Cicero's Career

Early in December 63 BCE, the consul Marcus Tullius Cicero, having unmasked the conspiracy of Catiline and supervised the execution of several of the leading conspirators, was hailed as Father of his Country and escorted home by a crowd of grateful Romans from all ranks of society; a public thanksgiving was decreed in his honor, the first such award ever made for nonmilitary service to the state. That moment was the summit of a remarkable career: not only had Cicero's consulate been distinguished by signal success and acclaim, but the very fact that he had achieved that office – the chief magistracy in republican Rome – and had done so at the earliest legal age of 42 was itself unusual. Cicero was born in 106 BCE to one of the leading families of the town of Arpinum, some 115 kilometers southeast of Rome; and although the town had had Roman citizenship since 188, no one in Cicero's family had ever held public office at Rome. Ties of friendship between Cicero's family and some of the leading aristocrats of Rome had permitted him to learn the ways of Roman politics and law under the tutelage of the leading orator (Lucius Licinius Crassus) and jurists (Quintus Mucius Scaevola the Augur and his cousin Quintus Mucius Scaevola the Pontifex) of the 90s and 80s; but in the first half of the first century BCE it was rare for a “new man” – the first in his family to achieve high office – to become consul.

[1] Augustine, City of God 2.21: Thus, when the Roman commonwealth was in the condition that Sallust describes, it was no longer terrible and highly criminal, as he says, but altogether no commonwealth at all according to the argument set out in the discussion concerning the commonwealth held by the greatest leaders of the time. Cicero himself, speaking at the outset of the fifth book, not using the voice of Scipio or one of the others but in his own voice, first quoted the verse of the poet Ennius in which he said:

The Roman state stands upon the morals and men of old.

He then said: “That verse, in its brevity and its truthfulness, he seems to me to have spoken as if from an oracle. For if the state had not had such morals, then the men would not have existed; nor, if such men had not been in charge, would there have been such morals as to be able to establish or preserve for so long a commonwealth so great and ruling so widely. And so, before our time, ancestral morality provided outstanding men, and great men preserved the morality of old and the institutions of our ancestors. [2a] But our own time, having inherited the commonwealth like a wonderful picture that had faded over time, not only has failed to renew its original colors but has not even taken the trouble to preserve at least its shape and outlines. […] ”

The possibility of knowledge

Stoic epistemology is best understood as a response to a twofold challenge. Socrates had assumed that whether one had a good life depended on whether one had managed to acquire a certain kind of knowledge, which he identified with wisdom, in particular the knowledge of what is good and what is bad. For this reason he had devoted his life to philosophical inquiry concerning the good, the bad and related matters. Yet, for all of his efforts, even he himself did not think that he had obtained this knowledge. At the same time Socrates had made it clear that we should not content ourselves with mere belief or opinion concerning these matters, even if this belief happened to be true. One would not want to rely for the success or failure of one's life on mere opinion which at best happened to be true. Moreover, the Socratic elenchus suggested that one was not entitled to any belief which one did not hold as a matter of knowledge. For Socratic refutation seemed to rest on the fact that somebody who holds a belief as a matter of mere opinion can be made to see that he has equal reason to espouse the contradictory belief.

A century of philosophers since Socrates had done no better. Indeed, as if oblivious to Socrates’ strictures against mere belief, they had rushed precipitously to produce thesis after thesis, theses often quite extravagant and often contradicting each other, and in any case all a matter of mere opinion, as closer scrutiny would reveal.

Before tackling in detail the issue of the organization and structure of the philosophical schools, both in the Hellenistic period and more generally, one must try to find an answer to the question of what a philosophical school was. This is a difficult question, which has not yet found an answer that copes satisfactorily with all the problems it poses.

