Reimagining Political Legitimacy

Upon election, new consuls were expected to give a public address (contio) to legitimize their rule, traditionally by referencing the ancestor masks (imagines) of their gens, which stood as signifiers of their family’s honor and civic commitment. However, for new men (novi homines) lacking prestigious ancestors, such avenues for legitimization were unavailable. Instead, new men had to re-imagine ancestral legitimacy in light of their own qualifications, often to the discredit of traditional sources of inherited authority. By critically examining the first consular speeches of Marius and Cicero, this article brings to the fore how new men could manipulate and innovate on standard visual and ideological novitas/nobilitas tropes to legitimize their authority. What is revealed, in turn, is that even when the source of legitimacy for political authority differed between traditional officeholders and novi homines, the mechanism for making that legitimacy comprehensible to the people was identical: politics demanded visual proof

Art · Cicero · Legitimacy · Literature · Political science · Politics · Classical Antiquity Studies · History · Law