Cicero

The Philosophy of a Roman Sceptic

Raphael Woolf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317532194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Cicero's philosophical works introduced Latin audiences to the ideas of the Stoics, Epicureans and other schools and figures of the post-Aristotelian period, thus influencing the transmission of those ideas through later history. While Cicero's value as documentary evidence for the Hellenistic schools is unquestioned, Cicero: The Philosophy of a Roman Sceptic explores his writings as works of philosophy that do more than simply synthesize the thought of others, but instead offer a unique viewpoint of their own. In this volume Raphael Woolf describes and evaluates Cicero's philosophical achievements, paying particular attention to his relation to those philosophers he draws upon in his works, his Romanizing of Greek philosophy, and his own sceptical and dialectical outlook. The volume aims, using the best tools of philosophical, philological and historical analysis, to do Cicero justice as a distinctive philosophical voice.

Situating Cicero's work in its historical and political context, this volume provides a detailed analysis of the thought of one of the finest orators and writers of the Roman period. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Cicero: The Philosophy of a Roman Sceptic is a key resource for those interested in Cicero's role in shaping Classical philosophy.

1

Introduction

Cicero and philosophy

We probably know more about the life of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC), renowned statesman and orator of ancient Rome, than about any other figure in antiquity, largely because of the survival of many of his own speeches and other writings, including a treasure trove of letters. Less known, outside relatively specialist circles, is his devotion to the study and practice of philosophy. But his passion for the subject is something he acquired at a young age, and it stayed with him throughout his political career, serving as a source of guidance and at times solace during the upheavals that he lived through. Moreover, it is a passion reflected in his authorship of a number of philosophical works, most of which have survived, though not all of them intact.

To some extent it is understandable that his philosophical efforts have been overshadowed, at least from the point of view of his public persona, by his political profile. But any fair-minded assessment of Cicero’s accomplishments must give credit to his remarkable contributions in both arenas. In fact, when it comes to his philosophical output Cicero is in a way the victim of his own success. Part of his ambition in writing philosophical works was to make available to a Latin-speaking audience the main ideas of the philosophical movements that were current in his own day, including but not confined to prominent schools of thought such as the Stoics and the Epicureans. The leading figures of these schools wrote in Greek, and by communicating their theories in Latin Cicero hoped to create wider interest in philosophy among a Roman readership.

Given the extent of Rome’s dominance even in Cicero’s own day (let alone in the centuries-long imperial era to come after his death), he had reason to believe that his pioneering project to present philosophy in Latin would take hold. But the importance of what he was doing eventually outstripped what even he could probably have predicted. Due to the whims of history, virtually none of the works of philosophy written by the founders of, for example, Stoicism and Epicureanism survived into the modern period. We are reliant on the reports of later ancient authors for their main doctrines, and these reports tend themselves to be fragmentary, out of context, or hostile – often enough, all three.

Because of this, the survival of Cicero’s work takes on a particular importance. The fact that in many cases we do have complete or largely complete works of his, which often set out in some detail the views of one or other leading philosophical school, means that his philosophical writings have been of incalculable value in scholarly reconstructions of the philosophies of Stoicism, Epicureanism, Academic scepticism, and others. But this in turn has meant that the works themselves have perhaps not always been fully appreciated as examples of philosophical thinking in their own right. For understandable reasons, scholars have habitually mined the works for information about, say, Stoic ethics or Epicurean theology, while paying less attention to them as continuous, self-contained discourses by an author who aims to do much more than simply regurgitate existing views.

In more recent times scholarship has moved from seeing Cicero’s philosophical output largely as a historical tool for researching the ideas of others, towards greater engagement with it on its own terms, subject to appraisal on its merits (and, of course, flaws) as an independent body of work by an astute and reflective author. This is the approach that I intend to take here. I hope to encourage the idea that Cicero’s philosophical writings are worthy of study for their own sake, and I shall treat them primarily as philosophical works written to be read as such, rather than as reports of the ideas of others – though of course they are, importantly, those as well.

