Cicero: Philosophy, Quotes & Legacy

Biography

Marcus Tullius Cicero was born on January 3, 106 BCE, in Arpinum, a small town in the hills of central Italy, into a wealthy family of the equestrian order that had never held high office. His rise was the great Roman success story: a provincial nobody who, through his talents as an orator and his relentless ambition, became the greatest lawyer, orator, and statesman of the late Republic. He studied philosophy in Rome and Athens — he heard the Academic philosopher Philo of Larissa and the Stoic Diodotus, and he later studied with the leaders of the philosophical schools in Athens and Rhodes — and he was formed in the eclectic tradition of the Academy, which drew freely on the Stoic and Peripatetic doctrines.

Cicero's public career was extraordinary and catastrophic in turn. He was consul in 63 BCE, the highest office of the Roman state, and he suppressed the conspiracy of Catiline, earning the title "father of his country." He was then driven into exile by his political enemies in 58 BCE, returned to a diminished position, and spent the last decades of his life oscillating between public service and withdrawal. His philosophical writings belong to the last years of his life: in 46–44 BCE, after the death of his daughter Tullia and the triumph of Caesar's dictatorship, he turned from politics to philosophy and produced, in an astonishing burst of work, the dialogues that made him the founder of Latin philosophical prose.

The end was tragic. After the assassination of Caesar in 44 BCE, Cicero threw himself into the political struggle against Mark Antony, denouncing him in the fourteen speeches known as the Philippics. When Antony and Octavian formed the Second Triumvirate in 43 BCE, Cicero was proscribed — his head and hands were cut off and displayed in the Roman forum, on the rostra where he had spoken. He was sixty-three years old, and his death marked the end of the Roman Republic he had defended all his life.

Historical Context

Cicero wrote his philosophical works in the last years of the Republic, when the Roman world was collapsing into civil war. The political situation is the background of everything he wrote: the dialogues on the state (De Re Publica), the laws (De Legibus), the ends of goods (De Finibus), the nature of the gods (De Natura Deorum), the duties (De Officiis), and the Tusculan Disputations were all written in the shadow of the destruction of the Republic, and they share a single purpose: to provide the moral foundations for a world in which the old political order had failed.

The intellectual context was the relationship between Greek philosophy and Roman culture. The Romans had conquered Greece politically but were conquered by it culturally: the educated Roman of Cicero's generation read Greek, studied in Athens and Rhodes, and spoke Greek as freely as Latin. But philosophy remained a Greek discipline, taught in Greek, and it had no native Latin vocabulary. Cicero's project was to give philosophy a Latin home: to translate the concepts, to naturalize the arguments, and to show that the Roman language and the Roman character could carry the weight of the philosophical tradition. He succeeded so completely that the Latin philosophical vocabulary — words like "quality," "moral," "duty," "property," "species" — is largely his creation.

Core Ideas

The Transmission of Greek Philosophy

Cicero's first importance is as the transmitter of Greek philosophy to the Latin world, and through the Latin world to the Middle Ages and the modern age. His dialogues are not original systems but faithful and elegant presentations of the doctrines of the schools — the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Academics, the Peripatetics — presented as a dialogue in which the rival positions are stated with sympathy and weighed with judgment. The De Finibus (On the Ends of Goods and Evils) presents the ethics of the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Peripatetics in turn; the Academica presents the sceptical epistemology of the New Academy; the Tusculan Disputations presents the Stoic therapy of the emotions. For most of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, these dialogues were the principal source through which the educated West knew the thought of the ancient schools — and for the Stoic ethics in particular, Cicero's On Duties was the most read of all ancient ethical texts.

On Duties (De Officiis)

The De Officiis (On Duties, 44 BCE) is Cicero's masterpiece of practical ethics, and the most influential work of Latin moral philosophy. Written in the form of a letter to his son Marcus, it develops the Stoic doctrine of the "appropriate actions" (kathēkonta, translated by Cicero as officia): the duties that fall to a human being in the ordinary course of life, whether or not he is a sage. The work has two books on the two great sources of duty — the honorable (honestum) and the expedient (utile) — and a third book on the conflict between them, in which Cicero argues that nothing is truly expedient that is not also honorable. The book became, from the patristic age through the Renaissance, the standard textbook of secular ethics: it was read by Ambrose, by the scholastics, by the humanists, and by the founders of the American republic, who found in it the Stoic doctrine of duty, justice, and natural law.

