Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) is best known to posterity as a prominent statesman and orator in the tumultuous period of the late Roman republic. As well as being a leading political actor of his time, he also wrote voluminously. Among his writings, around a dozen philosophical works have come down to us. Philosophy was a lifelong passion for Cicero. In addition to what one might call his strictly philosophical compositions, much else of what he wrote – including his speeches, works on rhetoric, and a large collection of letters – show evidence of his philosophical interests. In terms of modern scholarship, the value of Cicero’s philosophical work was held, until relatively recently, to lie chiefly in the information it provided about the thought of the leading philosophical schools of his day: Stoicism, Epicureanism and Academic scepticism among them. However, in part because of the creative way in which he engages with his predecessors, he is increasingly studied today as a philosophical thinker of independent interest.
This is not of course to say that our perspectives cannot be changed by such philosophical encounters. Ethical theory, particularly of the professedly radical sort that many ancient philosophers propounded, would hardly have a point if that were the case; and Ciceros project of communicating such theories would be equally unintelligible in that light. But coming to a theory from outside of any perspective is unintelligible. What Ciceros holding up of Epicurean ethics against the canvas of Roman tradition conveys is a point about how ethical theory in particular must conform, not so much to specific values and traditions, as to certain basic elements of what makes us human, without which it would be hard to discern how an ethical theory could have purchase on us at all: above all, perhaps, our status as social creatures shaped by our relation to specific histories and traditions.
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When it comes to Stoic theory, as laid out next by its spokesman Cato the Younger, things look more promising. Cato was historically the arch-defender of the traditional values of the Roman republic, while Stoicism, with its emphasis on the supremacy of virtue and the value of political participation, seems on the face of it to conform to the Roman way much more readily than Epicureanism does. Nonetheless, the stringency of Stoic theory, which holds that virtue is the only good thing, and vice the only bad thing, and takes virtue not to admit of degrees without complete virtue one is not virtuous at all allows Cicero to mount his critique.
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He invites us to consider whether the Stoics have a theory which, in the terms they express it, can be proclaimed in those contexts that define the sphere of public life for a Roman: courts, assembly, Senate house, and battlefield. A lawyer, observes Cicero, could not credibly conclude the case for the defence by declaring that the punishments of exile and confiscation were not evils, but merely to be rejected (the Stoic technical term for aversion toward things that nonetheless cannot affect ones happiness); nor could an orator announce, with Hannibal at the gates, that captivity, enslavement, and death were no evils (4.22). Moreover, the Senate would not be able to speak of Scipio Africanus triumph as having been won by his valour, since he did not meet the standards of perfection required, in Stoic terms, for virtue (4.22).
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This sort of objection seems especially damaging for the Stoics, with their emphasis on agency and public participation. In effect Cicero argues that the Stoics can have their integrity, or their theory, but not both. They cannot express their doctrines about virtue in public contexts without incurring ridicule or incomprehension. What they are left with, according to Cicero, is hypocrisy: the use of ordinary language in public, their own language in their writings (4.22).
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