Cicero is not – nor does he claim to be – a great original philosopher. But if that were the test of whether an author’s philosophical work deserved notice, very few people who have called themselves philosophers down the ages (or today) would pass. Nor should the fact that an author is deeply concerned with the thought of others count against the independent value of his or her work. If that were the case, then Plato and Aristotle, who both spend much time engaging with their philosophical predecessors, would be regarded as diminished figures on those grounds, whereas in fact this aspect of their philosophical approach, aside from its historical interest, greatly enriches their own thinking. Cicero is no Plato or Aristotle; but what I hope to show through discussion of his work is that he is a thoughtful and sophisticated writer, whose works can and should be read as coherent bodies of philosophical reflection that use, subtly and critically, the views and arguments of others to stimulate readers to think through issues for themselves.

Indeed Cicero’s own philosophical allegiances indicate that his approach to other viewpoints will be one of neither uncritical reportage nor dismissive hostility. He is an adherent of Academic scepticism, the position upheld by the members of the Academy during its sceptical period – a phase that began some eighty or so years after the death of its founder Plato (427–347 BC) and continued into Cicero’s own time. Philo of Larissa (158–83 BC), the last head of the Academy during this phase, was one of Cicero’s teachers.

In Cicero’s hands this form of scepticism, while denying the possibility of knowledge, accepted that some ideas had greater rational credence than others, and that it was therefore possible rationally to accept some views over others. It was a scepticism that harked back to (and might have found favour with) Socrates, in that it placed a premium on critical evaluation and argument, and did not sign up dogmatically to any pre-existing set of views.

In the light of this we should expect – and on the whole, I believe, do find – from Cicero’s work an effort to treat the ideas he discusses fairly and to judge them on their merits. Many of his philosophical works have an explicitly dialectical structure: views for and against a position are argued out, often in the mouths of spokesmen representing opposing schools or points of view. And even those works written more in the form of an exposition show a keen awareness that truth is rarely to be found all on one side. This does not, of course, mean that Cicero considers all the views (or schools) he discusses to be of equal worth. But where he does express a preference – or, as sometimes, find fault with all the positions under consideration on a given topic – he does so, at least by his own lights, on the basis of reasoned assessment rather than prejudice. We have, I think, much to learn from reading Cicero not just about the main philosophical currents of his day, but about how to engage in the practice of philosophy itself.

Cicero’s career as orator and statesman was carried out, in its later stages, during the tumultuous dying days of the Roman Republic, and it is especially interesting that we are able to read his philosophical output against this backdrop, lending as it does a special urgency to an abiding concern of his: the question of how philosophy can act as a force for good in the wider world. It is perhaps fair to say that Cicero’s part-time status, as it were, as a philosophical author has sometimes been regarded as a strike against his philosophical credentials, the implicit thought being that someone whose principal concerns lay elsewhere – in politics and government – could only be an amateur (in a not wholly positive sense) as a philosopher.

Indeed the greater part of Cicero’s philosophical output was produced in a remarkable burst of creative activity during 45 and 44 BC (all subsequent references to years in the book are BC) in which he largely withdrew from active politics, a withdrawal brought about by the disaster (as he saw it) of Julius Caesar’s ascendancy to supreme power and, more personally, by the death of his daughter Tullia, as a result of childbirth, in February 45. Caesar was assassinated in March 44, but Cicero himself had by then less than two years to live: in November 43 the three-man alliance known as the Second Triumvirate took control of the Roman state; Cicero was killed on their orders the following month.

We can only speculate as to what (if anything) Cicero would have produced of note in philosophy had he devoted himself to the subject full time. Such a decision would certainly have been unusual for a leading Roman of his day. Indeed Cicero is often at pains to defend himself in his writings for spending any time at all on philosophy when there were more practical matters of state, or more traditionally Roman cultural pursuits (such as literature), to occupy oneself with. This wrestling with the proper relation between the demands of public life and the pursuit of philosophy, and Cicero’s commensurate belief that philosophy ought not to be done in isolation from its wider social and political context, is one of the most distinctive and poignant aspects of his philosophical approach.

