The Ciceronian Tradition in Political Theory [1 ed.] 9780299330132, 9780299330101

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The Ciceronian Tradition in Political Theory

Wisconsin Studies in Classics

The Ciceronian Tradition in Political Theory

x Edited by Da n i e l J. K a p u s t and G a ry R e m e r

The University of Wisconsin Press

Publication of this volume has been made possible, in part, through the generous support and enduring vision of Warren G. Moon. The University of Wisconsin Press 728 State Street, Suite 443 Madison, Wisconsin 53706 uwpress.wisc.edu Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road London EC1R 5DB, United Kingdom eurospanbookstore.com Copyright © 2021 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to [email protected]. Printed in the United States of America This book may be available in a digital edition. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kapust, Daniel J., 1976- editor. | Remer, Gary, 1957- editor. Title: The Ciceronian tradition in political theory / edited by Daniel J. Kapust and Gary Remer. Description: Madison, Wisconsin : The University of Wisconsin Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020016447 | ISBN 9780299330101 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Cicero, Marcus Tullius—Political and social views. | Cicero, Marcus Tullius—Influence. Classification: LCC JC81.C7 C53 2021 | DDC 320.01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016447

Contents

Preface vii Introduction Dan iel J. K apust and Gary R emer

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1 Augustine’s Reception of Cicero Bran d on Turner

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2 A Medieval Ciceronian: John of Salisbury C ary J. Nederman

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3 More’s Utopia and Its Ciceronian Roots Gary R emer

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4 Machiavelli: Menace to Societas 86 Mich elle T. C l arke 5 Montaigne in the Mirror of Cicero E ric M acP hail

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6 Thomas Hobbes, Cicero, and the Road not Taken Dan iel J. K apust

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7 Locke and Cicero on Property, Labor, and Value E m ily C. Nac ol

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8 Smith and Cicero on Anger, Resentment, and Retributive Justice Mich elle A. S chwarze

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9 Burke, Cicero, and the Personalization of Imperial Injustice Dan iel I. O’Neill

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10 Cicero’s Legacy in Contemporary Political Thought D ean Hammer

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Contributors 225 Index 229

Preface

Our interest in Cicero as a political thinker began during our graduate studies, long before we knew each other, and has continued to the present, more than ten years after we first met at a panel at the 2009 meeting of the Southern Political Science Association. We arrived at similar approaches to interpret Cicero’s political ideas with an eye to the role of rhetoric. In addition, we did not generally examine Cicero’s political ideas per se. Rather, we came to our study of Cicero through our analysis of thinkers whose political thought was shaped by the great Roman orator or through a mutual interest in rhetoric. One of us wrote a doctoral dissertation in which Cicero was considered in terms of his relationship to Roman historians Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus. The other one, in turn, composed a dissertation in which Cicero represented the source of the Renaissance humanists’ theory of religious toleration, exemplified by such northern humanists as Erasmus, Jacobus Acontius, Jean Bodin, and William Chillingworth. Thus, beginning in our dissertations and continuing through our later work, we interpreted Cicero’s legacy primarily through the rhetorical perspective adopted by political authors from ancient Rome to the present. In hindsight, our interest in Cicero’s political thought and, more specifically, our focus on the rhetorical character of his ideas reflected the rise of a broader intellectual movement of historians of political thought, classicists, and philosophers. As has been noted by several scholars, the late twentieth and the twentyfirst centuries have witnessed a “Roman turn” in political theory as well as a “renewed interest in rhetoric” among historians of political thought.1 The interest in Roman political thought and rhetoric’s place in political theory have been manifested in Cicero’s resurrection as a major political theorist worthy of study and no longer viewed simply—as he had been for most of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries—as a conduit for the weightier and more profound ideas of the Greek thinkers preceding him. Cicero’s newfound place in vii

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the canon of political theory can be seen in the significant increase in the number of books and articles published on him, along with the expansion of panels, colloquia, and roundtables devoted to him. For example, following our first panel together, we participated on at least six more panels, colloquia, and book roundtables (where our books were discussed) in which Cicero’s political thought was a crucial theme. As more attention was paid to Cicero, we met other political theorists, classicists, and academics from other fields in the humanities who devoted much of their time and effort to the study of Cicero. Very often, this cross-disciplinary group of authors focused (as did we) not only on Cicero himself but on his effect on other thinkers and times. This commitment to the study of Ciceronianism, or the Ciceronian tradition, along with the paucity of works on this tradition, sparked the idea to assemble a wide range of Ciceronian scholars who would each compose a chapter for The Ciceronian Tradition in Political Theory. This work would not have been possible without the help of others—editors, reviewers, and contributors. We thank Raphael Kadushin and Amber Rose, both with the University of Wisconsin Press, who provided crucial editorial support from the project’s inception, along with Sheila McMahon, who oversaw the production of the volume. We also thank two anonymous reviewers of our manuscript, whose careful and thoughtful feedback greatly improved the project. Particular thanks are owed to Joorahm Kim, a PhD student in UW–Madison’s Department of Political Science, who provided essential support as we prepared the manuscript for production. We thank audience members and participants at a 2019 International Society for the History of Rhetoric Conference panel, where we, along with Michelle Clarke, presented portions of our chapters. Finally, Daniel Kapust would like to thank the Institute for Research in the Humanities, where he completed much of his chapter on Hobbes and portions of the introduction to the volume. Note 1. Daniel J. Kapust, “Ecce Romani,” Political Theory 45, no. 5 (October 2017): 705–19; Bryan Garsten, “The Rhetoric Revival in Political Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science 14 (2011): 159–80.

The Ciceronian Tradition in Political Theory

Introduction Daniel J. K apust and Gary R emer

A Return to Cicero Not that long ago, before the latter part of the nineteenth century, Cicero’s prominence as a classical political thinker was second to none. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, his standing as an estimable political theorist had plummeted and was not revived to any significant degree until nearly the end of the century. Neal Wood, writing in the late 1980s, gives voice to Cicero’s diminished status by asking: “Who today troubles to read Cicero, save a handful of Latinists and ancient historians, and an ever-diminishing number of students?”1 Although his modern “downfall and discredit” cannot be attributed to any single cause, we may gain some sense of why scholars shifted away from Cicero by considering noted German classicist Theodor Mommsen’s condemnation of Cicero as a coward, “a second-rate, indecisive, disruptive politician and muddled thinker who paled beside the clear-minded, purposeful, and magnetic Caesar.”2 Similarly, twentieth-century students of philosophy dismissed Cicero as a second-rate and unoriginal philosopher—far beneath the intellectually superior Greeks.3 For them, Cicero’s primary value lies in popularizing ancient philosophical ideas that probably would have been lost without his twenty or so works on rhetoric and philosophy. Cicero’s opinions, however, were demeaned as derivative, assembled from a range of Hellenic and Hellenistic sources, from which he created an eclectic and unsystematic pastiche of ideas unworthy of being called “philosophy” in its full sense.4 Scholarly interest in Cicero’s philosophical and political views, however, has grown steadily since just before the beginning of the twenty-first century.5 The decade beginning in 2009 has been particularly good for those interested in political theory, with a substantial number of articles in major disciplinary 3

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journals focusing on his thought, in addition to monographs and edited volumes on Cicero’s ethical and political thought.6 Whether they are interested in rhetoric, imperialism, republicanism, deliberation, representation, civic virtue, or a range of other topics, political theorists are increasingly turning to Cicero and Roman thought more broadly.7 As these topics suggest, the current interest in Cicero owes much to Cicero’s immersion not only in philosophy but also (unlike Plato and Aristotle) in political life. Cicero was both a political thinker and a politician—for example, he was elected as consul, the highest office in the republic, at the youngest possible age—suggesting the possibility, even probability, that his conception of political theory was influenced by the practice of politics more than were the political philosophers of ancient Athens.8 It is true that Cicero wrote philosophical works, most reflecting the contemplative life, when he was excluded from participating in the vita activa. His letters to political figures and friends, many of them written to his best friend, Atticus, and his brother, Quintus, as well as his recorded speeches in which he addressed popular political meetings (contiones), the Senate, and legal courts—the latter generally addressing a legal case with political implications—were filled with political opinions and considerations. Similarly, many of his writings are linked to political practice, like his rhetorical works, On the Orator, Orator, and Brutus, and his dialogue on law, On the Laws. The two most political of Cicero’s philosophical writings are De Republica (On the Commonwealth) and De Officiis (On Duties). On the Commonwealth, a dialogue written in 51 BCE, is patterned after Plato’s Republic. Like the Republic, On the Commonwealth is devoted to discussing the ideal constitution. But contrary to Plato’s dialogue, in which the ideal state is presented as unattainable, Cicero’s ideal is based on balancing three real constitutional types—monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—which he calls a mixed constitution, a constitution he identifies with the Roman Republic. Whereas Plato banishes politics from the kallipolis, politics (which of necessity includes conflict) is central to Cicero’s best constitution.9 Cicero’s mixed constitution is no harmonious organism ruled by philosophers and free of discord. Rather, as Joy Connolly argues, “Cicero believes that conflict initiated and sustained republican politics.”10 Thus, in the second book of On the Commonwealth, the dialogue’s main speaker, Scipio Aemilianus, portrays his ideal state, Rome,“as a product of reconstitution through repeated struggles between the haves and the have-nots, its constitutional evolution as a series of conflicts where the powerful minority always seeks to maximize its domination and the people staunchly resist.”11 In contrast to Plato’s apotheosis of philosophy, from the beginning of On the Commonwealth, Cicero elevates politics above all other vocations, even

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philosophy. Thus, in this dialogue, Cicero compares the two callings, philosophy and politics: “Virtue is not some kind of knowledge to be possessed without using it: even if the intellectual possession of knowledge can be maintained without use, virtue consists entirely in its employment; moreover, its most important employment is the governance of states, and the accomplishment in deeds rather than words of the things that philosophers talk about in their corners.”12 For Cicero, the active life is superior to the contemplative life, but the truths reached through contemplation derive from the activity of political men, specifically “the men who established laws for states.” Therefore, Cicero argues, “the men who lead [‘great and powerful cities’] should be considered far wiser than people who have no experience at all of public life [i.e., politically ignorant philosophers].”13 However, Cicero does not reject philosophy as such, but philosophy disengaged from the public life. Speaking of the philosophers in On the Commonwealth, he claims that “they performed a public function,” even without holding public office themselves, because “they did much research and writing about government.”14 Cicero confirms the value of political philosophy when he devoted himself to studying and writing philosophy during those times he was excluded from active life. As he affirms in On the Orator, philosophy and political activity are best when combined rather than when one is practiced without the other. Although it is a work on practical ethics, not political theory per se, the ethics taught in On Duties are most appropriate for the statesman. Cicero composed On Duties in the form of a letter to his son Marcus but has a larger audience in mind. He intends the work as a plea to the younger generation to devote itself to a life of public service.15 Like in On the Commonwealth, Cicero maintains that politics is the highest vocation.16 Again, as in On the Commonwealth, he does not present the active and contemplative lives as necessarily being in conflict. Not all persons are “equipped by nature to administer affairs”; for some of them, the philosophical life is the most rational choice.17 However, Cicero presumably expects philosophers to value and study the political life, even if they do not engage in it directly. The centrality of politics in On Duties is manifested throughout the work. Cicero regards justice, the main virtue of public life, as the “mistress and queen of virtues.”18 He deems service to one’s country to be the foremost duty of a citizen.19 Even the elderly are expected “to assist . . . most of all the republic, with their counsel and good sense.”20 Moreover, the obligations he delineates in On Duties are not the perfect duties of the Stoic wise man—akin to Plato’s philosopher ruler— but the humanly achievable, imperfect duties, suited to the politician, “those that the Stoics call ‘middle’ [media]. They are shared and widely accessible.”21

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The practical character of Cicero’s political theory underlies to a significant degree the contemporary scholarly turn to philosophy grounded in the vita activa. This turn is a contemporary incarnation of the much older tradition of scholars interested in theoretical approaches to political life looking to the insight of the great Roman philosopher-statesman. But no volume has appeared that focuses on the Ciceronian tradition in political theory. We begin to address this lacuna with the chapters in this volume. Each chapter serves in part to familiarize readers with the relationship between the chapter’s respective focus and Cicero, while seeking to develop a distinctive contribution to understanding this relationship. The contributions deal with a range of figures central to the Ciceronian tradition—St. Augustine, John of Salisbury, Thomas More, Niccolò Machiavelli, Michel de Montaigne, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke—and conclude with a chapter addressing Cicero’s place in recent political thought. We do not pretend to have treated the subject of the Ciceronian tradition in an exhaustive manner and have not included chapters on all the figures whose relationship to Cicero deserves exploration. Our hope is that the essays herein will provide scholars interested in Cicero’s place in the history of political thought and in contemporary political theory with foundations for further inquiry and will expand the reach of the Ciceronian and Roman turn in political theory. Cicero’s Receptions Cicero’s place in the first century following his death was marginal.22 To provide just one example, beyond the well-known minor role he plays in Sallust’s War with Catiline, he is not mentioned by Virgil in either the description of Aeneas’s shield of Book VIII or in the underworld of Book VI; Alain Gowing notes that the omission makes sense because Cicero was neither the embodiment of “subversion,” as with Catiline, nor of “‘just and virtuous republican statesmanship.’”23 Once we move past the reign of Augustus, Cicero’s place and influence were substantial and evident in writers ranging from Seneca to Tacitus to Quintilian. As Gowing puts it of the post-Augustan period, “Cicero could never simply be ignored.”24 Yet Cicero posed something of a problem, given his status as the orator-statesman par excellence, and the fact that the oratorstatesman would play little role under the princeps. Tacitus often alludes to Cicero in an ambivalent fashion; Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, by contrast, “best illustrates the neo-Ciceronianism of the period.”25 As we turn to late antiquity, we see a different set of problems and responses, due chiefly to the development and spread of Christianity. This might take the form of turning to Cicero as a source for criticizing “Roman and in general pagan religion, and simultaneously to affirm the truth of Christian monotheism,” a

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task made easier in light of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, a text that was quite skeptical of traditional Roman religion.26 At other times, this took the form of Christian thinkers trying to make sense of the relationship between the classical philosophy of the pagans and the demands and teachings of Christianity. For Lactantius, Cicero was “something of a forerunner to Christianity,” although one who committed a lot of mistakes and was in need of some assistance. Cicero’s work gave many Christian writers “a voice that they used so as to explain their religion while at the same time claiming to support the established order of things.”27 Cicero played a pivotal role in Augustine’s intellectual and spiritual biography, along with his ethical and political writings, a point taken up in this volume by Brandon Turner in chapter 1. Although Cicero’s influence in the Middle Ages is often downplayed, especially once Aristotle was translated from Greek to Latin and became the dominant philosopher in medieval universities, his influence is nonetheless widely felt. In the Middle Ages, John O. Ward points out that writers in this period were often more interested in On Invention than On the Orator, and they were often uninterested in making “detailed researches into the political life of late republican Rome.”28 No matter the extent to which Ciceronian ideas pervaded Western Christian philosophy, there is just a single medieval author who self-identified as an adherent to Cicero’s ideas: mid-twelfth-century English philosopher and churchman John of Salisbury, subject of Cary J. Nederman’s chapter. As we move into the early Renaissance, we encounter Petrarch, who collected and studied more Cicero than his contemporaries or his predecessors of the preceding several centuries and made wide use of Cicero’s “major speeches, most of the philosophical works,” and “the main rhetorical texts” in his writings.29 Fond as he was of Cicero, Petrarch engaged in overt political criticism after discovering Cicero’s Letters to Atticus, which led Petrarch to criticize Cicero “for failing to live up to his own secular philosophical ideals.”30 Petrarch was just the beginning, and Paul Kristeller reflects the scholarly consensus when he speaks of Renaissance humanism as “an age of Ciceronianism.”31 More, Montaigne, and Machiavelli, all discussed in this volume (in chapters by Gary Remer, Eric MacPhail, and Michelle T. Clarke, respectively), were close readers of Cicero, though Machiavelli was far more critical than More or Montaigne. Cicero’s place in seventeenth-century England is central (as Quentin Skinner and others have shown), especially among republicans, though not all writers were appreciative, as chapter 6 on Hobbes (by Daniel Kapust) shows.32 As we move into the eighteenth century, David Hume’s remark in the Enquiry about Cicero is illustrative: “The fame of Cicero flourishes at present; but that of Aristotle is utterly decayed.”33 Among English writers in the eighteenth century,

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Cicero was referred to often—and simply—as “Tully”; Conyers Middleton, who published Life of Cicero in 1741, found a receptive market. On the Continent, Voltaire wrote his play Rome Saved, or Catiline, in part to “make young people who go to the theatre acquainted with Cicero.”34 Diderot labeled Cicero “first of the Roman philosophers,” and in Britain’s North American colonies and the new American republic, universities typically “mandated a basic knowledge of Cicero” to matriculate.35 Alexander Hamilton signed his papers criticizing the Whiskey Rebellion as “Tully.” James Farrell calls John Adams “the American Cicero,” and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres engage widely with Cicero.36 Cicero’s status begins a clear decline in the nineteenth century, as Nicholas Cole shows, and Mommsen’s The History of Rome is one of the most glaring examples. Mommsen’s Cicero is “a vacillating coward, whose character-flaws were most evident as the fate of the Catilinarians were being decided.”37 It is indeed both Cicero’s character and the issue of whether his treatment of the Catilinarians was legal (or ethical) that shaped the nineteenth century’s critical encounter with him. Thus, Trollope’s Life of Cicero, which portrayed him as a virtuous exemplar, “was generally scorned by reviewers.”38 Once we come to the twentieth century, the fate of Cicero is, like the fate of Roman political thought more broadly, rather dim. He features in Sabine’s A History of Political Theory, first published in 1937, but it’s hard to describe this view of Cicero as particularly laudatory: “The political thought of Cicero is not important because of its originality; his books were frankly compilations, as he himself avows. They had, however, one merit which is far from negligible: everybody read them.”39 Indeed, as far as Sabine is concerned, “Cicero’s true importance in the history of political thought lies in the fact that he gave to the Stoic doctrine of natural law a statement in which it was universally known throughout western Europe from his own day down to the nineteenth century.”40 Sheldon Wolin, in Politics and Vision, discusses Cicero largely in the course of about five pages, embedded in an account of Roman thought, of which Wolin remarked, “the student of political ideas must deal with a period notoriously lacking in great political thinkers.”41 Cicero was representative of the futile “politics of interest,” a futility evident in his call for the concordia ordinum when all Rome had was “the basis of interests.”42 Cicero featured in the first edition of Strauss and Cropsey’s History of Political Philosophy (1963), and at least one reviewer found his inclusion noteworthy.43 The chapter by James E. Holton begins on an inauspicious note: “Few of those who have sought to present a systematic account of the development of political philosophy have attached great importance to Cicero’s political thought.”44 Holton goes on to argue that

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there is more to Cicero than most think, and he locates his “specifically political teaching” in On the Commonwealth and On the Laws.45 Holton’s Cicero is concerned with the “fundamental question” of classical political philosophy: “What is the best political order?”46 Holton places Cicero in a tradition that finds its origins in Plato, insofar as Cicero sets “forth the nature of the best political order,” a teaching rooted in the recognition that those who can choose between “the practical or political life” must recognize that “reason and justice must somehow be diluted.”47 Cicero features in Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition, though it is fair to say that he is of far less interest to her than Plato. When we move beyond these few examples to a JSTOR search for the term “Cicero” in the abstract or the title, we encounter only 45 hits (compared with 438 for Plato). Of those 45 hits, 25 were published after 1990.48 Thus, roughly 1/10 as many articles and chapters had been published on Cicero as had been published on Plato. Neal Wood’s publication of Cicero’s Social and Political Thought in 1988, which one reviewer lauds as a “quantum improvement” after noting that such a study was “long overdue,” stands as an important marker in recent work on Cicero among political theorists.49 In addition, Cicero attracted increasing attention in the 1990s and early 2000s, in no small part because of the work of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, who placed Cicero in a family of paleo-Roman thinkers influential on neo-Roman thought.50 Increasing attention was paid to Cicero in light of revived interest in rhetoric, interest due to criticism of so-called deliberative democratic theories.51 Since 2010, we have seen monographs on the political thought of Cicero or engaging Cicero at length by political theorists, philosophers, and classicists, many of whom we have noted here and among whom we must surely count Dean Hammer, who has written the concluding chapter for this volume. Overview of Chapters The first chapter in the volume, Brandon Turner’s “Augustine’s Reception of Cicero,” takes up the often discussed yet still perplexing relationship between Augustine of Hippo and the Roman philosopher. Turner argues that Augustine’s response to and use of Cicero—whose Hortensius “enkindled” his love of philosophy—reflects a fundamental tension: that Augustine takes much of Cicero’s argument to be true (evident in Cicero’s status as Augustine’s most important source after scripture) although some of Cicero’s arguments are incompatible with or at least not readily reconcilable to Christian doctrine. Augustine distinguishes between the necessary and unnecessary components of Cicero’s thought. Cicero is not, then, a proto-Christian in Turner’s account; Augustine

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recognizes Cicero’s otherness, for while Cicero’s arguments are often true, not all elements are equally necessary. Turner turns to De Republica as a case study, arguing that Augustine reconfigures Cicero’s treatment of commonwealth to render it consistent with his two cities schema. Yet it is not simply a matter of reconfiguring Cicero, as Augustine was profoundly shaped by him; thus, Augustine “believes he follows Cicero in rejecting the possibility of true justice in earthly communities.” In chapter 2, “A Medieval Ciceronian: John of Salisbury,” Cary J. Nederman focuses on a particularly prominent example of the “ubiquitous” status of Cicero’s thought in the medieval period: John of Salisbury, who identifies himself as a Ciceronian. Part of this identification concerns John’s embrace of Cicero’s skeptical methodology; part of it has to do with the substantive and biographical emphasis on the importance of practical philosophy for John, an emphasis that Cicero shared. Nederman shows that John’s overt adherence to Cicero “does not mean he is an uncritical disciple”; John distances himself from Cicero at times, especially when Cicero’s thought is not amenable to his own aims. Nederman traces out this relationship through an exploration of several key themes in John’s thought, including John’s hostility to tyranny, his embrace of moderation, his account of friendship and its relationship to politics, his political and justicial naturalism, and his use of Cicero’s treatment of the origins and development of human civilization. In chapter 3 (“More’s Utopia and Its Ciceronian Roots”), Gary Remer turns to the influence of Cicero on Thomas More’s classic work of political thought. Remer takes up the rhetorical foundations of Utopia, especially how rhetoric is itself “an outlook or way of understanding,” including (in the Ciceronian account) decorum, arguing in utramque partem, and standards of probability grounded in the standards of the community. Cicero’s rhetoric is the foundation for the formal structure of the works and its arguments, a point Remer makes in part by turning to Erasmus. Although the character “More” embodies a Ciceronian approach to rhetoric, Raphael Hythloday is an anti-Ciceronian figure—his arguments and style are, in turn, opposed to those of More. Despite More’s deep appreciation for and debts to Cicero, however, Remer shows that More himself (and not “More” the character) may not always agree with Cicero, especially when it comes to policy, despite the temptation to identify the “historical More” with the “literary More.” Chapter 4, “Machiavelli: Menace to Societas,” is Michelle T. Clarke’s treatment of the vexed relationship between Niccolò Machiavelli and Cicero. As opposed to many studies of this relationship, which look to Machiavelli’s rejection of a range of Ciceronian doctrines (chiefly found in On Duties) in The Prince,

