Hannah Arendt (Sonning Prize acceptance speech, Copenhagen, April 18, 1975):
Persona, at any event, originally referred to the actor’s mask that covered his individual “personal” face and indicated to the spectator the role and the part of the actor in the play. But in this mask, which was designed and determined by the play, there existed a broad opening at the place of the mouth through which the individual, undisguised voice of the actor could sound. It is from this sounding through that the word persona was derived: per-sonare, “to sound through,” is the verb of which persona, the mask, is the noun. And the Romans themselves were the first to use the noun in a metaphorical sense; in Roman law persona was somebody who possessed civil rights, in sharp distinction from the word homo, denoting someone who was nothing but a member of the human species, different, to be sure, from an animal but without any specific qualification or distinction, so that homo, like the Greek anthropos, was frequently used contemptuously to designate people not protected by any law.
I found this Latin understanding of what a person is helpful for my considerations because it invites further metaphorical usage, metaphors being the daily bread of all conceptual thought. The Roman mask corresponds with great precision to our own way of appearing in a society where we are not citizens, that is, not equalized by the public space established and reserved for political speech and political acts, but where we are accepted as individuals in our own right and yet by no means as human beings as such. We always appear in a world which is a stage and are recognized according to the roles which our professions assign us, as physicians or lawyers, as authors or publishers, as teachers or students, and so on. It is through this role, sounding through it, as it were, that something else manifests itself, something entirely idiosyncratic and undefinable and still unmistakably identifiable, so that we are not confused by a sudden change of roles, when for instance a student arrives at his goal which was to become a teacher, or when a hostess, whom socially we know as a physician, serves drinks instead of taking care of her patients. In other words, the advantage of adopting the notion of persona for my considerations lies in the fact that the masks or roles which the world assigns us, and which we must accept and even acquire if we wish to take part in the world’s play at all, are exchangeable; they are not inalienable in the sense in which we speak of “inalienable rights,” and they are not a permanent fixture annexed to our inner self in the sense in which the voice of conscience, as most people believe, is something the human soul constantly bears within itself.
It is in this sense that I can come to terms with appearing here as a “public figure” for the purpose of a public event. It means that when the events for which the mask was designed are over, and I have finished using and abusing my individual right to sound through the mask, things will again snap back into place. Then I, greatly honored and deeply thankful for this moment, shall be free not only to exchange the roles and masks that the great play of the world may offer, but free even to move through that play in my naked “thisness,” identifiable, I hope, but not definable and not seduced by the great temptation of recognition which, in no matter what form, can only recognize us as such and such, that is, as something which we fundamentally are not.