The purpose of this chapter is to offer a sketch of the relation between rhetoric and dialectic as Cicero sees it, and to identify a problem internal to his account. Cicero argues at length in the Tusculan Disputations in favor of the idea that the good and wise person does not experience any form of emotional disturbance. That being so, how can one who signs up to the idea that emotional disturbance is ideally to be eliminated then in good conscience recommend a practice – namely, rhetoric – one of whose principal objectives is to arouse the emotions? There looks to be a clash here between the objective of the philosopher and that of the orator. I explore Cicero’s resources for tackling this tension, and suggest how his conception of the relation between rhetoric and dialectic may thereby illuminate some distinctive aspects of his philosophical approach.

In a striking passage from the last book of his Tusculan Disputations, Cicero claims to live from day to day (nos in diem vivimus; 5.33). He always opts for what he deems probable, and this, he argues, also constitutes his freedom. This remarkable statement, which is obviously rooted in Cicero’s Academic philosophy, is far from unproblematic. This contribution aims at a better understanding of Cicero’s claim, through an analysis of his argumentative strategies in Tusculan Disputations. More precisely, attention is given to Cicero’s use of (1) the argument from common sense, (2) the argument from dignitas and decorum, (3) illustrative examples, and (4) to his approach in introducing the philosophical topics of the conversation. Finally, I deal with the complicated question as to whether Cicero’s sophisticated attitude of in diem vivere can be reconciled with the therapeutic goal of Tusculan Disputations.

The De re publica contains a sophisticated strain of reflection on the place of the honor motive in a good life, and in particular in the good life of public service. Cicero finds a way for a conscientious public servant to be interested in receiving honor while still directing his actions at the public good and that only. Further, he finds a use for merited honor and merited shame in the moral education of citizens and political leaders. The chapter argues that Cicero’s account of how honor motivates a person, both ordinarily and in the normative case, is fundamentally more similar to the views on honor put forward by the Hellenistic Stoics than it is to the tripartite model of psyche used by Plato in his Republic. As so often in De re publica, what we have is Platonism filtered through and modified by subsequent Stoic thought. But Cicero’s own experience in politics has also given stimulus to his reflections; and conversely, the philosophical position on honor that he develops in his writing becomes part of his self-representation as a public figure.

This chapter examines Cicero’s Pro Marcello of 46 bce, a speech of thanksgiving to Julius Caesar for pardoning his civil-war for M. Claudius Marcellus. I argue that Cicero cleverly uses philosophical arguments to, as it were, entrap Caesar into working towards the restoration of the Republic. Philosophical wisdom is a leitmotif of the speech, and Caesar in particular is called sapiens or associated with sapientia nine times. The basic argument that underlies Pro Marcello, without ever being made explicit, is the following syllogism: The wise man will act virtuously. Caesar is a wise man. Therefore, Caesar will act virtuously. In defining what acting virtuously would mean for his addressee, Cicero argues vigorously against Caesar’s own statement that he had already ‘lived enough for either nature or glory’ (satis diu uel naturae uixi uel gloriae, 25), painting the dictator as an Epicurean whose wrong ideas about both virtue and glory the orator seeks to combat.

In book I of De re publica Cicero famously defined the res publica as res populi, the business or the interest of the people, and then went on to flesh out what we should understand to constitute a people: ‘a collection of a great number of human beings, joined in partnership through agreement or unanimity of law or justice or right (iuris consensu) and through sharing in advantage (utilitatis communione)’. ‘Sharing in advantage’ seems clear enough. But my disjunctive rendering of iuris consensu, with its repeated ‘or’ and unconvincing ‘of’, is intended to give an indication of the difficulty translators and other interpreters have had in grasping what Cicero meant by the expression. This chapter offers a fresh attempt at the problem.

An introduction to the key themes and arguments of the volume as a whole.

