Cicero (43 page)

He also took the opportunity to justify his overall project by responding to two criticisms he put into Varro's mouth: first, anyone seriously interested in Greek philosophy could look up the original authors and, second, the Latin language lacked the necessary technical terminology. To counter these objections, Cicero argued that Latin poetry was read and appreciated even though it was heavily dependent on Greek models. Latin was a richer language than Greek; but it was true that an accepted philosophical terminology was needed. This was precisely what he intended to produce.

Posterity has largely justified this defense. While Latin has disadvantages (the lack of a definite article, for one), to some extent Cicero succeeded in widening its range. Some of the terms he coined have had a long afterlife—
qualitas, moralis
and
essentia
, for example, are the antecedents of “quality,” “moral” and “essence.”

The next dialogue in the series,
On Supreme Good and Evil
(
De finibus bonorum et malorum
), was composed more or less at the same time as the
Academic Treatises
. In the preface, Cicero makes the point that he is not a
mere translator but is trying to express in his own words what lies at the heart of his subject. It is a justifiable claim. He is, indeed, more than a transcriber or even a high-quality journalist. He has read philosophy all his life and feels at ease with it. What he offers is a mature synthesis in which other people's ideas grow in the field of his own experience of life. His expositions are not only thought but deeply felt.

The different chapters of the book, which has survived in its entirety, are given roughly contemporary settings: Cicero's villa at Cumae in 50; Tusculum in 52; and then Athens during his grand tour in 79. Epicureanism and Stoicism are examined and rejected. To the Epicurean who asserts that the chief good is pleasure in the sense of an absence of pain and advocates a simple, virtuous and detached life, Cicero replies that what he is talking about is not pleasure in any customary sense. Also he rejects as disgraceful the notion that the man who measures his desires by utilitarian criteria has the firmest grasp on happiness.

If Epicureans say “it is good because it is pleasant,” Stoics answer that “it is pleasant because it is good.” Cato is now given the task of representing the Stoic view that virtue is what we naturally desire, which Cicero rebuts as not taking into sufficient account humanity's lower faculties. Cicero argues that virtue will not necessarily produce happiness, if, as is admitted, pain is an evil.
On Supreme Good and Evil
ends on a cautiously optimistic note; virtue outweighs everything and even if the good man is not supremely happy, he is
on balance
happy.

The
Conversations at Tusculum
(
Tusculanae disputationes
) were written in the summer of 45 when Cicero had begun to recover somewhat from Tullia's death. Again the form is a dialogue set in Cicero's beloved villa at Tusculum. The two speakers are identified only by the initials M and A, standing either for Marcus and Atticus or
Magister
(master) and
Adulescens
(young man). Either way it is M who does most of the talking and the book is a series of essays rather than debates.

Having examined the nature of the good life in the previous books of the cycle, Cicero now turns to practicalities. How is the good life to be lived? He answers the question by citing many instances of human behavior both from the past and from his own time. He mentions the deaths of Cato and Pompey and hints at his feelings for Tullia, while acknowledging that grief is useless and should be put aside. His underlying purpose is to show that right attitudes and a philosophical cast of mind can alleviate
misfortune and suffering. Death, he argues, is not an evil, being either a change of place for the soul or annihilation. Physical suffering is of no real importance and can be borne with fortitude. Mental suffering and distress, whether caused by mourning, envy, compassion, vexation or despondency, are acts of the will and can be eliminated by thoughtfulness, courage and self-control. The same may be said for excessive delight, lust and fear. The way forward, Cicero wrote, was to distance oneself from the cares and desires of life.

The discipline of the gladiator and the self-sacrifice of the Indian widow who commits
suttee
and joins her husband on the funeral pyre demonstrate that virtue can transcend pain. In this conclusion Cicero endorses Stoicism in a way that he felt unable to do in
On Supreme Good and Evil
, written a few months earlier, for he could now see, as the full intensity of his mourning subsided, how he had dragged himself from the brink of breakdown through firmness of mind.

The Nature of the Gods
(
De deorum natura
),
Foretelling the Future
(
De divinatione
) and
Destiny
(
De fato
) address religious and theological themes. Collectively, they ridicule the anthropomorphic conception of God, or the gods, and propose that Epicurus, who speculated that the
gods lived happily but impotently and had no effect on human affairs, was a crypto-atheist. Cicero tends to a Stoic pantheism (which gives him the opportunity to celebrate the physical universe in passages of great poetic grandeur). He criticizes superstition—dreams, portents, astrology and the like—and is particularly incensed by the Stoics' commitment to the art, or pseudoscience, of divination, by which investigation into the future can make it possible to avoid unpleasant events. Either the future is subject to chance—in which case nobody, not even a god, can affect it one way or the other—or it is predestined, in which case foreknowledge cannot avert it. A
S
he had been appointed an Augur in 53, it is not surprising to find that Cicero recognizes, even if he does not believe in, the art of augury but thinks it should be maintained for reasons of public expediency rather than accuracy. While external factors may influence our actions, they cannot control them, for that would be to negate free will. To say “what will be, will be” is not to imply that the future is predetermined.

