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CICERO

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 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.

Raphael Woolf is Reader in Philosophy at King’s College London. His work focuses on , and he has published on , and . Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 28/01/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/CICERO_COR/ApplicationFiles/9781844658404_text.3d

PHILOSOPHY IN THE ROMAN WORLD

Forthcoming:

Seneca R. Scott Smith

Lucretius Gordon Campbell

Galen Teun Tieleman

Marcus Aurelius John Sellars

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CICERO

The philosophy of a Roman sceptic

Raphael Woolf

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First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 R. Woolf The right of Raphael Woolf to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Woolf, Raphael. Cicero : the philosophy of a Roman sceptic / Raphael Woolf. pages cm 1. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. I. Title. B553.W66 2015 186’.2--dc23 2014034418

ISBN: 978-1-84465-840-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-84465-841-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-72485-0 (ebk)

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vi Some notable dates vii

1 Introduction: Cicero and philosophy 1

2 Scepticism and certainty 10

3 God, fate and freedom 34

4 The best form of government 93

5 The good life in theory and in practice 125

6 The role of the emotions 201

Suggestions for further reading 248 Index 254 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 28/01/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/CICERO_COR/ApplicationFiles/9781844658404_text.3d

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My interest in Cicero as a philosopher was first seriously awakened when I had the good fortune, some fifteen years ago, to be invited to collaborate with Julia Annas on a translation of Cicero’s ethical treatise De Finibus, during which I benefited greatly from Julia’s knowledge and insight. That collaboration was made possible through the good offices of M. M. McCabe, who has remained a constant source of encouragement and advice. A number of scholars have helped me think about Cicero over the years. I would like here to thank in particular Will Altman, Charles Brittain, Christopher Gill, Margaret Graver, Brad Inwood, Jonathan Powell, Andrea Sangiovanni, Malcolm Schofield, David Sedley and Gisela Striker. I’m grateful to an anonymous reader of an earlier version of the manuscript, who made several helpful suggestions for improvement. My thanks to Steven Gerrard, who commissioned the book, and to Matthew Gibbons and his team at Routledge for shepherding it through its final stages. Throughout the process of writing, Jane and mum have been unstinting sources of love and support. Finally, this book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Murray Woolf, who would have been proud; and to the memory of Ian Crystal, fellow ancient philosopher and friend, who would have been amused. Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 28/01/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/CICERO_COR/ApplicationFiles/9781844658404_text.3d

SOME NOTABLE DATES (ALL BC)

106 Cicero born on 3 January. 63 Cicero consul with Marcus Antonius. Exposes Catiline’s conspiracy. Has conspirators executed without trial. 60 Caesar, Pompey and Crassus form the First Triumvirate. 58 Cicero exiled. 57 Cicero recalled from exile. Returns to Rome in September. 56 First Triumvirate renewed. 53 Death of Crassus. 49 Caesar crosses the Rubicon, becomes dictator. 48 Caesar defeats Pompey at Pharsalus in August. Pompey is killed in Egypt in September. 45 Cicero’s daughter Tullia dies, following childbirth, in February. 44 Caesar named dictator for life. Assassinated on 15 March. 43 Antony, Octavian and Lepidus form the Second Triumvirate. Cicero is killed on 7 December. Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 28/01/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/CICERO_COR/ApplicationFiles/9781844658404_text.3d

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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 author- ship 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 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 28/01/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/CICERO_COR/ApplicationFiles/9781844658404_text.3d

2 Introduction

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 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 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 28/01/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/CICERO_COR/ApplicationFiles/9781844658404_text.3d

Introduction 3

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 philo- sophy 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 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 28/01/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/CICERO_COR/ApplicationFiles/9781844658404_text.3d

4 Introduction

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 philo- sophy; 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 trans- parent extent, a product of interaction with its cultural and political background. Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 28/01/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/CICERO_COR/ApplicationFiles/9781844658404_text.3d

Introduction 5

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 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 28/01/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/CICERO_COR/ApplicationFiles/9781844658404_text.3d

6 Introduction

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 ques- tion 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 philo- sophers (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 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 28/01/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/CICERO_COR/ApplicationFiles/9781844658404_text.3d

Introduction 7

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 approaches them in a critical spirit. Despite his twin love affair with philosophy and Rome, Cicero maintains an uneasy, though deeply engaged, relationship with both. And here one turns (or returns) to the final key element in his outlook: his scepticism. With regard to Rome, it is easy to see Cicero’s stance as consisting in a harking back to the good old days of virtuous leadership and stable republican institutions, while lambasting the moral and political decay of his own time. There is something to this picture, but it is vastly over- simplified. Cicero’s scepticism – which often enough means his refusal to see things one-sidedly – cuts both ways. He recognizes that Rome is, necessarily, a continually evolving society in which there is no golden age to be unproblematically identified and looked to for salvation; and conversely, that within the present troubles lie the seeds of new approaches that can make Roman society better. In this regard Cicero’s Roman scepticism is a scepticism about Rome: one which does not deny its greatness, nor its decline, but which sees both as the product of human experience and endeavour – a history neither to be revered nor reviled but learned from and put to use in the ceaseless, imperfect attempt to improve the human lot. But his scepticism represents also, from a Roman point of view, a scepticism about philosophy, especially in its more doctrinaire forms: a suspicion of grand solutions and unqualified precepts. From this scepticism, and because of it, emerges, I believe, something positive. Cicero occupies – indeed positions himself – in the middle ground between the twin giants of philosophical theory and Roman tradition, and seeks to make a place there for the individual agent, as a figure inevitably and rightly shaped by wider forces, but never their slave. If there is a core philosophical motive in Cicero’s work, it is, I believe, to uphold the metaphysical reality and ethical importance of individual agency. This is not a matter of fending off philosophical theory on the one side and historical tradition on the other, but of reflecting from a critical, open-minded standpoint – the sceptical standpoint – on how the two might work together to allow human beings to flourish to their fullest extent. Cicero’s scepticism; his deep interest in the relation between Roman identity and the project of philosophy; the care with which he constructs his works – something that only a detailed reading can make evident: these, among other features, render his philosophical writings more than just repositories for the thought of others, however valuable that aspect of them may be. Rather, they justify our regarding them as philosophical explorations in their own right, to be assessed and enjoyed as such. I shall treat them not primarily as clues in the reconstruction of Epicurean theology, Stoic ethics, or any other particular set of school doctrines, but as independent works of the intellect by a figure with a perhaps unique standing at the interface of philosophy and practical affairs. I shall be more than satisfied if readers are encouraged to see them, and him, in a similar light. Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 28/01/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/CICERO_COR/ApplicationFiles/9781844658404_text.3d