In his philosophical works Cicero addresses a number of questions concerning the role of old men in politics, most obviously in his dialogue De senectute of 44 bce. How best should the old participate in politics and the wider community – what, if anything, do the old have to offer that is special or unique? How should the generations fit together in the body politic, and should age be a factor in the structural organisation of states? Should the old rule? Through a close reading of De senectute, I argue: (1) Cicero develops a coherent line on the special political role of old men, which can be seen as a call to arms in the contemporary Roman political context; and (2) this line is not just a restatement of traditional Roman ideals: Cicero draws on and adapts some of the most important arguments from Plato’s Republic and his earlier De re publica when addressing these questions regarding the role of old men in politics.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which Cicero’s choice of dialogue form serves to support his preferred position of Academic Scepticism in the Academica. From the letters Cicero wrote to Atticus while composing this work, we know that he was particularly interested in the verisimilitude of the conversation presented in his text. Yet, in the dedicatory letter that accompanied this text, Cicero is at pains to point out that this conversation is, in fact, fictitious, presenting to the reader speeches that never took place. The contention of this chapter is that Cicero’s apparently paradoxical focus on both the credibility and the fictitious nature of his dialogue can be explained by the epistemological stance advocated in this text. By creating a dramatically convincing (in rhetorical terms, enargēs, or ‘evident’) account of a conversation that never took place, Cicero is providing his reader with a further counter example to the Stoic theory of the kataleptic impression, which holds that true impressions can be distinguished from false impressions by virtue of their unique enargeia (or ‘evidentness’). Consequently, then, the form of the dialogue itself serves to reinforce the Academic claim that we have access to no clear criterion of truth.

This chapter explores the relationships among Cicero’s three pre-Civil-War dialogues, De oratore, De re publica, and the incomplete De legibus, both in terms of their relationship to Plato and in terms of their connections with one another. While some important recent scholarship has emphasized the links between De re publica and De legibus, I concentrate on the links between De oratore and De re publica, in terms of their attitudes to Plato and to Hellenistic learning, the relationship they establish between Greek thought and Roman practice, and their construction of the interrelated histories of philosophy, rhetoric, and politics. I also suggest that De legibus is strikingly different from the other two works in these respects and also in the relative weight it places on the role of individuals and institutions in creating a moral and successful public world.

In the chapter I argue that we should set aside the Quellenforschung arguments of Lefèvre and Brunt and Atkins and others and look at what Cicero is up to in book 3, where he aims to fill in a gap left by Panaetius and not followed up by Posidonius. My analysis focuses in particular on Cicero’s redeployment of the Ring of Gyges thought experiment to undercut the Epicurean reliance on Kuria Doxa (KD) 5 to bolster their ‘moral’ hedonism; and the critical role, or so I argue, of the correspondence with Cassius (which cites KD 5 in Fam 15.19) in the development of Cicero’s argument (with additional reference to Fin. 1-2, where KD 5 also takes a critical role). In addition to making the case for the importance of the correspondence as ‘work in progress’, I argue that Cicero’s engagement with Posidonius, Panaetius et al. represents a mature, confident Cicero philosophus, ready to make a targeted contribution to Stoic ethics, with none of the dissimulatio doctrinae of the works of the 50s.

In his De re publica and De officiis, Cicero discusses the conditions that must exist for a war to be justly commenced and waged. In developing his account, Cicero lays the groundwork for many of the principles of the later just war tradition. However, commentators have detected inconsistencies between Cicero’s account of ‘the justice of going to war’ and his reliance on the competitive honor code of the ancient Mediterranean world, which undergirds much of his account of conduct within war. Commentators usually see Cicero’s commendation of wars undertaken for the sake of glory as inconsistent both with the legal and religious principles undergirding his account and with the Stoic account of justice derived from Panaetius, whom Cicero follows in De officiis. In this chapter, I reconstruct Cicero’s account of just war theory and explain why he could plausibly see coherence where the modern commentators see incoherence.