24 - Cicero

Summary

Introduction

Cicero could read in his well thumbed text of Plato’s Republic that political constitutions did not endure forever. Experience reinforced the message of philosophy that the Roman Republic was unlikely to withstand the recurrent civil wars that marked the years of his adult life. Cicero, along with his contemporaries, preferred to analyse historical change in moral terms. Thus, he argued that the traditional constitution of the Republic was intrinsically the most stable available, and the only reason for its weakness was the corruption of the ruling classes. To the modern historian, his conservatism may seem nostalgic or impractical; yet his de Re Publica was received with immediate enthusiasm, while de Officiis proved one of the most influential of all Classical works. Cicero’s strength as a political philosopher lay in the creative and enduring expression that he gave to a remarkably fertile set of aristocratic ideals.

I have described Cicero’s political philosophy as creative. However, much scholarship since the late nineteenth century has been devoted to discovering the precise ways in which his thought is derivative. Cicero the philosopher has been supposed habitually to have imitated a lost Greek ‘source’; and his texts have been mentally translated back into Greek in order to learn more about their alleged author. Unsurprisingly, Cicero’s arguments have seemed both unoriginal and anachronistic. However, the presuppositions, the methods and the results of the source-hunters have not stood up to close scrutiny. In particular, we can no longer ignore the wealth of evidence for Cicero’s wide reading in Greek philosophy and history, and his easy familiarity with philosophical concepts (shown, for example, by jokes in his letters) as well as his outstanding ability to organize ideas and arguments.