CICERONE, MARCO TULLIO. – Roman orator, statesman, and philosopher, born on 3 January 106 B.C. at Arpino, died at the hands of Antony’s assassins near Gaeta on 7 December 43. He completed his studies in Rome, where M. Antonio and L. Crasso were his teachers of oratory. In 75, barely thirty years old, he was appointed to govern Sicily, and in 63 was elected consul. Exiled in 58 by Clodio, after a year he was recalled to Rome by Pompeo. After Pompeo’s fall, and unable to tolerate monarchy, he was forced to abandon public life. As a politician, he was one of the most representative figures of the final age of the Roman Republic; as a writer, among the greatest of all time. Because of the complex of ideas that informed his personality and the mastery of his style, for centuries he served as a model and teacher, as few others among the ancients did. In addition to fragments of his lost works, including his poetic and historical works, 57 orations, 7 rhetorical works, 12 philosophical works, and 4 collections of letters (850 in all) have come down to us.
PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS. — C.’s philosophical activity began with the De republica, composed between 54 and 51 in 6 books. We possess about a third of it, discovered in 1819 by Cardinal A. MAGI (v.) in a Vatican palimpsest. Before then, only one part of it was known, the Somnium Scipionis, preserved by Macrobius. In 52 the De legibus was begun, but left unfinished: 3 books (perhaps out of 6) have come down to us, with lacunae, together with fragments of the remainder. Both works derive their form from Plato; as for their content, however, they depend largely on the Stoic Panezius, on Posidonius, also a Stoic, whom C. had heard at Rhodes, and on the Academic Antiochus of Ascalon, whom he had heard in Athens. The Paradoxa Stoicorum date from 47–46. In 45 came the Consolatio, on the death of his daughter Tullia, and the Hortensius, both lost works: the latter, which was an exhortation to philosophy and acted upon s. Agostino, made use of the Protreptia of Aristotle and Posidonius. In the same year the Academica were composed, originally in 2 books and later in 4, as well as the De finibus bonorum et molorum (on the highest good and the highest evil) in 5 books. The Academica, of which only Book I of the first version (Luelius) and Book I of the second have survived, dealt with the problem of knowledge according to the doctrines of the Middle and New Academy. The De finibus sets forth and refutes the ethical doctrines of the Epicureans and the Stoics, and finally treats of the Academic-Peripatetic doctrine (Antiochus), which C. regards as the best. Between 45 and 44 the Tusculanne disputationes were composed, in 5 books, dealing with death, pain, the passions, and virtue, which alone can ensure happiness. In 44 came the De natura deorum in 3 books, the Cato Maior de senectute, the Luelius de amicitia, the De divinatione in 2 books, the De fato (fragmentary), the De officiis, in 3 books, and the two lost minor works: De gloria (still known to Petrarch) and De virtutibus.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF C. — Speaking to Atticus in 45 (Ad Att., XVI, 12, 5) about the works he had planned, C. writes: « ἀπόγραφα sunt, minore labore fiunt, verba tantum adfero quibus abundo ». In fact, the subject matter he presents and the arguments he employs are for the most part dependent on Greek sources. In this respect, C.’s originality can only be limited, or even altogether nonexistent. But this dependence is neither servile nor mechanical: he chooses and judges, and to the opinions of professional philosophers he brings the contribution or correction of his Roman experience, of his humanity, at once broad and profound. « Non interpretum fungimur munere », he writes more truthfully in De finibus (I, 6: cf. De off. I, 6), « sed tuemur ea quae dicta sunt ab iis quos probamus, eisque nostrum iudicium et nostrum scribendi ordinem adiungimus ». All this implies a determinate spiritual attitude, that is, a personality. Considered in its form, that is, by generalizing the motives from which it derives its inspiration and impulse, it may be defined as humanism, meaning by this that conception of life which seeks to promote, on the model of an ideal form, the specific activities of man as a rational being capable of virtue. From this point of view, C.’s philosophical position becomes logically clear and shows greater coherence than is normally granted to II.
C. found himself confronted by three currents of thought: the Epicurean, the Stoic, and the Academic—the last skeptical up to and including Philo of Larissa, C.’s teacher and friend, the other two dogmatic. He was always hostile to the Epicurean school, which he came to know directly through its most reputable teachers, such as Phaedrus, Zeno, and Philodemus:
it lowered man too far and removed the foundations of the State, contradicting everything that C. regarded as belonging to the Roman moral and civic tradition. The Stoics responded more fully to his idealistic requirements and to the social aims which, as a Roman, he assigned to every form of spiritual activity; but he disliked their excessive subtlety, extreme rigorism, and dogmatism. The Academy seemed to him the school best suited to his needs, not only because, through its practice of discussing every thesis pro and contra, it was best suited to the orator, but also because it left free scope for his intelligence and for his exceptionally vivid sense of the particular, both historical and human. His adherence, however, was not such as to make him reject what, in relation to different problems, he found in the other schools, and especially among the Stoics. In this respect he was an eclectic. Not, however, in a systematic sense, but with a view to a philosophy that would not contradict the requirements of a spirit deeply conscious of the nobility of man and the value of the human community. This makes it understandable that the works in which C. comes closest to Stoicism are the political works and, at the end of his life, the work that is his ethical testament, namely the De officiis; and it is in these that he finds his most moving and sincere accents. The same is true of the Tusculanae and, in part, of the De finibus. It is here, in the face of the problems of society and morality, that he appeals to the testimony of conscience and to the consensus of the nations. This does not place him at all in contradiction with his principles, because, although no representation can be said to be absolutely true, there is nevertheless a degree of probability that can take the place of truth. These criteria come particularly into play in the problem of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. The existence of God, if it cannot be demonstrated with the rigor claimed by the Stoics (De nat. deor., III, 10), is rendered sufficiently probable by universal consent (ibid., III, 95; Tusc., I, 30; De leg., I, 24). C. rejects popular mythology and considers belief in a single God more probable (De leg., I, 23; Tusc., I, 70). The same
holds true of the problem of the immortality of the soul, whose kinship with God he affirms (Tusc., I, 65). A vivid religious vibration is present in the Somnium Scipionis.
#### CICERUACCHIO: V. BRUNETTI, ANGELO.