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Clarke focuses on a more foundational problem: how Machiavelli departs from Cicero on the matter of political life. She argues that Machiavelli’s Prince is in fact an attempt to systematically rethink the move that Cicero makes in On Duties: namely, redefining the honestum in terms of the utile, with the object of utilitas being the preservation and enhancement of societas. In the Prince, then, Machiavelli critiques Cicero, but his critique is more profound than others have argued. Machiavelli’s most (in)famous work “is a sustained effort to rethink political life in the absence of societas.” Eric MacPhail delves into the complex relationship between Michel de Montaigne and Cicero in chapter 5, “Montaigne in the Mirror of Cicero.” MacPhail grapples with what he calls “the inevitability of Cicero for Montaigne’s selfexpression.” Yet Montaigne does not turn to Cicero in any simple way. He is both repelled by and drawn to Cicero, dependent on and annoyed by this dependence on Cicero. Although Montaigne’s ambivalence is partly rooted in Cicero’s inconsistencies (for example, between his moral theory and his less-than-moral practice) and indecisiveness (during the civil war between Caesar and Pompey), MacPhail shows that Montaigne’s ambivalence toward Cicero is also based on the essayist’s unwillingness or inability to commit to a uniform philosophy and decisive decision making. Ironically, Montaigne—critic of Cicero’s irresolution in civil war—himself follows the greatest Roman orator’s example, when facing the French civil war, of knowing better how to flee than how to follow. “Thomas Hobbes, Cicero, and the Road not Taken” (chapter 6) is Daniel J. Kapust’s contribution to the volume. Kapust examines Hobbes’s fraught relationship with Cicero, a source he knew well and that deeply influenced many of his key philosophical and political opponents, in light of how Cicero was taken up by later critics of Hobbes, especially Adam Smith. Hobbes’s engagement with Cicero is, in effect, an effort to redirect a conversation that, in its Ciceronian form, features the normativity of human sociability, the role of intersubjectivity in the formation of the human personality, and the naturalism of human society. In short, Hobbes seeks to develop an anti-Ciceronian tradition, a would-be tradition that replaces these key features of Cicero’s thought with an unsociable human nature, a noncopious primitive language, a morally and politically problematic conventional rhetoric, and a psychology rooted in fear rather than the central Ciceronian passion of shame. In “Locke and Cicero on Property, Labor, and Value” (chapter 7), Emily C. Nacol explores Locke’s relationship to Cicero, a relationship that is both clear and often unmentioned by Locke. Nacol’s focus is on “communities as political economies structured by property relations”; she argues that Locke’s theory of property is, like Cicero’s, predicated on human sociability. As a result, individuals

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relate to their property not just in economic—or even political—terms but in moral terms as well. For Locke and Cicero, property is central to the formation of moral character and social relationships. Nacol thus reconstructs, despite Locke’s relative silence on the matter, Cicero’s influence on Locke’s account of property while fleshing out what is often a vague and nonsystematic treatment of political economy in Cicero’s writings. For both Locke and Cicero, human labor fundamentally gives shape to human sociability and politics. In chapter 8, “Smith and Cicero on Anger, Resentment, and Retributive Justice,” Michelle A. Schwarze explores Adam Smith’s relationship to Cicero by centering on Smith’s account of resentment and its connection to Cicero. On the face of it, the neo-Stoic Smith might seem to view emotions in a very different way than Cicero did, but Schwarze shows that “Smith internalizes many Ciceronian concerns with the disordering and overwhelming effects of resentment.” Focusing especially on On Duties and the Tusculan Disputations, Schwarze shows that Cicero is deeply concerned with resentment. Smith’s account of the appropriate form and role of resentment, which Schwarze calls “spectatorial resentment,” is rooted in Cicero’s concerns along with the Ciceronian moralpolitical value of decorum. Smith thus takes up the difficulty Cicero grappled with while addressing Cicero’s concern about the difficulty of mastering resentment through moral spectatorship. “Burke, Cicero, and the Personalization of Imperial Injustice” (chapter 9) is Daniel I. O’Neill’s contribution. In it, O’Neill takes up the oft-studied relationship between Edmund Burke and Cicero, a relationship that Burke embraced, as did several of his contemporaries (although not always in a straightforwardly laudatory way). As opposed to scholars who read Burke’s speeches during the impeachment of Warren Hastings as Burke strategically deploying Cicero to ensure that Britain would avoid the fate of republican Rome, O’Neill suggests that there is a deeper theoretical connection between Burke’s impeachment of Hastings and Cicero’s prosecution of Verres. Burke and Cicero, O’Neill argues, shift the responsibility for “imperial injustice” from empire itself to the moral failings of specific agents of empire. Beyond similarities in rhetorical style or self-fashioning, Burke and Cicero sought to absolve empire from injustice and to blame “rogue administrators,” which allows them to deny that empire has corrupted their respective polities. Dean Hammer, in the tenth and final chapter, “Cicero’s Legacy in Contemporary Political Thought,” traces Cicero’s fate from the nineteenth to the twentyfirst century. He pursues this ambitious task by focusing on five different ways of reading and understanding Cicero’s thought: approaches that center on the creation and maintenance of constitutional orders, approaches that center on

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social power, the pursuit of truth that transcends the political domain, the recognition and importance of “human embeddedness,” and the pursuit of “a vision of the ideal.” Hammer is especially interested in addressing these themes through a focus on recent scholarship on Cicero that is, as he puts it, characterized by more pragmatic approaches, scholarship that has given rise to Cicero Redidivus. Notes 1. Neal Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1–2. 2. Nicholas P. Cole, “Nineteenth-Century Cicero,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cicero, ed. Catherine Steel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 338; Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 6, 7–8. 3. An important exception is Hannah Arendt. See Dean Hammer, Roman Political Thought and the Modern Theoretical Imagination (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 38–77. 4. On Cicero’s decline in the twentieth century, see Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 8–13. On the modern decline of scholarly interest in Cicero’s political thought, as well as Roman political thinking more generally, see Hammer, Roman Political Thought, 13–37. 5. See, for example, J. G. F. Powell, ed., Cicero the Philosopher (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995); Robert Hariman’s fourth chapter, titled “In Oratory as in Life: Civic Performance in Cicero’s Republican Style,” in Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 95–140; and Gary Remer, “Political Oratory and Conversation: Cicero versus Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory 27 (1999): 39–64. 6. A casual search of Sage, Cambridge University Press, and University of Chicago Press journals, along with JSTOR and History of Political Thought, yielded the following (in chronological order) reaching back to 2009: Oleg Kharkhordin, “Why Res Publica Is Not a State: The Stoic Grammar and Discursive Practices in Cicero’s Conception,” History of Political Thought 31, no. 2 (2010): 221–46; Gary Remer, “The Classical Orator as Political Representative: Cicero and the Modern Concept of Representation,” Journal of Politics 72, no. 4 (2010): 1063–82; Daniel Kapust, “Acting the Princely Style: Ethos and Pathos in Cicero’s On the Ideal Orator and Machiavelli’s The Prince,” Political Studies 58, no. 3 (2010): 590–608; Xavier Marquez, “Cicero and the Stability of States,” History of Political Thought 32, no. 3 (2011): 397–423; Alexander S. Duff, “Republicanism and the Problem of Ambition: The Critique of Cicero in Machiavelli’s Discourses,” Journal of Politics 73, no. 4 (2011): 980–92; Daniel Kapust, “Cicero on Decorum and the Morality of Rhetoric,” European Journal of Political Theory 10, no. 1 (2011): 92–112; Geoff Kennedy, “Cicero, Roman Republicanism and the Contested Meaning of Libertas,” Political Studies 62, no. 3 (2014): 488–501; Michael C. Hawley, “Individuality and Hierarchy in Cicero’s De Officiis,” European Journal of Political Theory 19, no. 1 (2016): 87–105; Daniel Kapust and Michelle Schwarze, “The Rhetoric of Sincerity: Cicero and Smith on Propriety and Political Context,” American Political Science Review 110, no. 1 (2016): 100–111; Michael Hawley, “Cicero

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on the Problem of Unjust Origins,” Polity 50, no. 1 (2018): 101–28. A sample of monographs and edited volumes by political theorists or dealing with Cicero’s political and ethical thought includes Jed W. Atkins, Cicero on Politics and the Limits of Reason: The Republic and Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Yelena Baraz, A Written Republic: Cicero’s Philosophical Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Jonathan Zarecki, Cicero’s Ideal Statesman in Theory and Practice (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Gary A. Remer, Ethics and the Orator: The Ciceronian Tradition of Political Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Raphael Woolf, Cicero: The Philosophy of a Roman Sceptic (London: Routledge, 2015); Walter Nicgorski, Cicero’s Skepticism and His Recovery of Political Philosophy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Joy Connolly, The Life of Roman Republicanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); and Joy Connolly, The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Edited volumes include Walter Nicgorski, ed., Cicero’s Practical Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012); Dean Hammer, ed., A Companion to Greek Democracy and the Roman Republic (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014); William H. F. Altman, ed., Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Cicero (Leiden: Brill, 2015); and Catherine Steel, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Cicero (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Also noteworthy is the fine recent translation by a political theorist: Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Republic and On the Laws, trans. David S. Fott (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 7. For an overview of the Roman turn, see Daniel Kapust, “Ecce Romani,” Political Theory 45, no. 5 (2017): 705–19. 8. On this point, see especially Jonathan Zarecki, Cicero’s Ideal Statesman in Theory and Practice (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). 9. See Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), chap. 1. 10. Joy Connolly, “Cicero’s Concordia Ordinum: A Machiavellian Reappraisal” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, 2010), 5, 10. 11. Connolly, “Cicero’s Concordia Ordinum.” 12. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Commonwealth, in Commonwealth and On the Laws, trans. J. E. G. Zetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1.2. 13. Cicero, On the Commonwealth, 1.2–3. 14. Cicero, On the Commonwealth, 1.12. 15. Marcia Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 143–44; Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), xviii. 16. Cicero, On Duties, 1.70. 17. Cicero, On Duties, 1.71–72. 18. Cicero, On Duties, 3.28. 19. Cicero, On Duties, 1.58. 20. Cicero, On Duties, 1.123. 21. Cicero, On Duties, 3.14–16.

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22. For the history of Cicero’s texts and their transmission, see L. D. Reynolds, Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 23. Alain M. Gowing, “Tully’s Boat: Responses to Cicero in the Imperial Period,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cicero, ed. Catherine Steel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 238. 24. Gowing, “Tully’s Boat,” 233. 25. Gowing, “Tully’s Boat,” 244–45. 26. Sabine MacCormack, “Cicero in Late Antiquity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cicero, ed. Catherine Steel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 256. 27. MacCormack, “Cicero in Late Antiquity,” 260, 261. 28. John O. Ward, “What the Middle Ages Missed of Cicero, and Why,” in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Cicero, ed. William H. F. Altman (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 308. 29. Martin McLaughlin, “Petrarch and Cicero: Adulation and Critical Distance,” in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Cicero, ed. William H. F. Altman (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 20. 30. McLaughlin, “Petrarch and Cicero,” 20. 31. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper, 1961), 18. 32. Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 33. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals by David Hume, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1902). On Cicero in the eighteenth century, see Daniel Kapust, “Cicero and Eighteenth-Century Political Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cicero’s Philosophy, ed. Jed Atkins and Thomas Bénatouil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 34. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 106. 35. Carl J. Richard, “Cicero and the American Founders,” in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Cicero, ed. William H. F. Altman (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 125, 129. 36. James M. Farrell, “John Adams’s Autobiography: The Ciceronian Paradigm and the Quest for Fame,” New England Quarterly 62, no. 4 (1989): 520. 37. Nicholas P. Cole, “Nineteenth-Century Ciceros,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cicero, ed. Catherine Steel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 338. 38. Cole, “Nineteenth-Century Ciceros,” 347. 39. G. H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, rev. Thomas Landon Thorson (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973), 159. 40. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 161. 41. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 71. 42. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 89. 43. C. B. Robson, “Review of History of Political Philosophy,” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1964): 412–13. 44. James E. Holton, “Marcus Tullius Cicero,” in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 155.

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45. Holton, “Marcus Tullius Cicero,” 158. 46. Holton, “Marcus Tullius Cicero,” 158. 47. Holton, “Marcus Tullius Cicero,” 174. 48. Search conducted on October 31, 2019; search included only “Content I can access.” When “All content” was searched, there were 673 hits for Plato and 124 hits for Cicero. The ratio increases from 1:10 to nearly 1:5, largely because of multiple hits from books on Cicero with multiple chapters in which his name features in the title. 49. J. Jackson Barlow, “Review of Cicero’s Social and Political Thought,” American Political Science Review 83, no. 2 (1989): 625–26. 50. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism. 51. See, for example, Cary J. Nederman, Gary Remer, and Benedetto Fontana, eds., Talking Democracy: Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

chapter 1

Augustine’s Reception of Cicero B r a n d o n Tu r n e r

I

n Book III of his Confessions, Augustine recounts his arrival in Carthage at the impressionable young age of seventeen: “I came to Carthage and all around me a melting pot of illicit passions was seething.”1 What followed was the not unpredictable behavior of a teenager loose in the big city, where he discovered romance (“I enjoyed loving and being loved [amare et amari]”) and theater (the plays “added fuel to my flames” [fomitibus ignis mei]) and otherwise neglected the care of his soul (“my soul was in a poor state of health, and covered in sores it lay prostrate out of doors, in a pitiable state”).2 His soul gained little succor from his studies in rhetoric—which merely “sharpened [his] style” in what he considered an art of “deceiving” that appealed only to the “pleasures of human vanity”—or his fellow students, whom he dubbed “the Destroyers [eversores]” because of their “demonic activity.”3 In the course of these studies, “following the usual curriculum,” Augustine discovered “a book by a certain Cicero.” At least in memory—for Augustine of the Confessions was recalling his experience a quarter century later—the great Roman writer left a deep and lasting impression on him. Cicero “effected a change in my feelings, and also changed my prayers to you, Lord. It [Cicero’s Hortensius] altered the substance of my supplications and desires. All of a sudden every one of my vain hopes became worthless to me, and with an extraordinary passion of the heart I began to long for immortal wisdom, and I started to arise so as to return to you.”4 The work that moved Augustine so profoundly was Hortensius, a protreptic dialogue written during Cicero’s retirement, widely read in antiquity but almost entirely lost to us now (though the fragments of the work we have exist largely because of Augustine’s enthusiasm for it).5 In it, Cicero considers the proper use of leisure (otium) and defends philosophy and the search 17

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for wisdom against alternative pursuits like literature and especially oratory.6 If Augustine emphasizes the dangers of leisure time badly spent in Book III— in particular, at the theater—and of oratory divorced from the love of truth, then it comes as no surprise that the Hortensius spoke so clearly to him: Cicero, he writes, “enkindled” him (quo me accendebant).7 This chapter explores the nature of this enkindling in two parts. Through a survey of the extent of Cicero’s influence on Augustine and his contemporaries, the first section demonstrates that few (if any) thinkers—particularly thinkers outside the Christian tradition—shaped Augustine’s thought as deeply as Cicero did. In particular, I argue that Augustine consistently adopts Cicero’s views as true in some fundamental sense—and that his uses of Cicero often require him to distinguish between the necessary and unnecessary elements of Cicero’s teachings. The second section applies this interpretive pattern to Augustine’s political thought and its uses of Cicero’s Republic. A Lifelong Engagement The impression left by Cicero’s Hortensius on Augustine’s thought, so memorably portrayed early in the Confessions, proved deep and lasting. In Augustine’s recounting of his conversion in Book VIII of the Confessions—some twelve years after his initial encounter with Hortensius—Cicero again plays a central role. There, he recalls the story of a friend named Ponticianus who experienced an epiphany after reading a life of St. Antony, and he is reminded of his discovery of the Hortensius and his failure to live up to the philosophical calling. He is still reproducing long passages of the work in Book 14 of On the Trinity, finished in the last years of his life, some fifty years after his initial encounter, apparently still struggling with Cicero’s views on the immortality of the soul.8 The influence of the Hortensius seems to peak in the period of the Cassiciacum dialogues (386–87), when Augustine was temporarily released from public life and could fully embrace the life of otium, but his love for “Tullius, the great master of eloquence” extends far beyond the influence of this one lost dialogue.9 According to a recent scholar, Augustine cites Cicero more than he does any other Latin author—indeed, he cites Cicero’s corpus more than any other document except the Bible.10 Augustine’s debts to Cicero have been well documented for some time, particularly in substantive (and remarkably thorough) treatments by Maurice Testard and Harald Hagendahl.11 From a historical perspective, this is unsurprising—Cicero, along with Virgil and perhaps Apuleius, would have been important authorities for anyone studying Latin or oratory in northern Africa at the time. A careful student’s familiarity with these texts (including the Hortensius) would have included substantial



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memorization of important passages.12 Yet we have reason to think that Augustine’s intimacy with Cicero was unusual even by these standards. He relates in a late minor work, The Care to Be Taken for the Dead (De Cura Pro Mortuis Gerenda), the story of a former student named Eulogius who “came upon an obscure passage” in Cicero and, “not being able to determine the exact meaning, could scarcely sleep.” When sleep finally overtook him, he was visited by Augustine in a dream, and Cicero’s meaning was only then made clear.13 Augustine’s reputation as a lover of Cicero is further evinced by an exchange of letters in 410 with a student in Carthage named Dioscorus, who claimed to have learned of Augustine’s intimacy with Cicero from Augustine’s good friend Alypius. Dioscorus’s initial letter is lost to us now, but Augustine’s response makes its thrust clear: the letter contained a litany of questions about Cicero’s doctrine and works and a request for a speedy reply. Augustine’s response is curious. He berates Dioscorus at length for having “thought to besiege or, rather, to take me by storm” with a “sudden throng of endless questions” on Cicero. He wants the impudent Dioscorus to picture “a bishop, straitened and harried on all sides by the clamorous cares of the Church, suddenly turning a deaf ear to all of them, and shutting himself off, while he explains some of the fine points of Tully’s Dialogues to one lone scholar”—an impropriety amplified by the fact that Dioscorus seems to be seeking a better understanding of Cicero only to impress men of learning he expects to meet on an upcoming trip.14 This letter (Epistle 118) holds other insights into understanding Augustine’s relationship with Cicero. He is particularly insistent that his young interlocutor study Cicero for the right reasons—with his heart in the right place, as it were. As Augustine describes it, Dioscorus laid these considerable interpretive burdens on the already overburdened Augustine “for no other reason than that you fear being thought stupid and uncouth if you do not answer the questions of men who are prone to criticize,” and he chides the young man for his vanity: “you think of nothing else day and night but of being praised by men for your studies and your learning.”15 The parallel with Augustine’s own education is clear. He, too, had undertaken a classical education for reasons of earthly gain—for professional reasons and for praise from his parents and instructors.16 Likewise, if we assume that Augustine was taught Cicero’s works before arriving in Carthage to continue his education—in particular, the works of oratory—only to be waylaid by the Hortensius and its exhortation to philosophy, then his advice to the young Dioscorus reflects the sequence of his own Ciceronian epiphany. Dioscorus must learn to receive the “truth” found in Cicero before the facts concerning Cicero can be of use. He asks his interlocutor: “This is what I should like to know: Whether you possess and are able to impart anything supremely

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valuable and worth while. For it is absurd that you should have learned so many useless things for the express purpose of preparing men’s ears to receive the necessary truths for you, if you do not know the necessary truths yourself.”17 Of course, even as he reproaches the young man for his scholarly defects, he nonetheless provides—at considerable length—the answers Dioscorus seeks. The original letter apparently included a sheet of questions; Augustine indicates that he has responded to “almost all” of them on the original parchment (which is, sadly, lost).18 In the second half of his response, Augustine responds at length to what must have been a question concerning Cicero’s relationship to the various ancient schools of thought. Augustine divides ancient philosophy into three basic types, represented by the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Platonists. These correspond with three views on the source of happiness, “the right purpose in life, that is to say, where the supreme good of man is to be found”: those who seek it in the goods of the body, those who seek the good of the soul, and those who seek the good found in God.19 He puts the Platonist school firmly in the final category and argues that their project—otherwise true and just—lacked only “the model of divine humility, which enlightened us at the most fitting time through our Lord Jesus Christ.”20 A good Platonist, he notes, ought merely to “mak[e] the few changes which Christian teaching requires . . . [and] bow their heads devoutly before Christ, the one unconquered King, and recognize the Word of God made man . . . being the Word which they feared even to utter.”21 Readers familiar with Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods (De Natura Deorum) will recognize the tripartite division laid out here. Indeed, Augustine quotes at length from the work and seems to be writing with the text handy. He situates Cicero in the Platonist school as a kind of proto-Christian and reaffirms Cicero as figure of great spiritual importance: “if the knowledge of this man who may have seen the truth should not puff us up so as to make us seem learned by knowing it, [it] should rather strengthen us in the real truth through which we can be truly learned.”22 This proto-Christian rendering of Cicero is consistent with his comments in the Confessions, written a decade or so earlier: “I was roused by his words, kindled [accendebar, again] and ablaze [ardebam], and the one thing that checked me in my great passion was the fact that the name of Christ was not there.” Even in the face of Paul’s warning against the deception of a purely worldly philosophy, Augustine recounts that he was “delighted” by Cicero’s “recommendation . . . to love and seek and pursue and hold and embrace with all my strength not one sect or another, but wisdom itself, wherever it was to be found.”23 The enkindling engagement with Cicero spans almost the whole of Augustine’s career.24 As several commentators have noted, Augustine’s view on friendship—specifically that found in Epistle 258, where he quotes “Tully, the greatest



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writer of the Roman tongue,” who defines friendship as “the agreement on things human and divine, joined with kindliness and love”—owes much to Cicero’s On Friendship (De Amicitia).25 Augustine’s struggles with the character of individual freedom and the role of will in social and political affairs—found most notably in Book V of City of God (De Civitate Dei), where he argues against a fatalistic conception of political causality—rely on Cicero’s On Fate (De Fato) and On Divination (De Divinatione) for inspiration.26 Cicero’s influence extended to Augustine’s views on oratory, as well— unsurprisingly, considering Cicero’s status as an oratorical authority in the fourth century and Augustine’s training in rhetoric. Augustine’s use of Cicero in this domain nicely illustrates the productive tension produced by Augustine’s great respect for Cicero paired with his need to adapt his thought to an alien religious context.27 Book IV of On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana) contains his account of the ideal Christian orator, the “defender of the truth faith and the vanquisher of error,” who must “communicate what is good and eradicate what is bad,” and “in this process of speaking[,] must win over the antagonistic, rouse the apathetic, and make clear to those who are not conversant with the matter under discussion what they should expect.”28 Throughout, Augustine borrows from Cicero’s major rhetorical works: On the Orator (De Oratore), On Invention (De Inventione), and especially Orator. From the latter, he borrows several key rhetorical taxonomies, describing how a great “man of eloquence” has “quite rightly” claimed that “the eloquent should speak in such a way as to instruct, delight, and move their listeners.” Just a few pages later, he maps these three purposes of rhetoric onto the three styles presented elsewhere in Orator: “the eloquent speaker will be one who can treat small matters in a restrained style in order to instruct, intermediate matters in a mixed style in order to delight, and important matters in a grand style in order to move an audience.”29 No sooner is Cicero’s taxonomy introduced than it is apparently abandoned. Cicero’s stylistic scheme suits forensic matters, but “ecclesiastical matters” are different. For the Christian orator, “who must relate everything, especially what we say to congregations from our position of authority, to the well-being of human beings not in this temporary life but in eternity,” there is no meaningful distinction between small and big things: “all matters that we speak of are important.”30 Likewise Augustine distances himself from Cicero by brushing aside concerns with “the rhetorical rules which I learnt and taught in pagan schools,” which “must be learnt separately—assuming that a person of good character has the time to learn them on top of everything else.”31 Here, the letter to Dioscorus may come in handy. In it, Augustine identifies that element of Cicero’s teaching

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that is “necessary” (and presumably what is “unnecessary”); in his discussion of oratory, he likewise separates the unnecessary (the fine-grained rules of oratory, for example) but retains and fully incorporates the “necessary” Cicero into his doctrine. Oratory is necessary because it is not enough to know for oneself the truths of Christianity; one must move others to the same knowledge— “in a word, the function of eloquence in teaching is not to make people like what was once offensive, or to make them do what they were loth to do, but to make clear what was hidden from them”—those who think that Christian teachers need no instruction in oratory “may as well say that there is no need for us to pray.”32 Moderating this division of Cicero into necessary and unnecessary elements is Augustine’s faith in Cicero as a teacher of truth. Thus, even though Augustine’s Christian ontology forbids him from distinguishing between small and important matters for discussion—in this he follows Luke 16:10, where “the person who is trustworthy in small matters is trustworthy in important ones too”— he adopts Orator’s scheme by simply altering the relationship between Cicero’s original taxonomies. Building his case using textual evidence from Christian literature—from Paul and the work of his teacher, Ambrose—Augustine argues that “although our teacher must be a speaker on important matters, he should not always speak of them in the grand style”; indeed, “nobody should think that it is against the rules of the art to combine these styles . . . on the contrary, our discourse should be varied by using all three, as far as is possible without impropriety.”33 A Christian orator should not think that “a single aim [to be listened to with understanding, with pleasure, and with obedience] is assigned to each style”; he should instead “always have these three aims and pursue them to the best of his ability even when operating within one particular style.”34 In reflecting on Augustine’s uses of Cicero’s schema in Book IV of On Christian Teaching, R. P. H. Green has wondered why Augustine bothered to root his oratorical views in Cicero’s work at all. He argues that rather than using Cicero as a foil—as an authority to be bested or discarded—he uses Cicero as truth, as “the embodiment, imperfect but by far the best available, of the divinely instituted truths of rhetoric.” Adapting him to a new theological context is a matter, then, of discerning that which is “as immovable . . . as the truths of logic or mathematics” and that which is “open to modification.”35 In sum, few figures or texts can claim to be a more abiding or profound influence on Augustine; the depth of his intellectual and scholarly mastery over Cicero’s corpus was matched by the intensity of his love for Cicero’s truth. The next section examines the “immovable” aspects of Cicero’s political thought and their place in the political schema of Augustine’s City of God.



