Cicero

by Anthony Everitt

  Politics and war were the chief but not the only means by which a Roman could achieve status. Others were scholarship and literature. Leading figures such as Cicero’s friend the jurist Sulpicius could maintain their prestige by achieving an unrivaled knowledge of the law. Antiquarian expertise was necessary in a polity that was heavily dependent on the interpretation of tradition; thus Atticus, who eschewed the hurly-burly of the Forum, was able to make a name for himself by writing the Annals (Liber Annalis), an authoritative chronology of Rome back to its foundation. The religious apparatus of priestly colleges demanded detailed knowledge of the forms and procedures of ceremony and divination and it was necessary for some members of the elite to acquire it.

  Cicero had already found poetry (when he was a young man), philosophy and research into the art of public speaking to be useful supports to his status as a public figure. A decade previously he had been able to pick up the threads of his political career after the end of his exile, but now advancing years and Caesar’s autocracy seemed to him to mean that this time there could be no recovery.

  So he set about reasserting his reputation as an author. Despite all his other preoccupations, he wrote “from morning to night” (as he told Atticus), producing a flood of books and essays during the next three years. Looking back near the end of his life, he observed: “I have written more in this short time since the collapse of the Republic than I did throughout the many years while the Republic stood.” He hoped his books would be of use to the young but noticed that it was the older generation which took most comfort from them. He knew that his motives for writing were as much for his personal as for the public good. “I cannot easily say how useful I shall be to others: in any case, for my terrible sorrows and all the various troubles that assail me on every side no other consolation could be found.”

  Atticus advised his friend to concentrate on historical subjects, but Cicero disagreed. AS he saw it, the first priority was to protect his name as an orator, which was now under some threat. AS early as the mid-50s members of the Catullan/Clodian counterculture had begun to react against the elaborate and ample manner of public speaking which Cicero and, even more so, his onetime rival Hortensius represented. A leading spokesman of this point of view was Catullus’s closest friend, Caius Licinius Calvus. What he called the “Attic” tendency or school of oratory stressed grammatical correctness, simplicity of expression and restraint against the “Bacchic frenzy” of a speaker like Hortensius when he was in full flight. Cicero’s young friend Caelius had probably been another Atticist.

  Cicero felt that the time had come to rebut this fashion, partly because it contradicted his own views on oratory but also because he feared that if it got out of hand it would supersede his own achievements. In early 46 he wrote Brutus, a dialogue in which the speakers were Atticus, Brutus (who was an Atticist and to whom the book is dedicated) and himself. It was a history of Latin oratory with brief but telling critiques of Rome’s leading speakers, including an account of his own training and early career. It aimed to be evenhanded and, for example, was highly complimentary of Caesar’s stylistic purity; referring to his histories of the Gallic campaigns and the civil war, Cicero compared them “to nude figures, straight and beautiful; stripped of all ornament of style as if they had stepped out of their clothes.” However, he made it clear that, by definition, public speakers had to attract the interest of the public. Here the Atticists failed because, however correct their Latin, they bored the listener. In the law courts “they are deserted not only by the crowds of bystanders, which is humiliating enough, but by their client’s witnesses and legal advisers.” Brutus was followed later in the year by the Orator, which took the form of a letter to Brutus. It is a technical work and is concerned with the minutiae of rhetorical theory; the focus is on diction and style, for Cicero was aiming his fire once more at the Attic style of oratory.

  During the summer of 46 Cicero’s mind turned to questions of philosophy. After producing a squib on the Stoic ethical system, Stoic Paradoxes (Paradoxa stoicorum), Cicero committed himself to a much more ambitious enterprise. This was nothing more nor less than an attempt to give a comprehensive account of Greek philosophy in the Latin language. For one hundred years or so there had been numerous references to Greek philosophers and their doctrines in Roman literature, but there had been few serious books on philosophical themes. Such as there were mainly concerned Epicureanism, a way of life directed at worldly happiness and associated with a materialistic explanation of reality. Cicero deeply disapproved, although he acknowledged that it had given rise to one of the masterpieces of Latin poetry, the epic On the Nature of the Universe (De rerum natura) by Titus Lucretius Carus, a younger contemporary.

  In 44 when the series of books was largely complete, he set out a prospectus of what he felt he had achieved.

  In the book called Hortensius I advised my readers to occupy themselves with philosophy—and in the four volumes of the Academic Treatises I suggested the philosophical methods which seem to me to have the greatest degree of appropriate discretion, consistency and elegance. Then in On Supreme Good and Evil I discussed the basic problems of philosophy and covered the whole field in detail in five volumes which set out the arguments for and against every philosophical system. This was followed by Conversations at Tusculum, also in five volumes, which expound the key issues we should bear in mind in our pursuit of happiness. The first volume deals with indifference to death, the second with how to endure pain, the third with the alleviation of distress in times of trouble and the fourth with other distractions which affect our peace of mind. Finally, the fifth book addresses the topic that is best calculated to clarify the nature of philosophy—that is, it demonstrates that moral worth alone is adequate to ensure a happy life. After that, the three volumes of The Nature of the Gods were finished, which cover all the relevant issues. Once that had been adequately dealt with, I started work on my current book, Foretelling the Future. When I have added, as I intend to do, another book, Destiny, the entire field will have been satisfactorily surveyed.

  Cicero is explicit that this corpus was an alternative to the public life from which he was barred. In Foretelling the Future, he wrote: “it was through my books that I was addressing the Senate and the people. I took the view that philosophy was a substitute for political activity.” He had always believed that philosophy was an essential ingredient of a training in the art of public speaking and the collapse of the Republic was evidence of the failure by statesmen to apply moral values to their conduct. To develop this long-standing theme was the last gift he could make to his country.

  The purpose of the Hortensius, to judge from its surviving fragments, was to establish the uses of philosophy. It was cast as a debate set in the late 60s and the speakers were four leading personalities of the day, including Hortensius and Cicero himself. It contained defenses of poetry, history and oratory. Hortensius attacked the inadequacies of many philosophers and launched a vigorous onslaught on aspects of Epicureanism. Cicero responded with a powerful apologia for philosophy. The seeker after truth traveled hopefully, he said, but would never arrive. Cicero retained the skepticism about the possibility of knowledge that he acquired during his first visit to Athens. He closed with a hint of reincarnation, borrowed from the current revival of interest in the mystical ideas of the Greek sage Pythagoras. The purer a man’s soul, the greater the possibility that it would escape the impending cycle of future lives.

  The Academic Treatises (Academica) were started in autumn 46 and Cicero was still working on them the following summer. They were an epistemological inquiry which examined in greater detail than the Hortensius different theories of knowledge. According to Pliny, writing in the following century, the dialogue was composed in Cicero’s villa at Puteoli. The setting and characters were originally the same as in the Hortensius, but once the book was finished its author worried that “the matter did not fit the persons, who could not be supposed ever to have dreamed of such abstrusiti
es.” The problem was solved when he learned that his new friend Varro wanted a part in one of his dialogues, although he was not altogether sure he would take kindly to representing ideas that Cicero would go on to refute. So the work was brought up to the present day and he and Atticus were added as the other speakers. Only one volume of the first version survives (now called Lucullus), along with a fragment of the second.

  The Academic Treatises gave an extended account of the evolution of the doctrines of the Academy, the school of philosophy founded by Plato and developed over the centuries by his successors. What was called the New Academy flourished in Cicero’s time. In the second century BC, its leading figure, Carneades, adopted a skeptical position, which emphasized probability as against certainty. Cicero gave himself the task of defending this point of view.

  He also took the opportunity to justify his overall project by responding to two criticisms he put into Varro’s mouth: first, anyone seriously interested in Greek philosophy could look up the original authors and, second, the Latin language lacked the necessary technical terminology. To counter these objections, Cicero argued that Latin poetry was read and appreciated even though it was heavily dependent on Greek models. Latin was a richer language than Greek; but it was true that an accepted philosophical terminology was needed. This was precisely what he intended to produce.

  Posterity has largely justified this defense. While Latin has disadvantages (the lack of a definite article, for one), to some extent Cicero succeeded in widening its range. Some of the terms he coined have had a long afterlife—qualitas, moralis and essentia, for example, are the antecedents of “quality,” “moral” and “essence.”

  The next dialogue in the series, On Supreme Good and Evil (De finibus bonorum et malorum), was composed more or less at the same time as the Academic Treatises. In the preface, Cicero makes the point that he is not a mere translator but is trying to express in his own words what lies at the heart of his subject. It is a justifiable claim. He is, indeed, more than a transcriber or even a high-quality journalist. He has read philosophy all his life and feels at ease with it. What he offers is a mature synthesis in which other people’s ideas grow in the field of his own experience of life. His expositions are not only thought but deeply felt.

  The different chapters of the book, which has survived in its entirety, are given roughly contemporary settings: Cicero’s villa at Cumae in 50; Tusculum in 52; and then Athens during his grand tour in 79. Epicureanism and Stoicism are examined and rejected. To the Epicurean who asserts that the chief good is pleasure in the sense of an absence of pain and advocates a simple, virtuous and detached life, Cicero replies that what he is talking about is not pleasure in any customary sense. Also he rejects as disgraceful the notion that the man who measures his desires by utilitarian criteria has the firmest grasp on happiness.

  If Epicureans say “it is good because it is pleasant,” Stoics answer that “it is pleasant because it is good.” Cato is now given the task of representing the Stoic view that virtue is what we naturally desire, which Cicero rebuts as not taking into sufficient account humanity’s lower faculties. Cicero argues that virtue will not necessarily produce happiness, if, as is admitted, pain is an evil. On Supreme Good and Evil ends on a cautiously optimistic note; virtue outweighs everything and even if the good man is not supremely happy, he is on balance happy.

  The Conversations at Tusculum (Tusculanae disputationes) were written in the summer of 45 when Cicero had begun to recover somewhat from Tullia’s death. Again the form is a dialogue set in Cicero’s beloved villa at Tusculum. The two speakers are identified only by the initials M and A, standing either for Marcus and Atticus or Magister (master) and Adulescens (young man). Either way it is M who does most of the talking and the book is a series of essays rather than debates.

  Having examined the nature of the good life in the previous books of the cycle, Cicero now turns to practicalities. How is the good life to be lived? He answers the question by citing many instances of human behavior both from the past and from his own time. He mentions the deaths of Cato and Pompey and hints at his feelings for Tullia, while acknowledging that grief is useless and should be put aside. His underlying purpose is to show that right attitudes and a philosophical cast of mind can alleviate misfortune and suffering. Death, he argues, is not an evil, being either a change of place for the soul or annihilation. Physical suffering is of no real importance and can be borne with fortitude. Mental suffering and distress, whether caused by mourning, envy, compassion, vexation or despondency, are acts of the will and can be eliminated by thoughtfulness, courage and self-control. The same may be said for excessive delight, lust and fear. The way forward, Cicero wrote, was to distance oneself from the cares and desires of life.

  The whole life of the philosopher, Plato said, is a preparation for death. For what else do we do when we remove the soul from pleasure—that is to say, from the body, from private property (the body’s agent and servant), from public affairs and from every kind of private business: what, I repeat, do we do except call the soul into its own presence and cancel its allegiance to the body? And is separating the soul from the body anything else than learning how to die? So let us, believe me, study to dissociate ourselves from our bodies—that is, to acclimatize ourselves to the idea of death. While we are still alive, this will be an imitation of heavenly life: once we are free from our chains here, our souls will run their race less slowly. For those who have always been shackled to the flesh make slower progress even when they are released. It is as if they have spent many years in manacles. Once we have arrived at the other place, and only then, shall we live. For this life is truly death and I could, if I would, weep for it.

