Self-Help and Social Status in Cicero's "Pro Quinctio".

Abstract

The Pro Quinctio, Cicero's earliest surviving speechl, has received little scholarly attention2, perhaps because its rhetoric is less sparkling than his later works, or because legal technicalities dominate its argument. Quinctius' was a tough case; his fIrst advocate dropped it shortly before the trial and Cicero took over. It seems unlikely that he won the case, because if he had, he probably wouldn't have passed up the opportunity of boasting that he had so early in his career bested Hortensius, who led the team of influential orators representing C. Naevius, Quinctius' opponent in the suit. This paper offers a new reading of the Pro Quinctio as an early contribution of Cicero's to the ongoing dialogue about the role of law in Roman society. In the Pro Quinctio, Cicero addressses the relationship between selfhelp -taking the law into one's own hands -and legal procedure in Roman private law. In both ancient and modern discsussions, self-help is understood as an individual's taking action, even to the extent of using force, to assert or protect his rights without any formalized legal procedure3. Much of the political violence of the late Republic is often explained as self-help4, and these unsettled conditions also affected the private law system, as the evidence of the praetor's edict indicates: through the creation of special interdicts, the praetors in the fIrst century