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Cicero’s Influence on Augustine’s Political Thought Cicero’s influence is particularly important for those interested in making sense of Augustine’s social and political thought—an errand that has proven to be no easy undertaking for several reasons. Augustine did not write about politics in a systematic or linear fashion, and his most straightforwardly political work— the sprawling City of God—remains a difficult text to categorize, despite inspiring some of the most important political theory of the past century.36 For interpreters of Augustine’s political thought, the most central text for locating Cicero’s influence is The Republic (De Re Publica); Hagendahl claims that Augustine mentions it “more often than any other work of Cicero’s.”37 These mentions include the momentous passages in Books 2 and 19 of City of God where Augustine confronts the Ciceronian conception of res publica head on. We have good reason to suspect that Cicero’s Republic was very much on Augustine’s mind when he began composing City of God after 410. In 408, he exchanged a series of letters with a man called Nectarius, who wrote to Augustine seeking his intervention regarding a civil dispute. Earlier that year, the town of Calama—some thirty miles southwest of Hippo—had witnessed a series of clashes between pagans and church officials over a proposed prohibition on pagan festivals. Riots ensued, and Calama’s church was razed. Augustine had already intervened to advise against using torture and capital punishment on the ringleaders, but Nectarius was chosen to write on behalf of the pagans in the hope that Augustine would further intercede on their behalf.38 In his first letter, Nectarius couches his efforts in his “patriotic love” for his hometown. Though he acknowledges the bad behavior of Calama’s citizens, he nonetheless insists that “a good man’s service of his home-town” has “no limit or terminus,” something he expects a “man who is thoroughly well-educated” like Augustine to recognize.39 Augustine recognizes the reference to Cicero’s Republic almost immediately in his response (Epistle 91). He encourages Nectarius to “think a little” about Cicero’s teachings, to notice “how they proclaim as praiseworthy simplicity and restraint, along with faithfulness to the marriage bond, and behavior that is chaste and honourable and upright”—this, he says, constitutes true “flourishing,” flourishing “in the true judgement of the wise . . . not merely in the opinion of fools.”40 He pleads with Nectarius to redirect his praiseworthy love for Calama and become “a citizen of a certain country beyond,” for “it is because we love that country with a holy love—as far as we can—that we accept hard work and danger among the people we hope to benefit by helping them reach it.”41

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Nectarius responded the next year with a letter that begins by claiming that, upon reading Augustine’s letter, “the consularis Marcus Tullius Cicero was summoned by your eloquence and stood before my eyes”—the same Cicero who “saved the lives of countless of his fellow-citizens,” whose “sonorous voice” had condemned “the parricides of his republic.”42 Here he cites Scipio’s dream against Augustine—specifically against the two-cities scheme Augustine hinted at in his previous letter: You were talking about a city where the great God lives and dwells, along with those souls that truly deserve it, a city that is the goal at which all laws aim, by various paths and ways, a city that we cannot fully describe in speech, but can perhaps discover by contemplation . . . However that may be, I do not think that we need to abandon the city in which we were born and brought into life . . . [because] for those heroes whose fine service to the city merits it, a home is being prepared in heaven—so the philosophers tell us—for after their bodily deaths.43 If this is written in earnest, Nectarius’s view suggests an entirely straightforward reading of Scipio’s dream, where the fulfilment of civic duties garners rewards in the afterlife, since “the people who are shown to have secured safety for their own homeland”—and Nectarius emphasizes material safety throughout his comments—“by their advice or their efforts, are the ones who will live closer to God.”44 Nectarius would have found support for this interpretation in the revival of classical (and thus pagan) scholastic education in the late fourth century.45 This movement, tied in various ways to Roman triumphalism and a cult of the city, had begun to arrive in North Africa from Rome in the early 400s.46 Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, widely circulated at the time, provides just such a civic reading for men like Nectarius. Following Plotinus (“chief with Plato among the professors of philosophy”), Macrobius writes that the political virtues are the highest virtues for man, the “social animal.” According to these, “upright men devote themselves to their commonwealths, protect cities, revere parents, love their children, and cherish relatives,” and “by these they direct the welfare of the citizens.” Citing Hesiod and Virgil as authorities, he writes that “with good reason and not in vain flattery did the men of antiquity enroll certain founders of cities and men distinguished in public service in the number of the gods”; these civic heroes “really live in the sky though they still cling to mortal bodies, and consequently have no difficulty, after leaving their bodies, in laying claim to the celestial seats which, one might say, they never left.”47



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There are glimpses of this growing conflict in Augustine’s response to Nectarius’s second letter—particularly in his repeated references to “our” literature and “your” literature.48 Throughout the lengthy letter, however, Augustine enlists Cicero in his effort to distinguish sharply between two conceptions of civic duty—serving the interests of one’s fellow citizens, and serving the true interests of one’s fellow citizens. A policy of leniency might serve Calama’s citizens in the short run, but it will not direct them to their proper end. He thus excoriates Nectarius: “You are concerned for your city’s interests! Why are you afraid of wielding a scalpel to their audacious behavior? Otherwise it will be nourished and strengthened by your leniency which is so destructive.”49 If Nectarius would truly serve his city in the way he suggests, he would resist the urge to forget or forgive the crimes committed, for “we would tend to help most by not giving what they want, and to do harm by giving it,” a view for which Augustine can cite Cicero in support. (“Hence the saying, ‘Don’t give a boy a sword.’ As Cicero says, ‘You wouldn’t give one even to your only son.’”50) In what would later become a central theme in City of God, Augustine argues that Nectarius’s love for his city is insufficiently “true.” If Nectarius truly seeks “the heavenly homeland” found through civic virtue, he “could reach it through a true and devoted love for the home-town that gave [him] physical birth, by showing true concern for [his] citizens, bringing them not to empty and temporary enjoyment, nor to immunity from punishment for the outrage . . . but to the grace of everlasting happiness.”51 Without commenting directly on the dream of Scipio, he nonetheless emphasizes that the civic hero’s place in heaven is not secured simply by serving the city but by making it better through a kind of divine discipline. These themes carry over into City of God, where, as in his exchange with Nectarius, Cicero functions as a kind of metaphysical anchor. His “immovable” truth provides Augustine and his pagan interlocutors a bit of common conceptual ground. In Book 2, Augustine undertakes a full-fledged defense of Christianity against the charge that the fall of Rome can be attributed to the abandonment of its pagan gods and the adoption of its new Christian God.52 Augustine grapples with Sallust’s narrative in the Bellum Catilinae whereby Rome had experienced a dramatic decline from its early, more virtuous days, to the “depths of depravity” in the late days of the republic.53 On one hand, Augustine disputes Sallust’s characterization of Rome’s early days—for example, he mockingly questions whether the Rape of the Sabine Women “arose from this ‘justice and morality’” for which Sallust praised the early Romans.54 On the other hand, and more importantly, Augustine encourages those otherwise unperturbed by Rome’s decline to consider how Sallust’s diagnosis squares with Cicero’s definition of a commonwealth in Book 1 of The Republic. There, Scipio explains that

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a res publica is a res populi: a commonwealth is the “property of a people”— not just any group of people, of course, but “an assemblage of people in large numbers associated in an agreement with respect to justice and a partnership for the common good.” Elsewhere in Book 1, Scipio puts things more succinctly: “What is a State except an association or partnership in justice?”55 Augustine recounts at length the argument in the first two books of The Republic—often quoting substantial passages, suggesting that he was working on City of God with a copy of The Republic at hand—so he can insist that, should a community be ruled in injustice, it would thereby cease to be a state at all. “For there can be no ‘weal of the community,’ if it is unjust, since it is not ‘associated by a common sense of right and a community of interest,’ which was the definition of community.”56 To the church’s accusers, Augustine asks: how can it be that the fall of Rome can be the fault of the one Christian God if, according to the reasoning of Rome’s greatest mind, it ceased to be a republic at all many years before Christ? Augustine breaks off this discussion at the close of Book 2, Chapter 21, promising to return to the topic to “demonstrate that that commonwealth [Rome] never existed, because there never was real justice in the community.”57 This promise he keeps, returning to Scipio’s definition of a commonwealth in Book 19, Chapter 21.58 His argument runs as follows: if a “commonwealth” refers to the “‘weal of the people,’” and a “people” refers to a “multitude ‘united in association by a common sense of right and a community of interest,” and if by “‘a common sense of right’” Cicero means that “a state cannot be maintained without justice, and where there is no true justice there can be no right,” then where there is no “true justice,” there is “no people [populus] answering to the definition of Scipio, or Cicero.”59 Augustine marshals two arguments against the justice of Rome. In Book 2— early in the work, before he has established Christ as the only source of true justice—Augustine uses Cicero’s testimony against Rome, pointing to Scipio’s speech at the opening of Book 5 of The Republic. There, Cicero’s Scipio—who begins by quoting Ennius’s Annales: “The commonwealth of Rome is founded firm / On ancient customs and on men of might”—seems to presage Augustine’s critique: Before our own time, the customs of our ancestors produced excellent men, and eminent men preserved our ancient customs and the institutions of their forefathers. But though the republic, when it came to us, was like a beautiful painting, whose colours, however, were already fading with age, our own time not only has neglected to freshen it by renewing the original



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colours, but has not even taken the trouble to preserve its configuration and, so to speak, its general outlines. For what is now left of the “ancient customs” on which he said “the commonwealth of Rome” was “founded firm”? They have been, as we see, so completely buried in oblivion that they are not only no longer practised, but are already unknown.60 Augustine points to the difficulty in squaring this statement with Scipio’s stated goal of “not merely disprov[ing] the contention that a government cannot be carried on without injustice, but also . . . prov[ing] positively that it cannot be carried on without the strictest justice.”61 In Book 19, Augustine has established the grounds to argue that because Rome was not oriented around the love of Christ, it could not harbor true justice. If “justice is that virtue which assigns to everyone his due,” then “what kind of justice is it that takes a man away from the true God and subjects him to unclean demons?”62 Augustine’s purpose is not to disprove or otherwise discredit Cicero’s conception of a commonwealth but to reconfigure it in ways that make the necessary elements of Cicero’s thought—those elements that his good-faith interlocutors sought to preserve—consistent with the two-cities scheme in Book 19 of City of God. Crucial to this process is reconciling Cicero’s discussions of the nature of justice in The Republic with Augustine’s commitment to the view that true justice is found only in Christ. In Book 3 of The Republic, Cicero’s Philus presents a number of arguments against justice found in Plato and elsewhere in the Greek classics: that justice is derived from human weakness or utilitarian calculation; that justice is mere convention, varying from place to place; that “wisdom” wishes “us to increase our resources, to multiply our wealth, to extend our boundaries . . . to rule over as many subjects as possible, to enjoy pleasures, to become rich, to be rulers and masters,” and justice “instructs us to spare all men, to consider the interests of the whole human race, to give everyone his due, and not to touch . . . that which belongs to others.”63 More problematic for Scipio’s “strictest justice” criterion is Philus’s view that effective governance requires injustice. Scipio’s response is paternalistic: true government—and thus true justice, the giving of each his due—manifests itself in the higher ruling the lower. Do we not observe that dominion has been granted by Nature to everything that is best, to the great advantage of what is weak? For why else does God rule over man, the mind over the body, and reason over lust and anger and the other evil elements of the mind? . . . the mind is said to rule over the body . . . as a king governs his subjects, or a father his children . . .

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So kings, commanders, magistrates, senators, and popular assemblies govern citizens as the mind governs the body.64 Rulers govern subjects like the mind governs the body, but of course such rule is not arbitrary. As reason guides the mind, so it guides rulers, for “true law [vera lex] is right reason [recta ratio] in agreement with nature,” and “it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.”65 This lends statesmanship a divine aspect, for in guiding their subjects to harmony with the laws of nature, rulers lead them to the “one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.”66 Justice, then, means directing citizens toward the true law, which is determined only by God; good rulers and civic heroes are those who discipline the city in ways that bring it closer to divine truth. This divine character of statesmanship is of course powerfully depicted in the famous account of “Scipio’s Dream,” found in the closing pages of The Republic. Scipio describes a vision wherein his namesake, Scipio Africanus, exhorts him to “love justice and duty, which are indeed strictly due to parents and kinsmen, but most of all to the fatherland.” Because “nothing at all that is done on earth is more pleasing to that supreme God who rules the whole universe than the assemblies and gatherings of men associated in justice, which are called States,” the statesman fulfills his divine obligations by dedicating himself fully to the health of the state.67 At issue between Augustine and those like Nectarius is the nature of this dedication to the city: is the city a kind of moral end-in-itself (in which case its heroes would be those who help it satisfy its wishes), or is the life of the city bound up in a broader moral cosmology or universal community (in which case its heroes are those who direct it and its members to their proper end)? In raising this question, Scipio’s dream guides us back to Augustine’s twocities scheme. City of God represents Augustine’s most sustained (by far) attempt to explain the status and character of the two cities—“the earthly and the heavenly”—in which humans find themselves.68 These cities are “interwoven” and “mingled” in everyday life, and we participate in each according to that love that motivates us—we dwell in the earthly city as we act on our self-love, and we participate in the Holy City when we are moved by our love for God.69 The two cities operate on multiple levels: for the individual, they represent qualitatively different ways of orienting oneself in action (toward or away from God). In the case of communities, however, the scheme is a bit more robust. The earthly city—which is to say, all cities, beginning with the first political societies borne from Adam’s sin and Cain’s fratricide—were “created by self-love reaching the



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point of contempt for God . . . the earthly city glories in itself . . . [and] looks for glory from men”; in the earthly city “the lust for domination lords it over its princes as over the nations it subjugates.”70 Although the cities are “interwoven,” they remain separated by a metaphysical gulf—a rift opened as a result of Adam’s first, prideful turn away from God. What, then, can the earthly city provide for those who seek the kingdom of God? In a word, peace—for “both kinds of men and both kinds of households [those oriented around a love of self, and those oriented around a love of God] alike make use of the things essential for this mortal life; but each has its own very different end in making use of them. So also, the earthly city, whose life is not based on faith, aims at an earthly peace, and it limits the harmonious agreement of citizens concerning the giving and obeying of orders to the establishment of a kind of compromise between human wills about the things relevant to mortal life.”71 A virtuous ruler can provide the peaceful and orderly existence needed for flesh-bound souls to participate in the heavenly city.72 This deeply ambiguous account of the dual nature of cities and men— their existence simultaneously and irrevocably participating in both ways of being—has proven to be a remarkably durable and rich source of insight into political life. It has also proven to be a sturdy fulcrum on which much scholarship and interpretation of Augustine’s political thought has balanced. For some interpreters, Augustine’s separation of the two cities opens, for the first time, the conceptual space necessary for a secular politics—a politics “limit[ed]” to a “compromise . . . about things relevant to mortal life.”73 Others have argued that although Augustine has a quite chastened outlook of what politics can do for a citizen’s soul, he nonetheless views political life—and thus politics and statesmanship—as necessary activities in the broader scheme of salvation.74 To put this interpretive question differently, and in a way that links it to Augustine’s encounter with Cicero’s Republic: is earthly peace to be considered as an end-in-itself (in which case a city’s true benefactors are those who most effectively keep the peace), or is earthly peace to be regarded as merely one essential form of discipline needed before true justice can be pursued (in which case civic virtue takes on a decidedly more perfectionist and more straightforwardly religious character)? Ultimately, one’s understanding of Augustine’s reception of Cicero depends on how one interprets the status of politics and political life—particularly as it is found in City of God. Augustine’s final repurposing of Cicero’s Republic appears in Chapter 24 of Book 19, where he offers a solution to the myriad problems that emerged from Cicero’s definition of a commonwealth by proposing an amended definition of his own: “A people is the association of a multitude of rational beings

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united by a common agreement on the objects of their love,” he argues, and from this it follows that to observe the character of a particular people we must examine the objects of its love.75 This allows Augustine to admit that Rome (and Athens, and Babylon) was in fact a commonwealth, and it helps him generate a normative scale through which one might evaluate cities while recognizing that justice can only be truly realized in a city organized around a love for the Christian God. No city (save the heavenly city) is just, but some are better than others, according to the “objects” of their love. Rome (early Rome, anyway) was organized around a love for glory: “they were passionately devoted to glory; it was for this that they desired to live, for this they did not hesitate to die . . . this unbounded passion for glory, above all else, checked their other appetites.”76 As an object of love, glory—which, while linked with virtue, nonetheless remains a (noble) species of the love of praise—falls far short of God. Then again, all objects do, and communities have been organized around the love for objects far more vicious in nature. The conceptual distance between defining a commonwealth as a community organized around an idea of justice and one organized around a common “love” shrinks when one recalls how Augustine problematizes Cicero’s conceptions of earthly justice. There will never be a just community, Augustine argues, because there will never be a community organized solely around a love of God. Thus, even here, as Augustine seemingly remakes the Ciceronian account of commonwealth, there are reasons to think this should be considered an adaptation of one of Cicero’s “immovable” truths rather than an innovation. After all, Augustine believes he follows Cicero in rejecting the possibility of true justice in earthly communities; he believes he follows Cicero in positing an unbridgeable gulf between the relentlessly imperfect world of earthly politics and the divine realms characterized by perfection; and he believes he follows Cicero’s model of the statesman in conceiving him as one with the knowledge and the rhetorical skill necessary to discipline and bend his fellow citizens toward divine truth. Notes 1. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Carolyn J. B. Hammond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), III.i.91. 2. Augustine, Confessions, III.i.91, III.ii.93. 3. Augustine, Confessions, III.iii.99–iv.101. 4. Augustine, Confessions, III.vii.101. Though it seems unlikely that Augustine would have encountered Cicero for the first time in Carthage, after years of (“frankly pagan”) Latin instruction in Thagaste and then in Madaura, he nevertheless makes the same claim elsewhere—in particular, in The Happy Life (De Beata Vita), where he writes, “From the



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age of nineteen, having read in the school of rhetoric that book of Cicero’s called Hortensius, I was inflamed by such a great love of philosophy that I considered devoting myself to it at once.” Augustine, The Happy Life (De Beata Vita), trans. Ludwig Schopp (New York: Cima, 1948), 46–47; Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 36, chap. 3. 5. For Augustine’s interactions with the work, see John Hammond Taylor, “St. Augustine and the Hortensius of Cicero,” Studies in Philology 60, no. 3 (1963): 487–98. 6. Constantin-Ionuț Mihai, “Reconstructing Cicero’s Hortensius: A Note on Fragment 43 Grilli,” Philologica Jassyensia 10, no. 1 (2014): 451–56. 7. Augustine, Confessions, III.viii.103. 8. Augustine, Confessions, VIII.xv–xvii.383–89; Augustine, On the Trinity (Books 8–15), trans. Gareth B. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. XIV.ix.151. 9. Brown, Augustine, chaps. 10–11; Harald Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics, 2 vols. (Gothenburg: Elander, 1967), 2:488–89. 10. Augustine, On the Trinity; Danuta Shanzer,“Augustine and the Latin Classics,” in A Companion to Augustine, ed. Mark Vessey (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 161–74, 165. 11. Maurice Testard, Saint Augustin et Cicéron (Paris: Institut d’etudes augustiniennes, 1965); Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics. 12. Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics, 479. 13. Augustine, The Care to Be Taken for the Dead (De Cura Pro Mortuis Gerenda), trans. Charles T. Wilcox, in Treatises on Marriage and Other Subjects, ed. Roy J. Deferrari (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), chap. 2, 369. 14. Augustine, Letters, vol. 2, trans. Sister Wilfrid Parsons (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1953), 83–130, Epistles 117–18, 263. 15. Augustine, Letters 2:265. 16. Augustine writes that he was “top of the class in the rhetor’s schoolroom.” Confessions, III.vi.99; Brown, Augustine of Hippo, chap. 2. 17. Augustine, Letters 2:272. 18. Augustine, Letters 2:293. Those interested in the depth of Augustine’s appreciation of Cicero should note his claims that should he have needed to consult a copy of some of the works in question, he would have been unable to find one in a backwater like Hippo. Augustine, Letters 2:270. 19. Augustine, Letters 2:274. 20. Augustine, Letters 2:278. 21. Augustine, Letters 2:282. 22. Augustine, Letters 2:287. 23. Augustine, Confessions, III.viii.103; on Paul’s warning, see Colossians 2:8–9. 24. Though note with Hagendahl and others that Augustine’s frequent engagement with classical texts dries up after his ordination in 391, picking up again as he began composing City of God in the 410s. See Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics; and James J. O’Donnell, “Augustine’s Classical Readings,” Recherches Augustiniennes et Patristiques 15 (1980): 144–75, 147.

