As early as the fourth century BCE Greeks like Isocrates began to represent Athens as a universal model of human greatness. Being “Greek” in an Attic mode came to embody itself in a set of cultural practices (like speaking pure Greek or doing rhetoric or philosophy) theoretically accessible to all educated men, regardless of “native” ethnicity or language. This construction of Greekness created an immensely useful heuristic for the Romans who had conquered the Mediterranean world. If Athens could be claimed as the model for refined human culture on a global scale, it was Roman military might that preserved its memory and made its continued circulation possible. The habits of thought and practice advocated by classical Atticizing Hellenism promoted a universalist worldview peculiarly favorable to imperial government and its claims to provide security.

This paper explores how the habit of imperial Greeks of seeing Athens in classicized and classicizing, universalized and universalizing terms — already incipient in fifth and fourth century Attic texts — gains traction in first century BCE Roman texts, particularly in the writings of Cicero. This has implications not only for understanding the development of Greek imperial civic culture, but for grasping the forces that gradually made Roman citizenship thinkable as a universal property. After sketching recent critiques of cultural studies’ use of “identity” as a term of art, the paper turns to the emphasis on fantasy in forging ideas and practices of collective belonging in Frantz Fanon, Lauren Berlant, Homi Bhabha and others. Closely reading Cicero’s representation of his own desiring identification with Athens (especially in the prefaces to De Finibus) it examines how immersion in a cultural context coded as foreign or other transforms local regional, linguistic, or family bonds into a larger “inscape” of transcendent identification — in this case, with “classical” “Attic” culture. The paper seeks to advance our historical understanding of the adoption and transformation of Greek culture by Roman elites (whose distinctive imitative qualities Denis Feeney has recently noted) and its role as a forebear of Atticizing imperial Greeks, and to contribute to the growing literature in political thought on the history of cosmopolitan and universalist values.