Tres famosiores Respublicae, or Kasper Siemek on Antiquity

Abstract

During the Old Polish period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), the ancient tradition played a major role in Polish political and constitutional thought. The citizens of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania living in the seventeenth century were well aware of the uniqueness and value of their statehood. The contemporary world did not provide them with many analogies to debate these issues, and as a result, they sought a more distant point of reference, finding ancient examples to which the Commonwealth could relate in recognizing its own strengths and weaknesses.

In the political writings of the Old Polish period, the republican system of the Commonwealth was regarded as a realisation of the mixed model which existed in Sparta and Rome at the earliest and which was regarded as a permanent, stable, virtually ideal system. It is clearly visible in the texts of Kasper Siemek, who like many other young men of his generation, studied at the of Cracow (1610) and Bologna (1620). In the last years of his life he wrote two treatises on political and legal issues. In the first treatise, Civis bonus (1632), he gave a systematic lecture on the state, the laws and citizenship, and at the same time an apotheosis of the status quo in the Commonwealth. In the second book entitled Lacon, Octavian Augustus and a Laconian discuss the republican constitution, acknowledging that only a republic, under the rule of law, enabled freedom to be preserved.

Siemek’s texts reveals a knowledge of the ancient history that was thorough for its time. The author was fluent in Greek and Latin, familiar with the works of Plutarch, Cicero and Aristotle. His knowledge of various details of Greek and Roman history is really surprising.

It is a common belief that the authority of Antiquity was used in Poland to emphasise the worth of the political solutions adopted by the Commonwealth; that those references were a meeting of two apologies: the apologia for the republican system of Antiquity and the apologia for the system of the Polish-Lithuanian state. Invoking the example of the ancient republic made the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania universal. Siemek probably used the example of tres famosiores Respublicae to the same purpose. There are obvious conclusions to be drawn from a reading of both his works in relation to the presence of the tradition of Antiquity. But in my opinion Siemek was interested also in achieving the most advantageous system, not only in elevating the Commonwealth by giving it ancient roots.universities