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25. Augustine quotes this twice in Epistle 258 and again in the Answer to Skeptics (Contra Academicos). This line—that friendship “is nothing else than an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection”—is taken from Cicero’s On Friendship (De Amicitia). Augustine, “Epistle 258,” in Letters, vol. 5 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1956), 250; Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Friendship, trans. William Armistead Falconer (London: William Heinemann, 1923), VI, 131; Augustine, Answer to Skeptics, trans. Denis J. Kavanagh (New York: Cima), III.vi.182. On Augustine’s debts to Cicero on friendship, see Kim Paffenroth, “Friendship as Personal, Social, and Theological Virtue in Augustine,” in Augustine and Politics, ed. John Doody, Kevin L. Hughes, and Kim Paffenroth (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 53–65. 26. Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics; Jasper Hopkins, “Augustine on Foreknowledge and Free Will,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 8, no. 2 (1977): 41–63; Shuai Sun, “Fate and Will: Augustine’s Revaluation of Stoic Fate in the De Civitate Dei V, 8–11,” Mediaevistik 25, no. 1 (2013): 35–53; G. J. P. O’Daly, “Thinking through History: Augustine’s Method in the City of God and Its Ciceronian Dimension,” Augustinian Studies 30, no. 2 (1999): 45–57. On Augustine’s views on free will, see also Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will (De Libero Arbitrio Voluntatis), trans. Anna S. Benjamin and L. H. Hackstaff (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964). 27. For an overview of Augustine’s debts to Cicero’s works on oratory, see James Burnette Eskridge, “The Influence of Cicero upon Augustine in the Development of His Oratorical Theory for the Training of the Ecclesiastical Orator” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1912); and Čelica Milovanović-Barham, “Three Levels of Style in Augustine of Hippo and Gregory of Nazianzus,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 11, no. 1 (1993): 1–25. 28. Augustine, On Christian Teaching (De Doctrina Christiana), trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), IV.103. 29. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, IV.117–23; compare Marcus Tullius Cicero, Orator, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 69–73, 100– 101 (357–59, 379). 30. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, IV.124. 31. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, IV.101. Augustine suggests that learning the rules of rhetoric is a poor substitute for natural rhetorical ability—good orators “observe the rules because they are eloquent; they do not use them to become eloquent.” In On the Orator (87–93), Cicero seems to suggest a similar relationship between the rules of rhetoric and the skilled orator’s intuitive grasp of rhetoric; his Orator is nonetheless brimming with discussion of rhetorical rules. 32. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, IV.117, IV.121. 33. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, IV.125, IV.137. 34. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, IV.141. 35. R. P. H. Green, “Introduction,” in Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), xx. 36. For example, Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics



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and Politics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). 37. Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics, 540. 38. Peter Ivan Kaufman,“Patience and/or Politics: Augustine and the Crisis at Calama, 408–409,” Vigiliae Christianae 57, no. 1 (2003): 22–35. 39. Nectarius, “Epistle 90,” in Augustine, Political Writings, ed. E. M. Atkins and R. J. Dodaro, trans. E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–2. 40. Augustine, “Epistle 91,” in Augustine, Political Writings, 3, 5. Augustine emphasizes sexual modesty and simplicity to contrast with the pagan festivals’ emphasis on natural fertility; see throughout his comments on the adulterous Jupiter and his use of the metaphors of “flowers” and “flourishing.” 41. Augustine, “Epistle 91,” 2. 42. Nectarius, “Epistle 103,” in Augustine, Political Writings, 8. 43. Nectarius, “Epistle 103,” in Augustine, Political Writings, 9. 44. Nectarius, “Epistle 103,” in Augustine, Political Writings, 9. 45. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 299–308; on these trends, see especially the discussion in Samuel Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire (New York: Macmillan, 1921), Book V; William Harris Stahl, “Introduction,” in Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); and H. Bloch, “The Pagan Revival in the West at the End of the Fourth Century,” in The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. Arnaldo Momigliano (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963). 46. In 412 Volusianus recounts to Augustine a banquet, also attended by Marcellinus, at which various criticisms of Christianity follow from a lively discussion “regarding ‘invention’ in rhetoric” and other scholastic topics. See Epistles 135 and 136 in Augustine, Letters, vol. 3, trans. Sister Wilfrid Parsons (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1953). 47. Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, chaps. 8–9. 48. Brown takes Augustine’s late tendency to refer to “your” Virgil—counterpoised against “our” Scripture—as evidence of a kind of “Christian nationalism” in support of which Augustine emphasizes the richness of Christian literature. See Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 306. 49. Augustine, “Epistle 104,” in Political Writings, 14. 50. Augustine, “Epistle 104,” in Political Writings, 15. 51. Augustine, “Epistle 104,” in Political Writings, 17. 52. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1972), II.ii.50. 53. Compare with his remarks on early Rome in his 411/412 letter to Marcellinus, “Epistle 138,” in Political Writings, 40–41. 54. Augustine, City of God, II.xvii.66. 55. Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Republic, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), I.xxv.65, I.xxxii.77. 56. Augustine, The City of God, II.xxi.74.

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57. Augustine, The City of God, II.xxi.75. 58. The fact that Augustine pays little to no attention to Scipio’s considerable discussion of regime types and theory of mixed government in Books I–III of The Republic points to some of the difficulties in interpreting Augustine’s political thought. Augustine tends to confine his thoughts on political life to investigations of the nature and limits of human community and earthly peace. 59. Augustine, The City of God, XIX.xxi.881–82. Robert Dodaro points out that this large gap between Augustine’s initial comments on Scipio’s definition of a republic (Book II) and his proof that no commonwealths have existed (Book XIX) is not as puzzling as interpreters have often found if one recognizes that a crucial step in the proof is demonstrating that true justice is found only in the proper worship of the one true God—a demonstration that occupies him for many if not all of the intervening books. See Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 16. 60. Augustine, City of God, II.xxi.75; Cicero, Republic, V.i.245–47. 61. Cicero, Republic, II.xliv.183. 62. Augustine, City of God, XIX.xxi.882–83. 63. Augustine, The City of God, III.v–xv.191–205. Note that substantial portions of these pages have been lost. 64. Augustine, The City of God, III.xxv.213–15. 65. Augustine, The City of God, III.xxii.211. 66. Augustine, The City of God, III.xxii.211. 67. Augustine, The City of God, VI.xvi.269, VI.xiii.265–67. 68. On Augustine’s uses of the “two cities” outside of City of God, see Gerard O’Daly, Augustine’s City of God: A Reader’s Guide (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), chap. 4. 69. Augustine, The City of God, XI.I.429–30. 70. Augustine, The City of God, XIV.xxviii.593; see in general Books XIV–XVIII. 71. Augustine, The City of God, XIX.xvii.877. 72. Augustine, The City of God, XIX.xii–xvi. 73. See especially Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963); and R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). This probably also includes Oliver O’Donovan, “Augustine’s City of God xix and Western Political Thought,” Dionysius 11 (1987): 89–110. 74. See, for example, Peter J. Burnell, “The Status of Politics in St. Augustine’s City of God,” History of Political Thought 13, no. 1 (1992): 13–29; Paul J. Cornish, “Augustine’s Contribution to the Republican Tradition,” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 2 (2010): 133–48. 75. Augustine, The City of God, XIX.xxiv.890. 76. Augustine, The City of God, V.xii.197.

chapter 2

A Medieval Ciceronian John of Salisbury C ary J. Nederman

C

icero’s social and political thought was ubiquitous during the Latin Mid        dle Ages, both before and after the reception of Aristotle’s Nicoma        chean Ethics and Politics in the mid-thirteenth century.1 But no matter the extent to which Ciceronian ideas pervaded Western Christian philosophy, there is just a single author who self-identified as an adherent to Cicero’s ideas: the mid-twelfth-century English philosopher and churchman John of Salisbury (1115/20–80). It would be impossible to narrate the story of Cicero’s medieval reception without discussing the contributions of John, who was something of a polymath. He authored a major work of social and political theory, the Policraticus; a shorter treatise with important discussions of pedagogy and speculative philosophy, the Metalogicon; and a long satirical and didactic poem about philosophers and courtiers called the Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum. These works date from the period between 1154 and 1159, although they may have had origins in John’s school days in Paris between 1135 and 1147. In addition, John composed works of history and hagiography and compiled two substantial collections of correspondence. All along, he was deeply engaged in the ecclesiopolitical affairs of his time, in particular in the service of successive archbishops of Canterbury between 1148 and 1170.2 He died in 1180 as bishop of Chartres.3 Throughout his main philosophical writings, John explicitly professed to follow the moderately skeptical methodology Cicero laid out as a result of his selfidentification as an adherent of the New Academy.4 Thus, in the prologue to the Metalogicon, he proclaims himself to be “an Academic in matters which to the wise man are doubtful,” which for John means “I do not swear that what I say is true but, be it true or false, I remain content with probability alone.”5 Quoting Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations II.5 and On Duties III.20, he praises the principle 35

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of probabilism and rejects the “dialecticians” who claim to have attained certain knowledge.6 Likewise, in the Policraticus, John observes that “Cicero himself witnesses that he was transformed into one of those who is in doubt about each matter about which wise men may pose questions.”7 Indeed, John dedicates several chapters to demonstrating “why the Academic School is preferable to others for imitation,” namely because “in the examination of truth each person reserves to himself freedom of judgment and the authority of writers is to be considered useless when it is subdued by a better argument.”8 Referring to one of his favorite themes of modestia or moderatio, he contends that the New Academy alone evades what he calls “the precipice of falsehood” occasioned by rash assertions of certitude.9 Academic teachings coincided closely with the broader tenor of his intellectual sensibilities. No element of John’s work so thoroughly reflects the spirit and the substance of Ciceronian thought as his insistence on the practicality of philosophy.10 Like Cicero, John did not embrace the traditional doctrine that contemplation is inherently superior to and more praiseworthy than action.11 To the contrary, he adopted the position that the whole point of philosophical inquiry is to provide guidance in conducting one’s affairs.12 This orientation constitutes the core of John’s main contribution to medieval philosophy. The Metalogicon is meant to be a practical guidebook for human fulfillment through a morally guided quest for knowledge, a goal that John regards to be of far greater worth and far more befitting the philosopher than the technical pursuits too often found in the schools. Similarly, in proposing the political ideas of the Policraticus, he sought above all to illustrate the principle that philosophy provides invaluable aid in achieving the good life for the individual and the community. The vitality of John’s thought consists primarily in its confrontation with the tensions between the demands of everyday life, whether in a classroom or at court, and the requirements of living well in a moral and religious sense. His vision of philosophy is a self-consciously practical one of revealing how our ethical and intellectual characteristics may help us navigate toward lives that complete our earthly potential while also attaining the ultimate heavenly reward. Much of John’s career proves a testament to his conviction that philosophy only has value to the extent that it shapes our choices and actions. He did not discriminate radically between his speculative and his practical work. Philosophy for John was not to be left at the schoolhouse door, for it ought to occupy an important place in the world at large. There could hardly be a point of view more congenial to that of Cicero. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that John’s proclivities rendered him an unalloyed adherent to every feature of Cicero’s doctrines. Rather, John brings some elements of Ciceronian thought to the forefront and adapts them to his



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intellectual needs, especially in a Christian context; others recede into the background when they do not suit his purposes. Just because John announces himself to be a devotee of Cicero does not mean he is an uncritical disciple in all matters. This chapter highlights several Ciceronian concepts that were especially relevant and useful to John’s intellectual project. These include Cicero’s account of the genesis and evolution of civilized humanity, his naturalistic model of justice and political order, his attack on tyrannical government, his advocacy of moderation, and his theory of friendship and its practice. Each feature of Ciceronian thought appropriated by John is translated and transposed into a Christian framework. For all of his pronouncements of devotion to Cicero, John could never have embraced “pure” Ciceronianism. Origins of Society A fundamental issue addressed by John is the role nature plays in the foundations of social and political order. This concern is evident across the range of his works. That he adopts such a naturalistic framework in the Policraticus might seem sensible, but it appears also and especially as a crucial feature of the Metalogicon. This is because John develops there a key Ciceronian theme: that humans are transformed from animalistic primordial beings into civil creatures as a consequence of realizing the inhering human capacities of reason and language.13 Thus, education forms a highly relevant element of his naturalism. It may well be wondered why John appealed to a Ciceronian conception of the natural foundations of society in the Metalogicon. The answer lies in his aim to refute the doctrine that humans, endowed with fixed natures, ought not to seek to improve their lot or condition on Earth, ought not to develop their minds and skills. Instead, they may only find redemption directly in the grace of God, shunning the material world and their terrestrial natures completely.14 By contrast, John argues, God through nature has granted to humankind the capacity to advance its earthly lot by diligent application of the native faculties of reason and speech. This is not to say that John considers man’s nature to be wholly perfectible on its own; grace is still required to complete what nature has begun. Yet men may accomplish much by nature alone.15 Toward this end, John adapted a version of Cicero’s depiction of the primitive development of human association (most fully, but not exclusively, described in On Invention I.2–3).16 He uses his Ciceronian source to demonstrate that social interaction among men is an important well-spring of true (albeit partial, because merely mortal) happiness or blessedness (beatitudo). The Metalogicon regards nature, “the most benign parent and governor of all things in order most due,” to be imprinted with a divine plan.17 Thus, if nature has granted to man alone

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the powers of speech and reason, this is so he above all other creatures may “gain blessedness.”18 Such a plan is evident, in the first place, from the observation and investigation by reason of the structure of the universe: “The one and true God, in order to bind the parts of the universe in a firm alliance and to keep charity alive, ordered them in such a way that one thing needed the help of another, and one made good the deficiency of another, every single one being as it were a member of every other one. All things if separated from one another are thus only half complete, but are made perfect when allied to others, since all things are held together by mutual support.”19 This theme of reciprocity runs throughout John’s corpus. For instance, it forms the basis for his organic metaphor for the polity, to be addressed below. But in the Metalogicon, the model of the mutual intercommunication of members is seen to indicate the natural course that ought to guide human behavior. “It is not possible even to imagine a kind of blessedness which knows nothing of communion or exists outside society,” John declares, because reason’s knowledge of the world dictates that this is the essence of nature as designed by the divine will.20 Therefore, whoever wishes to achieve supreme happiness is well advised to seek earthly beatitude in accordance with nature, that is, in association with his fellow human beings. To imperil society by assailing man’s capacity to improve his rational powers thus cuts him off from the happiness God has allotted to him in the present life and excludes the possibility of fulfilling the terms of divinely bestowed grace. In effect, John’s view is that rational human nature demands of man a level of sociability unparalleled in the rest of nature. In Ciceronian fashion, however, the Metalogicon argues that reason’s discovery of the naturalness of association is insufficient. The rational faculty is individual and personal in its impact, so that left to itself, it could never generate the community it knows to be natural to and beneficial for human existence. Instead, reason must be made manifest by speech (and eloquent speech at that) if the sociability implicit in human nature is to be widely awakened and invigorated.21 Such enlightened eloquence “gave birth to so many glorious cities, brought together and made allies of so many kingdoms, and united and bound so many peoples in the bonds of charity, that whoever strives to put asunder what God has joined together for the common benefit of all would rightly be accounted the common enemy of all.”22 Speech is the mechanism by which wisdom translates its insights into public proclamations and persuades men to follow their natural inclination by surrendering their private interests in favor of the common good. Should humans be deprived of this faculty of discourse, even if they retained their rational abilities, they “will become brute beasts, and cities will seem like farmyards rather than gatherings of human beings in the bonds of society so that by taking their share of



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responsibility and paying back friendship with friendship they may live according to the same principles of justice.”23 John’s vision of society is thus comparable to Cicero’s in its quasi-voluntary quality. Human association is not simply a matter of several people living in close geographic proximity; it is an agreement to share a common life in faith, morals, economic transactions, and all the other features that compose a community. Speech alone renders an explicit agreement possible; it must be an eloquent use of language indeed that can convince basically selfish men that by nature they should prefer the common good to personal welfare. In this regard, John’s reliance on Cicero is pronounced. The Metalogicon presumes that the bond of association among men, although natural, is simultaneously a product of their active cooperation. Public institutions are not, properly speaking, purely natural, because they are contingent on the active participation of all persons subject to them. Whoever might dispute this conclusion, John says, is an opponent of “all cities simultaneously and the whole of civil life,” because by claiming that men should not develop their capacities for reason and speech, any opportunity for them to associate is denied in the process.24 Although the price paid by humanity for committing the original sin was high, it did not extend to eradicating any communal inclination in the nature of humankind. Indeed, for humans to be rendered utterly incapable of association, it would have been necessary to mute them and strip them of their reason, which never occurred as a result of the Fall. It is thus a dangerous error to interpret the fixity of postlapsarian human nature as a permanent condition; if this were correct, society could never have been formed originally, let alone maintained. John recognizes that conscious effort is required on the part of men if they are to join together in a communal life. Human nature is incapable of impelling them to congregate apart from diligent application of rational inquiry combined with eloquent persuasion. Without this activity on behalf of social unity, the sinful and egoistic side of man will prevail, and no common civil relations and institutions can emerge. John seems to conceive of human association as a process of man refining and improving his own abilities to aid the cause of nature. The Metalogicon’s understanding of the genesis of society is profoundly indebted to Cicero’s notion that nature’s endowment is only a point of departure, which men must develop and shape if they are truly to live in accordance with their own natural predilections. Political Naturalism: The Body Politic and Justice John’s commitment to naturalism is reinforced in the Policraticus, in which he repeatedly asserts that “nature is the best guide to living.”25 The Policraticus

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follows the teaching in the Metalogicon that nature provides the foundation for human capabilities, but these are only potentialities that must be realized and completed by men’s activity. “The beginning of each thing is from nature,” he observes, but people must develop their natural capacities by means of practice until they master their art, a principle that “obtains in liberal and mechanical occupations” alike.26 Nature provides a baseline, an opportunity, on which humans may (and should) build to improve their own condition. The operations of nature offer a model for human conduct and association. “The civil life should imitate nature,” John insists. “Otherwise, life is duly called not merely uncivil, but rather bestial and brute.” He admits that other “creatures devoid of reason,” such as bees, may be gregarious.27 But inasmuch as “man is superior to other animals in that he exercises reason and understanding,” the natural scheme for living well may only be realized with cooperation among the people who partake in it, based on their rational faculties.28 Living together in an organized society requires men to put their natural inclinations to work. Without doubt, the most obvious indication of John’s naturalistic orientation is his extensive analogy between the human body and social and political order, in other words, the body politic. The use of this metaphor, which takes up the entirety of the fifth and sixth books of the Policraticus, has been widely and properly celebrated as a watershed contribution to the tradition of thought that models political organization along organic lines.29 In particular, the version of the organic metaphor articulated in the Policraticus is unprecedented in detail and scope. There has been some debate regarding the source of John’s inspiration for his organic naturalism. John ascribes the analogy to a letter of instruction purportedly written by Plutarch to Emperor Trajan. It has long been recognized that this letter was a fake; recent scholars have concluded that John himself created it.30 As to the actual stimulus for John’s metaphor, scholarship has pointed to Livy, the Bible and the Fathers, Seneca, Roman law, and medieval neo-Platonism.31 Given the character of the naturalism found in the Policraticus, the most plausible inspiration is Cicero, who in On Duties III.32 used the organic analogy to connect the maintenance of bodily health to social and political order. Although John moves far beyond the relatively schematic description of the body proffered by Cicero, it is noteworthy that he retains many elements of the terminology associated with the Roman system of government. John begins with the observation that the commonwealth (res publica) may be likened to a “body which is animated by the grant of divine reward and which is driven by the command of the highest equity and ruled by a sort of rational management.”32 He proposes that the differentiation of the offices (officia) of political society may be represented in a similar way to the distinction of the parts of the human anatomy.



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The body politic is invoked in the Policraticus as the expression of a principle of cooperative harmony through which otherwise disparate individuals and interests are reconciled and bound together. Thus, John recurrently stresses “reciprocity” as the salient characteristic of natural and social systems. He insists that “there can be no faithful and firm cohesion where there is not an enduring union of wills and as it were a cementing together of souls. If this is lacking, it is in vain that the works of men are in harmony, since hollow pretence will develop into open injury, unless the real spirit of helpfulness is present.”33 All the parts of the body must be truly dedicated to a shared welfare that supersedes the aggregate private goods within the polity. The ruler and magistrates are advised to attend “to the common utility of all,” the lesser parts are counseled “in all things [to] observe constant reference to the public unity,” and in general “all the members” are expected to “provide watchfully for the common advantage of all.”34 The life of the body politic can only be maintained and nurtured by means of a joint commitment to a public good that benefits every part without distinction, from the royal head through the various magistracies, all the way down to the feet, which consist of peasants and artisans. “Each and all,” John insists, “are as it were members of one another by a sort of reciprocity, and each regards his own interest as best served by that which he knows to be most advantageous for the others.”35 His political body is one where, beyond all social differentiation, “mutual charity would reign everywhere,” because all wills are attuned to the precept of an enduring common purpose that encompasses the true interests of the whole.36 Unity follows from cooperation, and cooperation stems from the existence of a good shared by the entire community and each of its members. This theme contains clear resonances of Cicero’s idea of the fundamental unity of humanity (as in On the Laws I.16). A question remains about what constitutes the substance of the common good of the body politic. How is the public welfare to be realized? In the physical organism, the joint purpose is achieved by maintaining the health of the whole body. Analogously, John contends that the “health” of the body politic, the public welfare, is coextensive with the dissemination of justice throughout the organs and members. His definition of the common good in terms of justice is simultaneously embedded in a recognition of a correlative obligation on the part of all community members: “So long as the duties (officia) of each individual are performed with an eye to the advantage of the whole, as long, that is, as justice is practiced, the sweetness of honey pervades the allotted sphere of all.”37 This portends John’s move into overtly Ciceronian territory, echoing the words of On Duties III.22. Every organ of the body must conduct itself according to the dictates of justice if the polity is to exist as a corporate unity. All other public

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goods flow from the presence of justice in the corporate totality, and none of the collateral benefits of human society are possible without that equity, which is the product of the just will. Why would John make justice the touchstone of the political organism’s common good? The answer has much to do with how he defines justice. Following Cicero’s formulation in On Duties I.23, the Policraticus asserts, “It is agreed that justice consists chiefly of not doing harm and of prohibiting out of duty to humanity those who seek to do harm. When you do harm, you assent to injury. And when you do not impede those who seek to do harm, you then serve injustice.”38 Justice demands responsibility toward one’s fellows; this duty is not simply constituted by a negative obligation to refrain from the commission of injury but also entails a positive duty to protect others from harm. To behave in accordance with justice requires one to ensure that one’s own acts do not threaten the good of others and to attend to the injurious actions that other people may commit. Justice is inherently productive of social cooperation, whereas injustice necessarily tends to human disharmony and social disintegration. We may observe, then, that John’s Cicero-inflected approach to justice has important repercussions for his theory of the body politic. The effect of his argument is the wide diffusion of obligation for the maintenance of justice: All parts of the body politic are ultimately charged with guarding and protecting the common good, just as in Cicero’s view, and refraining from the commission of injury is insufficient to be a just person. One must also be cognizant of harm to others; it is an active (rather than purely passive) virtue. Tyranny and Tyrannicide In the same section of On Duties where Cicero makes overt political use of organic imagery, he analyzes the predicament of the tyrant and defends the legitimacy of tyrannicide. John of Salisbury in many ways recapitulates Cicero’s connection between the health of the (political) body and defense against tyranny. Because John contends that cooperation between the parts of the body is achieved through the disposition of each member toward the practice of justice in the whole, the organs and limbs have a duty to resist the disease of injustice when it threatens to infect the organism. John thereby argues that the tyrant— the foe of that justice constitutive of the health and good order of the political organism—is to be opposed directly by those other parts of the body who share responsibility for advancing justice. In turn, declining to enforce justice against the tyrant implicates oneself in the commission of tyranny. This leads John to assert that the tyrant is rightfully to be slain; his justification of tyrannicide may be regarded as a direct logical consequence of his approach to the body politic.



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John’s theory of tyrannicide in the Policraticus depends on its close relationship with the idea that in the political organism all members have definite duties toward serving the common welfare by promoting justice in every sphere of public life, a view that echoes Cicero in many ways. No one who is not himself beyond the bounds of virtue can properly decline responsibility for opposing the rule of the tyrant, by violent means if necessary. The association between John’s discussion of tyrannicide and his conception of the body politic may be located in the context of his treatment of flattery (about which more will be said later). This may seem an odd place to assert the legitimacy of slaying a tyrant. John’s immediate purpose in invoking the link is to demonstrate that although flattery is ordinarily evil, it is not always so. He reasons that as long as some measure of justice is present at court, the good man has a duty to speak frankly and openly to the ruler and even criticize those royal actions he regards as opposed to moral rectitude and orthodox faith. To flatter the king under such circumstances, rather than counsel him honestly, places private gain before public welfare. John believes the reverse to be true in the case of the tyrant. To flatter a tyrant is to protect oneself and one’s community from the wrath and vengefulness that might guide the tyrannical ruler’s reaction to honest advice. If by flattery and dissimulation one may turn a tyrant away from an evil policy or mitigate its harmful effects, then one has a clear obligation to do so, according to John. After all, John regarded the tyrant to be evil incarnate, the imago pravitatis, to whom no respect or subservience is owed.39 Hence, for the sake of the whole polity, one should use those means to which one has access, including flattery, to deflect the debilitating and sinful consequences of tyrannical rule.40 As part of his “proof ” for the validity of this claim, John cites tyrannicide. His argument is deceptively simple: “In the secular literature [that is, Cicero] there is a caution that one must live differently with a tyrant than with a friend. It is not lawful to flatter a friend, but it is permitted to flatter (mulcare) the ears of a tyrant. For it is lawful to flatter whomever it is lawful to kill. Furthermore, it is not only lawful but equitable and just to kill a tyrant.”41 This passage is a mash-up of two apparently unrelated Ciceronian teachings. One is derived from On Friendship 89, that flattery is unbecoming a virtuous man, except when a tyrant is involved, in which case flattering him is justifiable. The other is found in On Duties III.32, that robbery of a tyrant does not violate nature because it is morally right to kill a tyrant. John weaves these together into a syllogism in which the principle of the propriety of tyrannicide is the minor premise (the major premise is that whoever may be slain may be flattered).42 The conclusion of the syllogism is that one may licitly flatter a tyrant—precisely what we

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might expect in the context of the section about flattery where the argument appears. John makes a direct connection between the prospective legitimacy of killing a tyrant and his organic naturalism by observing that tyranny itself ought to be understood as a crime against the body of justice (corpus iustitiae). When viewed from this perspective, John argues, “Not only do tyrants commit a crime against the public, but, if it is possible, more than the public,” by which he presumably means God. In other words, because justice is endemic to a political community, to offend against justice itself (the crime of the tyrant) is an unnatural assault on the body politic.43 This imputes to everyone concerned with the performance of justice the authority to act against, prosecute, the tyrant by the appropriate means. Fear of retribution cannot excuse hesitation: “Truly there will be no one to avenge a public enemy,” since the tyrant is the friend of none, nor does he enjoy any just claim on loyalty.44 Indeed, John describes the eradication of the tyrant in terms of a duty: “Whoever does not prosecute [the tyrant] sins against himself and against the whole body of the secular republic (in totum rei publicae mundanae corpus).”45 So John does not regard tyrannicide as a matter of choice for the individual; it is an obligation incumbent on every community member, when appropriate. In turn, those who renounce their duty are accused by John of complicity with tyranny. By referring to the corporate “body” of the republic, and by associating it with the corpus iustitia, John directs his reader’s attention to his theory of the body politic. The implication is clear: the immediate reason every person in the polity is obliged to oppose the tyrant, even to the point of slaying the oppressor, is rooted in the organic conception of the secular community, just as in Cicero’s view. Moderation and Tyranny There is another sense in which tyranny connects to the physical body, derived from John’s loathing of Epicureanism, another trait his thought shares with Cicero. If anything, John’s critical stance regarding the Eupicureans is even more extreme then Cicero’s. The seventh and eighth books of the Policraticus contain a withering critique of the Epicurean school of philosophy, especially inasmuch as its mind-set and lifestyle are intimately associated with—indeed, the source of—tyranny.46 What motivates the tyrant to impose himself on whoever he can is his deep-seated desire to seek pleasure and gratify himself sensually, that is, to live in the manner of the Epicurean. As John remarks, “They who wish to do their own will are to be rated as Epicureans; for when actions become the slave of lust, affection changes to passion.”47 For John, the tyrant is the very archetype of a willful creature, driven to dominate his fellow human



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beings: “Who is it who does not wish to come before some other one if he might be subdued?”48 Epicureanism leads men to suppose that they “can do with impunity” whatever they wish and “can to a certain degree be just like God”—not in imitation of divine goodness, but in the belief that their wills can supplant God’s own. Thus, Epicureanism promotes the key Christian evils of pride and ambition, leading to “a passion for power and honors” that constitutes the root of tyranny.49 In turn, “pride is the beginning of all sin,” from the “poisonous root” of which grows all of the other sins: vanity, envy, anger, moroseness, avarice, gluttony, and self-indulgence.50 The glorification and unending pursuit of bodily pleasures is not merely an invitation to vice; it also yields the essential conditions under which tyranny flourishes. John’s remedy for Epicureanism is typically Ciceronian: exercising moderation. The way to resist succumbing to the evils attendant on pride—the moral origin of tyranny—is to be guided by a moderate cast of mind: “Each one more easily becomes puffed up with pride in that in which he excels others, unless he be sustained by the grace of moderation.”51 Moderation is necessary for negotiating sensual pleasure by rejecting its inherent excesses: “Nothing is unseemly except that which is beyond measure.”52 This is especially true of the rule of a king, whose governance is predicated on his moderate exercise of power. He “punishes all injuries and wrongs, and also all crimes, with moderate equity.”53 John particularly insists that care should “be taken by princes to be moderate— at one time by the vigor of justice, at another by the forgiveness of mercy— so that subjects are made to be of a single mind.”54 The moderation displayed by the king, in other words, yields the harmony that unites the disparate parts of the community (in effect, the body politic) into a harmonious whole. In turn, “discretion with regard to place, time, amount, person, and cause . . . is the source and origin of moderation in its widest sense, without which no duty is properly performed,” an apparent allusion to Cicero’s definition of decorum in Orator 70–72.55 When the ruler must exercise judgment in some particular case, moderation in this contextual sense ought to (and will) lead him toward an equitable determination. In repeated references to moderation, John’s correspondence exemplifies his avowed stance that philosophy properly plays a central role in understanding and appraising contemporary political affairs. This is especially the case for the letters dating to the period of sustained conflict between King Henry II and Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket in the late 1160s, a clash in which John was deeply enmeshed.56 Although a partisan of Becket’s cause, he criticizes both men at one or another time for failing to act within the bounds of moderation. In one missive, John speculates that Henry II would enjoy universal praise

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and acclaim “if he would only . . . act more moderately with those who reason with him, and inhibit his language and spirit from outbreaks of anger and other reprehensible emotions, according to the measure of royal dignity.”57 (Ironically, of course, it is precisely the immoderate royal temper that led [indirectly?] to Becket’s assassination.) Precisely on account of his own excessiveness, the king needs to reconcile himself with Becket: “The archbishop of Canterbury will inspire the soul of the lord king to employ moderately his divine license.”58 John’s correspondence regularly styles Henry as a “tyrant,” in the specific sense of a ruler who employs his power immoderately.59 In particular, Henry demands an unwavering and unquestioning acceptance of his dictates, to the extent that John (facetiously) remarks, “The ‘moderation’ of his requests . . . is such that it is sometimes necessary to disobey.”60 John doesn’t quite rise to the level of calling for the “tyrant” Henry to be slain, but he certainly believes that the king’s immoderate behavior requires some concerted response by men of piety and virtue. More surprising than John’s condemnation of Henry’s character is the concern expressed about the immoderate qualities of Becket’s personality. John displays an acute awareness of the archbishop’s defects, which he ascribes to a tendency to exceed moderate bounds. To one of his intimates, John bluntly states, “I have kept the faith owed to the church and archbishop of Canterbury, and I have stood by him faithfully in England and on the continent when justice and moderation seemed to be his. If he ever seemed to detour from justice or exceed the mean, I stood up to him to his face.”61 Becket showed little sense of discretion with regard to judgments about circumstance, as evidenced by John’s observation that the archbishop “has from the beginning inadvisedly provoked the resentment of the king and court by his zeal, since many provisions should have been made for place and time and persons.”62 Elsewhere, fearing Becket’s propensity toward rash behavior, John exhorted him to display virtuous moderation in his negotiations with his opponents. “It is especially expedient that your moderation be known to all,” he recommends, “With moderation write and state the conditions [of a reconciliation], since it seems to be certain that the souls of the enemies of God’s church are so hardened that they will admit no condition at all.”63 John suggests that Becket position himself as a conciliatory figure, not an extremist. Whenever someone accuses Thomas of acting out of pride or hatred, rather than virtue and religious conviction, “this opinion should be answered by exhibiting moderation in deeds and words, in conduct and dress.”64 The archbishop is advised to imitate “the most modest David” in order that “you can moderately reply” to “those who reprove, indeed severely deride you.”65 John enunciates a principle that should direct Becket: “In all things behave such that your moderation may be known by all. . . . Attend to the state of the times, the



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condition of the Roman church, the needs of the English realm.”66 The Ciceronian echoes here are unmistakable.67 In any case, the archbishop largely ignored John’s advice, even after his return to England in December 1170 (and subsequent murder in Canterbury Cathedral). A more moderate Becket may have made a far less compelling martyr, but he would have lived more in accordance with the virtues that John exhorted.68 Friendship and Flattery Probably no aspect of John’s thought reflects his Ciceronian proclivities more than his embrace of the human relation of friendship. As with Cicero, this is true in practice as well as theory. This is especially evident when we turn to the third book of the Policraticus, the main aim of which is to disparage the efforts of flatterers to manipulate their superiors for their own gain. Book 3 also contains repeated and extensive references to friendship, in particular to Cicero’s treatise on the topic. Why might friendship matter in this context? In John’s view, flattery, which predominates among courtly modes of speech, detracts from good government by leading the ruler and his counselors and servants down the path to vice. He says that flattery is always “accompanied by deception and fraud and betrayal and the infamy of lying.”69 John’s standard of speech consists in free and open debate, sincere in seeking after the honorable and the virtuous course of conduct. In his view, one should “prefer to be criticized by anyone whomsoever rather than be praised by one who . . . flatters; for no critic need be feared by the lover of truth.”70 Flattery is inimical to the kind of rational discourse oriented toward truth that he believes must accompany any government whose goal is truly to seek the common good and justice for the governed. Such a view follows directly from John’s conception of language articulated in the Metalogicon as the indispensable medium through which humanity’s welfare and happiness are realized by gaining access to truth. By contrast, friendship is antithetical to flattery. Flattery is the courtly form of Cicero’s false friendship based on “profit” and “lucrative results,” which he elucidated in On Friendship 51. Like the false friend, the flatterer seeks his own good without reference to the good of others. John explains that “since men . . . love not their friends but themselves in each instance, it is necessary to have the garb of pretense in order to be pleasing.”71 Such costumes—which John consistently compares to the masks and tricks of actors on the stage—constitute the relationship built on flattery.72 Real friendship may only flourish “if utility ceases” and “one cherishes friendship on account of its own virtues.” John agrees with Cicero that such friendship for its own sake is “rare,” commenting (perhaps somewhat hyperbolically) that it occurs among only “three or four pairs of

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friends” amid “the multitude and variety of persons”—a direct reference to On Friendship 15.73 What forms the foundation of friendship? John declares that cultivation of “benevolence toward everyone . . . is the fount of friendship and the first step toward charity.”74 Such benevolence is entirely distinct from flattery because it proceeds by “untrammeled honor, observant duty, the path of virtue, the acceptance of service, and the sincerity of words. And it is aided by fidelity, namely, constancy of speech and deed, and by truth, which is the foundation of all duties and goods.”75 Honor and virtue are the keys to real friendship. Thus, as to the question of whether “there can be friendship or love among bad men,” John sides with Cicero, On Friendship 65: “It cannot exist except among good men.” Whatever similarities seem to create a harmonious bond among evil men, he insists, are merely faint imitations of the true bond of friendship arising between people fully inculcated in virtue.76 Real reciprocity is found only among those who share virtuous characters. We may wonder why, for John, virtue among friends constitutes the chief characteristic of friendship. Because the goal of virtue is the realization of the good of others, only virtue ensures that friends will be truly oriented toward each other’s good first and foremost rather than toward their own advantage. Perhaps as important, at least for John’s immediate concern with courtly flattery, virtue stands in close and irrevocable connection to truth. Because virtue requires knowledge of the good, which is grounded in truth, the bond of friendship must rest on the mutual commitment of friends to seek and respect the truth, an evident adaptation of On Friendship 89–91. As a general precept of his thought, John emphasizes that open and free debate and criticism form a crucial quality of the public sphere of the court. Individuals should be protected in their liberty to engage in conscientious, constructive reproval of the morals of others and to challenge ideas that do not stand up to rational evaluation. Likewise, people should be prepared to listen to and consider seriously such honest criticism when it is rendered. This quality seems particularly necessary in the case of friendship, which is guided by truthfulness. “If a friend makes a mistake he is to be instructed,” John insists. “If he should instruct, he is to be listened to.”77 “Truth is stern,” but the virtuous man wants to know when he has gone astray, and the true friend provides this knowledge unflinchingly: “Better the chastisement of a friend than the fraudulent kissing-up (oscula) of a flatterer.”78 In this sense, friendship is a bond of faith ( fides), because friends can be trusted to shun pretense and speak the truth in all matters for the sake of one another.79 It should be obvious, then, why John introduces a normative standard of friendship into his discussion of courtly flattery. “Under the guise of friendship”



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the flatterer does unremitting harm, specifically, “he blocks the ears of listeners lest they hear the truth.” In support of this, John again quotes from On Friendship 90 to the effect that the man who refuses to listen to the truth endangers his own well-being.80 The flatterer covers over the faults of those he flatters, which is ultimately detrimental to the good of the flattered; the friend speaks the truth openly and wants to correct his fellow with patience and good will.81 John clearly believes that the ethical stringency of friendship should be the guiding principle in a well-ordered court. Such a court would be free of flattery, and its members would concern themselves with their various duties in such a way as to promote the common good and justice. It would be a court characterized by free and open criticism of ideas and conduct, without rancor and with the greatest degree of mutual trust. All its members would serve one another mutually and would have each other’s best interests at heart. In this sense, the model of friendship described in Book 3 of the Policraticus is intended to have direct and immediate public relevance. John is not merely describing an intimate or private relationship; he is sketching a standard of conduct against which may be judged the activities of real courtiers, to their obvious detriment. At the same time, John fully realizes that the chances for creating such a court are minimal at best. The image of the “court of friends” should perhaps be conceived as a regulative ideal rather than a blueprint he plans to apply precisely and rigorously. In particular, an honorable courtier needs to know how to distinguish between people such as himself—true friends—and those who take on the pretense of friendship for the sake of self-interest, and how to treat each. This is the central message of Book 3. John cites the dictum (derived from On Friendship 59) that “one is to live among enemies as though among friends, and to live among friends as if in the midst of enemies.”82 In other words, he believes that it is necessary to treat those of whom one is distrustful at court with a veneer of affection until one can establish their true intentions. If they prove to measure up to the standard of friendship, they can be admitted into one’s circle; thereafter, they are to be treated with honesty and valued for their own sake, which may mean they will be subjected to critical scrutiny when their words and deeds are unseemly. This is an irony of friendship for John: one feature of a truly friendly bond is the readiness of both parties to offer unsparing criticism to the other when it is appropriate and necessary. One friend so loves another that he will not shrink from the moral duty of correction. Treatment of those whose friendship is uncertain, or who are likely to be foes, requires an entirely different attitude. In this case, one should decorously maintain distance from the person until his true status becomes evident; one may be polite and cordial, but by no means should a stranger be admitted immediately

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into one’s group of friends. John especially cautions suspicion of those with great wealth and authority. It is “in doubt whether the rich and powerful are capable of loving. It is now agreed that they are never or rarely capable of loving and especially in cases where it is apparent that they love themselves rather than others.”83 Here, too, John echoes Cicero in On Friendship 65. The love of accumulation—whether of material goods or of power—is simply incompatible with the sort of unselfish affection necessary for friendship. Moreover, the wealthy man will devote all his time and energy to keeping or expanding his possessions, leaving no opportunity for the pursuits shared among friends: “The rich man is known to be an acquaintance, rarely or never a friend.”84 Consequently, a courtier desirous of friends is advised to shun such seekers after property and position. John’s adaptation of the essentially Ciceronian conception of friendship affords an especially clear illustration of the “practical” dimension of his attitude toward philosophy. John was, as has been said, a figure of some significant standing in the ecclesio-political world of the mid-twelfth century. As in other regards, he self-consciously attempted to practice the Ciceronian values he defended in his theoretical writings. Careful examination of John’s letters addressed to his “familiars” reveals how frequently he invoked the public model of friendship articulated in the Policraticus. Not only do direct references to On Friendship crop up regularly in the correspondence, there is an obvious tendency therein to rebuke personal shortcomings (of himself not less than his friends) as an expression of friendliness. John’s exchanges with intimates have the clear didactic aim of inducing the members of his friendship networks to hold to the course of virtue when faced with the challenges and temptations arising from public life.85 The letters often perform the function of offering guidance to those who find themselves in the midst of moral dilemmas. John’s missives thus suggest how he sought to practice the Ciceronian doctrine of friendship espoused in the Policraticus. In one letter, he speaks of that “true friendship, whose origins, progress, and end” may be found “faithfully in the presence of Cicero’s Laelius [the alternate name for On Friendship].” Yet theory alone is inadequate. Rather, friendship is learned “more faithfully in the practice (experientia) of the virtue itself,” which “gentile philosophers commend to the extent that they estimate it to be preferable to life, since without it living lacks joy and is odious to God as well as man.”86 This remark is deeply revealing of John’s general mind-set. Philosophy provides us with the knowledge about how to live rightly. But it remains to men to transform philosophical teachings into a guide for everyday action. John sought to capture the Ciceronian spirit in the conduct of his life and in his compositions, even if the duties during his



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time as an ecclesiastical administrator and courtier demanded a rather different set of skills. Refined oratorical technique and eloquence in speech were not primary requirements of John’s public position. Yet just as Cicero held that the true value of the contemplative life was to afford guidance to the statesman, John demonstrated that philosophy and political affairs ought to be closely intertwined. For John, the task of philosophical inquiry is to aid in discerning the good from the evil, the true from the false, and thus to illuminate the path for navigating the tricky by-ways in the courtly environment and the temporal world in general. The life of the mind and the life of action were of a piece for John of Salisbury. In this sense, we ought to take very seriously John’s self-description as a follower in the footsteps of Cicero. Notes 1. For a general discussion of Cicero’s dissemination and popularity, see Cary J. Nederman, The Bonds of Humanity: Cicero’s Legacies in European Social and Political Thought, c.1100–c.1550 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020). 2. A brief overview of John’s life and writings is Cary J. Nederman, John of Salisbury (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2005). More extensive analysis may be found in Christophe Grellard and Frèdèrique Lachaud, eds., A Companion to John of Salisbury (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 3. John’s late episcopal career has been afforded detailed examination by Karen Bollermann and Cary J. Nederman, “The Sunset Years? John of Salisbury as Bishop of Chartres and the Emergent Cult of St. Thomas Becket in France,” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 45, no. 2 (2014): 55–76. 4. See Christophe Grellard, Jean de Salisbury et le Renaissance Médiévale du Scepticisme (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2013). 5. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, trans. J. B. Hall (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013), 122. 6. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 206–7. 7. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VII.6, in Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers, trans. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 152. There are two other partial English translations of the Policraticus: John Dickinson, trans., The Statesman’s Book of John of Salisbury (New York: Knopf, 1927); Joseph B. Pike, trans., Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1938). I make use of the Nederman and Pike translations as appropriate, although with occasional modifications as warranted by the Latin text, of which there are one and a half versions: a complete edition by C. C. J. Webb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1919) and a partial version comprising Books 1–4 by Katherine Keats-Rohan (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1993). In subsequent citations of the Policraticus, the book and chapter numbers are given, followed by the name of the relevant translator and page number(s) in the English version. 8. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VII, Prologue (Nederman, 148).

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9. For modestia or moderatio, see Cary J. Nederman, “The Aristotelian Doctrine of the Mean and John of Salisbury’s Concept of Liberty,” Vivarium 24 (1986): 128–42. For “precipice of falsehood,” see John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VII.1 (Nederman, 149). 10. On this feature of Cicero’s thought, see the contributions to Walter Nicgorski, ed., Cicero’s Practical Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2012). 11. See Yelena Baraz, A Written Republic: Cicero’s Philosophical Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), esp. 67–78. 12. This is documented thoroughly in the final section of the entry on John of Salisbury by Karen Bollermann and Cary J. Nederman, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed April 26, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/john-salisbury/#PracPhil. 13. A fuller exposition of Cicero’s position may be found in Nederman, Bonds of Humanity, 17–20. 14. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 137, 141–42. John refers to the doctrine propounded by “Cornificus” and his devotees. This figure (pseudonymous and possibly fictitious) is the primary target of John’s ire throughout the Metalogicon. 15. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 125–26. 16. For more complete references to Cicero’s teachings about reason and speech, see Nederman, Bonds of Humanity, 14–17. 17. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 124. 18. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 125. 19. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 125. 20. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 125. 21. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 126. Following inter alia De Oratore I.30–34, in which Cicero praises the necessity of language as the founding principle of all human communities. 22. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 126. 23. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 126–27. 24. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 127. 25. For example, John of Salisbury, Policraticus, IV, Prologue, VI.21, VIII.18 (Nederman, 27, 127, 201). 26. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, IV, Prologue, VI.19 (Nederman, 125). 27. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, IV, Prologue, VI.21 (Nederman, 127). 28. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VII.2 (Nederman, 150). 29. See Tilman Struve, Die Entwicklung der Organologischen Staatsauffassung im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1978), 123–48; and Gianluca Briguglia, Il Corpo Vivente dello Stato: Una Metafora Politica (Pavia: Bruno Mondadori, 2006). 30. Janet Martin summarizes the evidence for this in “John of Salisbury as Classical Scholar,” in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Michael Wilks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 194–96. 31. Tilman Struve, “The Importance of the Organism in the Political Theory of John of Salisbury,” in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Michael Wilks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 304–7. 32. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, V.2 (Nederman, 66). 33. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, V.7 (Nederman, 77).



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34. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VI.24 (Nederman, 136), VI.20 (Nederman, 126), and VI.24 (Nederman, 135). 35. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VI.20 (Nederman, 126). 36. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VI.29 (Nederman, 124). 37. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VI.22 (Nederman, 131). 38. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, IV.12 (Nederman, 62). 39. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VIII.17 (Nederman, 190–91). 40. A particularly compelling example of John’s views on the commission of tyrannicide is afforded by John’s adaptation of the story of the biblical Judith; see John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VIII.20 (Nederman, 207–9). This tale is discussed in Karen Bollermann and Cary J. Nederman, “The Sword in Her Hand: Judith as Anglo-Saxon Warrior and John of Salisbury’s Tyrant Slayer,” in Thinking Politics in the Vernacular from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Gianluca Briguglia and Thomas Ricklin (Freibourg, Switzerland: Academic Press Freibourg, 2011), 23–41. 41. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.15 (Nederman, 15). 42. This is discussed in some detail by Jan van Laarhoven, “Thou Shall NOT Slay a Tyrant,” in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Michael Wilks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 320. 43. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, IV.1 (Nederman, 28–29). 44. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.15 (Nederman, 25). 45. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.15 (Nederman, 25). 46. For an elaboration of John’s attitude toward Epicureanism, and its Ciceronian roots, see Cary J. Nederman and Karen Bollermann, “‘The Extravagance of the Senses’: Epicureanism, Priestly Tyranny, and the Becket Problem in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, n.s. 3, no. 8 (2011): 1–25. 47. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VIII.24 (Pike, 399). 48. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VII.17 (Nederman, 163), translation slightly modified. 49. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VII.17 (Nederman, 162–63). 50. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VIII.1 (Pike, 295). 51. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VIII.2 (Pike, 297). 52. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VIII.12 (Pike, 373), emphasis added. 53. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 4.2 (Nederman, 31). 54. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 4.8. (Nederman, 51). 55. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 8.12 (Nederman, 187). John uses similar language at 1.5 (Pike, 23) and quotes Cicero, On Duties, I.113. 56. The relationship between John and Becket receives thorough examination in Cary J. Nederman with Karen Bollermann, Thomas Becket: An Intimate Portrait (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2020). 57. John of Salisbury, The Letters of John of Salisbury, ed. W. J. Millor and C. N. L. Brooke, vol. 2, The Later Letters, 1163–1180 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 634– 35 (Letter 287). 58. John of Salisbury, The Letters, 2:686–87 (Letter 297). 59. For instance, John of Salisbury, The Letters, 2:237–38 (Letter 187), 2:429–30 (Letter 234), 2:455–58 (Letter 239).

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60. John of Salisbury, The Letters, 2:468–69 (Letter 241). 61. John of Salisbury, The Letters, 2:20–23 (Letter 139). 62. John of Salisbury, The Letters, 2:48–49 (Letter 150). 63. John of Salisbury, The Letters, 2:168–69 (Letter 176). 64. John of Salisbury, The Letters, 2:170–71 (Letter 176). 65. John of Salisbury, The Letters, 2:172–73 (Letter 176). 66. John of Salisbury, The Letters, 2:190–91 (Letter 179). 67. See Cicero, On Duties, I.142, in which he dissects the meaning of moderatio in terms of “orderliness of conduct and seasonableness of occasions.” 68. For more on John’s role in the martyrdom and its aftermath, see Bollermann and Nederman, “The Sunset Years?” 69. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.5 (Pike, 165). 70. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, I.14 (Pike, 210). 71. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.7 (Pike, 170). 72. On John’s employment of this trope, see Donnalee Dox, The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 87–92. 73. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.7 (Pike, 171). 74. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.5 (Pike, 163). 75. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.5 (Pike, 163). 76. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.12 (Pike, 192). 77. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.14 (Pike, 210). 78. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.6 (Pike, 167). 79. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.6 (Pike, 167). 80. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.3 (Pike, 158). 81. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.4 (Pike, 161). 82. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.14 (Pike, 196). 83. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.12 (Pike, 192). 84. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, III.12 (Pike, 193). 85. For a detailed examination of John’s application of Ciceronian principles of friendship across the range of his correspondence, see Cary J. Nederman, “Friendship in Public Life during the Twelfth Century: Theory and Practice in the Writings of John of Salisbury,” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 38, no. 2 (2007): 385–97. 86. John of Salisbury, The Letters, 2:618 (Letter 281).

chapter 3

More’s Utopia and Its Ciceronian Roots Gary R emer

T

homas More’s Utopia is widely acclaimed as one of the most important political and literary works of Renaissance humanism. Consistent with this view of Utopia as a creation of the humanist tradition, which was devoted to the revival of classical studies, it should come as no surprise that scholarly readers have attempted to identify more than a few of its classical sources. In this chapter, I focus on Cicero as a primary influence on Utopia, highlighting (as other scholars have not) how More grounds his work in Cicero’s conception of rhetoric. What distinguishes this study from so many others that examine the classical influences on Utopia—even those that link the work to Cicero or emphasize its rhetorical nature—is that my focus on rhetoric is principally about rhetoric as an outlook or way of understanding, not as commonly viewed as a series of stylistic devices or persuasive techniques. Among the presuppositions and attitudes that characterize Cicero’s rhetorical outlook in philosophical terms, even as a weltanschauung are decorum, the principle of Ciceronian rhetoric that the orator must speak and act according to what is fitting to the given circumstance; the use of argument in utramque partem (arguing both sides of an issue); and relying on communal values and custom as criteria of probable truth and morality. Because Utopia is a dialogue with several speakers, I identify the Ciceronian rhetorical perspective held by More the author with the opinions of the character “More,” the narrator and an interlocutor. I support my claim that Ciceronian rhetoric underpins the formal structure and arguments of Utopia and that Cicero’s rhetorical perspective is taken up by the persona “More” by examining how Cicero’s rhetorical assumptions and perspective were embedded into the structure of Utopia and by looking to the characters’ views, especially when there is a consensus among them. In addition, I support my argument by 55

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looking to sources outside Utopia, including insights into More’s rhetorical outlook as expressed by Erasmus. The character in Utopia whom I contend best exemplifies the opposition to Cicero’s and More’s rhetorical standpoints is Raphael Hythloday (more about him later), who fancies himself (and is characterized by other interlocutors in the work) as a defender of philosophy and a votary of the author of the Gorgias and archcritic of rhetoric, Plato. Contrary to Cicero and More (the author and the character), Hythloday rejects decorum (and changing from one rhetorical genre to another for purposes of persuasion), opting instead for the assertion of an uncompromising and unmodified truth. He also opposes the multisided examination of politics and morality, and he advocates relying on reason independent of community values as the standard for truth and morality in policy matters. Although the author More is profoundly influenced by Cicero’s rhetoric, I contend that he does not necessarily share Cicero’s political and policy conclusions. For example, the character “More” agrees with Cicero that the vita activa is superior to the vita contemplativa.1 In More’s political context (monarchical rather than republican), this means that the vocation of a king’s counselor is more honorable than the life of an apolitical scholar. Even though the real-life More served as a counselor to King Henry VIII, we cannot say with certainty that he sided with the position of his persona in Utopia other than agreeing with the naysayer Hythloday on service to the ruler. Thus, More may possibly have chosen Utopia to express his own reservations about the primacy of the active life—the life he selected. Similarly, Cicero defends private property as just. Although the character “More,” like Cicero, opts for a system of private property over communism, we cannot prove (nor do I claim) that the author’s attitudes toward communal ownership of property are identical to those of the character “More” or of Cicero.2 Good arguments can be made on either side as to whether the author More accepts Cicero’s substantive political conclusions. A distinction must be made between More adopting Cicero’s rhetorical approach and espousing Cicero’s substantive positions on politics and policy. Although More’s substantive positions need not be identical to those of either Cicero or of the persona “More,” the author’s political and policy standpoints are circumscribed by the principles of the Ciceronian rhetorical approach, for example, decorum and adherence to the community’s mores. Thus, the author More may not agree, as do Cicero and the persona “More,” that the active life is best, but he is bound by Cicero’s rhetorical perspective, which requires that anyone who opts for the vita activa, as practiced in sixteenth-century England, must adapt his counsel (form and substance) to the monarch to what is contextually

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appropriate (in line with the decorum of counsel and the community’s values). The same holds true for More’s attitude to communal property, which may differ from that of Cicero or the persona “More” but must still be governed by Cicero’s rhetorical approach, which includes decorum and faithfulness to the moral understandings of the community. Moreover, More (like Cicero or the persona “More”) cannot assert the truth or correctness of any political policy but must weigh the different policy arguments to arrive at a tentative decision— that is, a decision that can always be altered according to more probable or persuasive arguments. Decorum—central to Cicero’s rhetoric and embraced by More—requires accommodation to circumstance, which often mandates changing with the times. Erasmus, More’s fellow humanist, makes this point in the Ciceronianus, his dialogic critique of rigid and doctrinaire Ciceronians who aped Cicero’s style in their writings.3 There, Erasmus identifies the true Ciceronian with someone who “spoke in the best possible way in the age he lived in,” which is to speak with decorum.4 Thus, Erasmus has one interlocutor, Bulephorus, ask the other interlocutor, Nosoponus, the following question: “Do you think the world as it is now has anything in common with the situation at the time when Cicero delivered his speeches?” Bulephorus continues: “Everything has been completely altered—religion, empire, government, constitution, law, customs, pursuits, even men’s physical appearance.”5 He concludes by stating that paradoxically, “it may well be that the most Ciceronian person is the one least like Cicero,” that is, the person who espouses the most appropriate views, even though these views are unlike Cicero’s own.6 Utopia’s lack of resolution suggests that the author More may not embrace the character More’s and Cicero’s political standpoints (or, for that matter, Hythloday’s), opting instead for some combination of their views or even ambivalence. Like Cicero’s philosophical dialogues, in which we cannot necessarily identify him with a view or combination of views, Utopia does not determine which speaker’s views are most correct, thereby enabling readers to reach their own conclusions. Cicero’s influence on Utopia is considered here chiefly in terms of its method and approach (i.e., that speech must be adapted to the context or that the values on which an argument is based must be derived from an audience’s own society and not from some foreign “rational” set of assumptions). In contrast, other studies often focus on More’s use of Cicero’s rhetorical techniques or categories of speech, without situating their analyses in Cicero’s broader rhetorical perspective.7 Similarly, some studies (which may include those mentioned in the previous sentence) view Cicero’s effect on Utopia as determining that the particular political and policy viewpoints of More’s dialogue parallel those of Cicero.8

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This chapter’s examination of Cicero has the advantage of considering Cicero’s rhetorical influence as broader than just stylistic, while allowing for the possibility that More’s stance on socioeconomic and political issues may not be identical to Cicero’s own standpoint on the same issues. Thomas More, Humanist Sir Thomas More was a man of prodigious talents and varied vocations—lawyer, Lord High Chancellor of England, author, and religious polemicist. He was a martyr and a saint (canonized in 1935) for choosing execution over taking the Oath of Supremacy, which required any person taking public or church office in England to swear allegiance to the monarch as Supreme Head of the Church of England. More is also remembered as a devoted humanist. As Paul Oskar Kristeller states: “Renaissance humanism . . . constitutes a significant aspect of the life and work of Thomas More.”9 What was a humanist or, to be more exact, a Renaissance humanist? The origin of the term “humanist” can be traced back to the Renaissance.10 Humanista in Latin, and its vernacular equivalents in Italian, French, English, and other languages, were terms commonly used in the sixteenth century for the professor or teacher or student of the humanities, and this usage remained alive and was well understood until the eighteenth century. . . . The term humanista, coined at the height of the Renaissance period, was in turn derived from an older term, that is, from the “humanities” or studia humanitatis. . . . By the first half of the fifteenth century, the studia humanitatis came to stand for a clearly defined cycle of scholarly disciplines, namely grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy, and the study of each of these subjects was understood to include the reading and interpretation of its standard ancient writers in Latin and, to a lesser extent, in Greek.11 Of the five subjects that make up humanistic studies, rhetoric is most distinctively humanist. As Kristeller observes, Renaissance humanism “must be understood as a characteristic phase in what may be called the rhetorical tradition in Western culture.”12 Hannah H. Gray emphasizes not only rhetoric’s preeminence for the humanists but also its philosophical implications for them—consistent with what I call a “rhetorical perspective” or “rhetorical outlook” above: “certain basic presuppositions and attitudes . . . identify the [humanist] movement as a whole,” attitudes derived from classical rhetoric “or classical rhetoric as interpreted and adapted in the Renaissance.”13 It was Cicero’s rhetoric, above that of

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others (including Aristotle and even Quintilian) that took pride of place among Renaissance humanists. Kristeller reflects the scholarly consensus when he speaks of Renaissance humanism as “an age of Ciceronianism.”14 As for the professional status of the Renaissance humanists, because of the central importance of literary preoccupations, they were mostly “active either as teachers of the humanities in secondary schools or universities, or as secretaries to princes or cities.”15 Based on these criteria, More fits squarely in the humanist camp. Like many other humanists, he counseled King Henry VIII as secretary and personal adviser.16 He received a solid classical education at the University of Oxford. He achieved proficiency in Latin and Greek. He was part of a London-based circle of humanists, which included John Colet, Thomas Linacre, Thomas Lupset, and William Grocyn. He was friends with the most renowned of northern Renaissance humanists, Erasmus, who dedicated to More his Praise of Folly or, in Latin, Encomium Moriae, a pun on More’s name. Surveying More’s writings, we see that “a sizable part of them fits the humanist pattern rather neatly.” Thus, we find that More wrote about and made use of his skills in all five of the studia humanitatis.17 Consistent with other humanists, rhetoric was of especial significance to him. For More, rhetoric is “the highest art of human discourse [and] the culmination of the arts of speech and letters.” Accordingly, of the three literary arts (trivium)—grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric—More subordinates the first two to rhetoric because “as the most general art of human expression and persuasion,” rhetoric subsumes the others.18 Like most of his humanist contemporaries, More derives his conception of rhetoric primarily from Cicero.19 Foremost among More’s humanist writings is Utopia, which has been characterized as “a thoroughly humanistic work.”20 What defines Utopia as such? “Central to the culture of Renaissance humanism is what might best be called ‘the art of dialogue.’”21 The dialogic model the humanists emulate is chiefly Ciceronian, as is the model that More selects for Book I of Utopia.22 Stylistically, the Ciceronian model, like More’s Book I, is characterized by “introductory exchanges followed by long set speeches” in contrast to the Platonic dialogue, which “simulates the give-and-take of actual conversation.”23 In addition, More adheres to Cicero’s prescription, in On Duties, that conversation be casual and informal.24 Moreover, it has been observed that More clearly models Book I after Cicero’s On the Ideal Orator in that in each dialogue attention is paid to “the verisimilitude of setting and character”; for example, Hythloday is placed in a realistic historical context and is juxtaposed against actual historical figures like More, Peter Giles, and Cardinal Morton.25 More important than Cicero’s stylistic effect, however, are the more fundamental effects of the Ciceronian dialogue on Utopia, for example, Utopia’s adherence to the rules of decorum, its

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open-endedness, and its grounding in communal norms. These characteristics, all of which have their roots in Ciceronian sermo, are discussed in the next section. More the Ciceronian, Hythloday the Anti-Ciceronian Utopia is composed of two books, populated by several characters, most importantly the character “More,” whose views may or may not differ from the actual More, and Raphael Hythloday, an old, sunburned, long-bearded (fictional) world traveler and philosopher, who is the most frequent speaker in the work. Early in Book I, the character “More” is sent by King Henry VIII on a royal trade mission to Flanders. He visits Antwerp, where he meets Peter Giles, a classical scholar, who introduces him to Hythloday. After introductions, the three men retire to a garden “on a bench covered with grassy turf ” to engage in conversation.26 Hythloday reports to “More” and Giles about his many voyages, comparing the pros and cons of the customs and institutions of European states with those of the distant lands he has visited, after which “More” and Giles urge him (because of his wisdom and experience) to enter into a king’s service as an adviser. Hythloday, however, scoffs at the proposal. What ensues is a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of Hythloday joining the king’s counsel— a discussion commonly called “The Dialogue of Counsel.” Hythloday speaks at length about why he refuses to undertake such employment. He finds support in a story he relates about a dinner he once shared in England with Cardinal Morton and some others. During this dinner, Hythloday proposes alternatives to the legal practices of England, like replacing the policy of capital punishment for theft with more moderate penalties. His proposals are initially met with ridicule, until they are taken seriously by the cardinal, at which point they are met with great general approval. Hythloday uses this story to show how futile it is to counsel a king (although Morton was not a king) when the sovereign can always expect his advisers to agree with him. In addition, Hythloday points out, no matter how good the proposed policies are, they will always appear absurd to those who find them unfamiliar—like the Utopian social, economic, and political policies (particularly communism) that Hythloday would propose to the Europeans as superior to their own. “More” responds that even if Hythloday fails at changing bad policies, he may at least improve on existing practices: “what you cannot turn to good, you may at least make as little bad as possible. For it is impossible to make everything good unless all men are good,” which “More” says that he does not expect to happen “for quite a few years yet.”27

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Instead of abandoning the commonwealth, “More” suggests that Hythloday should be willing to accommodate his positions to and compromise them for his audience, a recommendation that Hythloday equates with telling lies. According to Hythloday, although partial reforms may be achievable, these half measures can only mitigate the effects of social evils for a while, but (contra Cicero’s position and like Plato’s) “so long as private property remains, there is no hope of effecting a cure and restoring society to good health.”28 Raphael asserts that he knows this to be the case from his firsthand knowledge of the “manners and customs” of Utopia’s citizens: “If you had seen them, you would frankly confess that you had never seen a well-governed people anywhere but there.”29 “More” implores Hythloday to describe “everything” about the island to him. Book I closes with the three interlocutors eating lunch. While Book I is a dialogue, a conversation between Hythloday, “More,” and Giles (and as already seen, even a dialogue within a dialogue, principally between Hythloday and Morton), Book II is not so easily categorized. Until the last two paragraphs, Book II is composed almost solely of Hythloday’s laudatory description of Utopia and its people, laws, customs, beliefs, and institutions. Edward Surtz labels Book II a monologue, in which the speaker conceals his listeners and their personalities from the reader, although he concedes that it may also be considered a “one-sided dialogue”; in Book II, Hythloday provides answers to supposed objections, and it exhibits an ill-defined “consciousness of an audience,” although without establishing any concrete sense of the listeners and their personalities.30 Meanwhile, Kristeller describes Book II as “a dialogue only in name.”31 Arthur Kinney and George Logan classify it as an example of demonstrative oratory, “a self-contained and self-referential speech in praise of the ideal commonwealth,” that is, Utopia.32 Regardless of how scholars classify Book II, it differs from Book I in that Hythloday maintains his viewpoints without opposition, a point whose relevance we shall see later in this section. We might even say that Book I and Book II are in dialogue with each other—with Book I reflecting More’s Ciceronianism and Book II representing Hythloday’s Platonism. Only because of the concluding observations of the character “More” in Book II, in which he takes issue with Hythloday, does Ciceronian argument in utramque partem appear, bracketing off most of Book II as an antirhetorical counterargument to the dialogic defense of rhetorical values that bookends it. Hythloday begins the second book by describing the geography and history of Utopia. He proceeds to discuss Utopian society in detail, which he compares favorably to European societies and all societies he has encountered in his travels. Although he asserts that he has “undertaken only to describe [the Utopians’] principles, not to defend them,” he states immediately afterward that he is sure

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“that whatever their principles are, there is not a more excellent people or a happier commonwealth anywhere in the whole world.”33 The remainder of the book largely contains further reports of the Utopians, whom Hythloday continues to praise and defend, in spite of his denial. He describes them as tireless in intellectual pursuits, wonderfully fair, maintaining a commonwealth that he considers “not only the best but indeed the only one that can rightfully claim that name,” and as more just than any other peoples.34 Hythloday concludes his story with a full-throated panegyric of Utopia and its people: “So I am glad that the Utopians at least have been lucky enough to achieve this republic which I wish all mankind would imitate. Through the plan of living which they have adopted, they have laid the foundations of a commonwealth that is not only very happy but also, so far as human prescience can tell, likely to last forever.”35 At the very end, “More,” who has been silent in Book II, expresses doubts about Hythloday’s never-ending praise of Utopia: “I was left thinking that not a few of the laws and customs he had described as existing among the Utopians were really absurd,” especially “the basis of their whole system, that is, their communal living and their moneyless economy.” Persona “More” does not criticize Hythloday here, knowing “that Raphael was tired with talking” and uncertain whether “he could take contradiction in these matters.”36 “More” brings Utopia to a close with some ambiguity, observing that although he can hardly agree with everything Hythloday said, he “freely confess[es] that in the Utopian commonwealth there are very many features that in our own societies [he] would wish rather than expect to see.”37 Thus, “More,” in his concluding thoughts and remarks maintains the stance he adopts throughout Utopia. Although he disagrees with much of what Hythloday says, his disagreement is not absolute—neither in the sense of rejecting all of Hythloday’s positions nor of being opposed to reconsidering his earlier opinions. He expresses his hope to Hythloday, in Utopia’s penultimate paragraph, that the two of them “would find some other time for thinking of these matters more deeply, and for talking them over in detail.”38 He does so cordially, praising the Utopians “for their way of life and his account of it.”39 Hythloday, however, ends his encomium of Utopia and its citizens with the same certainty he voices all through the work—a detail that “More” alludes to when articulating his doubt as to whether Hythloday “could take contradiction in these matters,” that is, in his exposition of the laws and customs of the Utopians, which he defends almost without exception. This difference between the two interlocutors is not grounded in their disputes over political and socioeconomic issues but in their distinct means of exploring and communicating their substantive disagreements, that is, the rhetorical

