78 Mass Oratory and Political Power

should be on our guard against our own assumptions, our own tendency
to perpetuate the ancient stereotype of ignorant audiences (imperitissimi! ).
Fabricius (cos. II 278) and Calatinus (cos. II 254) indeed belong to the
common fund of rhetorical exempla virtutis (“models of excellence”), as
their not infrequent use in Cicero’s speeches before senatorial and equestrian
audiences shows.52 On the face of it, then, their appearance in the speech on
the agrarian law suggests that the contional audience shared in a common
civic-historical tradition with the élite. And, as we have already seen, Cicero
does not “dumb down” his allusions for his plebeian audiences. He does not
refer to Fabricius here by his well-known gentile name, as he does regularly
elsewhere, but – presumably for the sake of homoeoteleuton (repetition
of word-endings) – solely by his less familiar cognomen; and Acidinus
(cos. 179), a much more obscure character from the third or second century
bc, he elsewhere cites as an exemplum only once, in a personal letter to his
equestrian friend, Atticus.53
The details of any single passage will not, of course, prove anything. But
rather than systematically depreciating the possible significance of such
allusions in accordance with an a priori “presumption of ignorance,” I
suggest that we interpret them against the background of recent work
on the Roman sense of the past. Cicero’s audiences belonged to a civic
community, the populus Romanus, whose sense of identity was forged and
maintained by an extraordinarily rich “collective memory” and a tight
connection with the glorious past. Indeed, Roman mnemonic practices –
for example the extraordinary monumentalization of Roman culture, the
“reincarnation” of great figures of the past in noble funerals, or the ever-
present invocation of the maiores (“ancestors”) in the form of exempla within
a continuous moral-political tradition – tended, to a noteworthy extent,
to erase the boundary between past and present.54 The maiores were the
fount and measure of moral (and thus political) legitimacy, and paradigms
For Späth 2001: 382–83, on the other hand, it serves as evidence of the progressive abstraction of
exemplary figures into an undifferentiated collectivity; but in fact the narratives associated with these
names have great specificity and are rarely, if ever, interchangeable. With David 1980b: 72–73, I
would suppose instead that a multitude of specific associations were sparked by mere names in such
sequences.
52 Cic. Pis. 14, 58; Sest. 72, 143; Cael. 39; Balb. 50; Planc. 60. Calatinus appears also in the form
“Caiatinus” (MRR i.207, n. 1). On Fabricius, see Berrendonner 2001 and Vigourt 2001.
53 Cic. Att. 4.3.3, with Shackleton Bailey ad loc. and Oppermann 2000: 65–66. Cf. Münzer, RE xiv
(1928) 1162.
54 On “collective memory” in the Republic (or “social memory” [Fentress and Wickham] or “cultural
memory” [Jan and Aleida Assmann]: the terminological debate can be set aside here), see esp.
Hölkeskamp 1996 and 2001; Späth 1998; and Hölscher 2001. On the blending of past and present,
see the somewhat divergent perspectives of Hölkeskamp 2001: 125–26; Späth 1998: 42–47, esp.
p. 45 on the “dual parallel temporalities” of the recent past and “le passé sublime”; Hölscher 2001: