Nigidius Figulus - Political Career

Political Career

By 63 BC, Nigidius had been admitted to the Senate. He may have been aedile in 60 BC, when Cicero mentions that Nigidius was in a position to cite (compellare) a jury, or a tribune of the plebs in 59. He was praetor in 58, but no further official capacity is recorded for him until he serves as a legate 52–51 BC in Asia under Quintus Minucius Thermus. He left the Asian province in July 51.

Arnaldo Momigliano tried to explain the apparent contradictions between Nigidius’s active political career and his occult practices:

Even Varro, though schooled in the Stoicism of Aelius Stilo and in skeptical Antiochean Platonism, requested a Pythagorean funeral for himself. The 19th-century historian Theodor Mommsen compared the occult interests of the Late Republic to the “spirit-rapping and tablemoving” that fascinated “men of the highest rank and greatest learning” in the Victorian era.

Pythagoreanism was not associated with a particular political point of view at Rome. Nigidius remained staunchly among the conservative republicans of the senate, but Publius Vatinius, the other best-known Pythagorean among his political contemporaries, was a fierce and long-term supporter of Caesar. The three eminent Roman intellectuals of the mid-1st century BC — Cicero, Varro, and Nigidius — supported Pompeius in the civil war. Caesar not only showed clemency toward Varro, but recognized his scholarly achievements by appointing him to develop the public library at Rome. Both Cicero and Varro wrote nearly all their work on religion under Caesar’s dictatorship. But despite Cicero’s “rather inept and embarrassed” efforts, Nigidius died in exile before obtaining a pardon.