Memory and leadership in the Late Roman Republic.

Abstract

This dissertation places the political inheritance of the last generation of the Roman Republic in the context of Roman social memory, focusing particularly on reactions to the upheavals of the 80s BCE as embodied by the figures of Marius and Sulla. These men loomed large in the discourse of the generation of Cicero and Caesar as the best and worst exemplars of Roman leadership for the turbulent social and political climate of the Late Republic. In order to understand and evaluate the posthumous rhetorical lives of these two figures, I attempt to isolate Republican images of them from the accretions of later tradition and to compare those images as closely as possible to the recoverable details of their actual careers. The result of this comparison sheds light not only on the figures of Marius and Sulla themselves but on the mental and social processes and political needs that characterized the last decades of Republican government in Rome. Memories of both Marius and Sulla were drastically simplified as they were embedded in the rhetorical framework of public discourse, and while Sulla was remembered accurately if very selectively, Marius was transformed dramatically in the public consciousness by virtue of his role as Sulla's greatest enemy in life. Because Sulla as dictator presided over the worst excesses of the 80s, he came to be seen primarily as a cruel autocrat whose example was to be avoided in all situations and at all costs. Marius, on the other hand, who was in his own life a relatively conventional politician, was remembered as a populist and an almost universally praiseworthy hero, the protector of the Roman people against all forms of oppression. Because these images were deeply ingrained in the memory and imagination of the Roman people as a whole, leading figures frequently situated themselves in political life by reaction to them. Public appeals to the legacies of Marius and Sulla represented not empty rhetoric or aristocratic infighting but genuine attempts to win political battles and the allegiance of the Roman people.