  The discipline of the gladiator and the self-sacrifice of the Indian widow who commits suttee and joins her husband on the funeral pyre demonstrate that virtue can transcend pain. In this conclusion Cicero endorses Stoicism in a way that he felt unable to do in On Supreme Good and Evil, written a few months earlier, for he could now see, as the full intensity of his mourning subsided, how he had dragged himself from the brink of breakdown through firmness of mind.

  The Nature of the Gods (De deorum natura), Foretelling the Future (De divinatione) and Destiny (De fato) address religious and theological themes. Collectively, they ridicule the anthropomorphic conception of God, or the gods, and propose that Epicurus, who speculated that the gods lived happily but impotently and had no effect on human affairs, was a crypto-atheist. Cicero tends to a Stoic pantheism (which gives him the opportunity to celebrate the physical universe in passages of great poetic grandeur). He criticizes superstition—dreams, portents, astrology and the like—and is particularly incensed by the Stoics’ commitment to the art, or pseudoscience, of divination, by which investigation into the future can make it possible to avoid unpleasant events. Either the future is subject to chance—in which case nobody, not even a god, can affect it one way or the other—or it is predestined, in which case foreknowledge cannot avert it. AS he had been appointed an Augur in 53, it is not surprising to find that Cicero recognizes, even if he does not believe in, the art of augury but thinks it should be maintained for reasons of public expediency rather than accuracy. While external factors may influence our actions, they cannot control them, for that would be to negate free will. To say “what will be, will be” is not to imply that the future is predetermined.

  Cicero’s last major work is Duties (De officiis); written in autumn 44, it takes the form of a letter to Marcus, who was making heavy weather of his philosophical studies in Athens at this time. Complementing the theoretical discussions in On Supreme Good and Evil, it is based on the work of a Stoic philosopher, Panaetius, who was a member of the circle of Scipio Aemilianus, Cicero’s great hero from the second century (and the protagonist of his dialogue On the State). It has a practical cast and reflects the experience of the author’s own lifetime. Composed at a time when Cicero was returning to public life, it condemns citizens who abstain from politi
cal activity.

  The work opens with a discussion of the cardinal virtues—wisdom, justice, fortitude and temperance—and goes on to set out the specific duties that follow from adherence to them. Cicero’s central concern is the contradiction between virtue and the inevitable expediencies that divert human agents from the path of right conduct. Giving many examples from Roman history, he argues that often the contradiction is only apparent, although sometimes it is difficult to establish what is really right. The primary duty, transcending all others, is loyalty to the state and Cicero takes the opportunity to review the record of his contemporaries. The behavior of various politicians of his day—the avaricious Crassus and Caesar, who has gone to the lengths of destroying the state—is compared with this principle and found wanting.

  This body of work kept Cicero’s name in the public eye for the brief remainder of his lifetime as a man of principle and thoughtful reflection. For posterity it became a primary vehicle by which the achievements of Greco-Roman philosophy were communicated to the early Christian Church, which regarded him as a virtuous pagan, and offered essential models to the thinkers and poets of the Renaissance and those who in the following centuries were concerned with the revival of Republican ideas of governance and the reassertion of humanistic principles.

  Caesar may well have laughed with everyone else when all those years ago the boastful ex-Consul had written the much-ridiculed sentence “Cedant arma togae,” “Let the soldier yield precedence to the civilian.” But now, with his customary clarity and generosity of mind, he well understood the nature of the “glory” Cicero had won for himself. Sometime towards the end of his life, Caesar remarked that Cicero had won greater laurels than those worn by a general in his Triumph, for it meant more to have extended the frontiers of Roman genius than of its empire.