The distorted mirror of Rome
1 July 2024
[NOTE: This is the fifth in a series of articles about Lacanian psychoanalysis and free speech. For the previous article, click here. For the next article, click here.]
In the previous article in this series, I promised to say something more about the problems that have arisen, for modern discourse in English, from the fact that Aristotle’s legacy has largely come down to us via the intermediation of Roman writers and their infelicitous rendering of Greek terms like politeia into Latin ones like res publica. So let me try to make good on that promise…
The simplest way to illustrate this problem is to say that there is no word for politics in Latin. That statement is, of course, a conceit, but it makes the point nicely. Of course, if you look up the word politics in an English-Latin dictionary, you will find some Latin translations. Here, for example, is what the Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary has:
As you can see, unlike English, which has politics, politician, etc., there are no Latin cognates for the Greek politeia. That’s why Plato’s Politeia was rendered Res publica by Roman writers. Most English editions unfortunately follow the Romans in calling it Plato’s Republic rather than Plato’s Politics, which would be more accurate. And this has obscured some of the most fundamental points about Plato’s most famous work. Most importantly, it tends to conflate Plato’s ideas with those of Cicero, when the two are in fact miles apart.
Cicero titled one of his dialogues, De re publica (usually translated as On the Republic, or simply The Republic). In the first book of that dialogue, he provides a very cursory definition of the term:
[39] Est igitur, inquit Africanus, res publica res populi, populus autem non omnis hominum coetus quoquo modo congregatus, sed coetus multitudinis iuris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatus.
This is translated by Niall Rudd (OUP, 1998) as follows:
SCIPIO: Well then, a republic is the property of the public. But a public is not every kind of human gathering, congregating in any manner, but a numerous gathering brought together by legal consent and community of interest.
In a fascinating article entitled “Cicero’s definition of res publica” (in J. G. F. Powell, Cicero the Philosopher: Twelve Papers, OUP, 1995: 63–83), Malcolm Schofield provides a more insightful translation:
But it is not any and every collection of human beings, herded together in any way at all, that is a people, but a collection of a mass which forms a society by virtue of (1) agreement with respect to justice and (ii) sharing in advantage.
It is clear from this passage that Cicero means something quite different by the term res publica than either Plato or Aristotle mean by the term politeia.
In his book on politics Aristotle famously identified six types of politeia — six types of constitution or political system (Politics, 4. 1289a26–1289a30):
ἐπεὶ δ᾽ ἐν τῇ πρώτῃ μεθόδῳ περὶ τῶν πολιτειῶν διειλόμεθα τρεῖς μὲν τὰς ὀρθὰς πολιτείας, βασιλείαν ἀριστοκρατίαν πολιτείαν, τρεῖς δὲ τὰς τούτων παρεκβάσεις, τυραννίδα μὲν βασιλείας ὀλιγαρχίαν δὲ ἀριστοκρατίας δημοκρατίαν
In English:
And inasmuch as in our first inquiry about the forms of the constitution we classified the right constitutions as three, kingship, aristocracy and constitutional government, and the deviations from these as three, tyranny from kingship, oligarchy from aristocracy and democracy from constitutional government
The six types of constitution are distinguished both by the number of rulers (one, a few, or all the citizens) and by whether the rulers rule for the good of the whole community (good) or for only a part of the community, such as themselves (bad).
Note that for Aristotle, politeia can designate both the superordinate term (i.e. a constitution or political system in general) and one particular kind of constitution (i.e. that in which all the citizens participate in government, and govern for the good of the whole community).
Cicero abandons the practice of having different words for the good and bad versions of a type of constitution. He uses the same word for both. So, in his, Republic (I. 42) he states:
Quare cum penes unum est omnium summa rerum, regem illum unum vocamus et regnum eius rei publicae statum. Cum autem est penes delectos, tum illa civitas optimatium arbitrio regi dicitur. Illa autem est civitas popularis (sic enim appellant), in qua in populo sunt omnia.
In English:
And so when the supreme authority is in the hands of one man, we call him a king, and the form of this State a kingship. When selected citizens hold this power, we say that the State is ruled by an aristocracy. But a popular government (for so it is called) exists when all the power is in the hands of the people.
It is notable that nowhere in his Republic does Cicero use the word democratia, so when Niall Rudd translates civitas popularis as democracy in the Oxford World’s Classics edition, (p.20), this simply adds to the confusion.
This is not to say that Cicero does not distinguish good political systems from bad ones. But he does so in a different way to Aristotle and Plato — not by having different terms for the three kinds of political system, depending on whether they are good or bad, but by saying that these systems are good when they qualify as a republic, and bad when they don’t. In other words, for Cicero, a republic is not a particular kind of political system, but something that any kind of political system — whether a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a city of the people — can be described as if it is governed well, and which can no longer be described as when it ceases to be governed well. For Cicero there is no inherent contradiction, therefore, in talking about a “republican monarchy,” while in modern usage this would be an oxymoron, for in our degenerate political vocabulary we have come to define the word republic simply as a political system in which there is no king. This is such an impoverished notion that Cicero would no doubt turn in his grave if he were to learn how far his legacy has been debased by those who claim to be his intellectual heirs. Cicero spends most of his Republic clarifying what he means by “governing well,” and hence what he means by the phrase res publica. It is certainly not a concept that admits of a simple dictionary definition.
It is, however, quite different from what Aristotle or Plato understood by the term politeia. And this is what I meant, when I concluded my previous article by claiming that the Latin terminology of Cicero and other Roman authors has functioned analogously to the imaginary barrier in Lacan’s schema L; it is a kind of looking glass through which the thought of Aristotle has reached us in a distorted, inverted form.
For the next article in this series, click here.
