The Republic of Virtue: The Republican Tradition in Greek Political Philosophy and Roman Historiography

Thinkers as diverse as Niccolo Machiavelli, John Adams, and J.G.A. Pocock have written of a “republican tradition” in Greco-Roman political thought. But what is this tradition? What links the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle with the Roman histories of Sallust and Livy?

This dissertation argues that from the 5^th century to the 1^st century BCE, the Roman Republic displaced imaginary utopias like Plato’s kallipolis as the major locus of constitutional theory. This process has far-reaching implications for the method and the content of political philosophy and historiography.

Plato and Aristotle’s political philosophy elaborates and rationalizes the anti-egalitarianism of earlier Greek texts like the Old Oligarch’s Constitution of the Athenians. On their account, justice is when those with a superior endowment of rationality employ their intellect in ruling over others. Aristotle calls participation in rule “citizenship.” In an Aristotelian just society, citizenship is distributed in proportion to capacity for reason, with the wholly irrational—natural slaves and productive laborers—excluded altogether.

Polybius and Cicero use the model of the mixed constitution to figure the Roman Republic in terms of Platonic-Aristotelian justice. The mixed constitution, composed of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements, distributes political power to each citizen in proportion to their capacity for reason. In Rome, these elements are the consuls, Senate, and people. For Polybius, Rome’s constitutional elements each enjoy the positive powers necessary to check and balance each other. Each element is thus prevented from achieving dominance and destabilizing the polity.

Cicero holds, against Polybius, that the empowerment of the polity’s less rational elements cannot be constructive. On his model, the citizen masses do not enjoy positive political powers. Rather, their citizenship consists in special protections, in the form of the tribunate and provocatio, from the corporeal abuses afforded to non-citizens. Cicero’s model thus dissolves the Aristotelian link between citizenship and active political participation.

Sallust’s theory of the mixed constitution challenges Polybius by showing that the mutual obstruction of Rome’s constitutional elements causes not stability but endlessly escalating civil strife. As each component morally degrades, Rome’s mixed constitution is corrupted into a mélange of tyranny, oligarchy, and mob rule. Sallust also challenges Cicero’s model of citizenship, arguing that if the masses are disempowered, the elite cannot be trusted not to abuse them—but if the masses are empowered, they cannot be trusted to behave rationally.

Livy recuperates Cicero through a new model of citizenship by synecdoche. Revisiting the Conflict of the Orders, he suggests that Aristotle’s definition of citizenship is fulfilled for the masses at large, so long as some individuals from the masses rise to high office. The hope of office provides sufficient incentive for citizens to strive in service of the polity, which constitutes a form of political participation without allowing the unworthy to wield power. Widespread opportunities for meaningful work, with the possibility of substantive reward, ease the odiousness of hierarchy and generate civic concord. At the same time, representation of the lower orders in high office creates a bulwark against the threat of oligarchic overreach.