Black Cicero

Black Cicero examines the black American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois's lifelong engagement with the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero. To Du Bois, Cicero's life and his opposition to Caesar provided a foundational example of anti-tyrannical thought and action, a tradition of which he considered himself a part alongside his ancient Roman forerunner. Despite this continuity in Du Bois's extensive oeuvre, the image of ancient Mediterranean life that informed his self-fashioning as a "Black Cicero" underwent tremendous changes as the nineteenth century yielded to the twentieth. Considering Cicero a white man at the start of his career, Du Bois later came to advertise ancient Rome's multi-continental positioning at the intersection of Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as the diversity of that space's populations. Du Bois travelled, read, and interacted with thinkers from across these same continents--and the Americas--evincing a complex intertextual rhizome within which Cicero ultimately turned non-white. From the Jim Crow era, through World War I and II, to the Cold War and his move to newly independent Ghana at the end of his life, Du Bois celebrated those who pursued liberty, and he condemned imitators of the imperialist oppression that he observed in the Roman empire. Black Cicero embeds this duality in the discourses about the ancient Mediterranean that were proliferating at the time. Probing Du Bois's attractive yet also notably distorted view of a freedom-loving Cicero, this book traces how one of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' most engaging thinkers and compelling writers made ancient Rome relevant to discussions about white supremacism and anti-blackness, to decolonial and anti-colonial thought, to communism, and to the fight against fascism.

Mathias Hanses is Melvin and Rosalind Jacobs University Endowed Fellow in the Humanities and Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, African Studies, and African American Studies at Penn State University. He holds a PhD in Classics from Columbia University and an MA in English Philology (American Studies) from the University of Münster. He is author of The Life of Comedy after the Death of Plautus and Terence (Michigan, 2020), and works broadly on the history of race, status, and difference in the ancient Mediterranean; Latin literature; the Roman theatre; and Black classicism.