Cicero's last major work is
Duties
(
De officiis
); written in autumn 44, it takes the form of a letter to Marcus, who was making heavy weather of his philosophical studies in Athens at this time. Complementing the theoretical discussions in
On Supreme Good and Evil
, it is based on the work of a Stoic philosopher, Panaetius, who was a member of the circle of Scipio Aemilianus, Cicero's great hero from the second century (and the protagonist of his dialogue
On the State
). It has a practical cast and reflects the experience of the author's own lifetime. Composed at a time when Cicero was returning to public life, it condemns citizens who abstain from political activity.

The work opens with a discussion of the cardinal virtues—wisdom, justice, fortitude and temperance—and goes on to set out the specific duties that follow from adherence to them. Cicero's central concern is the contradiction between virtue and the inevitable expediencies that divert human agents from the path of right conduct. Giving many examples from Roman history, he argues that often the contradiction is only apparent, although sometimes it is difficult to establish what is really right. The primary duty, transcending all others, is loyalty to the state and Cicero takes the opportunity to review the record of his contemporaries. The behavior of various politicians of his day—the avaricious Crassus and Caesar, who has gone to the lengths of destroying the state—is compared with this principle and found wanting.

This body of work kept Cicero's name in the public eye for the brief remainder of his lifetime as a man of principle and thoughtful reflection. For posterity it became a primary vehicle by which the achievements of Greco-Roman philosophy were communicated to the early Christian Church, which regarded him as a virtuous pagan, and offered essential models to the thinkers and poets of the Renaissance and those who in the following centuries were concerned with the revival of Republican ideas of governance and the reassertion of humanistic principles.

Caesar may well have laughed with everyone else when all those years ago the boastful ex-Consul had written the much-ridiculed sentence “
Cedant arma togae
,”
“Let the soldier yield precedence to the civilian.” But now, with his customary clarity and generosity of mind, he well understood the nature of the “glory” Cicero had won for himself. Sometime towards the end of his life, Caesar remarked that Cicero had won greater laurels than those worn by a general in his Triumph, for it meant more to have extended the frontiers of Roman genius than of its empire.

Plots and Conspiracies: January–March 44
BC

F
rom the moment the civil war finally ended in 45, respectable opinion agreed that Caesar's duty was to restore the constitution. From his policy of pardoning his enemies whenever they fell into his hands and recruiting former Pompeians to his government it looked, in the early days of victory, as if this was what he would do. His clemency had few precedents, for previous generals who had used military force to take over the state had massacred their opponents. Most people thought it meant that Caesar had a clear vision of a reconciled society after his victory.

He probably did. But he was also convinced that a strong executive authority should replace the incompetent competitive cockpit of Senatorial government. He had the means with which to impose his will. However, minimum cooperation from the political class was necessary if any solution he devised was to last. To begin with, he thought that he had gained it. But former enemies—such as Marcus Junius Brutus, the dead Cato's son-in-law and half-nephew, and Caius Cassius Longinus, Praetor for 44 and hungry for a senior military command that Caesar never gave him—were willing to work with him only as long as they believed that he would bring back the Republic. A
S
it became clear he had no intention of doing
so, they lost confidence in him and withdrew their support. The more powerful he became, the more isolated he felt.

Despite the smiles and adulation, the Dictator knew he was unpopular in leading circles. Once, when Cicero called to see him but was not shown in at once, he remarked: “I should be an idiot to suppose that even so easygoing an individual as Cicero is my friend when he has to sit waiting for my convenience all this time.”

The first signs of the conspiracy against Caesar can be detected almost exactly one year before the Ides of March 44—after the last battle of the civil war at Munda. A
S
soon as news reached Rome of the outcome of the battle, all kinds of people—entrepreneurs, politicians and young men on the make—left Rome to meet the returning army en route and catch the eye of the Republic's undisputed master. At Narbo in Transalpine Gaul, Mark Antony, one of Caesar's principal lieutenants, fell in with another of his supporters, who had recently been a governor in Spain, Caius Trebonius.

Trebonius had a very curious deal to propose. He wanted to know if Antony would join a plot to kill Caesar. Antony did not respond to the tentative sounding. What was sinister about the conversation was less that it took place than that Antony did not report it. The fact that Caesar's closest political partner saw no cause to warn him is strong evidence of the disaffection of the ruling class.

Nothing came of this démarche, but at some point in the months that followed individuals began meeting in small groups in one another's houses and discussed various ideas of how and where the murder should be committed. Perhaps he could be attacked on the Holy Way, the street that led into the Forum. Or he could be ambushed during an election on the Field of Mars. Voters had to pass along a narrow bridge over a stream where the ballots were counted. Perhaps Caesar could be pushed off the bridge and pounced upon. The trouble with these schemes was that they would take place in public and there was always a risk that the assassins would themselves be assaulted or killed. For the time being these quiet conversations led nowhere and were overshadowed by the hyperactivity of the regime.

One of the leading conspirators was Caius Cassius Longinus. A
S
Quaestor he had taken charge of Syria after Crassus met his end at Carrhae
and had scored a military success against the Parthians in 51, when Cicero had been governor of the neighboring province of Cilicia. An irascible man, he did not easily forget a grudge and fell out for a time with Brutus when the latter won a promotion at his expense. His contemporaries took the view that he opposed Caesar for personal reasons rather than on principle. According to Plutarch, he was furious when, during the civil war, Caesar came across a number of lions Cassius had acquired for use at some Games he was due to stage in Rome and confiscated them for his own purposes.