Until recently the theory of Wilamowitz prevailed, according to which the philosophers' schools were religious societies (thiasoi), dedicated to the worship of the gods, or the Muses in this particular case. Wilamowitz started from the presumption that all such ancient societies had cult characteristics and that, for this reason, they were recognized by Athenian law, giving them the status of legal bodies. From an outsider's viewpoint the philosophical schools would therefore have appeared to be religious societies devoted to the worship of the Muses, while internally they would have developed functions like those of modern universities. In the Academy and Peripatos, above all, there would have been activity in scientific research and teaching based on a division of duties between teachers old and young, and carried out in a series of public lectures and private seminars.

Wilamowitz's theory has attracted criticism and objections. In particular, it has been discovered that certain elements which for Wilamowitz were typical of a thiasos (statues of the Muses and their worship) were shared by other institutions like the gymnasia and children's schools, and were therefore not by themselves enough to support the identification of philosophical schools as religious societies.

Augustine, City of God 2.21: The discussion of this topic was put off to the next day, when it was the subject of a heated debate in Book 3. Philus himself undertook to give the argument of those who believe that the conduct of public affairs is impossible without injustice, while making a strong plea not to be taken to believe this himself. He gave a careful presentation of the case of injustice against justice: he tried to show by plausible arguments and examples that the former is useful to the state, while the latter is useless. Then Laelius at the request of everyone took up the defense of justice and asserted as strongly as possible that there is nothing so dangerous to a state as injustice, and that in fact a state cannot exist or be maintained without a high degree of justice.

When this subject had been discussed to everyone's satisfaction, Scipio returned to the previous topic; he recalled and commended his brief definition of the commonwealth, in which he had said that it was the concern of the people and that the people was not any large assemblage, but an assemblage associated with one another by agreement on law and community of interest.

[1a] Cicero, Letters to Atticus 7.3.2: If I had not had that idea about a triumph, which you also approve of, then you would not find me much short of that man who is described in the sixth book. Why should I be silent with you, who gobbled up those books? As it is, I will have no doubts about abandoning so grand a thing, if it is better to do so; it is impossible for both to proceed together, to campaign for a triumph and to speak freely on public affairs.

[1b] You are awaiting the complete foresight of this leader, which derives its name from seeing ahead. [+ Nonius 42.3]

[1c] Therefore this citizen must so prepare himself as always to be armed against things which disturb the stability of the state. [+ Nonius 256.27]

[1d] That discord of the citizens which is called sedition because people go apart in following different leaders. [+ Nonius 25.3]

[1e] And in fact in a civil discord, when the respectable citizens are more important than the majority, I believe that citizens should be weighed rather than counted. [+ Nonius 516.17]

[1f] The passions exercise powerful control over thoughts; they compel and command innumerable things, and since they can in no way be fulfilled and satiated, they drive to every sort of crime those whom they have inflamed with their enticements. [+ Nonius 424.31]

Introduction

As the previous chapter has shown, Epicurean psychology is physicalist in ways that have some affinity to contemporary use of that explanatory model. The Stoic theory is harder to characterize though no less intriguing so far as scientific and philosophical issues are concerned. Modern western thinkers are likely to find the Stoics to be considerably more sophisticated than the Epicureans in analysing the faculties and subjective content of the mind but less plausible than their rivals in accounting for the mind's ontological foundations. By way of introduction, we may note some striking similarities and differences between the two theories.

Like the Epicureans, the Stoics identify the principle of sentient life with a corporeal psuchē. In both theories the psuchē is distributed throughout the limbs and organs of the animal, whether human or non-human. Like the Epicureans again, they draw a sharp distinction between the human mind (which they call ‘thought’ or the ‘governing part’ of the psuchē), located in the heart, and the rest of the psuchē (the ‘spirit’ in Lucretius’ Epicurean terminology), situated in all the other parts of the body. Ignoring differences of detail concerning the relation between the mind and the rest of the psuchē, we have something broadly analogous in both theories to the modern allocation of functions to the brain and the central nervous system respectively.

The physical constituency of the Stoic psuchē, together with its functional division into governing and instrumental parts, differentiates it sharply from the psychology of Aristotle as well as Plato. However, the Stoics’ similarity in these respects to Epicurus should not be overemphasized.

