Homo Novus and Nobilis: Cicero and the formation of the modern aristocracy

Cicero’s novitas has elicited different reactions throughout the centuries. Starting from a re-examination of a passage of Velleius Paterculus (2, 128, 1-4), a celebration of a notion of nobilitas founded on moral and political virtues, this paper revisits the role played by Cicero homo novus in the formation of a new, modern ideology of nobility. It argues that the status of Cicero as ‘new man’ and ‘new nobilis’ impacted on later reflections on human dignity and nobility throughout the Middle Ages and the Early Italian Renaissance. On the footsteps of Juvenal’s praise of Cicero as the ‘true’ nobilis, later biographers and intellectuals elaborated on the figure of Cicero, seen as a model of political man acting for the conservation of the res publica by virtus and ingenium.