Cicero's Practical Philosophy

Walter Nicgorski

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780268158118
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Cicero's Practical Philosophy marks a revival over the last two generations of serious scholarly interest in Cicero's political thought. Its nine original essays by a multidisciplinary group of distinguished international scholars manifest close study of Cicero's philosophical writings and great appreciation for him as a creative thinker, one from whom we can continue to learn. This collection focuses initially on Cicero's major work of political theory, his De Re Publica, and the key moral virtues that shape his ethics, but the contributors attend to all of Cicero's primary writings on political community, law, the ultimate good, and moral duties. Room is also made for Cicero's extensive writings on the art of rhetoric, which he explicitly draws into the orbit of his philosophical writings. Cicero's concern with the divine, with epistemological issues, and with competing analyses of the human soul are among the matters necessarily encountered in pursuing, with Cicero, the large questions of moral and political philosophy, namely, what is the good and genuinely happy life and how are our communities to be rightly ordered.

The volume also reprints Walter Nicgorski's classic essay "Cicero and the Rebirth of Political Philosophy, " which helped spark the current revival of interest in Cicero the philosopher.

Contributors: Walter Nicgorski, J. G. F. Powell, Malcolm Schofield, Carlos Lévy, Catherine Tracy, Margaret Graver, Harald Thorsrud, David Fott, Xavier Márquez, and J. Jackson Barlow.

1

Cicero’s De Re Publica and the Virtues of the Statesman

J. G. F. POWELL

In dealing with a fragmentary philosophical text such as Cicero’s De Re Publica,¹ it is more than usually difficult to perform the basic tasks of scholarly interpretation: to characterize plausibly the main lines of argument and the structure of the exposition, to notice the deployment of recurring themes, to examine the relationship to any literary models and precursors, and to come to a view on the overall persuasive purposes of the work. Even with texts that survive complete, there can be a good deal of debate and disagreement about that kind of issue. What hope, therefore, for a text of which at the most reliable estimate only about a quarter survives in total and what does survive is heavily weighted toward the first half of the work? Any attempt to take the broader view risks being dismissed as hopelessly speculative. However, for this occasion I am prepared to take the risk and make the attempt. I shall try to stay clear about where the boundary lies between interpretation of what is there in the text and speculation about what is not there. I should also make clear at the beginning that while I address in part the issue of Cicero’s relationship to Plato,² I am not by and large attempting to unravel the sources of Cicero’s ideas but rather—in tune with the overall direction of Ciceronian scholarship in the last twenty years—to interpret Cicero on his own terms.

I start with one of the more out-of-the-way testimonia for Cicero’s De Re Publica. This comes from the late-antique but by no means unintelligent commentary of one Grillius³ on another work of Cicero, the De Inventione. Grillius is commenting on a passage of the prologue to that work (1.4) in which the young Cicero sets out a view of the relationship between oratory and politics. He refers to a work that he calls Cicero’s politia—evidently what we know as the De Re Publica—for a characterization of the statesman, or rector rei publicae. (Clearly the word is rector, not rhetor as one branch of Grillius’s manuscript tradition has it; the error is understandable in a work otherwise on rhetoric.) This phrase occurs notoriously in a number of places in the text of the De Re Publica and has been the subject of a good deal of controversy. As Heinze showed in 1924,⁴ the rector rei publicae is not a king or a dictator, nor necessarily a person with supreme political authority, nor a kind of precursor of the Augustan princeps: these interpretations, popular until recently, are misunderstandings. It is not the name of a political office or position at all; this was clear to Heinze and to Krarup.⁵ There has not, however, always been clarity as to what it does designate.

The solution for which I have argued⁶ is that it is simply the name of a profession or occupation, that of the statesman or politician. Confusion has arisen from the fact that, like many such terms, it can be used either in a relatively neutral, factual sense or in an idealistic, value-laden sense: as for example “poet” may be used as a general categorization of anyone who writes verses or as a term of praise (especially in phrases like “true poet”) for the finest practitioners of the art. Sometimes our own language provides us with a choice between different terms for the ordinary and for the ideal: thus run-of-the-mill practitioners of politics tend to be called “politicians,” while we reserve “statesman” for those we admire. In Latin there was no easy way of making this distinction, nor indeed was there a convenient Latin word or phrase for either concept until Cicero invented his rector rei publicae. It will not, however, surprise us to find that Cicero mostly uses the phrase to refer to an excellent or ideal practitioner of the political art, just as the word orator in the rhetorical works (especially De Oratore and Orator) more often than not refers to an excellent or ideal orator.

