Abstract
This book is the fruit of an effort to make sense of Cicero’s moral and political philosophy. It attends to his overall thinking as well as his actions. It, thus, contributes to making sense of Cicero. It builds on a renaissance in Cicero studies and a renewed respect for him as a thinker. It examines, and sometimes resolves, apparent tensions in his thought that have often posed obstacles to appreciating his philosophy. Chief among these tensions are those between his Academic skepticism and apparent Stoicism, between his commitment to philosophy and to rhetoric and oratory, between his attachment to Greek philosophy and his profound engagement in Roman culture, between theory and practice, and between right and expediency as a chief good. Cicero’s recovery of Socratic political philosophy in Roman garb is, then, the basis for our recovery of Cicero as a notable political thinker relevant to the present.
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Notes
- 1.
Hyneman (1959: 53).
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Wood (1988), J. Atkins (2013), J. Zarecki (2014), and Woolf (2015). In 1978, in an essay in The Political Science Reviewer, I had sought to bring to wider attention the neglect of Cicero and the reasons for it. That essay, “Cicero and the Rebirth of Political Philosophy,” was republished as an Appendix in a 2012 collection of contemporary scholarship on Cicero. Nicgorski (2012).
- 3.
Laursen (1992: 59).
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Powell (1995: 23).
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Though not treating Cicero explicitly, Lom (2001) has well explored how later skeptics found ways to limit their skepticism in order to come to terms with the need for a ground for living and action. Garsten has directly considered how Cicero fits his skepticism with his apparent Stoicism (2009: 148, passim). More recently Woolf shows how Cicero’s skepticism impacts on his overall thinking including his approach to politics and morals (2015: 7, passim).
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This phrasing comes in part from an especially eloquent appeal for the study of Cicero in our time, an appeal made by the prolific British classicist, T. P. Wiseman: “Cicero matters not just to classical scholars” but also more broadly because his political career “for all its failings and compromises stood for the rule of law against the rule of force…” and because he gifted us with “a literary corpus that effectively defined our civilization’s concepts of humanitas and the liberal virtues” (1990: 648).
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The concept of “practical philosophy” is adapted from Aristotelian studies and refers to moral and political philosophy, in other words, philosophy directed at answering the questions about how to live or order human life. Cicero’s De Re Publica, De Legibus, De Finibus, and De Officiis are his chief writings of this kind. His rhetorical writings, especially De Oratore, are properly also considered to belong to practical philosophy. Giving serious attention to Academica becomes, of course, necessary to defend a possible moral basis for the practical philosophy.
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Annas (1989: 155). Atkins, in a bibliographical note to Griffin and Atkins (1991: xlii–xliii). Earlier, in defending Cicero’s philosophical work on the topic of justice, she observed, “The days are over when Cicero could be treated as merely a faithful (if not always competent) transcriber of Greek sources” (1990: 284). Barnes opened another kind of inquiry not only by distancing himself from source-hunting in Cicero but also by distancing himself on this occasion from seeking to determine which views Cicero accepts from those he expresses (1997: 140).
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Sedley (1989: 118–19).
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Dillon (1988: 104). Earlier, Buckley had protested the application of “eclectic” in a disparaging sense to Cicero as an instance “of a recurring failure to understand a philosophy within the context of its own methodological structures and coordinates” (1970: 154). Donini, cites the pejorative meaning of the term as denoting “a combination of heterogeneous elements that is substantially uncritical and more or less deliberate” and adds an observation that has seemed, in the inquiry this present book represents, particularly applicable to Cicero: “The more penetrating the interpretation of individual authors once contemptuously defined as eclectic becomes, the more inadequate this sense of eclecticism appears” (1970: 31). A decade earlier, in commenting on Aristotelian and Antiochian influences on Cicero, Horsley, while conceding that eclecticism in philosophy could be an indication of “poverty of thought,” speculates that it might rather be “an indication of a genuine and creative search for new combinations of ideas, for intellectual solutions to live issues of the day for which the answer of any particular doctrine from the traditional schools no longer seemed adequate” (1978: 50). See also, Ferrary (1974: 768). Other recent discussions of eclecticism that directly entail Cicero can be found in Tarrant, Barnes, and Griffin. Tarrant sympathetically understands Cicero’s eclecticism against a tradition of such in the Academic school (1985: 4). Barnes picks up and develops a distinction between a syncretist and an eclectic, seeing Cicero as the latter and associating with the former what has often been understood as eclectic in the pejorative sense, though Barnes even offers some defense of his exemplar syncretist, Antiochus (1989: 79–81). Griffin defends eclecticism in the ancient world chiefly because it represented a tradition of taking doctrines chosen seriously as the basis for living (1989: 15, esp. n. 25).
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Long (1986: 217). Posidonius (c. 155–c. 51–50) was a man of wide-ranging learning, who, at one point, took up writing a history of Rome and interacted with Cicero both in his school in Rhodes and later in Rome. Like Panaetius, Cicero’s teacher in Athens at one point, he was a somewhat unorthodox Stoic.
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Habinek wrote, “The characteristic feature and, I believe, greatest virtue of these texts [Roman writings such as Cicero’s]—their deep engagement with Roman culture—is their greatest weakness as sourcebooks for earlier or alien modes of thought” (1990: 185). Davies (1971) emphasizes Cicero’s “overall” originality in creating an effective literary genre for philosophy in the Roman context.
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Görler’s phrase where he looks for this stance in a single work of Cicero (1997: 36). The views of other scholars who appreciated the distinctive synthesis and substance of Cicero’s thought are noted in Nicgorski (2012: 252–53).
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Lévy (1992: 584, also 94–95) for the seriousness and, hence, significance with which Lévy takes Cicero as philosopher. More recently Baraz (2012: 6) has drawn new attention to Cicero’s own sense that his philosophical work is “a unified project.”
