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Cicero on the Emotions : Tusculan Disputations  and  / Translated and with Commentary by Margaret Graver

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Cicero on the Emotions : Tusculan Disputations  and  / Translated and with Commentary by Margaret Graver Translated and with Commentary by MARGARET G RAVER Margaret Graver is assistant professor of classics at Dartmouth College. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London ௠ by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published Printed in the United States of America ISBN (cloth): --- ISBN (paper): --- Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cicero, Marcus Tullius. [Tusculanae disputationes. English. Selections] Cicero on the emotions : Tusculan disputations and / translated and with commentary by Margaret Graver. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN --- (alk. paper) — ISBN --- (pbk. : alk. paper) . Emotions—Early works to . Happiness—Early works to . I. Graver, Margaret. II. Title. PA.T G Ј.—dc o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z.-. PREFACE vii ABBREVIATIONS AND MATTERS OF CITATION ix INTRODUCTION xi ABOUT THE TRANSLATION xxxvii A NOTEONTHETEXT xli TUSCULAN DISPUTATIONS BOOK 3 3 BOOK 4 39 COMMENTARY BOOK 3: ON GRIEF 73 BOOK 4: ON EMOTIONS 129 APPENDIXES: SOURCES FOR CICERO’S ACCOUNT APPENDIX A. CRANTOR AND THE CONSOLATORY 187 TRADITION APPENDIX B. EPICURUS AND THE CYRENAICS 195 vi APPENDIX C. THE EARLY STOICS AND 203 CHRYSIPPUS APPENDIX D. POSIDONIUS 215 BIBLIOGRAPHY 225 INDEX LOCORUM 233 GENERAL INDEX 245 The third and fourth books of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations present the reader with a self-contained treatise on the nature and management of human emotion. Cicero sets himself the task of presenting, first for grief, then for emotions in general, the insights that had been gained in Greece over many years through philosophical debate and also through practical experience in the ancient equivalent of psychotherapy. His own support is given for the most part to the Stoic position, which he admires for its thoroughness and close reasoning; indeed, his work now stands as the oldest complete text documenting Stoic views on this subject. But he also pays considerable attention to the views of other Hellenistic thinkers, notably the Peripatetics and the Epicureans, setting their arguments in dialogue with those of the Stoics. Recommendations from all the schools are com- bined in the advice he offers to counselors on the means of allaying grief and other strong emotions. Scholars in the field of ancient philosophy have over the last decade become increasingly interested in the analyses of emotion that were posited by various thinkers during the Hellenistic period, that is, the two and a half centuries following the death of Aristotle in ... The majority of scholarly attention has rightly been devoted to reconstructing and inter- preting the positions of the primary Greek thinkers of the period, figures like Zeno of Citium, Chrysippus of Soli, Epicurus, and later Posidonius of Rhodes. But progress in this area is frequently uncertain and always methodologically difficult because of the nature of our evidence, much of vii viii which is fragmentary and heavily mediated by the opinions of later writers. Cicero, by contrast, provides us with a continuous account which, though it comes from a slightly later time period and from a different culture, can still serve as an invaluable point of reference for the Hellenistic thought which preceded it. For Cicero is well informed about his subject through many sources, oral and written, that are now lost to us, and his treatment is both intelligent and relatively impartial. By following his argument on its own terms, working out its motivations, and then comparing it with other available sources, we learn much about Stoicism in particular which could not be gained from any other source. But for many readers, this work will have an appeal in and of itself. The topic has a perennial interest, and the position Cicero takes, though unlikely to win wide adherence, will nonetheless command respect, challenging its op- ponents to construct equally thoughtful and rigorous responses. The man- ner of presentation is lively and accessible, for Cicero’s intention is not to en- ter the debates of professional philosophers but to engage a wider public in disciplined reflection upon a matter of importance. It is my hope that both scholars in ancient philosophy and others new to the subject will find in his work material for many fruitful discussions. This project has benefited from research funds supplied by the Walter and Constance Burke Research Initiation Awards for Junior Faculty at Dart- mouth College, as well as from leave time provided under Dartmouth’s Ju- nior Faculty Fellowship program. Among the many individuals who have assisted me in various ways, I would like to thank Martha Nussbaum, Charles Fornara, and Victor Caston, who guided my graduate studies in Hellenistic ethics and epistemology; Christopher Gill, who provided the initial inspiration for this project and waded patiently through my first efforts; and David Konstan, who did much to clarify