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Cicero Crosses the Color Line: Pro Archia Poeta and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk

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Notes

  1. See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. H. L. Gates Jr. and T. H. Oliver, New York, 1999, pp. 46–54, and D. L. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919, New York, 1993, pp. 56–78.

  2. Du Bois, Souls (n. 1 above), p. 49.

  3. For Cicero’s strategy, see, e.g., A. M. Riggsby, Crime and Community in Ciceronian Rome, Austin, 1999, p. 151; J. Dugan, Making a New Man: Ciceronian Self-Fashioning in the Rhetorical Works, Oxford, 2005, p. 33.

  4. See, e.g., C. Cowherd, ‘The Wings of Atalanta: Classical Influences in The Souls of Black Folk’, in The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later, ed. D. Hubbard, Columbia, MO, 2003, pp. 284–97 (295–7) and W. W. Cook and J. Tatum, African American Writers and Classical Tradition, Chicago, 2010, pp. 107–14.

  5. The relevant literature (as indicated also in the introduction to this collection of essays) includes P. D. Rankine, Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature, Madison, WI, 2006; B. Goff and M. Simpson, Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora, Oxford, 2007; E. Greenwood, Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century, New York, 2010; African Athena: New Agendas, ed. D. Orrells, G. K. Bhambra, and T. Roynon, Oxford, 2011; J. McConnell, Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939, Oxford, 2013; and E. A. Hairston, The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African American Reclamation of the West, Knoxville, TN, 2013, who discusses the Pro Archia reference on pp. 181–3.

  6. See H. L. Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, Oxford, 1988 and Patrice Rankine's contribution to this special issue.

  7. In this respect, Du Bois’s approach to Cicero is ‘omni-local’. It ties into larger networks of classical reception across the globe that assert the value of Greco-Roman literature, but nevertheless remains primarily defined by the local concern of redressing US-American racism. See E. Greenwood, ‘Afterword: Omni-Local Classical Receptions’, Classical Receptions Journal, 5, 2013, pp. 354–61.

  8. Greenwood, Afro-Greeks (n. 5 above), esp. pp. 1–13 and L. Hardwick, ‘Fuzzy Connections: Classical Texts and Modern Poetry in English’, in Tradition, Translation, Trauma: The Classic and the Modern, ed. J. Parker and T. Matthews, Oxford, 2011, pp. 39–60.

  9. Hardwick, ‘Fuzzy Connections’ (n. 8 above), p. 41.

  10. For this and similar images within classical reception studies, as well as the impossibility of ignoring intervening authors in one’s study of the Classics, see C. Martindale, Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception, New York, 1993; J. Gaisser, ‘The Reception of Classical Texts in the Renaissance’, in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, ed. A. J. Grieco et al., Florence, 2002, pp. 387–400; Hardwick, ‘Fuzzy Connections’ (n. 8 above); and Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception, ed. S. Butler, London, 2016.

  11. Influential discussions of Souls include F. L. Broderick, W. E. B. Du Bois: Negro Leader in a Time of Crisis, Stanford, 1959; A. Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois, Cambridge, MA, 1976, pp. 68–90; Lewis, Biography (n. 1 above), pp. 265–96; K. E. Byerman, Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Athens, GA, 1994; and D. P. Alridge, The Educational Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History, New York, 2008, pp. 33–67. For an accessible introduction to the debates between Washington and Du Bois, see J. M. Moore, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift, Wilmington, DE, 2003. For the role of classics more specifically, see M. V. Ronnick, ‘A Look at Booker T. Washington’s Attitude Toward the Study of Greek and Latin by People of African Ancestry’, Negro Educational Review, 53, 2002, pp. 59–70; Rankine, Ulysses in Black (n. 5 above), pp. 26–9; and Hairston, Ebony Column (n. 5 above), pp. 159-91.

  12. See L. R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901, New York, 1972 and L. R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915, New York, 1983.

  13. B. T. Washington, Up from Slavery, ed. W. L. Andrews, New York, 1996, p. 40.

  14. Ibid., p. 40. Cf. also pp. 44, 58, and 72.

  15. Du Bois, Souls (n. 1 above), p. 67. For Du Bois’s later revisions of this position, see, e.g., Alridge, Educational Thought (n. 11 above), pp. 69–144.

  16. Du Bois, Souls (n. 1 above), pp. 58–9.

  17. Du Bois, Souls (n. 1 above), pp. 67–8, quoting a racist editorial.

  18. Hairston, Ebony Column (n. 5 above), pp. 173–6 and 181–3.

  19. W. E. B. Du Bois, Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others, Vol. 1: 1891–1901, ed. H. Aptheker, Millingwood, NY, pp. 1–18 (10).

  20. Cic. Arch. 20. All translations are my own and based on the Oxford Classical Text.

  21. On Pro Archia’s canonicity, see, e.g., H. Vretska and K. Vretska, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pro Archia Poeta: Ein Zeugnis für den Kampf des Geistes um seine Anerkennung, Darmstadt, 1979, pp. 189–227 and Dugan, New Man (n. 3 above), p. 49 with n. 84.

  22. W. E. B. Du Bois, Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887–1961, ed. H. Aptheker, Amherst, MA, 1985, p. 6.

  23. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘So the Girl Marries’, The Crisis, 35, 1928, pp. 208–9. See also the introduction to this special issue for Du Bois’s reference to Cicero’s Pro Marcello at his daughter’s graduation in 1924.

  24. The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century, ed. H. Aptheker, New York, 1968, p. 118.

  25. See, e.g., M. Malamud, African Americans and the Classics: Antiquity, Abolition and Activism, London, 2016, pp. 120–21 and 160–61.