- 15.
Glucker (1978: 420 n. 68). This comment is in the context (407 ff.) of Glucker narrowly interpreting Cicero’s apparently dismissive comment that some of his philosophical writings are but “copies” of the work of others. Cicero’s comment is made in a May 45 letter to Atticus (Att. 294.3) There is some consideration of this comment in Nicgorski (2012: 252, 280 n. 14). Lest one make too much of this indication of respect for Cicero the thinker, Glucker’s description on another occasion of Cicero’s eclectic procedure tends in the direction of seeing Cicero as at least “light-headed” in the synthesis he forms: here Glucker writes that Cicero’s eclecticism should be seen as less programmatic and more in the model “of the bee flitting from flower to flower and choosing according to its taste and mood at the time” (1988: 63).
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Lom (2001: 95) has pointed out the importance of consistency and coherence to later skeptics.
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Div. 2.2. Consider how Aristotle links the human capacity for discourse on utility with that concerning justice in the opening pages of his Politics (1253a6–18).
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Fin. 2.51–52; Off. 1.5,19.
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Clearly illustrated in Annas (1993) and Nussbaum (1994).
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Grilli (1962: fr. 114 & n., p. 53). These philosophers seem to be exemplified in the type of man chosen for roles in Cicero’s dialogues, such as Scipio Africanus Minor and Gaius Laelius. These were men marked by what Cicero called humanitas; they were “genuinely cultured” men. Before his philosophical writings were undertaken, Cicero wrote to his brother of the need for rulers and leaders who are characterized by their pursuit of doctrinam, virtutem et humanitatem (Q. Fr. 1. 29). See also, Fam. 20.12. A number of passages from the texts of Cicero bearing on humanitas as the defining quality of Cicero’s princeps or statesman are discussed in Wegemer (2014: 31 ff.).
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Evidence of Cicero’s presence, though limited influence, in this period of American history can be found in Richard (1994) and Rahe (1994: esp. 65–66). Throughout his life, Jefferson was clearly an engaged reader of Cicero, who found more significant thought and material in his writings than in Plato’s. Jefferson’s favorite ancient philosopher was Epicurus, and he was critical of Cicero for his attacks on Epicurus and Epicureanism. Cicero’s critique of Epicureanism is explored in Chaps. 1 and 3. John Adams’s attraction to Cicero was more enthusiastic and unqualified than Jefferson’s. In writing about constitutional forms, he remarked “As all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united than Cicero, his authority should have great weight” (1851: vol. 4, 295). On another occasion, Adams approved Cicero’s advice to his son (Off. 1.22) that we are not born simply for ourselves (cited in Richard 1994: 63).
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Two biographies of Cicero are especially recommended for a fuller inquiry into his life and its context: Rawson (1994) and Petersson (1920).
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Cicero’s letters are, of course, the primary of those self-revealing sources. The letters available to us have fittingly been described as of “a volume and quality not to be reached again before Augustine—or even, it has been suggested, Elizabethan England” (Leach 1981: 382), One commentator even observes, “[W]e know more about the day-to-day Cicero from his twenty-sixth year forward than we can claim to know about most of our contemporaries” (Micken 1970: xv). Habicht (1990: 49) reports that the prominent early nineteenth-century historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, apparently with Cicero’s experience in mind, “went so far as to condemn the practice of publishing letters ‘which reveal the inmost of an extraordinary human being, since it is neither right nor just to expose a single soul naked while most others are not.’” Carcopino’s highly speculative study (1951: I, 201; II, 561, n. 1) of the motivation behind the publication of Cicero’s letters includes the following observations on the letters from French scholarship in the 1930s: L. Laurand, “Never was any man so cast down. He sighs, he weeps. He writes pitiable letters, which unfortunately for his reputation his correspondents carefully preserved. They have been delivered to posterity, for whom they were by no means intended.” Henri Marrou, “if we think so ill of Cicero, it is because he has confided in us in his Letters and we know about him many things which we do not know about other men.”
Besides the letters, note must be made of the self-revealing and self-promotional side of Cicero’s orations. There are also his highly self-conscious and self-disclosing prefaces (prooemia) as well as other such passages in his philosophical works. Then too his autobiography, beyond what is spread throughout his letters and other works, is quite explicit in his Brutus (304–24). How different, then, he is in this respect from Plato and Aristotle! It is rightly thought that Cicero’s writings mark the entrance into Western thought of a new emphasis in self-awareness, developed to the form of the intellectual and spiritual autobiography by St. Augustine on whom Cicero had such a profound impact. These rich materials on the self-understanding of Cicero provide the basis for the assurance in this book that Cicero perceived his writings and political actions as consistent efforts of his own struggle with the challenges and opportunities of his time. He does not appear to be hiding one self from another self.
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Very interesting and very significant to me was Strauss’s observation (1973: 127), after finding Cicero’s political action on behalf of philosophy comparable to Plato’s, that this political action has nothing in common with his actions against Catiline and for Pompey. Yet Strauss may be questioning this very separation of ordinary politics from the high politics of defending philosophy when he adds of the West’s successful political action on behalf of philosophy, “One sometimes wonders whether it has been too successful.”
- 25.
Consider Rep. 2.1 where Cicero has Cato the Elder praised for the consistency between his speech and his life. Lévy (1992: 121 ff.) has emphasized the continuity between Cicero the public man and his philosophy. Griffin (1989: 34 f.) brings forward the interaction between Cicero’s real life political dilemmas and his philosophical writings.
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Nicgorski, W. (2016). Introduction. In: Cicero’s Skepticism and His Recovery of Political Philosophy. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58413-7_1
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