Now Grillius happens to preserve for us a description of Cicero’s ideal statesman, almost certainly not in Cicero’s own words but in a close enough paraphrase to enable us to see the main lines of the concept. According to Grillius, Cicero said rectorem rei publicae summum virum et doctissimum esse debere, ita ut sapiens sit et iustus et temperans et eloquens, ut possit facile currente oratione animi secreta ad regendam plebem exprimere. Scire etiam debet ius, Graecas nosse litteras, quod Catonis facto probatur, qui in summa senectute Graecis litteris operam dans indicavit quantum utilitatis haberent.

This gives the politician a number of qualities both moral and intellectual, as well as educational attainments. First he is described as in general summus vir et doctissimus, an imprecise characterization but one that would surprise many politicians both ancient and modern. We should not weaken our reading of doctissimus and make it appear to mean no more than “well educated,” non illiberaliter institutus as the Scipio of Cicero’s dialogue puts it in 1.36. The onus of proof would be on anyone who maintained that doctissimus did not here have its full sense of “highly learned” in intellectual matters. And if Cicero himself really said anything like this, he was aligning himself firmly with Plato in the debate over whether statesmen needed to be intellectuals.

Next, the general characterization is explicated by reference to a list of individual qualities of character and intellect. The statesman is to be sapiens, wise; iustus, just; and temperans, temperate, self-controlled, or orderly in behavior. These are three of the canonical four Platonic cardinal virtues; and I think it likely (for reasons that will become clearer in due course) that this is not to be attributed to the schematizing tendencies of late antiquity as they may be manifested in Grillius’s commentary but to Cicero himself. The remaining cardinal virtue, that of courage, is missing from the list; instead, the stress is placed on eloquence as a characteristic of the statesman. Eloquence doubtless has a special relevance to the passage of De Inventione that Grillius is expounding but was not necessarily imported here by Grillius: it could also have been part of Cicero’s picture. Speaking out does sometimes require courage, and the two concepts no doubt overlapped in Cicero’s mind; the ideal statesman of De Re Publica is a complement to the ideal orator of De Oratore.

The Cardinal Virtues in the First and Second Books of De Re Publica

The Prologue and Opening Discussion

In general, Cicero’s interest in the four cardinal virtues needs no demonstration: to go no further, they constitute the structuring principle of his last work of moral philosophy, the De Officiis. Furthermore, they play an important part in the argument of Cicero’s overt model in the De Re Publica, Plato’s Republic. To find them in the De Re Publica would not, therefore, be in the least surprising, and I think the only reason their role in that work has not attracted attention is that nobody has been looking for them there. In fact, once one starts to look for them, they come into relief with an unexpected degree of prominence, occurring either individually or in combination at various key points of the work. Of course, I do not mean to say that whenever a Roman author mentions wisdom or courage he is automatically recalling the Greek cardinal virtues. It is the combination of the four, or at the very least of three out of the four, that is significant. But once one has found them together in combination in a text such as the De Re Publica, one may then begin to suspect that mentions of the individual virtues, even when not immediately found in combination, may still contribute to a larger picture. The case for Cicero’s involvement, in this text, with the idea of the four virtues is a cumulative one: the reader therefore must be both patient and on the alert for details that otherwise might be taken for granted.

I propose first to examine the references to wisdom, justice, temperance, and fortitude—and to virtue in general—in the surviving parts of De Re Publica; and secondly to suggest a hypothesis as to the part the four virtues may have played in the overall argument of this work. This hypothesis can never, of course, be proved, except by the unanticipated discovery of a complete text some time in the future, but I hope at least that it may take its place among the recognized possibilities. After all, the three most puzzling questions about the fragmentary text of Cicero’s De Re Publica must surely be these: First, what was in the lost sections of the text? Second, what was the overall message? And third, what relation did it bear to Plato’s Republic? The hypothesis I shall propose seems to me to add significantly to our ability to answer all three of these questions, although the answers it provides are not always tidy or schematic.

