11 - Cicero and the relationship of oratory to literature

Summary

CICERO’S ATTITUDE TO CULTURE

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.) has been endlessly studied as a character and as a politician, and certainly these aspects of him are of absorbing interest; but his chief historical importance is as a man of letters. Deeply conscious of the philistinism of most Romans, this ‘new man’ with no ancestors adopted as his spiritual ancestors the younger Scipio and his friends of the second century, the disseminators, under the guidance of the Stoic Panaetius, of Hellenism, who were also exemplars of Roman patriotism, decorum and humanitas. ‘I am more than others a philhellene and known to be’, he says to Atticus, though his admiration was for the literature, philosophy and art of the great Greeks of the past rather than for the shifty modern ‘Greeklings’ (Q Fr. 1.2.2). In his dialogues, composed in the beautifully situated villas he had acquired at Tusculum (above Frascati) and down the west coast of Italy, which he sometimes also used as their mise en scène, he seems concerned to portray a particularly courteous society (like Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice): no one is allowed to be rude, unlike some of the Sophists in Plato. His characters have that tolerance which is one of his own characteristics.

When he was eighteen Philo of Larissa, head of the ‘New’ Academy at Athens, visited Rome and made a deep impression on him. Philo stood for hearing every side in a debate before making up one's mind. Holding that nothing could be known for certain, he deplored dogmatism and insisted that all conclusions were provisional. So when Cicero later visited Athens to study, he chose to join the Academy.