The influential African American scholar and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois had plenty of influences throughout his long and distinguished life - among them the ancient Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero.
It's a connection Penn State Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Africana Studies Mathias Hanses first discovered as a graduate student, and has now made the basis of his new book, "Black Cicero: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Ancient Romans in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," published by Oxford University Press.
In the book, Hanses examines the many ways Du Bois engaged with Cicero's writings and how they provided him with a "foundational example of anti-tyrannical thought and action" that he activated in his arguments on race, equal rights and other subjects throughout his life.
On Thursday, Nov. 12, Hanses will participate in a panel discussion about the book at Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African & African American Research from 1 to 3 p.m. The event will be livestreamed on the center's YouTube page.
Hanses, who recently was appointed interim director of the Paterno Fellows Program in the College of the Liberal Arts, said the book broadened his scholarship in several ways.
"What I loved about this project was that Du Bois was such an intellectually voluminous thinker and reader, so in order to understand what he's doing, you have to dip into all these different conversations and public discourses," Hanses said. "I learned so much about Pan-Africanism and about anti-racist methodologies, and about the reception of ancient figures more broadly. Who was Cicero to a turn-of-the-20th-century Black American?"
The book begins in the 1890s, when Du Bois, the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard, joined the faculty at Wilberforce University in Ohio. There, Hanses said, he likely included Cicero in his teaching and began formulating his theories on the ancient Mediterranean world.
In Cicero's opposition to Julius Caesar in the period leading from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire, Du Bois found a forerunner for Black civil rights activists like himself. The two men also shared some personality traits, said Hanses, who received fellowships from Penn State's Humanities Institute and the Classical Association of Atlantic States to support the book's research and writing.
"Both could be described as egocentric," he said. "Both were initially outsiders, yet made it far based on education and public speaking and publishing. That said, Cicero was a member of ancient Italy's wealthy elite, and Du Bois was part of a racialized minority. That difference is defining."
