DuBois and Cicero

As I rush to finish up a paper for a conference publication on panegyric that concentrates on Cicero's praise of Caesar in the Pro Marcello, I turn to W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk -- which Jim Tatum's and Bill Cook's terrific book African American Writers and Classical Tradition led me to reread a couple of months ago, and which a new paper in progress by Sharon Krause on non-sovereign freedom reminds me of again today -- in particular, DuBois' painfully acute insights into "the sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." Cicero's speech is painful to read for related reasons: it is a proclamation of self-abnegation and obedience in a voice that insists on responsibility, volition, will, and agency even as it marks how these things are withering away--worse, how the very effort to recapture them is advancing their destruction.  What gives Cicero a heroic stature in this flattery-filled speech is his insistence on seeking a way forward through the experience of self-loss.