2025 Syme Lecture

Cicero on slavery

Cicero, like other Romans of his class, owned numerous slaves. His attitude to and relationship with his slaves and ex-slaves have come under scrutiny in some recent studies. Others have offered important insights into ideas of freedom and slavery in the Roman political sphere more generally – and in Cicero’s work in particular. This lecture aims to probe the relationship between Cicero’s experiences as a slaver and the figure of slavery in his political thinking. Cicero was well aware that the power exercised by Rome over its subject territories might be figured as slavery. In his letters, Cicero terms his own position vis-à-vis Pompey, Caesar and Crassus a kind of enslavement. The figure of slavery is one he invokes with still greater frequency in coming to terms with Julius Caesar’s dictatorship – and, after the Ides of March, in attacking Mark Antony. The power Antony exercised over his fellow Romans was worse than that of Caesar, according to Cicero, for his own character was that of a slave. The lecture will explore the slippery ways in which Cicero’s reflections on the political sphere interact with, reinforce or challenge the brutal realities of literal enslavement.