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means of persona “More” as opposed to Hythloday’s philosophical. In much of the rest of this chapter, we shall see further proof that More’s rhetorical perspective originates in Cicero’s rhetoric. What of Hythloday’s philosophical approach? Early on in Utopia, Giles describes Hythloday as someone whose “main interest is philosophy” (and therefore he is more practiced in Greek, the language of most notable ancient philosophers, than in Latin) and as a traveler like Plato.40 Likewise, in speaking to Hythloday, the character “More” refers to Plato as “your friend [who] thinks that commonwealths will be happy only when philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers,” a description Hythloday readily accepts—“But doubtless Plato was right.”41 Toward the end of Book I, Hythloday depicts his return to Europe from Utopia in language reminiscent of Socrates’s account in the Republic of the unchained prisoner who feels obligated to return from the sunlit world back to the darkness of the cave. This enlightened former prisoner must try to teach the remaining prisoners, who refuse to hear the truth, that they are living in a world of shadows, ignorant of reality. Similarly, Hythloday writes: “But you should have been with me in Utopia and seen with your own eyes their manners and customs, as I did—for I lived there more than five years, and would never have left, if it had not been to make that new world known to others,” a duty Hythloday readily admits he is unlikely to fulfill.42 Like Plato in the Gorgias, Hythloday views himself as a truth teller unwilling to use rhetoric to persuade others at the cost of diluting the truth or dissembling. Fundamental to their contrasting attitudes toward rhetoric is decorum, which, as we have seen before, Erasmus identifies as the hallmark of the true Ciceronian. In the Orator, Cicero confirms decorum’s preeminence in his conception of rhetoric. “For after all the foundation of eloquence, as of everything else, is wisdom.”43 Cicero identifies rhetorical wisdom with propriety: “I shall begin by approving of one who can observe what is fitting [deceat]. This, indeed, is the form of wisdom that the orator must especially employ—to adapt himself to occasions and persons.”44 And propriety is equated with decorum: “In an oration, as in life, nothing is harder than to determine what is appropriate [deceat] . . . ; let us call it decorum.”45 Decorum requires that the orator not use “the same style and the same thoughts . . . in portraying every condition in life, or every rank, position or age, and in fact a similar distinction must be made in respect of place, time and audience. The universal rule, in oratory as in life, is to consider propriety [quid deceat].”46 In line with Cicero, More holds that “human communication requires that the words be appropriate to the occasion and to the subject.”47 Evidence of decorum’s importance to More is found not only in Utopia, where the character “More” criticizes Hythloday for rejecting decorum. (Such proof, however,

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is insufficient because, as noted previously, the views of the character “More” may not be identical to those of the author More.) Confirmation of More’s obedience to the rules of decorum are found outside Utopia, in contemporaneous and modern accounts of his faithfulness to the principle. For example, Erasmus describes More in a letter to Ulrich von Hutten dated July 23, 1519, as thoroughly committed to decorum, even in informal communications: “he adapts himself with marvellous dexterity to the tastes of all; while with ladies generally, and even with his wife, his conversation is made up of humor and playfulness.”48 Similarly, Erasmus portrays More as having “a mind that catches and anticipates all that passes, and a ready memory, having everything as it were in stock, [to] promptly supply whatever the time, or the occasion, demands.”49 Elizabeth McCutcheon elaborates on these observations in commenting on More’s accommodation of language to audience: “It is essential to note the language he chose . . . because it reflected his awareness of audience and shaped his whole rhetorical process, manifested in his adherence to the key rhetorical precept of decorum, which mandates that all features of a piece of writing be appropriate to the subject, speaker, audience and occasion.” When communicating to other humanists, McCutcheon notes, More wrote in Latin. “By contrast, he wrote in the vernacular for fellow English men and women, anxious to reach a broader and more popular audience of both readers and auditors.”50 Like his choice of language, More’s selection of rhetorical genres in Utopia is determined by decorum. Book I is composed as a dialogue, more particularly as a philosophical dialogue (disputatio), which Cicero categorizes in On Duties as an example of “conversation,” sermo.51 Adopting Aristotle’s division of oratory into three main genera, Cicero distinguishes, like Aristotle, between deliberative or political, forensic or judicial, and epideictic or demonstrative oratory. Cicero also identifies another kind of rhetoric, distinct from these three oratorical genres, that he calls sermo. He describes this category of speech by contrasting it with judicial or deliberative rhetoric, which he refers to collectively as “oratory,” contentio: “Speech also has great power, and that in two areas: in oratory and in conversation. Oratory [contentio] should be employed for speeches in lawcourts, to public assemblies or in the senate, while conversation [sermo] should be found in social groups, in philosophical discussions and among gatherings of friends—and may also attend dinners.”52 Cicero distinguishes philosophical dialogue specifically from other types of oratory when he refers to this form of sermo as “the rhetoric of philosophers.”53 As a type of rhetoric, Cicero contends that conversation is governed (as are other rhetorical genres) by decorum. With conversational decorum in mind, Cicero counsels in On Duties: “Above all, let [the speaker] have regard for the

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subject of discussion” and for the other interlocutors, “for we do not all at all times enjoy the same subjects in the same way.”54 What, then, is the subject of discussion in philosophical dialogues? Unlike the oratorical genres, in which speakers concern themselves with specific and immediate matters, in philosophical dialogues, the subject of discussion is the “indefinite question,” in which the interlocutors discuss abstract questions, which are those “which may be maintained or impugned without reference to persons, time or place and the like.”55 Among the indefinite or abstract questions Cicero addresses in his philosophical dialogues are those relating to epistemology, legal and political systems, ethics, social conduct, physics, religion, friendship, old age, and rhetoric and oratory. The goal in pursuing these issues is expanding our knowledge of truth. Thus, Cicero describes his mission and the goal of the other speakers in On the Ends (of Good and Evil), where he constructs a philosophical dialogue between an Epicurean, a Stoic, a follower of Antiochus’s interpretation of the Old Academy, and an Academic skeptic (Cicero himself) as follows: “For our object is to discover the truth, not to refute someone as an opponent.”56 What holds true of On the Ends holds true of Cicero’s other philosophical dialogues. These dialogues aim at discovering the truth or coming as close to it as possible. More, in his letter to Peter Giles, which serves as a preface to Utopia, echoes Cicero: “Truth in fact is the only thing at which I should aim and do aim in writing [Utopia].”57 Both Cicero and More agree that what makes the decorum of philosophical dialogue distinct is philosophical dialogue’s aim of furthering the truth. In addition, they maintain that the decorum of philosophical dialogue should be determined with reference to the intended audience, which Cicero and More envision as composed of the educated elite. James E. G. Zetzel describes Cicero’s dialogues as “conversations among members of the elite, people who were capable of reading philosophy in Greek or discussing it in Latin.”58 Cicero’s intended reading audience for his dialogues (not just the interlocutors in them) was also scholarly, capable of understanding the philosophical issues under discussion: “the central corpus of Cicero’s philosophical writings is not aiming at the average person.”59 Echoing Plato in the Republic, Cicero contends in the Tusculan Disputations that it is not simply that the masses are intellectually incapable of being philosophical but that they are naturally antiphilosophical: “For philosophy is content with few judges, and of set purpose on her side avoids the multitude and is in her turn an object of suspicion and dislike to them, with the result that if anyone should be disposed to revile all philosophy he could count on popular support.”60 The people’s bias against abstract thinking absolutely precludes a popular setting for philosophical discussion. Likewise, Utopia’s main

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interlocutors were learned humanists (“More,” Giles, Morton) or a philosopher (Hythloday). As McCutcheon points out, “More wrote Utopia in Latin and subsequently [and unsuccessfully] opposed its translation,” suggesting that he intended the reading audience of his dialogue to be well educated.61 Even before the speakers in Cicero’s dialogues and More’s Utopia address any philosophical issues, they are placed by the authors in a setting that is consistent with the decorum for philosophical conversation. Thus, Cicero sets his philosophical dialogues in settings “far removed from daily life,” away from the streets and largely far from Rome. The Roman dialogue is emphatically kept out of the streets: “In the dialogues in which Cicero himself is a participant, the settings for philosophical discourse are the villas and gardens and libraries of the Roman aristocracy.”62 Likewise, although More situates the discussion in Utopia outside More’s quarters in Antwerp, he seeks to evoke a pastoral milieu, “in the garden . . . on a bench covered with grassy turf.”63 Both authors desire an environment conducive to learned conversation, removed from the life of negotium (business) and the lives of the common people.64 Cicero and More have similar views on the decorum of speech in philosophical dialogue. According to Cicero, the speech of philosophical dialogue, as of sermo more generally, is to be friendly and polite, egalitarian; the speakers in the dialogue are supposed to be open to changing their original viewpoints. “Conversation [sermones],” Cicero writes in On Duties, “flourish most of all in friendships.”65 The relationship between interlocutors should resemble a community of friends. The exchange of ideas between speakers “ought therefore to be gentle and without a trace of intransigence; it should also be witty.”66 Although elitist in whom he deems fit for intellectual conversation, Cicero is egalitarian among those considered competent, encouraging the participation of potential interlocutors. Therefore, he supports alternation between speakers: “Nor should any one speaker exclude all others as if he were taking over occupancy of his own estate. He should think it fair in shared conversation, just as in other things, for everyone to have a turn.”67 Likewise, regarding philosophical conversation, Cicero writes: “Let anyone, who will, state the subject he wishes discussed.”68 Friendly, civil, and egalitarian conversation between scholars, according to Cicero, is conducive to the finding of truth. The same holds true for the speakers’ openness to changing their opinions based on what Jürgen Habermas calls “the force of the better argument,” which “neutralizes all motives other than that of the cooperative search for truth.”69 Like Habermas, Cicero sees such conversation as rational, not emotional. Conversation should be free from seeking to move the spirit in a direction contrary to reason.70 Accordingly, as we have seen, Cicero explains that his aim in On the Ends, as a philosophical

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dialogue, is “to discover the truth, not to refute someone as an opponent.”71 Likewise, in the Tusculan Disputations, he describes his dialogic method, which is consistent with the method of the Academic skeptics with whom he identifies, as “prepared both to refute without obstinacy and be refuted without anger.”72 This conversational model stands in stark contrast to oratory’s agonistic ideal, where fellow orators confront each other as adversaries because, in deliberative and forensic oratory, each orator aims to beat his opponent. In Ciceronian conversation, the search for philosophical truth is better enhanced by the interlocutors’ common bonds than by antagonistic posturings. When we turn to the dialogue of Book I, we find that More shares Cicero’s outlook on the decorum of speech in sermo. (More uses the term sermo some twenty times through Utopia, even titling the dialogue as a “sermo, discourse, on the best state of a commonwealth.”73) Although Cicero expressed his opinions on the decorum of sermo, explicitly by stating them and implicitly in the performance of the interlocutors in the dialogues, More’s opinions can be inferred most often from the characters (especially, when they agree with each other) and from how he embedded his views on sermo into the dialogue itself, that is, More performs sermo throughout Book I.74 Thus, we see that the character “More” describes Giles as “cultured, virtuous, and courteous to all, . . . open-hearted, affectionate, loyal and sincere” with his intimates—a man who appears to have no equal “in all the points of friendship.” Like Cicero, “More” goes on to link Giles’s friendliness to his praiseworthy conversation, which “is so pleasant, and so witty without malice.”75 In turn, Giles implies that Hythloday will adhere to the decorum of conversation by depicting him as “a man whose conversation he hoped [More] would enjoy.”76 Most decorous of all in conversation is the character “More,” whom Gerard Wegemer describes as adopting an “argumentative style that reflects the ethos of his character: polite—‘civilis’—conversation.”77 Wegemer analyzes in detail how the speech of “More” reveals his “polite, civil, and Christian ethos.” One such example he offers is that “More” “mitigates the possibility of personal offense often engendered by . . . strong disagreement through the use of parable, antanagoge [a figure of speech in which an undesirable continuation is averted], understatement, and litotes.”78 The dialogue in Utopia is also egalitarian in the sense that all interlocutors are given an opportunity to speak their piece. Although Hythloday arrogates much more of the conversation for himself, even he recognizes that he is breaking with the ground rules of conversation and apologizes to “More” for it: “‘Look my dear More, what a long story I have inflicted on you. I would be quite ashamed if you had not yourself eagerly insisted on it, and seemed to listen as if you did not want any part to be left out. Though I ought to have related this conversation more concisely.’”79

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The dialogue in Utopia, like Cicero’s philosophical dialogues, is structured as a common search for truth. That the author More values truth over winning is implicit in his statement in his letter to Giles, which we have already seen: “Truth in fact is the only thing at which I should aim and do aim in writing this book.”80 As such, interlocutors must be open to changing their original position when they find that another standpoint is closer to the truth. The character “More” looks to Hythloday to instruct him about foreign practices that may improve European (particularly English) policies and institutions. Early in Book I, the character “More” notes how Hythloday “described quite a few . . . customs from which our cities, nations, races and kingdoms might take lessons in order to correct their errors.”81 Near the end of Book I, “More” does not just listen to Hythloday’s reports but implores him to describe Utopia. “Don’t try to be brief, but explain . . . everything, in short, that you think we would like to know. And you can assume that we want to know everything we don’t know yet.”82 Thus, the character “More” suggests his readiness to discard his assumptions in the interest of new ideas that promote greater justice and utility. Similarly, in the dialogue within a dialogue, Morton seeks to hear from Hythloday why he deems the English law imposing the death penalty on thieves to be “neither just nor expedient.”83 “More than that, . . . [the cardinal] proposes experimenting with Hythloday’s ideas, cautiously accepting and implicitly approving them.”84 If having refrained from using the death penalty on a thief “turned out well, the practice, might be made law; if not [the king] could then carry out the punishment of the man already condemned.”85 Because of how More structured Utopia, Hythloday is pigeonholed into participating in a Ciceronian dialogue in Book I—for example, he has no choice but to take turns with the other speakers—but he stands in opposition to the other main interlocutors by straining against the bonds of Ciceronian decorum. (Hythloday escapes from the shackles of decorum in most of Book II, where he “proves” the superiority of Utopian institutions without being bothered by his interlocutors’ questions, doubts, and opinions.) The character “More” calls attention to this quality when he describes Hythloday’s “academic” or “school” philosophy (suggesting Platonic and/or scholastic discourse) as “suppos[ing] every topic suitable for every occasion,” although decorum presumes that not every topic is suitable for every occasion.86 Hythloday acknowledges that “his own principles require a blunt abrasive style,” contrary to the friendly rhetorical manner of Cicero and “More.”87 Friendly, polite speech appears to be an effort for Hythloday, as does taking turns with the other speakers. He uses “exaggeration and ad hominem arguments to sharpen the effect of his rather virulent attacks.”88 He characterizes anyone who disagrees with his view that theft and

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murder should not be punished equally as “absurd and even dangerous for society.”89 Compare Hythloday’s verbal assault on his disputants with the character More’s reaction to Hythloday, with whom he differs. “More” does not attack Hythloday. He even refrains from criticizing him. Rather, “More” is “left thinking” (but does not verbalize) his opinion “that not a few of the laws and customs” that Hythloday described were “really absurd.”90 As for Hythloday’s commitment to conversational equality, although he does not prevent other interlocutors from voicing their points of view, he is inclined toward dominating the conversation, albeit with the apparent consent of the characters “More” and Giles, who request that he inform them about his knowledge of the customs and institutions of far-away lands. Thus, Hythloday not only speaks far more than anyone else in Book I; he is virtually the only speaker in Book II. What of Hythloday’s readiness to reconsider his opinions in the light of others’ arguments—an essential element of the decorum of sermo? Although Hythloday asks questions of the other interlocutors, he does so not to reconsider his views but to underscore the correctness of his arguments. At no point in Utopia does Hythloday evince any doubts about the positions he stakes out. This difference between Hythloday and the other interlocutors is highlighted by distinct stances on argument in utramque partem. Thus, Book I is organized as a series of debates between Hythloday and the other main interlocutors— that is, argument on both sides of an issue—over the superiority of the active life against the contemplative life, the proper punishment for thieves, the legitimacy of the indirect approach in advising rulers, the benefit of private ownership of property (as opposed to common ownership), and so on. The character “More” most clearly represents the Ciceronian perspective on the utility of argumentum in utramque partem; Hythloday epitomizes the rejection of this Ciceronian approach. Cicero grounds his argument for double-sided argumentation in the skepticism of the New Academy, to which he adhered. Cicero accepts the Academic principle that probability is the closest to knowledge of the truth that we can attain. He writes: “Further than this, the mind of man cannot advance” but is “for a divine being to determine.”91 To determine the most probable truth, Cicero turns to argument in utramque partem. After examining the two (or more) sides of the matter under discussion, the interlocutors are given the opportunity to decide which viewpoint is most probable; the philosophical debates of sermo have no resolution because skepticism, Cicero concludes, is a persistent attribute of sermo and the debate has no authoritative arbiter to settle the question.92 Without the possibility of consensus, Cicero argues that the speakers are free to decide probability for themselves. Thus, he affirms, “But let everyone defend his views, for judgment is free: I shall cling to

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my rule and without being tied to the laws of any single school of thought which I feel bound to obey, shall always search for the most probable solution in every problem.”93 Like the interlocutors who are free to adhere to any of the viewpoints under discussion, the audience (i.e., readers) has the right to determine which opinion they determine is closest to the truth. Thus, Cicero’s character Cotta concludes his argument in On the Nature of the Gods: “My purpose was rather to discuss the doctrines I have expounded than to pronounce judgment upon them.”94 Without Cotta or any interlocutor in the dialogue arriving at an authoritative determination, Cicero anticipates Erasmus’s epilogue to De Libero Arbitrio (his two-sided consideration of “free will” targeting Martin Luther, the epilogue to which is titled “As to Which Side Is Right, Let the Reader be Judge”): “I have completed my discourse; now let others pass judgment.”95 Although More does not explicitly espouse Academic skepticism in Utopia, his use of argument in utramque partem that does not conclude with agreement between speakers suggests the uncertainty of the subject matter. As Damian Grace observes about the dialogue of Book I: “Where matters do not admit of certainty, it is not only foolish but offensive to dogmatise.”96 Like Cicero, More (given the absence of any determination) entrusts his readers to make their own decisions. Unlike Cicero and “More,” Hythloday makes no use of double-sided argumentation to elucidate the truth. Although he represents one side of the debate, he does not take the existence of another side as signaling the uncertainty of his own argument. On the contrary, Hythloday shows himself fearful of the possibilities of argument in utramque partem. In discussing the consequences of “judges giv[ing] differing opinions,” Hythloday states that with this multisided argumentation, “the clearest matter in the world can be made cloudy and truth itself brought into question.”97 Accordingly, for Hythloday, the interlocutors or audience should not be free to decide what is their truth. Rather, Hythloday distinguishes between the dialogue form and actual dialogue. He supports the dialogue form, like that in Plato’s Republic, in contrast to dialogue where the questions and responses are not predetermined: “By the time he wrote the Republic, Plato was quite capable of using the dialogue form as a thin disguise for the exposition of doctrine.”98 Or “Socrates knows all the time where the logic of his dialectic leads, although Plato’s artistry conceals the outline of the plan.”99 Like “Socrates” in Plato’s didactic dialogues, Hythloday deems the dialogue in Book I of Utopia as valuable only when it confirms his own conception of truth. Without a preordained conclusion reflecting his understanding of truth, dialogue risks manipulating interlocutors and readers away from the path of the truth.

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Although Book I of Utopia is written in dialogue form, the character “More” and Hythloday engage in a philosophical conversation about the proper rhetorical genre and decorum for speech in the royal counsel board. As we saw earlier, Hythloday rejects his interlocutors’ suggestion to become an adviser to the king. He questions “More,” already knowing the answer, about how his advice would be received by king and councilors if he spoke frankly. What if he “showed that all this war-mongering, by which so many different nations were kept in turmoil for [the king’s] sake, would exhaust his treasury and demoralize his people, yet in the end come to nothing through one mishap or another?”100 What if he proposed adopting the law of the Macarians who require their king, on the day he assumes office, to “take an oath confirmed by solemn ceremonies never to have in his treasury at any one time more than a thousand pounds of gold, or its equivalent in silver?”101 To the first question, “More” responds that Hythloday’s speech would certainly not be received enthusiastically. To the second question, “More” answers that his listeners would undoubtedly “turn [stone] deaf ears” to him. Hythloday reveals that he knows as much; he is setting ideas “before men strongly inclined to the contrary.”102 “More” is perplexed. If Hythloday knows that his advice will be spurned, why even propose it? “To tell you the truth, I don’t think you should thrust forward ideas of this sort, or offer advice that you know for certain will not be listened to. What good can it do? When your listeners are already prepossessed against you and firmly convinced of opposite opinions, how can you win over their minds with such out-of-theway speeches?”103 Rather than engage in “this school [Platonic and/or scholastic] philosophy which supposes every topic suitable for every occasion,” that is, which is blind to the principle of decorum, “More” suggests using another rhetorical genre, “another philosophy, better suited for the role of a citizen [civilis], that takes its cue, adapts itself to the drama in hand and acts its part neatly and appropriately [cum decoro]. This is the philosophy for you to use.”104 To play the role of the philosopher in political discussions,“More” suggests, is akin to an actor “com[ing] on stage in the role of a [Senecan] philosopher” when “a comedy of Plautus is being played.”105 The appearance of an actor qua Stoic philosopher in a comedy would “pervert a play and ruin it” by “turn[ing] the play into a tragicomedy.”106 Likewise, for the antirhetorical philosopher to act decorously and persuade, he must adopt a different philosophy—one that is adapted to political debate. Although More does not state what this “philosophy” is, the ensuing discussion points to it being a rhetorical genre distinct from Hythloday’s dialogue, even from Ciceronian sermo. The character “More” has the deliberative genre, the speech of political counsel, in mind.

