Nigidius Figulus: A Failed Masculine Countermodel

E. Del Chrol (Marshall University)

The fall of the Roman Republic was in one sense a crisis of masculinity.  Attempts to integrate middle Republican models of appropriate elite behavior with the realities of the late Republican world generated great strife yet abundant creativity.  Men who saw the current system of hegemonic masculinity as neither inevitable nor natural attempted to effect viable and acceptable alternatives to the dominant system, these alternatives coalescing into countercultures.  

Neo-Pythagoreanism was one such counterculture.  In the battles over authorized and appropriate realms for elite expertise, Pythagoreanism is at once liminal and central.  On the one hand, Pythagoreanism was viewed by the Romans as a home-grown, Italic religion and philosophy, claiming luminaries such as king Numa and Appius Claudius Caecus as adherents.  On the other, during the late Roman Republic it becomes wedded to non-Italic means of divination, to the occult, to magic, and becomes a potentially dangerous alternative to state religion as well as gender identity.  At the center of the Neo-Pythagorean revival and redefinition were Nigidius Figulus and his Sodalicium Nigidianum.  Not since della Casa 1962 has there been a manuscript length analysis of Nigidius Figulus, and the majority of anglophone scholarship has centered on his brief astrological prophesy in Lucan 1.658-63.  Despite the singularity of his personality and the impact he had on his contemporaries, no substantial gendered reading of Nigidius Figulus exists in modern scholarship.  Furthermore, works like Musial 2001 or Petit 1998 focus on the political or philosophical implications of the Neo-Pythagorean revival, inadequately treating its social ramifications.

This paper will consider first the ethical implications and social disabilities of the practice of Roman Pythagoreanism.  How did being a Pythagorean provide a broader range of techniques for expressing masculine identity?  What were the potential repercussions for an elite man whose vegetarianism precluded him from fully participating in state sacrifice, or whose beliefs claimed that all men and women were equal?  Next this paper will address the intellectual context for the Neo-Pythagorean revival of the last century BCE.  As aristocratic males were foreclosed from many of their traditional realms of expertise, how did they colonize foreign intellectual realms and renovate native ones?  Finally, it will demonstrate how Nigidius Figulus – friend of Cicero, intellectual rival of Varro, enemy of Julius Caesar – was a charismatic, appealing, but ultimately failed exemplar of countercultral masculinity.