Chapter 11 - Private Knowledge and Public Image in Roman Elections

Summary

This paper explores the intersection between the institutional form of Roman elections and the way in which participants and other interested parties spoke about and within the electoral process; or, in other words, the relationship between elections as an abstract phenomenon and the lived experience of those who were really part of those electoral processes. Using Cicero’s pro Murena as a case-study, I argue that the speech dramatises a tension between Cicero’s privileged electoral knowledge and the audiences’ expectations, a rhetorical strategy that applies also to the pressing issue of the day, the Catilinarian conspiracy. These two strands comprise between them several heuristics that resemble the practices of modern politicians: respectively, the deployment of generic templates (which might also be termed clichés or stereotypes), and of ‘valence issues’, that is to say, issues of general and equally generic importance to the majority of the audience. The deployment of these gambits is revealing not only of the political strategies used by Romans in electoral campaigns, but also the lack of real transparency in Roman elections, for modern viewers as well as for the original audiences, who did not always enjoy access to Cicero’s privileged behind-the-scenes access.