Cicero and the Rhetorics of Race

Recorded: April 10, 2025
Event: Whither Global Antiquity? Retrospection and Future Directions
Citation: Čulík-Baird, Hannah & Mathias Hanses. “Cicero and the Rhetorics of Race,” Global Antiquity: Whither Global Antiquity (April 10, 2025).

by Hannah Čulík-Baird (University of California, Los Angeles) and Mathias Hanses (The Pennsylvania State University)

The only African to obtain a speaking role in Cicero’s philosophical corpus is the Numidian king Masinissa. In the Somnium Scipionis in Book 6 of De re publica, Masinissa’s residence provides the setting where Scipio Aemilianus dreams of his ancestor, the elder Scipio Africanus, who had defeated Hannibal’s Carthage with Masinissa’s help a half-century before. In this paper, we focus on this scene to provide a glimpse at our project, Cicero and the Rhetorics of Race. Our work reorganizes the orator’s intellectual output into three geographical regions: Europe, Asia, and Africa. This division surfaces the rhetorical structures of the global racial imaginary within which Cicero aggressively asserts Rome’s right to rule over a variety of dehumanized Others. In examining Masinissa as a test case, we aim, first of all, to help counteract the erasure of Africa from discussions of Latin literature by demonstrating that Cicero considered Numidia, Carthage, and other African states “good to think with.” We especially cover those passages that demonstrate actual knowledge of Masinissa and his culture, such as references to the worship of Baal in 2nd-century-BCE Numidia. At the same time, our second objective is to demonstrate that even not entirely ignorant depictions of African cultures serve to reinforce a Roman hegemonic perspective. Masinissa acts as a model provincial who happily and eagerly submits to Roman rule. This presentation flies in the face of Numidian self-portrayals. Yet, within De re publica, Masinissa “confirms” Cicero’s/Scipio’s larger argument that Rome is divinely ordained to rule the known world.

About the Speakers

Hannah Čulík-Baird is the co-organizer of an annual online conference—Res Difficiles (resdifficiles.com)—which examines issues of “difficulty” arising out of intersectional vectors of race, ethnicity, gender, and beyond, as well as the co-editor and co-founder of a new Green and Open Access journal, Res Difficiles, The Journal, which launched in March 2024. A specialist in Cicero and Latin literature more broadly—her first book, Cicero and the Early Latin Poets (Cambridge University Press) was published in April 2022—she has published a number of articles, which address rhet- orics of oppression, slavery, and race in the Ciceronian corpus (“Archias the Good Immigrant,” Rhetorica 2020; “Erasing the Aethiopian in Cicero’s Post Reditum in Senatu,” Ramus 2022; “The Image of the Slave in Cicero’s Catilinarians,” Rhetorica 2023).

Mathias Hanses is co-founder and co-president of Eos: Africana Receptions of Ancient Greece and Rome (eosafricana.org), asociety for the study of Africana receptions of classical texts that centers the work and experiences of Black people in the field of classics. A specialist in Latin literature and Africana receptions of ancient Greece and Rome as well as race, status, and difference in the ancient Roman world, his first book The Life of Comedy after the Death of Plautus and Terence (University of Michigan Press) was published in 2020, and his second book—a study of W.E.B. Du Bois’s engagement with the works of Cicero (Black Cicero: W.E.B. Du Bois, the Ancient Romans, and the Future of Classical Scholarship)—is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. He has also written a number of articles and book chapters on race in ancient Rome (e.g., “Race and Slavery in Roman Comedy” in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race, ed. by Rosa Andújar, Elena Giusti, and Jackie Murray; “Dying Gauls and Weak Numidians: Roman Racecraft in the African War” in the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of Decolonising Knowledge in Africa, ed. by Ezra Chitando and Obert Bernard Mlambo).