When Cicero entered office as consul on January 1, 63 BC, no one was raising slave armies or trying to set fire to Rome. Catiline still hoped that he would be elected to the consulship later that year. The biggest issue facing the Republic was a land bill proposed by the tribune P. Servilius Rullus. Rullus’ bill would settle poor citizens on public land in Italy as well as on other lands acquired through a complicated scheme of fund-raising and purchasing. It was against this land bill that Cicero addressed himself in his first speeches as consul: to the senate on January 1 (De lege agraria 1) and to the people in a contio a few days later (De lege agraria 2). Brian Krostenko’s book is a close reading of the rhetoric of these two Agrarian Speeches. While some scholars have claimed that these orations are merely unprincipled, misleading, and self-serving rhetorical performances, Krostenko argues that Cicero is actually presenting a coherent political program and giving voice to some sincerely held beliefs. Krostenko’s argument is intuitively plausible—it makes sense that Cicero would use his inaugural speeches as consul to lay out his Big Ideas—and seems likely to be right, although Cicero is admittedly capable of being both sincere and misleadingly manipulative at the same time.
Everything about the Agrarian Speeches is a challenge for modern readers. Essentially all of our information about Rullus’ bill comes from Cicero’s words, and so we’re left with a picture that is both biased and incomplete. Moreover, a series of speeches discussing the provisions of a land bill tends inevitably to the technical—how much do you care about the details of the proposed sale of particular uectigalia in various provinces? Finally, we’re missing the beginning of the senate speech (agr. 1), and there is a third extant speech that Krostenko does not discuss (agr. 3, a brief and focused response to a subsequent tribunician contio), and there is a fourth speech which has not survived at all. So we’re left with a partly preserved corpus of rather dry speeches presenting a partial picture of a land bill whose details we cannot otherwise reconstruct and which in any case went nowhere. It’s not hard to see why the Agrarian Speeches have been little read by comparison to, say, the Catilinarians. But in conjunction with Gesine Manuwald’s recent commentary (Cicero: Agrarian Speeches, Oxford 2018), Krostenko’s book goes a long way to rehabilitate the intellectual content and inherent interest of these speeches.
Krostenko’s method has two hallmarks: first, he proceeds by close reading, paying attention to the nuances and implications of what Cicero says and doesn’t say. This is a work that nicely marries traditional philology with modern linguistic theory, and Krostenko is a sensitive reader (see, e.g., pp. 72–75 on the implications of Cicero’s not saying merely recita but rather eam tu mihi ex ordine recita de legis scripto populi Romani auctionem). Second, Krostenko focuses in particular on comparing the senate speech (agr. 1) and the contional speech (agr. 2). These two speeches treat the same topics, but often in different ways, and a comparison of these differing treatments often yields useful insights: on the one hand, how Cicero adapts the same material for different audiences, and on the other hand, what the underlying issues and ideologies really are (at least as Cicero sees them). Krostenko’s approach is thus very promising.
After a foreword and an introductory first chapter discussing the circumstances of the speeches and offering a preview of the method, chapters two through nine focus on different themes, comparing their treatment in agr. 1 and 2: the imagined abuses of Rullus’ land commissioners (ch. 2), the envisioned auction of properties under the terms of the law (ch. 3), libertas in agr. 2 (ch. 4), commoda (“tangible material benefits”) that the bill will or won’t deliver to the people (ch. 5), the personae of Cicero and Rullus (ch. 6), allusions to the past, such as the decemvirate of 450 BC (ch. 7), dignitas in agr. 1 (ch. 8), and the treatment of Capua and the ager Campanus (ch. 9). Although chapter 9 ends with a brief coda, the book has no conclusion, which feels like a missed opportunity and leaves individual chapters as relatively discrete units.
The book closes with detailed appendices on the major divisions of the speeches, the structure of Cicero’s treatments of Capua and the ager Campanus, and the structure of his treatment of the placement of colonies, along with an index divided into thematic sections (“argument, techniques of,” “figures of speech and thought,” “Latin words and phrases,” and so forth).
