Chapter 2 considers how Cicero responded to the model of the body politic proposed by Catiline. Rejecting the head of state metaphor, his oratory describes a civic healer capable of diagnosing and curing the ills of the Republic. This idea drew upon a well-established moralizing tradition that identified vice as a contagion that had infected the res publica. Whereas Varro, Sallust, and Lucretius employed such imagery to indict Rome’s governing class for its ambitio and avaritia, Cicero used it to justify the extralegal execution of the Catilinarian conspirators. Although he sought to protect a constitution under threat, his medically inspired language helped legitimize violence as a tool of political engagement. Identifying Clodius and his allies as new malignancies in need of amputation, he contributed to a corrosive cycle of civic conflict that culminated in Pompey’s sole consulship and Caesar’s dictatorship, two constitutional innovations justified as curative remedies. In the end, his rhetoric proved susceptible to appropriation by those less invested in collegial governance than he.

The Conclusion uses the downfall of Nero to consider the legacy of the body politic metaphor in Roman political thought. Julio-Claudian writers relied on the duality of head and body to express fears about the recurrence of civil war. Without a head to command Rome’s warring limbs, they argued, Rome would return to its ancestral cycle of self-destruction. The Year of the Four Emperors confirmed the prescience of their warnings. Plutarch and Tacitus relied on symbolism of a headless body politic to describe the conflict, confirming their perception of sole rule as necessary if not ideal. This contest for power therefore did not weaken the Principate so much as confirm its viability as an institution independent of its Augustan origins. With the rise of the Flavians came the formalization of both sole rule and the Imperial model of the body politic for centuries to come.

Chapter 3 explores how the models of the healer and head of state converged around the figure of the princeps. Although each proved useful in validating the Principate, their distinctive Republican histories invested them with divergent imperial trajectories. Because Cicero had already integrated the figure of the healer into Republican discourse, Augustan writers could soon locate the princeps in this role as well. The regal resonance of the caput, in contrast, made it unavailable as a descriptor of the “first citizen.” It is therefore absent in the works of Vergil, Horace, and Propertius. Yet for a society steeped in organic comparisons and confronted with constitutional change, the utility of the metaphor was obvious. Livy responded to this quandary in his first pentad, which depicts three stages in the life cycle of the Roman body politic: a regal polity topped by a caput, a Republic structured around the Fable of the Belly, and a fusion of these two forms under Camillus. Livy’s narrative thereby helped make the head of state metaphor available for contemporary usage. As Augustus’ rule came to an end, Ovid finally began identifying him as the caput orbis.

Chapter 5 locates the Younger Seneca and Lucan in a shared conversation about the long-term ramifications of sole rule. It opens with a reading of Seneca’s De Clementia, which is the first text to theorize the metaphors of the healer and head of state. Using both to construct a persuasive ideal of imperial interdependence, Seneca described a body politic whose health vacillates in proportion to the virtue of its princeps. The sick heads and overzealous surgeons that crop up in his other works, however, confirm the risks of such an arrangement. Lucan took this idea as his point of departure in the Bellum Civile, which responds to the imagistic framework of De Clementia through the characters of Sulla and Pompey. Portraying the former as a surgeon who makes excessive use of the scalpel and the latter as a head who suffers the mutiny of his limbs, he portrayed a body politic that was harmed but yet unable to survive without its rulers. He thereby conveyed the futility of politics in a society doomed to civil war.

Chapter 4 identifies the Tiberian era as the moment when Roman writers started representing the establishment of the Principate as a civic rebirth. Benefiting from the hindsight granted by half a century of peace, Manilius, Velleius Paterculus, and Valerius Maximus constructed a triumphant narrative that equated the acquisition of a head of state with the end of civil war. Yet their imagery also betrayed growing concern over the succession, a weakness encoded in the fabric of the Principate’s Republican façade. This problem became acute with the violent assassination of Caligula, which exposed the vulnerability of a political community dependent on one man for its survival. Those writing under Claudius, including the Elder Seneca, Philo of Alexandria, and Curtius Rufus, consequently began returning to imagery of a sick, aged, and headless body politic. Their revival of this tradition confirmed that the Augustan restoration was not a permanent solution. With each transfer of power came a new head of state who could harm or heal the body under his care.