Raymond Geuss originally encouraged me to undertake this translation; I owe him and Quentin Skinner thanks for publishing it in this series, and I am also grateful to Richard Fisher, Elizabeth Howard, Caroline Drake, and Jane Van Tassel of Cambridge University Press for their expert advice and assistance.

A preliminary draft of the translation of Book 1 of On the Laws was used by students in Contemporary Civilization CI101 in the core curriculum of Columbia College; I am grateful to David Johnston, the director of the course, for including it in the course reader, and to the students in my own section who offered useful corrections and suggestions. Susanna Zetzel has offered advice on numerous passages and has improved the introduction immeasurably. Robert Kaster and Gareth Williams generously read a draft of the entire book and have offered many corrections of my Latin, English, and logic. The remaining faults are my own.

This translation was begun during a sabbatical leave in 1993 and completed during a research leave in 1997–98 aided by a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. I am grateful both to Columbia University and to the Guggenheim Foundation for their support. I received practical assistance of other kinds from my good friends Douglas Kilburn, Robert Phinney, and Scott Decker, who supplied water, heat, and light, without which the revision of this book would have taken far longer to complete.

Introduction

Early in the Hellenistic period the Academy went sceptic. Sceptic it remained until the two leading figures in the school at the beginning of the first century BC, Philo of Larissa and Antiochus of Ascalon, adopted more sanguine positions on the possibility of cognition – albeit mutually incompatible positions. The philosopher who effected this change of outlook in the Academy was Arcesilaus, scholarch from c. 265 BC until his death around twenty-five years later, and reputed as a dialectician whose employment of the Socratic method led him to suspend judgement about everything. He impressed the contemporary polymath Eratosthenes as one of the two leading philosophers of his time. And in his assaults on the Stoic theory of cognition he established the principal focus of argument between the Stoa and the Academy for the best part of the next two hundred years.

The most notable of Arcesilaus' sceptical successors was Carneades, the greatest philosopher of the second century BC. Although like Arcesilaus – and in similar emulation of Socrates – Carneades wrote nothing, his pupil Clitomachus published voluminous accounts of his arguments on issues across the whole range of philosophical inquiry; and it is principally to this source that – albeit indirectly – we owe our knowledge of a subtle system of thought. In the course of his engagement with both Stoicism and Epicureanism Carneades worked out for the first time in Greek philosophy an alternative non-foundationalist epistemology, sometimes misleadingly dubbed ‘probabilism’ in modern discussions of his views – although whether Arcesilaus or Carneades had any views of their own, or were simply dialecticians intent on undermining the positions of others, is a disputed question.

Philosophical theology

Though theology without some form of religion to prompt it would be an odd phenomenon, it is by no means the same thing as religion. Theology, or at least philosophical theology, is a rational enterprise or at any rate an attempt to rationalize the irrational. Rationalist forms of reflection concerning the gods, or the divine, are part of Greek philosophy from its very beginning. On the one hand, the primary principle or principles were often said to be divine or provided with divine attributes, while on the other traditional views of the gods were criticized and other proposals formulated. But the first philosopher to elevate theology (at least in principle) to the status of a part of philosophy was Aristotle, who at Metaph. E 1.1026a19 affirms that there are ‘three theoretical disciplines: mathematics, physics, theology’. Before Aristotle, Plato had argued that those who write about the gods should follow certain ‘models’ (Rep. 379a6). According to this prescription, a god is good and so not the cause of evil but only of what is good, and he does not change but always remains the same. The sharp contrast with the gods of traditional Greek religion, who assume different shapes at will and may not only favour human beings but also deceive and harm them, is very deliberate.

Divinities which conform to this ideal play a decisive part in Plato's and Aristotle's cosmologies. According to Plato's Timaeus we live in the best of all possible worlds because it has been constructed by a Divine Craftsman and his help-mates.