historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

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Chapter 7. The mistress of life
Besides this principle of causation, four other points attract attention. First,
the way Boxhorn attests credibility. Boxhorn uses two directives: the opinion
of all or the many, and logic. Thus, Boxhorn follows Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s
version of Romulus’s death, because most ancient authors hold the same
opinion as Dionysius’s. 165 In a discussion between Livy and the Greek biographer
Plutarch (46-after 119) on the duration of the highest power (summa
potestas) in the hands of the senators who ruled Rome after the death of Romulus,
Boxhorn sides with Livy, because his ‘story is more consistent with reason,
and therefore seems to us to be more truthful’. 166
Second, the importance of quotations. That each dissertation is full of quotations
is not so surprising: they had, of course, in the first place a rhetorical
purpose. The quotations serve two purposes: they form a part of the narrative,
or they are used to support certain statements. So, after claiming that the
tribunes’s power to veto was bad and destructive, Boxhorn cites Quintius,
one of the participants in Cicero’s Laws: ‘For with the birth of the tribunate
the weight of the aristocracy diminished and the sheer force of the masses
gathered strength.’ 167
165 Boxhorn, Emblemata politica: accedunt dissertationes politicae de Romanorum Imperio et quaedamaliae,
I.11, pp. 150-51.
166 Ibidem, II.1, pp. 152-53, with the following quote on p. 153. ‘At Livii narratio rationi magis convenit,
ac idcirco verior nobis videtur.’ In Boxhorn’s version Plutarch had held that the highest power
had rotated among the senators individually, who had to lay down their powers after six hours. Plutarch,
however, tells a slightly different story, claiming that the senators had arranged ‘that each of
them in his turn should assume the insignia of royalty, make the customary sacrifices to the gods, and
transact public business, for the space of six hours by day and six hours by night’. See Plutarch, Lives,
Vol. 1, Numa, 2, pp. 308-13, with quote on p. 313. Livy, according to Boxhorn, had claimed that ten
senators, who were elected from the ten decuria in which Rome’s hundred senators were divided, held
power without being bound by any time limit. Livy’s report, however, is somewhat different. ‘And so
the hundred senators shared the power among themselves, setting up groups of ten and appointing one
man for each group to preside over the government. Ten men exercised authority, but only one had the
insignia of command and the lictors; the command was limited to a period of five days and passed to all
in rotation.’ Quoted from Livy, The History of Rome: Books 1-5. Translated, with Introduction and Notes,
by Valerie M. Warrior (Hackett Publishing Company; Indianapolis/Cambridge, 2006), I.17, p. 27.
167 Ibidem, X.10, p. 270. ‘… nata potestate tribunitia gravitatem Optimatium cecidisse, & convaluisse
jus multitudinis.’ Cicero, De re pvblica, De legibvs, Cato maior de senectvte, Laelivs de amicitia. Recognovit
breviqve adnotatione critica instrvxit J.G.F. Powell (Clarendon Press; Oxford, 2006), De legibvs,
III.17, p. 246. ‘Magnum dicis malum; nam ista potestate nata gravitas optimatium cecidit convaluitque
vis multitudinis.’ English translation taken from Cicero, The Republic and The Laws. Translated by Niall
Rudd. With and Introduction and Notes by Jonathan Powell and Niall Rudd (Oxford University Press;
Oxford, 1998), III.17, p. 156. Here one has a good example of how Boxhorn, by taking a quotation out of
its original context, manipulates a text in a direction favourable for his own argument. By citing from
a work of Cicero, he seeks Cicero’s authority to support his argument. But in the Laws Cicero actually
defends the institution of the tribunate, something that becomes quite clear if one looks at the immediate
response of Marcus, one of the other participants in the discussion, and the one who is actually
expressing Cicero’s standpoint of view. As Neil Wood has explained, Cicero saw the institution of the
tribunate as an advantage, because it would institutionalise the conflict between the patricians and the
plebeians, making it controllable. Neil Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (University of California
Press; Berkeley, 1988), pp. 165, 171. The fact that Boxhorn is omitting this response, indeed, the fact
that he does not mention any source that defends the tribunate, serves as a warning that Boxhorn, who