Language and Artistry in Cicero’s Pro Archia

Erika J. Nesholm (Georgetown University)

Cicero takes advantage of his defense of Archias as an opportunity to celebrate the liberal arts so that the Pro Archia is a theoretical treatment of the status of literature as an artistic product within a political context. In a highly polished speech that reveals at every turn a remarkable depth of linguistic artistry (Gotoff 1979), Cicero celebrates the role of poetry in shaping his own forensic voice. The speech itself becomes an iconic representation of the integral role of literature in Roman society, manifesting precisely that cooperation between the arts that Cicero is arguing for.

In this paper, I examine the language of artistic production as applied to the composition of literature and its constructive role within Roman society. I examine first the way the familial connection Cicero posits between all the arts is manifested in the recurring metaphor of the speech as a sculpture for commemoration and contemplation; I then turn to the way he deploys the artistic language of rhetorical theory to call attention to his new forensic style in this speech; finally, I examine how the representation of literature as artistic monument culminates in the construction of a textual repository for immortality. Dugan 2005 argues that the speech’s connections with epideictic construct a literary identity for Cicero, allied with Archias; Panoussi (forthcoming) argues that the speech constructs Roman cultural identity through the supremacy of the arts. Drawing on these discussions of the speech’s role in the larger political and cultural context, I argue that Cicero re-activates the artistic language so that his effective deployment of images familiar from rhetorical theory subtly colors his argument concerning the significance of literature in Roman society.