  26. See M. Malamud, Ancient Rome and Modern America, Malden, MA, 2009, pp. 70–97; C. Richard, The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States, Cambridge, MA, 2009, pp. 181–203; J. L. Barnard, ‘Ruins amidst Ruins: Black Classicism and the Empire of Slavery’, American Literature, 86, 2014, pp. 361–89; and Malamud, African Americans and the Classics (n. 25 above), pp. 105–46.

  27. Rankine, Ulysses in Black (n. 5 above), pp. 22–34 discusses inter alia the composition of Du Bois’s readership.

  28. Cic. Arch. 14.

  29. Ibid. 12–16; cf. also 26–30.

  30. Du Bois, Souls (n. 1 above), p. 73.

  31. Ibid., p. 110.

  32. Ibid., p. 61.

  33. See again Hairston, Ebony Column (n. 5 above), pp. 159–91 for the relevant sources.

  34. See esp. C. Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910, Baltimore, 2002, pp. 99–178.

  35. Cic. Arch. 12.

  36. Ibid. 16.

  37. Du Bois, Souls (n. 1 above), pp. 73–4.

  38. Decades later, F. M. Snowden, Jr. would make similar, much-discussed points about the Greeks and Romans’ attitudes toward people of colour in Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks, Cambridge, MA, 1983. On the history of the question, see D. E. McCoskey, Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy, Oxford, 2012, esp. pp. 5–11.

  39. Du Bois expresses such views as they relate to Rome with particular clarity in ‘The Beginning of Emancipation’ of 1905; see Du Bois, Writings in Periodicals (n. 19 above), pp. 242–5. Cf. also C. West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, Madison, WI, 1989, pp. 138–50; P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, MA, 1993, pp. 111–45; W. J. Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 136–68; and P. C. Taylor, ‘W. E. B. Du Bois’, Philosophy Compass, 5, 2010, pp. 904–15. For similarities within the wider Black Atlantic, see Goff and Simpson, Black Aegean (n. 5 above), esp. pp. 1–77; Greenwood, Afro-Greeks (n. 5 above), pp. 1–14; and McConnell, Black Odysseys (n. 5 above), pp. 3–4.

  40. See esp. Du Bois’s discussion of the black ‘Sorrow Songs’ as America’s singular contribution to world culture at Souls (n. 1 above), pp. 154–64.

  41. Ibid., p. 11.

  42. Du Bois, Souls (n. 1 above), p. 24.

  43. Ibid., pp. 24–5. See also p. 69.

  44. For this element in Cicero’s self-image, see, e.g., T. Habinek, The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome, Princeton, 1998, esp. p. 87; Dugan, New Man (n. 3 above), pp. 40–43.

  45. Compare also Irenae Aigbedion's and Harriet Fertik's contributions to this collection.

  46. Compare Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. S. Gillman and A. E. Weinbaum, Minneapolis, MN, 2007 (esp. J. James, ‘Profeminism and Gender Elites: W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett’ [pp. 69–95]; M. Elam and P. C. Taylor, ‘Du Bois’s Erotics’ [pp. 209–33]; and H. V. Carby, ‘The Souls of Black Men’ [pp. 234–68]), as well as C. Simpson, ‘Du Bois’s Dubious Feminism: Evaluating through The Black Flame Trilogy’, The Pluralist, 10, 2015, pp. 48–63.

  47. Washington, Slavery (n. 13 above), p. 58.

  48. Du Bois, Souls (n. 1 above), p. 35.

  49. See W. J. Moses, Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent, New York, 1989 and Lewis, Biography (n. 1 above), pp. 161–74.

  50. Du Bois, Souls (n. 1 above), p. 141.

  51. Du Bois, Souls (n. 1 above), p. 132.

  52. Cic. Arch. 12–16.

  53. See Dugan, New Man (n. 3 above), pp. 31–47 and E. J. Nesholm, ‘Language and Artistry in Cicero’s Pro Archia’, Classical World, 103, 2010, pp. 477–90. Compare also H. C. Gotoff, Cicero’s Elegant Style: An Analysis of the Pro Archia, Urbana, IL, 1979.

  54. Hardwick, ‘Fuzzy Connections’ (n. 8 above) passim. Compare also Martindale, Redeeming the Text, (n. 10 above), esp. pp. 1–34.

  55. See Butler, Deep Classics (n. 10 above), esp. the editor’s own contributions (pp. 1–48).

  56. Gaisser, ‘Reception of Classical Texts’ (n. 10 above), p. 387.

  57. Hardwick, ‘Fuzzy Connections’ (n. 8 above), p. 42.

  58. Compare Greenwood, ‘Omni-Local’ (n. 7 above), pp. 359–61, who observes that an author’s translation into a new language assimilates that writer into the culture of the reader.

  59. T. Roynon, ‘The Africanness of Classicism in the Work of Toni Morrison’, in African Athena (n. 5 above), pp. 380–97. Compare also the editors’ introduction to the same volume, esp. pp. 11–16; Rankine, Ulysses in Black (n. 5 above), pp. 22–34; Greenwood, Afro-Greeks (n. 5 above), esp. pp. 1–13; McConnell, Black Odysseys (n. 5 above), pp. 9, 13–14; as well as the introduction to this special issue.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Harriet Fertik, Erin M. Hanses, Stephen M. Wheeler, and the journal’s anonymous referees for their many helpful comments, which have much improved this contribution. Further thanks are due to this paper’s original audience at the 2016 annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies for a lively and rewarding discussion.

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    Mathias Hanses

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Hanses, M. Cicero Crosses the Color Line: Pro Archia Poeta and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Int class trad 26, 10–26 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-018-0476-8

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