my understanding of the Epicurean material in book . Brad Inwood and two anonymous scholars read complete drafts for the University of Chicago Press; their comments have not only saved me from numerous errors but also material- ly improved nearly every page of this book. Bruce Graver has been my tech- nical support and for many years my source of strength and model of exacting scholarship. I wish to dedicate this volume to my parents, Harry Robson and Roberta Steffe Robson, without whose love of learning and deep commitment to truth I could not be what I am today. Acad., Acad. Pr. Cicero, Academics and Prior Academics Ad Brut. Cicero, Epistulae ad M. Brutum (Letters to Brutus) AM Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos (Against the Professors) Att. Cicero, Letters to Atticus D.L. Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers EK Posidonius: The Fragments, ed. Edelstein and Kidd Ep. Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium (Moral Epistles to Lucilius) Ep. Hdt. Epicurus, Epistle to Herodotus Ep. Men. Epicurus, Epistle to Menoikeus Fam. Cicero, Epistulae ad familiares (Letters to Friends) KD Epicurus, Kuriai Doxai (Principal Doctrines) LSJ Greek–English Lexicon, ed. H. G. Liddell, R. Scott, and H. S. Jones (Oxford, ) ND Cicero, De natura deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) NE Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Off Cicero, De officiis (On Appropriate Actions) OLD Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P.G.W. Glare (Oxford, ) PHP Galen: On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato QFr. Cicero, Epistulae ad Quintum fratrem (Letters to Quintus) Rhet. Aristotle, Rhetoric Stob., Ecl. Stobaeus, Eclogae (Anthology) ix x SVF Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, ed. von Arnim Tusc. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, books , , and Cross-references to the translation are to book and chapter. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Where the com- mentary makes assertions as to the derivation or meaning of specific words and phrases, I have relied on the relevant entries in the standard lexica as noted above, including a citation only if needed to pinpoint a section of a long entry. Dates for persons and events are given in accordance with the relevant ar- ticles in the Oxford Classical Dictionary (ed. S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, Oxford, ). All dates in this volume are B.C.E. unless otherwise indicated. The bibliographical notes provided with each section are meant to direct the reader to important recent treatments of specific topics, with emphasis on works in English, and to indicate which modern treatments have most influenced my reading of the evidence. They are not by any means comprehensive. Fuller bibliographical resources for matters treated in this volume can be found especially in Everson , Barnes and Griffin , Griffin and Barnes , and Long and Sedley . CICERO AND THE PHILOSOPHERS ON EMOTION To the philosophers of Greece and Rome, it seemed obvious that the emotional experience of humans was a proper topic for philosophy to ad- dress. Grief and anger, delight and desire, fear and pity had always belonged to ethical discourse, for formal moral education was first and always fore- most the province of poets, and the most respected poetic forms of an- tiquity were also the most deeply emotional. Emotion, its causes largely mysterious, figures centrally in the narrative strategy of Homeric epic, motivating gods and humans alike to acts of prowess, of cowardice, of car- ing and deceit. In Athenian tragedy, the unexplained and intensely prob- lematic power of emotion figures large both in the actions on stage and in the critical responses of the viewers. It is not surprising, then, that when the philosophical writers set themselves to provide explanations for the behav- ior of individuals in social settings, they inquired closely into the emotional dimensions of motivation, asking on the one hand psychological questions about how emotions are generated and how they are related to conscious thought processes, and on the other hand broadly ethical questions about the nature of emotional health, the function of emotional responses in a divinely ordered universe, and the extent to which we can be blamed or praised for the emotions we have. Both Plato and Aristotle developed po- sitions on the subject, and the views of their predecessors and contempo- rary opponents are often mentioned in their writings. The hedonist philos- xi xii opher Epicurus, a generation later than Aristotle, made questions of fear and desire central to his ethics; his views, too, were widely influential. By the time Cicero came to study philosophy, however, the most highly developed position was that of the Stoics, a series of scholar-philosophers working primarily at Athens, all of whom were deeply influenced by the thought of Zeno of Citium (– ...).1 In modern English, the word “stoic” has come to mean “deliberately unemotional,” and it is quite true that for Zeno and his followers, a reasoned approach to ethics makes nec- essary a radical overthrow of many of our usual assumptions about emo- tion.
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