We start in the prologue to Book 1 with virtus in general. The extant text begins some way into the prologue, and we have little evidence as to what was in the lost initial section except for a fragment preserved in Nonius about the duty we owe to our country as to a parent.⁷ The continuous portion of the text plunges us into the middle of a series of standard examples of Roman political and military excellence, which are summarized (1.1) in the statement that nature has implanted in mankind a necessitas virtutis that overcomes all the temptations of pleasure and idleness. Obviously, this is the concluding section of an argument against the partisans of the quiet life—one may think in particular of the Epicureans—and virtus is identified, in traditional fashion at this point, with the virtues of the active statesman and soldier, that is, native courage and primitive morality. Cicero then continues with the point that virtus is not just an “art” that can be possessed in the form of theoretical understanding without being practiced but consists entirely in action (he reverts to the idea in later philosophical works: Off. 1.19, virtutis laus omnis in actione posita est, in the context of a caution against letting enthusiasm for academic research take one away from public business; Nat. D. 1.110, the Epicurean god cannot have virtue since he does nothing). As well as countering Epicurean notions of ataraxia, the present passage opposes cognitivist accounts of virtue like the Socratic or Stoic, which risk being reduced to the position that virtue is knowledge of the right thing to do irrespective of whether one actually does it.

According to Cicero (and the point recurs again at the very end of the work in the “Dream of Scipio”), the most important arena for virtuous action is politics, which is characterized as the achievement in practice, not just in theory, of those things that the philosophers “shout about in their corners” (in angulis personant), a phrase seemingly taken from Callicles’ attack on philosophers in Plato’s Gorgias (485d). In other words, politics is the practical embodiment of the ethical principles established by philosophers; and the supreme form of politics turns out to be that which is practiced by the lawgiver, that is, the nomothetes of Greek tradition, eis … a quibus civitatibus iura descripta sunt. Lawgivers are responsible for both explicit law (leges) and custom (mores) (Rep. 1.2), and from them derives a whole range of essential features of human civilization: religious attitudes (pietas) and practices (religio); the common law of humanity (ius gentium) and the particular law of the Roman state (ius civile); plus a range of individual virtues listed as follows: unde iustitia fides aequitas? unde pudor, continentia, fuga turpitudinis, appetentia laudis et honestatis? unde in laboribus et periculis fortitudo?

This rhetorical tricolon with anaphora of unde quickly gives away its underlying structure: the first clause lists justice and its kindred virtues of trust and fairness; the second, the virtues of self-regulation, that is, temperance;⁸ and the third, fortitude. In other words, the activity of the lawgiver is responsible for the existence of three of the four Platonic virtues; the missing one this time is wisdom, which is not long in coming as an attribute of the lawgivers and statesmen themselves (1.3 eos qui his urbibus consilio atque auctoritate praesunt, eis qui omnis negoti publici expertes sint longe duco sapientia ipsa esse ante-ponendos). This also makes explicit for the first time the distinction between practical and theoretical sapientia and Cicero’s preference for the former over the latter. Furthermore, it is to be noticed (the point will recur later) that the development of justice, temperance, and bravery or endurance in human societies is not supposed to come of itself by the light of nature: it is the result of the activities of particular individuals who, nevertheless, are obeying a natural urge toward virtuous action. When we come to consider the prologue to Book 3 we shall see more clearly stated there the theory that humankind has natural, unformed impulses toward virtue, which must be perfected by means of cultivation, education, and intellectual endeavor.

At the end of 1.3, this part of the argument is summed up: the will to improve the conditions of human life is stated to be a natural one; political activity is presented in what must be admitted to be a highly idealistic light, of making the life of men “safer and better resourced” (tutiorem et opulentiorem) and of always having been the preferred activity of the best men (optimi cuiusque). Here the life of the politician is already being presented in the guise of Cicero’s ideal statesman whose attributes are laid out in more detail in the course of the work; in the phrase “making human life safer,” there is also a nuance of the politician as guardian and protector of the community that again we shall see developed later (esp. 2.51, quasi tutor et procurator rei publicae) and in connection with which it is easy, though not perhaps at this stage imperative, to recall Plato’s Phylakes, “Guardians.”

Cicero’s argument so far has succeeded in inflecting what was doubtless a common popular prejudice against the impractical preachings of philosophers toward a more positive view of the way in which the principles of philosophical ethics can be put to work. Philosophers have the right ideas but are ineffective in making the bulk of the people follow them (1.3), whereas the legislator and politician equipped with philosophical principles can create a political system that will ensure that those principles are followed in practice. In this context Cicero turns on its head a saying of the Academic philosopher Xenocrates, who said that philosophy enabled people to do the right thing of their own accord rather than because the laws compelled them to do it: Cicero’s view is that the lawgiver is preferable to the philosopher, because the former does not rely on the hazardous process of intellectual persuasion but makes sure people do the right thing whether they want to or not. Yet Cicero does not imply that the lawgiver is less of an intellectual than the philosopher; rather, the reverse is implied, that one who has both the t...