I can give only a taste of Krostenko’s comparative method here, but he is both a master of the historical context of the speeches and a sensitive reader of their nuances. For example, he discusses the two speeches’ treatments of liberae legationes, or ambassadorships to foreign powers that came with imperium and public funding but without official duties. He shows that the rhetorical structure is the same in both speeches: Cicero argues that liberae legationes are bad, and Rullus’ land commissioners will be even worse, because not only will they have imperium, but they’ll also be able to exercise the right of eminent domain and wreak other sundry evils on the innocent populace. But the details of Cicero’s presentation are different: in the senate speech, the audience sees the commissioners from a high and mighty perspective; in the address to the people, the audience sees events through the victims’ eyes. Thus in the senate speech Cicero talks of the terror that the commissioners will bring to people, whereas in the popular speech he talks of the metus that the “poor nations” (miseras nationes) will feel upon the arrival of the commissioners. The difference is subtle, but it is real: as Krostenko remarks, “terror properly describes the quality of an external cause of fear; metus properly describes the internal response to a frightening stimulus” (p. 46). In part, of course, Cicero is simply tailoring his approach to his audiences’ expectations. But Krostenko well argues that Cicero is also shaping his audience by his approach: the listeners at a contio may in fact have had no particular sympathy with squatters on public property, and yet Cicero goads them into outrage at the bill’s potential abuses of popular sovereignty. The book is full of such observations, both large and small, and they are broadly convincing (individual points of readerly disagreement are of course inevitable).
But while Krostenko’s comparative method is a good one, it also places extraordinary demands on the reader. Just as Cicero has chosen various bits and bobs of Rullus’ bill to quote and discuss, so Krostenko has done the same for Cicero’s two speeches: he has taken various passages from the speeches, inevitably divorced from context, and re-arranged them to illustrate selected themes or topics. For each theme or topic, Krostenko proceeds by presenting lengthy tables in parallel columns, one column representing agr. 1, the other agr. 2. He then lists commonalities in the two speeches’ treatments of the theme (concerning the sale of Italian and Sicilian properties, he lists: “allegation of disruption,” “summary of sales provision,” “sale as auction,” “Italian properties, especially forests,” “Sicilian properties”). Each commonality is assigned a letter (“allegation of disruption” = A, “summary of sales provision” = B, and so forth). Under each commonality Krostenko presents Latin passages from the respective speeches that exemplify it, along with an English translation and endnotes to the table on points of detail.
If this sounds like hard going, that’s because it is, but it only gets harder: after the detailed table, Krostenko analyzes the theme in question by cross-references to, say, “D-p” (= the ad populum passages cited under the D heading in the preceding table). The degree of difficulty can rise higher still: some tables, for instance, use bold and italic type for further sub-distinctions (pp. 248–250). The ne plus ultra is reached in chapter 9’s discussion of Capua and the ager Campanus, where a preliminary table with various themes re-arranged sequentially is adorned with further dots and fractional notations, all of which is cross-referenced to the actual passages listed in Appendix 2, which appendix itself is given its own intricate set of further notations (e.g. “(prec. I:C2)” and square brackets and half brackets). The reader must either trust Krostenko or be prepared to do a lot of work to follow the details of his argument.
While this arrangement of material is challenging, it’s hard for me to see a better alternative. The book wouldn’t really work as a commentary, because Krostenko rightly wants to compare similar themes and ideas that occur in different places in the two different speeches. Not arranging the material thematically would entail even more cross-referencing and even more effort for the reader. I’m reminded of a time when I was working at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae and timidly suggested to my editor that the dispositio we’d settled on for a particular article might prove difficult for the reader to follow. He replied simply, “Der Leser muss arbeiten.” So it is with Krostenko’s book: the reader has to work.
Mercifully, the reader’s burden is eased by Krostenko’s lively writing style. All Latin is translated into idiomatic contemporary English, and the translations are again alive to the nuances of Cicero’s word choice and rhetoric (e.g., p. 170 audio rendered “yes, yes, I know!” < “I hear you [i.e. I understand what you’re saying]”). Krostenko also makes frequent and relatable analogies to contemporary American political life (references to the Overton window and to Chicago aldermen, for instance). Best of all are Krostenko’s illustrative linguistic comparisons (such as moving from an abstract idea about the power of reading out of a Roman law to the concrete example of a modern police officer’s saying, “You’re under arrest,” where the words cause the condition). Indeed, I have to say that I found this book more enjoyable to read than the Agrarian Speeches themselves—the sauce is better than the fish, so to speak.
Krostenko’s book will be an essential resource for anyone studying Cicero’s De lege agraria 1 and 2. Those interested in Cicero’s rhetorical art more generally will also find many good and stimulating observations. The book’s organization means that its arguments can be a challenge to follow—most readers will probably find it easiest to work through Krostenko’s discussions only of particular themes or passages of interest—but it is full of close readings that help explain what Cicero was trying to do in these speeches and how he was trying to do it. Between Krostenko’s monograph and Manuwald’s commentary, Cicero’s Agrarian Speeches are now more accessible than they’ve been since the first century BC.