8 Introduction

The plan of the book The book aims at coverage of what one might call Cicero’s core philosophical writings, with minor works, such as On Old Age, On Friendship and the difficult to classify Stoic Paradoxes by and large left to one side. It is organized thematically, the five chapters that follow this introduction (Chapters 2–6) representing broadly, in terms of modern philosophical divisions, respective treatments by Cicero of epistemology, theology and metaphysics, political philosophy, ethics and moral psychology. Some chapters cover a single work, some more than one. To sustain the book’s focus, I have not devoted any substantive discussion to Cicero’s letters, speeches or treatises on rhetoric, though these all contain material pertinent to a full assessment of his philosophical stance. For similar reasons I have not engaged explicitly with the growing body of secondary literature on various aspects of Cicero’s philosophical thought, though I have learned much from that literature both in agreement and dissent. It is not my objective to expound, let alone resolve, one particular scholarly crux or another, but to try to complement the existing literature with a cogent reading of Cicero’s philosophical works both individually and as a whole. I have in this regard thought it appropriate to start afresh from the texts themselves, as it were, rather than from existing scholarly debates. Readers who wish to become better acquainted with recent scholarship on Cicero’s philosophy will find suggestions for further reading at the end of the book. Chapter 2, immediately following this introduction, is devoted to Cicero’s Academica and his outline of the sceptical position that he himself avowed. This offers a fasci- nating debate on the question of whether certain knowledge is possible, and a defence of philosophical enquiry in the event that it is not. A health warning is perhaps in order here: though I have tried to present the material as lucidly as possible, Cicero’s treatment of knowledge and methodology is among his more technical discussions. Some understanding of it is necessary, however, if one is to appreciate the outlook of his other works. In Chapter 3 I turn to Cicero’s trilogy On the Nature of the Gods, On Divination, and On Fate, in which rival accounts of the nature of the divine are evaluated, with a particular emphasis on Stoic theology, which taught among other things that the universe is governed by divine providence and that all human action is pre-ordained by fate. Cicero sees this view as a threat to the possibility of genuine human agency, and his exposition points to a controversy that prefigures modern discussions of the relation between determinism and freedom. Chapter 4 considers Cicero’s two works of political philosophy, the Republic and the Laws, which seek to uphold republican institutions against more autocratic forms of government, and provide a cautiously sympathetic treatment of the Stoic theory of ‘natural law’, which holds that there are fundamental principles of right and wrong by which all concrete human laws are to be judged. Cicero’s handling of the tension between, on the one hand, the universalist outlook represented by natural law theory and, on the other, the specific traditions and practices of Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 28/01/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/CICERO_COR/ApplicationFiles/9781844658404_text.3d

Introduction 9

republican Rome brings into focus the question of whether, and to what extent, abstract philosophical theory is equipped to have influence on actual human societies. Similar themes recur in Chapter 5, which discusses Cicero’s main work on ethical theory (On Ends) and his treatise on practical ethics (On Duties). Despite this division of labour, both works are preoccupied with the relation between theory and practice, and more specifically with whether general ethical prescriptions are the right way to structure good human lives. Cicero is concerned to defend the capacity of human beings, as rational individuals, to choose our own way of life, while maintaining that there are certain features of our make-up – in particular our nature as social beings – that provide constraints on what can plausibly be regarded as a good life. While social norms and social structures can compromise the integrity of the individual, it is only within societies that we can fully express our agency. Cicero’s ethical enquiries invite us to reflect on the complex interplay between social organization and human fulfilment. Finally, Chapter 6 explores Cicero’s wide-ranging discussion, in the Tusculan Disputations, of the nature and role of the emotions. Though he draws here on a variety of different philosophical approaches, he is particularly influenced by the Stoic idea that all turbulent emotions, as forms of mental disturbance, should be eradicated if one is to live a happy life. The Tusculans presents in its most concrete form Cicero’s conception of what happy and unhappy lives are like, in terms of the emotional states of the agents who live them. Cicero himself, here and elsewhere, would have been less concerned that we agree with his views than that his writings encourage us to reflect on how philosophy might contribute to the betterment of human life. This ambition, tempered by a hard-headed awareness of the difficulties of realizing it, demonstrates throughout a corresponding concern with the scope and limits of philosophy itself. It is a profile that, as I hope the forthcoming chapters may show, gives Cicero the philosopher a continuing claim on our attention today.