Even aside from the political turmoil, Cicero was well aware that he was fighting a significant cultural battle on behalf of the notion that presenting philosophical ideas, especially in the Latin language, could be a task worthy of a Roman of high standing. We have it on Cicero’s own authority that he was not the first to essay the writing of philosophy in Latin. That honour he attributes (in his Tusculan Disputations) to one Gaius Amafinius, a proponent of Epicureanism about whose productions and those of several imitators (none of whose works survive) Cicero is scathing.

Cicero’s Roman contemporary Lucretius also attempted the task, in the poem On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), which presents the philosophy of Epicurus (341–270) in Latin verse, and which is justly famed for both its poetic and philosophical qualities. But although the poem survives, we know virtually nothing of Lucretius’s life, though we do know that Cicero thought well of the poem: his brief but laudatory reference to it in a letter is, however, the only occasion he mentions it, and in fact is the only reference we have to the poem made during (or perhaps soon after) Lucretius’s lifetime.

Lucretius, so far as we can tell, did not feel the kind of pressure that Cicero, given his active and prominent membership of the Roman governing elite, would have felt to justify the pursuit of philosophy – a membership that for all its prominence never quite lost the whiff of the outsider about it. Cicero was a ‘new man’ (novus homo), the first in his family to attain high political office (he held the consulship, the most powerful Roman magistracy, in 63), and someone not always secure about his place in the hierarchy. In the prefaces to his works especially, Cicero champions the idea that there is nothing unRoman about devoting oneself to the study or indeed to the writing of philosophy, and that the Latin language is an appropriate vehicle for its transmission.

From a philosophical point of view such talk of what is Roman or not may seem both archaic and irrelevant. Philosophy, after all, is surely the study of reality at its most abstract and universal. Perhaps it is. But we do speak of Greek philosophy; and it is now rather in vogue among scholars of the ancient world to speak of Roman philosophy as well, meaning thereby (roughly speaking) philosophy written in Latin during the Roman era before the influence of Christianity began to take hold. This terminology is not, I think, intended to be purely neutral, nor should it be. It is meant in part to capture the idea that there might be something distinctive – distinctively Roman, if you will – about the philosophy that was being done in that period and that environment.

Cicero’s concern with how the activity of philosophy might fit in with broader Roman social and cultural norms is instructive. It reminds us that, however universal a subject may claim to be in aspiration, any cultural activity is in part a product of its time and place. By the same token, the status of any given activity within a culture, and the way that activity gets to be carried out, is to a significant extent a matter of concrete historical circumstance. Cicero’s work is, to an unusually transparent extent, a product of interaction with its cultural and political background. And in terms of its subsequent impact, if Cicero had not set out to convey the ideas of the Greek philosophical schools of his day in Latin, with the immense influence this had on the later reception of philosophy in the modern period, philosophy as a subject would probably look very different than it does – and perhaps be considerably impoverished.

Reading Cicero reminds us that philosophy does have a geography: not simply in the obvious sense that any philosophy that gets spoken or written down is spoken or written in some particular place, but also in the sense that the cultural context in which it is written or spoken is likely to have some effect on, and in turn be affected by, its content. The question (one that considerably exercised Cicero) of whether, say, Stoic or Epicurean philosophy fits better into the Roman scheme of values may seem to be of chiefly historical interest. It is certainly true that in Cicero’s day these schools, and others, could claim adherents among the upper strata of Roman society. Cicero’s closest friend, Atticus, for example, was a devotee of Epicureanism; another friend, Brutus, famous historically as one of Julius Caesar’s assassins and the dedicatee of several of Cicero’s philosophical works, was a follower of the school known as the Old Academy (which taught a kind of synthesis, roughly, of Plato and Aristotle). In that respect Cicero was not writing in a vacuum. Having a certain amount of philosophical education, and adopting the creed of one or other school, was not itself unusual for a leading Roman of Cicero’s day – though producing extensive philosophical work, and in Latin at that, certainly was.

Rome’s pre-eminent position as a centre of political and economic power in the first century BC acted as a magnet for Greek philosophers to set out their stalls there and compete for followers. Leading Romans, including Cicero, would often have such a philosopher (or more than one) as a member of their household. One reason for this is that the schools of philosophy of the time had a significantly practical orientation: they offered not just systems of abstract thought but philosophies as ways of life, creeds that promised the good life to those who successfully adopted them. But in the struggle for adherents this meant that they would to some extent be measured by their ability to adapt to the values of the host culture, even as they might, naturally enough, also play a role in modifying and shaping that culture.

