The Measure of All Things: Natural Hierarchy in Roman Republican Thought

Abstract

This work explores how writers of the late Roman Republic use the concept of nature rhetorically, in order to talk about and either reinforce or challenge social inequality. Comparisons between humans and animals receive special attention, since writers of that time often equate social status with natural status by assimilating certain classes of person to certain classes of animal. It is the aim of this study to clarify the ideology which supported the conflation of natural and social hierarchy, by explicating the role that nature was thought to play in creating and maintaining the inequality both between man and man, and between man and animal. In investigating this issue, this study also addresses the question of whether the Romans took a teleological view of human society, as they did of nature, and ultimately concludes that they did not. It proposes, rather, that the conceptual mechanism which naturalized social inequality, and which drove the assimilation of human to animal, was the belief that there is one, natural measure of worth and status for all creatures: utility to the human community. Chapter 1 identifies some pertinent beliefs, commonly found in Republican texts, about nature, animals, humans, and the relationship of all three to each other. Chapter 2 considers whether these beliefs have a philosophical provenance, by discussing Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery and Stoic views on the institution of slavery, and their possible relation to the ideas expressed in Roman sources. Chapter 3 returns to Republican texts, including popular oratory, and examines comparisons between domestic animals and humans in the treatment of slavery and wage-earning. Chapter 4 examines comparisons between wild animals and humans in discussions about violence and primitive peoples, and in political invective.