CICERO, MARCUS TULLIUS. - Roman orator, politician and philosopher, b. 3 January 106 B.C. at Arpino, d. by the hand of Antony's assassins near Gaeta on 7 December 43. He completed his studies at Rome, where he had M. Antonius and L. Crassus as teachers of oratory. In 75, barely thirty years old, he was chosen for the governorship of Sicily, and in 63 he was appointed consul. Exiled in 58 by Clodius, after a year he was recalled to Rome by Pompey. After Pompey's fall, and unable to tolerate the monarchy, he was forced to withdraw from public life. As a politician, he was one of the most representative figures of the last age of the Roman republic; as a writer, among the greatest of all time. For the body of ideas that informed his personality and for his mastery of style, he was for centuries a model and teacher as few other ancients were. Besides fragments of lost works, among them the poetic and historical ones, there have come down to us 57 orations, 7 rhetorical works, 12 philosophical works and 4 collections of letters (850 in all).
PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS
C.'s philosophical activity began with the De republica, composed between 54 and 51, in 6 books. About a third of it survives, discovered in 1819 by Cardinal A. Mai (v.) in a Vatican palimpsest. Before that only a part of it was known, the Somnium Scipionis, preserved by Macrobius. In 52 the De legibus was begun, left unfinished: 3 books (perhaps of 6) and fragments of the rest have come down to us, with lacunae. Both works follow Plato in form; as for content, however, they depend in large part on the Stoic Panaetius, on Posidonius, also a Stoic, whom C. had heard at Rhodes, and on the Academic Antiochus of Ascalon, whom he had heard at Athens. The Paradoxa Stoicorum date from 47-46. In 45 there follow in succession: the Consolatio, for the death of his daughter Tullia, and the Hortensius, both works lost: the second, which was an exhortation to philosophy and influenced St. Augustine, drew on the Protreptica of Aristotle and of Posidonius. In the same year were composed the Academica, originally in 2 books and then in 4, and the De finibus bonorum et malorum (on the highest good and the highest evil) in 5 books. The Academica, of which only book II of the first redaction (Lucullus) and book I of the second remain, dealt with the problem of knowledge according to the doctrines of the Middle and New Academy. The De finibus sets out and refutes the ethical doctrines of the Epicureans and the Stoics, and lastly treats of the Academic-Peripatetic one (Antiochus) which C. considers the best. Between 45 and 44 were composed the Tusculanae disputationes, in 5 books, in which are treated death, pain, the passions and virtue, which alone can ensure happiness. In 44 there follow in succession: the De natura deorum in 3 books, the Cato Maior de senectute, the Laelius 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 CICERO
Speaking in 45 to Atticus (Ad Att., XVI, 12, 5) of the works he had sketched out, C. writes: « ἀπόγραφα sunt, minore labore fiunt, verba tantum adfero quibus abundo ». In fact, the material he sets forth and the arguments he employs depend for the most part on Greek sources. From this angle C.'s originality can only be slight or indeed nonexistent. But this dependence is not servile and mechanical: he chooses, judges, and to the opinions of the professional philosophers he brings the contribution or the correction of his Roman experience, of his humanity at once broad and deep. « Non interpretum fungimur munere », he writes with more truth in the 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 of which entails a determinate spiritual attitude, that is, a personality. Looking at its form, and thus generalizing the motives from which it draws inspiration and impulse, it can be defined as humanism, understanding by this that conception of life which aims 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 it.
C. found himself faced with three currents of thought: the Epicurean, the Stoic and the Academic — the latter skeptical, down to Philo of Larissa, C.'s teacher and friend; the other two dogmatic. To the Epicurean school, which he knew directly from its most reputed masters, such as Phaedrus, Zeno and Philodemus, he was always hostile: it debased man too much and removed the foundations of the State, contradicting everything that C. felt to be proper to the Roman moral and civil tradition. The Stoics responded more to his idealistic demands and to the social ends which, as a Roman, he assigned to every form of spiritual activity, but he disliked their excessive subtlety, their extreme rigorism and their dogmatism. The Academy seemed to him the most suitable school, not only because, through its practice of arguing for and against every thesis, it best suited the orator, but also because it left open ground for his intelligence and for his sense of the particular, both historical and human, which he possessed in the highest degree. This adherence of his was not, however, such as to make him reject what, in relation to the various 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 demands of a spirit highly conscious of the nobility of man and of the value of the human community. From this one understands how the works in which C. comes closest to Stoicism are the political ones and, at the end of his life, the one that is his ethical testament, namely the De officiis; and it is in these that he finds his most moving and sincere accents. Thus in the Tusculanae and in part in the De finibus. And it is here, faced with the problems of society and morality, that he has recourse to the testimony of conscience and the consensus of peoples. Which does not put him at all in contradiction with his principles, because, if no representation can be said absolutely to be true, there is nonetheless 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 that the Stoics claim (De nat. deor., III, 10), is sufficiently rendered 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). In the same way he deals with the problem of the immortality of the soul, of which he affirms its kinship with God (Tusc., I, 65). A vivid religious vibration is present in the Somnium Scipionis.
Bibliography7 works
Carlo Diano