Equally, precisely because its presence in Roman society was of sufficient extent for it to make a serious mark, there is little doubt that philosophy continued to be seen by some among the elite (to say nothing of ordinary Romans) as an alien and potentially subversive activity, at odds with the practical, straightforward character that had supposedly made Rome great. Cicero’s need to defend the extent of his own engagement with philosophy makes clear that he could by no means take for granted that writing philosophy represented a properly Roman pursuit. Why should this matter to us as readers interested in philosophy? There are, I think, at least three reasons.

First, thinking about how Cicero could not take it as a given that philosophical activity would be seen as fully Roman reminds us that these kinds of culture wars are perennially with us. To take an example from within philosophy itself: in the English-speaking world, so-called Continental philosophy (very crudely, the philosophy done in a certain post-Kantian tradition by philosophers writing mainly in French and German) was in some quarters, particularly among those working in the so-called analytic tradition of the subject, barely regarded as a proper form of philosophy, to the extent that in many institutions in the US and UK it was taught in literature rather than philosophy departments. That attitude is becoming outmoded now, though it has by no means vanished; and for all its aspirations to universality, philosophy needs always to be seen as the product of particular cultures and as having no automatically secure place within a culture. Cicero’s sensitivity to the standing of philosophy within Roman culture provides modern readers with an excellent perspective from which to view our own commitments.

Second, it is very much a characteristic of philosophy itself that it should question its own standing. Cicero, to be sure, seeks to persuade his readers of the merits of philosophical activity. But making the case for philosophy’s role in one’s culture goes to the very heart of philosophy’s core value of critical self-examination, and was already, as Cicero would have been well aware, part of a tradition going back at least as far as Plato. That one cannot simply assume, but needs to argue, that the subject has a rightful place at the table is not just a matter of historical reality, but a part of what makes philosophy’s contribution a distinctive one.

Third, the question of how the particularities of a culture relate, or should relate, to the claims of universality that one often finds in the pronouncements of philosophers (including the schools of Cicero’s day) is a philosophical issue in itself. To ask, for example, whether philosophy is Roman is to raise the question of whether an activity might be of value in one cultural context but of lesser or no value in another. What might seem to be a parochial matter concerning the fate of philosophy at Rome is in fact shot through with one of philosophy’s own perennial questions: the relativity (or otherwise) of value. This applies in equal measure to the specific philosophies of the individual schools. It seems clear, for example, that Cicero regards the ethical teachings of Epicurus as in some respects fundamentally unRoman – but it is a further question whether this means they are, unqualifiedly, wrong. The way Cicero frames the debate, in keeping with his sceptical tendencies, shows him sharply aware that treating philosophical (particularly ethical) precepts as absolutes risks missing much of importance about the source of value in human life.

The subtitle of this book, ‘the philosophy of a Roman sceptic’, is thus intended to indicate some central features of Cicero’s philosophical writings. First, that they should indeed be regarded as works of philosophy and not simply reports of the views of others. Second, that the question of the Roman identity of both Cicero and his immediate readership plays a crucial role in informing the philosophical outlook that we find in these works. To be a Roman is to be embedded in a society aware of having a particular history, culture and role in the world. Romans, like all humans – essentially social creatures, as Cicero will insist – are shaped by the history and traditions of the societies to which they belong.

This relationship to one’s social environment is an inescapable and vital part of one’s formation as a human agent. One of the most rewarding aspects of Cicero’s philosophical writings is their willingness to engage with the tensions, especially prominent in the ethical and political domains, between the universalist tendencies of certain schools of thought and the specific character of one’s social and cultural inheritance. Such attention, for him, is part of a conception of philosophy as a discipline that ought to be in the world, one that is answerable to the basic features of human experience even as it appro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Some notable dates
• 1. Introduction: Cicero and philosophy
• 2. Scepticism and certainty
• 3. God, fate and freedom
• 4. The best form of government
• 5. The good life in theory and in practice
• 6. The role of the emotions
• Suggestions for further reading
• Index