this vantage point, the assassination of Caesar looks completely out of touch with reality. Nevertheless, Cicero claims the boni rejoiced over the death of Caesar. To whatever extent that was true, Cicero had to expend a lot of effort to rally the boni against Antony. He was able to do so, but the deaths of Hirtius and Pansa brought to naught his final bid to save the Republic.
Chapter 16 tightly focuses on Cicero’s effort to deploy an ideology of Republicanism in accordance with his unique career and methods. For Cicero, a meritorious politician should harness the interests of a broad swath of the wealthy elites to guide the Republic peacefully. Mouritsen correctly identifies Cicero, not Pompey, as the man who best fit the role of gubernator/rector in the De republica. Unfortunately, bloody war was, in the final analysis, still required, and Cicero was dependent on others to wage it. This part of the ideology of the nobilitas—military charisma—was too woven into the fabric of the Republic to dispense with, and Mouritsen shows that even Cicero recognized that fact. Chapter 17 discusses how Augustus’ regime realized the hopes of the boni at the expense of the nobiles. His success partly resided in his ability to grasp that the army had to be part of any solution, something Cicero was unable to work out.
The above summary cannot replace careful and repeated readings of The Roman Elite and the End of the Republic, which makes a vital contribution to Late Republican scholarship. Mouritsen ambitiously set out to thoroughly overhaul our understanding of the Roman elite in its various parts, on the one hand, and the values and concerns that motivated its political behaviors, on the other, and he largely succeeded. Mouritsen also achieved his aims of bringing into clearer focus the identity and role of the boni in the period, the nature of their fragile but tenacious alliance with the nobiles, and Cicero’s doomed attempt to build on his relationship with both camps to forge a firm compact whereby the Republic could be preserved and strengthened without resorting to violence.
No book is perfect or able to answer every question that it raises, and one is glad to see myriad questions generated by this important work. In the end, this is a book mediated largely by a Ciceronian perspective. References to other authors are considerably fewer in number, and reflection on that fact raises questions about Mouritsen’s reading of pre-Sullan Italy. Indeed, one wonders how much the historians and biographers of the late first century were influenced by Cicero’s viewpoint. Finally, Mouritsen’s necessary focus on Cicero also has as its unintended byproduct the underestimation of Pompey’s influence and role. The irony is that Mouritsen provides scholars the means to reinterpret Pompey’s career in such a way as to render it much more intelligible. One hopes that Mouritsen and other interested scholars will continue to test his hypothesis and work out all its ramifications.
Notes
[1] Le vocabulaire latin des relations et des partis politiques sous la République. Paris, 1963.