Basil DUFALLO Clodian Revenants: Conjuring and Elite Ideology in Cicero's Pro Milone  

This paper examines the process by which an elite Roman discourse such as oratory distinguishes itself from competing and marginal discourses. I take as a case study Cicero's Pro Milone, which draws upon magical conjuring-associated at Rome with foreigners and women-in its oratorical evocations of the dead Clodius. I thus build on recent work on the relation between Roman oratory and ideology, such as in T. Habinek's new book, The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome (Princeton, 1998). A study of conjuring, I maintain, complicates our understanding of Cicero's place in the Western canon by illuminating his paradoxical relationship to marginal socio-linguistic practice. Preserving the orator's authority means not only remaining true to his spirit, but coming to terms with the specters of social conflict he seeks to exorcise. Characterizing the dead Clodius as a spirit or revenant allows Cicero to suggest the menace Clodius still poses to the Roman state and so to mitigate the image of Milo as Clodius' killer. Cicero's comparison of Milo to Orestes implicitly aligns Clodius with the dead Clytaemestra, whose ghost and Furies stalked the Greco-Roman stage. While perhaps responding to concerns about religious transgression where the dead are concerned (as raised by Clodius' killing on the Via Appia and his unceremonious cremation in the curia), such tactics ultimately affirm the authority of state-sponsored law over the lawless impulses of a degenerate aristocrat like Clodius.

While Cicero's oratorical conjuring keeps his audience's attention focused on the evils of Clodius, the orator simultaneously promotes a philosophically enlightened view of death, the dead, and their place in a divine order. Although Cicero evokes traditional ideas of an embodied afterlife, he ultimately subordinates them to an overriding concern with disembodied gloria, a term that signals his allegiance to the Roman political elite. The Pro Milone's peroration locates both Milo and Cicero at the opposite pole from Clodius (who had been adopted into a plebeian gens in order to stand for the office of Tribune): through gloria, Cicero insists, men seem even to ascend into the heavens. The ghost emerges as a figure not only for the aftermath of injustice, but for the Pro Milone's own written language, itself a corporeal trace of an orator who remains both dead and "alive."