The Tusculan Disputations

The Tusculan Disputations (45 BCE) is Cicero's most personal and most moving philosophical work, written in the months after the death of his daughter Tullia. The five books treat the questions of the Stoic therapy: how to face death, how to endure pain, how to master grief, how to quiet the passions, and how to find the good life in virtue alone. The work is the fullest surviving account of the ancient therapy of the emotions, and its conclusion is the Stoic conviction: "Philosophy is the medicine of the soul" — the discipline by which the human being is released from the tyranny of fortune.

Natural Law

Cicero's account of natural law, in the De Re Publica and the De Legibus, became the classical formulation of the doctrine that there is a law higher than the law of the state: "True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting." The passage, transmitted through the Church Fathers, shaped the medieval doctrine of natural law and through it the modern tradition of human rights.

Philosophy

Cicero's philosophical position is the eclecticism of the Academy: he held that the wise course is not to bind oneself to a single school but to weigh the doctrines of all of them and follow the most probable. His sympathy, however, was with the Stoics, and his practical ethics — the doctrine of duty, the therapy of the emotions, the acceptance of fortune, the primacy of virtue — is the Stoic ethics transmitted to the Latin world. His philosophy is thus less original than influential: he created the terms, the form, and the audience for the philosophical tradition of the West.

His significance can be measured by the judgments of posterity. The humanists of the Renaissance treated him as the model of eloquence and the founder of the philosophia perennis; the medieval tradition, knowing little of Aristotle's ethics beyond the summaries, learned its practical philosophy from him; and the Stoic revival of the modern age has repeatedly returned to him, since the On Duties and the Tusculan Disputations are among the few Stoic texts that survive entire. The tradition that runs from Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus through Seneca and Epictetus to the modern Stoics passes, for the Latin world, through Cicero.

Major Works

Cicero's philosophical corpus includes the De Re Publica (On the Republic, 51 BCE), the De Legibus (On the Laws, c. 51 BCE), the De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Goods and Evils, 45 BCE), the Academica (45 BCE), the Tusculan Disputationes (45 BCE), the De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods, 45 BCE), the De Divinatione (On Divination, 44 BCE), the De Fato (On Fate, 44 BCE), the Cato Maior de Senectute (On Old Age, 44 BCE), the Laelius de Amicitia (On Friendship, 44 BCE), and the De Officiis (On Duties, 44 BCE). His orations — the Catilinarians, the Pro Milone, the Philippics — are the greatest corpus of Latin oratory, and his letters, above all the Letters to Atticus, are one of the great records of an individual life.

Famous Quotes

Cicero's most quoted philosophical sayings include the definition of natural law from the De Re Publica: "True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting." The summary of his Stoic therapy from the Tusculan Disputations: "Philosophy is the medicine of the soul." And the definition of the peaceful life from On Duties: "The life of the wise man is a life of calm: he is never disturbed by fortune." His most famous rhetorical saying is the opening of the first Catilinarian: "How long, Catiline, will you abuse our patience?"

Related Thinkers

Cicero stands between the Greek founders and the Roman practitioners of Stoicism. He transmitted the doctrine of Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus to the Latin world, and his practical ethics shaped the Roman Stoicism of Seneca and Epictetus. His relation to the modern tradition is equally important: the founders of the American republic — John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison — read him as the classical authority on duty, law, and republican virtue, and the modern Stoic revival has found in him one of its principal sources.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Marcus Tullius Cicero" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/cicero)
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Cicero" (iep.utm.edu/cicero)
• Cicero. On Duties. Trans. M.T. Griffin and E.M. Atkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• Everitt, Anthony. Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician. New York: Random House, 2001.