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As Cicero suggests in his philosophical dialogues, sermo need not culminate in consensus. Rather, the interlocutors may (and generally do) maintain their original positions. But political speech must conclude in a decision about how to act, and therefore agreement—at least agreement among most listeners—must be reached. In the Roman republic, the primary arena for deliberative or political oratory is the contio, which was the nonvoting informal assembly in which the orator spoke before the people and, secondarily, the Senate. In both oratorical settings, political speeches were offered before policies were decided on and laws were made. Contiones were called before the formal voting political assemblies convened and decided on laws and policies. Senators were given the opportunity to speak before the Senate passed decrees called senatus consulta, which were formally defined as “advice” from the Senate to a magistrate, but whose decisions, in practice, carried much more force and were obeyed in practice. To facilitate consensus or at a minimum agreement among most listeners in contiones and the Senate, speakers and audience must share some basic assumptions; orators rely on the community’s agreement or sense (communis sensus) when seeking to persuade their audiences. As Cicero affirms in the prologue to Book I of On the Ideal Orator, “in oratory, it is the worst possible fault to deviate from the ordinary mode of speaking and the generally accepted way of looking at things [communis sensus].”107 The deliberative orator must be so aware of the listeners’ beliefs that, in line with the dictates of decorum, he must adapt his speech and demeanor to any changes in their fundamental beliefs. Thus Cicero has the character Antonius assert that “the fundamental requirement for speaking persuasively is to know the character of the community. Since [it] frequently changes, our mode of speaking should often change as well.”108 We find “More” echoing this Ciceronian precept when he states, as we saw before: “You must not deliver strange and out-of-the-way speeches to people with whom they will carry no weight because they are firmly persuaded the other way.”109 Because the speech of sermo and deliberative oratory are communicated in different contexts, Cicero maintains that each genus has its own distinct decorum. The decorum of philosophical dialogue, in which individual decisionmaking is determined by the force of the better argument, is rationalistic. The decorum of deliberative oratory, however, requires the speaker to employ not only rational speech but emotional appeals, by which most votes can be marshalled in favor of (or against) a specific proposal. Thus, in deliberative oratory (as in forensic and epideictic oratory), Cicero emphasizes emotional appeals— the least rational—above the others. In Brutus, he depicts pathos as the quintessential oratorical talent: “everyone must acknowledge that of all the resources of an orator far the greatest is his ability to inflame the minds of his hearers

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and turn them in whatever direction the case demands. If the orator lacks that ability, he lacks the one thing most essential.”110 Similarly, Cicero contends that decorum in sermo prohibits manipulation, dissembling, and strategic communications, while encouraging (depending on the circumstances) these morally dubious communicative means in deliberative rhetoric.111 These departures from conventional morality are necessitated not only by the need to form a majority but by the need to act for the common good.112 Accordingly, when discussing social utility in On Duties, Cicero allows that “occasions often arise when the actions that seem most worthy of a just man, of him we call good, undergo a change, and the opposite becomes the case.” These include setting aside such requirements as “telling the truth, returning a deposit, carrying out a promise” because adhering to the normally honorable would not “serve the common advantage.”113 In contrast to Cicero’s late Republican period, in More’s political world, the proper locale for deliberative rhetoric is the king’s council. Thus, in the Dialogue of Counsel, the character “More” identifies the proper speech for counsel as the deliberative genre. He pairs the speech of the “commonwealth,” that is, the focus of political rhetoric, and “the councils of princes.”114 He distinguishes between Hythloday’s philosophical discourse, which lacks any concern with decorum (“this school philosophy which supposes every topic suitable for every occasion”) and “another philosophy,” that is, deliberative oratory, “better suited for the role of a citizen, that takes its cues, adapts itself to the drama in hand and acts its part neatly and appropriately. This is the philosophy for you to use.”115 Whether or not More would agree with “More” that Hythloday should join a royal council, that serving on such a council would be more noble and useful than being a philosopher without public service, the author More is committed to decorum. Therefore, More is obliged to maintain that once someone (like Hythloday) agrees to become a royal adviser, he must adopt deliberative speech and adapt himself to the rules of that genre. Although Cicero could not characterize the deliberative genre as speech to a royal council, he and Greek rhetoricians who preceded him define deliberative oratory, consistent with More’s understanding, as advisory speech. The Greek word that is translated as deliberative, symbouleuō, means “advise” or “counsel, thus symbouletic oratory.” Cicero taught that the goal of deliberative oratory is the giving of consilium, advice.116 Like Cicero, the character “More” grants the deliberative speaker greater latitude in departing from conventional moral strictures. “More” commends to Hythloday, when discussing speech to the council,“an indirect approach [obliquus ductus]” where you “must strive and struggle as best you can to handle everything

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tactfully—and thus what you cannot turn to good, you may at least make as little bad as possible.”117 By indirect speech, “More” implies something less than telling the full truth—Hythloday even depicts this indirect speech as telling lies.118 “More” acknowledges that the speaker in a council must sometimes conceal his true thoughts, “to take a silent role,” rather than “say[ing] something inappropriate.”119 The indirect speech of “More” also suggests the need to compromise, mitigating the bad rather than enacting the good. The moral adviser to a king cannot demand from people more than is reasonable, accepting that “it is impossible to make everything good unless all men are good,” which “More” observes ironically that he does not “expect to see for quite a few years yet.” You must do the best you can in less-than-ideal contexts: “If you cannot pluck up bad ideas by the root, or cure long-standing evils to your heart’s content, you must not therefore abandon the commonwealth.”120 For Hythloday, however, there is only one truth, which can neither be diluted nor accommodated. Conceding to unscrupulous advisers will produce nothing beneficial. The compromising adviser, his good intentions notwithstanding, will be compelled either to “openly approve the worst proposals and endorse the most vicious policies” or to praise wicked counsels half-heartedly, leading him to be suspected of being a spy, “perhaps a traitor.” The well-meaning counselor “wouldn’t stand a chance of changing anything for the better by that ‘indirect approach.’”121 Rather than adopt the indirect approach, Hythloday embraces the speaking style of the prophet, who proclaims the unvarnished truth. He identifies such speech with Christ, who “forbade us to dissemble [his teachings], and even ordered that what he had whispered in the ears of his disciples should be preached openly from the housetops.”122 Hythloday accepts Christ’s commitment to preaching unpopular beliefs and its concomitant renunciation of decorum. Looking not only to Christ but also to Plato, Hythloday finds that these exemplars are committed to a truth detached from the values or customs of the community. Christ’s teachings are alien to most, and because they are antithetical to the communis sensus, from the perspective even of preachers, they “have to [be] set aside, even in a community of Christians.”123 Similarly, Plato proposes an ideal state with a basic characteristic being its prohibition of private property, which makes it alien and therefore unacceptable to Western societies, despite the superiority of the ideal state’s institutions.124 Thus, Hythloday realizes that his rejection of communal assumptions, in favor of his conception of what is rational—“these ideas and others like them”—impedes persuasion, causing his audience to “turn deaf ears to [him].”125 Accordingly, Hythloday observes earlier, the king’s councilors reject any suggestion that “was seen in practice elsewhere” on the grounds that the status quo “was good enough for our ancestors . . .

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implying, of course, that it would be a very dangerous matter if anyone were found to be wiser on any point than [their] ancestors.”126 Hythloday’s opposition to Ciceronian rhetoric is more profound than his rejection of argument in utramque partem, communis sensus, and even decorum. Although Cicero views speech as the means of determining truth, Hythloday maintains that truth, in the sense of what is most moral and beneficial for society, can be manifested by abolishing private property, the main feature of Utopia. As Hythloday states regarding the institution of the best policies: “So long as private property remains, there is no hope at all of effecting a cure and restoring society to good health.”127 The paradox Hythloday faces is that society will not be cured of its ills until private property is abolished, but it will not be abolished because the practice is foreign to the known world. As Hythloday describes Utopia, it is “that new world, which is as distant from ours in customs and manners as by the distance the equator puts between us.”128 Conclusion: Hythloday’s Nonrhetorical Utopia Hythloday, who opposes rhetoric in Book I, manifests his rejection of rhetoric (specifically deliberative oratory) in Book II through his description of Utopian institutions. As we shall see shortly, for Hythloday, Utopia’s abolition of private property and money, along with several rules governing political discussion, eliminates disagreement among Utopia’s political representatives. And the absence or near-absence of conflict obviates the need for political rhetoric. As Cicero points out in the On the Orator, and as rhetoricians who preceded and followed him have similarly maintained, deliberation in political oratory is limited only to those matters that can happen and are not necessary. Therefore, “all deliberation is immediately cut short when people realize that something is impossible, or when necessity is adduced.”129 In politics, these are matters about which there is disagreement about the best course of action and in which each or every side is represented by one or more orators. Because of this conflict between orators, classical rhetoricians view deliberative (and forensic oratory) as agonistic.130 The contentious character of political speech is suggested by the fact that the Greek word agon not only means “contest” or “struggle” but also denotes the “public assembly” and “assembly place.”131 Rhetoric’s agonistic character is illustrated by Cicero’s metaphor of the orator as a soldier vanquishing his enemies on the battlefield and where rhetoric is represented as a struggle, in which one side winning is achieved by the other side(s) losing. In this conception of rhetoric, there can be but one victor.132 Because he views Utopia as a society in which contention has been abated by the ban on private property and money, Hythloday also perceives his ideal

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state as emancipated from political oratory. Conflict is diminished because Utopia’s social system fosters the triumph of the common good over private interests, in contrast to societies that subordinate the public welfare to self-interest, thereby engendering factionalism.133 In addition, Utopia’s abolition of money eliminates greed, a source of division among the people.134 Although Hythloday acknowledges that citizens disagree about abstract matters, like natural or moral philosophy—“they carry on the same arguments as we do”—these arguments have little to no practical effect on the people’s well-being.135 By contrast, Hythloday describes decision-making on practical, political issues without alluding to any discord or the use of rhetoric. Hythloday portrays the Utopian form of government as republican. Each city has representatives—syphogrants, tranibors, and governor. Syphogrants, numbering 200, are elected by the households. Above the syphogrants stand the tranibors, who are also elected and make up the senate. Both groups of representatives hold office for a year, although the tranibors “are not changed for light or casual reasons.”136 Above these two sets of officials is the governor, who is elected by the syphogrants and who holds office for life, “unless he is suspected of tyranny.”137 Each city has a governor, but there is no single official over the whole Utopia. Instead, there is a general council that meets at the capital, Amaurot, intermittently. How do the representatives arrive at their decisions? Hythloday notes that they meet to discuss public matters, but like Plato describing the rule of his philosopher kings in the Republic, he glosses over the possible disagreements between them. “All matters which are considered important are first laid before the assembly of syphogrants,” where, initially, “they talk the matter [under consideration] over with the households they represent, [second] consult among themselves, and report their recommendation to the senate.”138 Talking, consulting, and reporting their recommendation—one step to the next portrayed as being reached smoothly, sans impediments. Hythloday depicts the discussions and decision making of the tranibors as conducted even more expeditiously than those of the syphogrants: “they discuss affairs of state and settle disputes between private parties (if there are any, and there are very few), acting as quickly as possible.”139 Implicit in Hythloday’s account is an assumption about the public interest that anticipates Rousseau’s opinion of the general will in the Social Contract: once people turn their attention to the common weal, purging themselves of any selfish interests, the correct decision is obvious to the decision makers.140 Thus, the Utopians, like the communally minded citizens in The Social Contract, avoid the rhetoric of the orators, who distort the citizens’ perception of the common good, substituting the interests of factions for the general interest.141

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Illustrating the status of rhetoric in Hythloday’s Kallipolis, Wegemer writes: “Significantly, rhetoric marks the apex of a statesman’s education for Cicero, but has no place in Utopian education or government.”142 As an extra precaution against representatives acting self-interestedly, the Utopians enacted several laws to govern political meetings. For example, “no decision can be made on a matter of public business unless it has been discussed in the senate on three separate days,” and “it is a capital offense to make plans about public business outside the senate or popular assembly.” The purpose of these regulations, as Hythloday explains, is “to prevent governor and tranibors from conspiring together to alter the government and enslave the people.” In addition, the senate can never debate a matter on the same day it was introduced; discussion must wait until the next meeting. “This they do so that a man will not blurt out the first thought that occurs to him, and then devote all his energies to defending his own proposals, instead of considering the common interest.”143 These laws, like the societal prohibitions on property and money, militate against the rise of self-interest and consequently the need or appeal of rhetoric. Contrast Hythloday’s report of the Utopians’ political discussions with his description of deliberation in the king’s council in Book I. As opposed to Utopia’s syphogrants and tranibors, who arrive at a consensus on the genuine public good, the royal councilors of the Old World vie with one another to propose policies, not with an eye to the general welfare but with the goal of promoting the king’s interest over against the people’s interest.144 The king embraces one or more of their opinions to advance what he sees as his well-being, which he deems as opposed to the people’s prosperity.145 As we have observed already, the character “More” advises Hythloday to urge his case tactfully, with a rhetorical concern for decorum, rather than blatantly attacking the king and his councilors. Hythloday dismisses this advice as useless in ameliorating the state’s condition (“You wouldn’t stand a chance of changing anything for the better”) and as often resulting in the corruption of the honest councilor, when his colleagues “who would more readily corrupt the best of men than be reformed themselves . . . either seduce you by their evil ways, or, if you remain honest and innocent, . . . [make you] a screen for the knavery and folly of others.”146 If it were possible to eliminate all or nearly all divisions, from among the royal advisers, over the best policy, then perhaps agonistic oratory would be as useless in the king’s councils of Europe as in the representative bodies of Utopia. Political advisers would reach agreement or near-agreement without the need for the sometimes morally dubious persuasive means that typify rhetoric and that Hythloday rejects in toto. But for Hythloday, such political consensus is

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only achieved through wholesale societal change. Although More may find elements of the Utopian system of common ownership and its moneyless economy attractive, he embraces Cicero’s rhetorical perspective, in which decorum and the communis sensus restrict the speaker/politician from straying too far from the existing state of affairs. Therefore, it is highly doubtful that the author More expects that radical social transformation will transmute man from his present egotistic nature into the New Man, selfless in his pursuit of the communal good. Like Cardinal Morton (mentor of the young More), who agrees to moderate and gradual changes, the author of Utopia hears out radical proposals but in practice would scale them back to more mundane and achievable goals. For More, wishful fantasies cannot be treated as tantamount to realistic political programs. Political institutions and policies (including changes in the status quo) must be grounded in the core values of a particular political community. Notes 1. For example, Cicero writes that “virtue is most conspicuously displayed in eminent services to the commonwealth.” Cicero, Letters to Friends, vol. 3, trans. and ed. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), letter 377.5 (X.12.5). See also Neal Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 120–23. 2. Cicero, On Duties, trans. and ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1.21, 3.21–24, 1.21, 2.78–70; Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 111–15. For the interpretation that More supports Utopian communism, see Karl Kautsky, Thomas More and His Utopia, trans. H. J. Stenning (New York: A. C. Black, 1927). 3. Desiderius Erasmus, The Ciceronian: A Dialogue on the Ideal Latin Style, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 28, Literary and Educational Writings, 5 and 6, ed. A. H. T. Levi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). 4. Erasmus, The Ciceronian, 381. 5. Erasmus, The Ciceronian, 383. 6. Erasmus, The Ciceronian, 333. 7. Arthur F. Kinney, Rhetoric and Poetic in Thomas More’s Utopia (Malibu, CA: Undena, 1979); Andrew M. McLean, “Thomas More’s Utopia as Dialogue and City Encomium,” Acta conventus neo-latini Guelpherbytana: Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies 53 (1988): 91–97. 8. Quentin Skinner, “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 123–58; Gerard B. Wegemer, “Rhetoric of Opposition in Thomas More’s Utopia: Giving Form to Competing Philosophies,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 23 (1990): 288–306; Gerard B. Wegemer, Thomas More on Statesmanship (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996); A. G. Harmon, “Sacrifice in the Public Square: Ciceronian Rhetoric in More’s Utopia and

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the Ultimate Ends of Counsel,” Law and Literature 16 (2004): 93–125. The following identify the author More’s Ciceronian views with the character “More”: Skinner, “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia”; Gerard B. Wegemer, “Christian Humanism in More’s Utopia,” Moreana 27 (1990): 5–26; Travis Cutright, The One Thomas More (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012); and John M. Headley, “The Problem of Counsel Revisited: More, Castiglione and the Resignation of Office in the Sixteenth Century,” Moreana 40 (2003): 104. George M. Logan points up the parallels between Cicero and the character “More” and Hythloday in Utopia (“Utopia and Deliberative Rhetoric,” Moreana 31 [1994]: 103–20). Eric Nelson, by contrast, identifies the author More’s views with Hythloday’s but considers both to be expressing anti-Ciceronian opinions (“Greek Nonsense in More’s Utopia,” Historical Journal 44 [2001]: 889–917). Several authors emphasize More’s distancing himself from both the persona “More” or Hythloday, although they consider this open-endedness a characteristic of Cicero’s dialogues. See, for example, David M. Bevington, “The Dialogue in ‘Utopia’: Two Sides to the Question,” Studies in Philology 58 (1961): 496–509; and Dominic Baker-Smith, More’s Utopia (London: HarperCollins, 1991), 12. 9. Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Thomas More as a Renaissance Humanist,” Moreana 1 (1980): 5. 10. On defining Renaissance humanist and humanism, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanistic Strains (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 9–10; and Craig R. Thompson, “The Humanism of More Reappraised,” Thought 52 (1977): 233. 11. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, 9. Humanism is of more recent origin and derives from humanista. 12. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, 11–13. 13. Hanna H. Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 497–98. 14. Gray, “Renaissance Humanism,” 18. 15. Gray, “Renaissance Humanism,” 11. 16. “King Henry employed More primarily . . . as a secretary and orator—the two functions which, according to Burkhardt, made the humanist indispensable to the Renaissance state.” William Nelson, “Thomas More, Grammarian, and Orator,” in Essential Articles for the Study of Thomas More, ed. Richard S. Sylvester and Germain P. March’adour (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1977), 158. 17. Kristeller, “Thomas More as a Renaissance Humanist,” 6–7. 18. Martin Fleisher, Radical Reform and Political Persuasion in the Life and Writings of Thomas More (Geneva: Droz, 1973), 97. 19. An example of More’s regard for Ciceronian rhetoric can be found in a letter he wrote to Erasmus: “For if we were driven from childhood to follow diligently the authority of Cicero and Fabius [Quintilianus, who follows the Ciceronian tradition] . . . there would not be, I think such a poverty of speech, such deplorable lack of eloquence, such shameful stammering even among those who profess oratorical learning.” Quoted in A. G. Harmon, “Sacrifice in the Public Square: Ciceronian Rhetoric in More’s Utopia and the Ultimate Ends of Counsel,” Law and Literature 16 (2004): 97.

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20. Craig R. Thompson, “The Humanism of More Reappraised,” Thought 52 (1977): 242. On Utopia as a humanist work, see Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 123–58; John F. Tinkler, “Praise and Advice: Rhetorical Approaches in More’s Utopia and Machiavelli’s The Prince,” Sixteenth Century Journal 19 (1988): 187– 207; and Gerard B. Wegemer, “Christian Humanism in More’s Utopia,” Moreana 27 (1990): 5–26. 21. Ronald Ian Lakowski, “Sir Thomas More and the Art of Dialogue” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 1993), 5. 22. David Marsh, The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 4–6. 23. George M. Logan, “Utopia and Deliberative Rhetoric,” Moreana 31 (1994): 105. On the differences between the Platonic and Ciceronian dialogues, see K. J. Wilson, Incomplete Fictions: The Formation of English Renaissance Dialogue (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1985), 23–45. 24. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Duties (De Officiis), trans. and ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1:135–37; Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter, vol. 4 of The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), cxxix. 25. Andrew M. McLean, “Thomas More’s Utopia as Dialogue and City Encomium,” Acta conventus neo-latini Guelpherbytana: Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies 53 (1988): 93; see also Elizabeth McCutcheon, “More’s Rhetoric,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More, ed. George M. Logan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 66 n.28. 26. Thomas More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, ed. George M. Logan, Robert M. Adams, and Clarence H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 47. 27. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 97. 28. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 103. 29. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 105. 30. More, Utopia (ed. Surtz and Hexter), cxxxix. 31. Kristeller, “Thomas More as a Renaissance Humanist,” 11. 32. Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 57; Logan, “Utopia and Deliberative Rhetoric,” 105–6; see also McLean, “Thomas More’s Utopia.” 33. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 179. 34. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 181, 185, 241, 245. 35. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 247. 36. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 247–49. 37. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 249. 38. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 249. 39. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 249. 40. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 43–55. According to Diogenes Laertius, Plato traveled widely. Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, trans. C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853), xxviii.

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41. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 81–83. 42. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 105 (emphasis added). See also More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 99. 43. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Orator, trans. G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 70. 44. Cicero, Orator, 123. 45. Cicero, Orator, 70. 46. Cicero, Orator, 71–72. 47. Fleisher, Radical Reform, 98. 48. Desiderius Erasmus, A letter about Sir Thomas More from Erasmus of Rotterdam to Ulrich Hutten: dated: 23 July 1519, trans. Laverne Madigan (New York: F. Warde, 1935), emphasis added. 49. Erasmus, A Letter, emphasis added. 50. McCutcheon, “More’s Rhetoric,” 50. 51. Cicero, On Duties, 1.132. 52. Cicero, On Duties, 1.132, 2.48–49. Cicero argues that epideictic oratory is less important than deliberative or forensic, partly because the Romans “do not generally use laudatory speeches that much.” Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, trans. James M. May and Jakob Wisse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2.341. 53. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Ends, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 2.17. 54. Cicero, On Duties, 1.134–35. 55. Marcus Fabius Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 1:3.5.5–7; Cicero, On Invention, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 1.8; Cicero, Orator; Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, 3.120–21. Quintilian notes Cicero’s change of heart (Institutio Oratoria, 3.5.14–15). 56. Cicero, On the Ends, 1.13. 57. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 31. 58. James E. G. Zetzel, “Philosophy Is in the Streets,” in Roman Reflections: Studies in Latin Philosophy, ed. Gareth D. Williams and Katharina Volk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 56. 59. Zetzel, “Philosophy Is in the Streets,” 56. 60. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 2.4; Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series 71 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 494a. 61. McCutcheon, “More’s Rhetoric,” 50. 62. Zetzel, “Philosophy Is in the Streets,” 56. 63. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 47. 64. I am neither suggesting that Cicero alone among classical thinkers sets his dialogues in pastoral settings nor that other classical authors are indifferent to how the physical environment affects the search for philosophical truth. For example, Plato situates his dialogue the Phaedrus under a plane tree.

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65. Cicero, On Duties, 1.58. 66. Cicero, On Duties, 1.134. 67. Cicero, On Duties, 1.134. 68. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.8. 69. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 88–89. Because the goal of conversation is the cooperative search for the truth, the conversation must be between equals; the interlocutors cannot be concerned with status inequality. 70. Cicero, On Duties, 1.136; see also Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 5.43. 71. Cicero, On the Ends, 1.13. 72. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 2.5. 73. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 40. 74. “Whenever we find an agreement between the two principals, we are surely safe in assuming the author’s concurrence. In the analogy of the courtroom, it is as though plaintiff and defendant have stipulated concerning some fact that is plainly incontrovertible.” Bevington, “The Dialogue in ‘Utopia,’” 500–501. 75. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 43. 76. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 47. 77. Wegemer, “Rhetoric of Opposition,” 290. 78. Wegemer, “Rhetoric of Opposition,” 290. 79. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 81, emphasis added. But in the dialogue-within-a-dialogue, in which Hythloday and Morton are the dominant speakers, the speech of two marginal characters is interrupted: the cardinal cuts off the lawyer, who threatens Hythloday that he will refute and demolish all his arguments, by telling him to hold his tongue (67); the cardinal nods to the “parasite standing around, who liked to play the fool . . . to leave” (77, 81). 80. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 31. 81. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 49. 82. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 107. 83. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 67. 84. Cutright, The One Thomas More, 87–88. 85. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 75–77. 86. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 95. 87. William J. Kennedy, Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 97. 88. Wegemer, “Rhetoric of Opposition,” 293. 89. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 71. 90. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 247–49. 91. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.47, 1.23, 1.17, 5.11. 92. Despite his disdain for Epicureanism, Cicero concedes that he may be in error: “‘many men, many minds’—so it is possible that I am mistaken.” Cicero, On the Ends, 1.15. “Cicero’s dialogues are more concerned with expounding alternative positions than with reaching definite and prescriptive conclusions.” More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, xxii.

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93. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.7. See also Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 1.17; Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 2.63, 5.83; and Cicero, On the Ends, 5. 76. At the close of the dialogue On the Nature of the Gods, the interlocutors departed, each with his own view of probability: “Here the conversation ended, and we parted, Velleius thinking Cotta’s discourse to be truer, while I felt that that of Balbus approximated more nearly to a semblance of the truth” (3.95). 94. Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, 3.95. 95. Ernest Gordon Rupp and Philip Saville Watson, Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1969), 97. 96. Damian Grace, “Utopia and Academic Scepticism,” in More’s Utopia and the Utopian Inheritance, ed. A. D. Cousins and Damian Grace (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995), 11. The character “More” arguing both sides of an issue “‘sharply curtailed any possibility of certainty. . . . Since the disputation rendered all verbal constructs tentative, the province of certainty was limited or rendered impossible.’” John M. Perlette, “Irresolution as Solution: Rhetoric and the Unresolved Debate in Book I of More’s Utopia,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 29 (1987): 37. 97. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 89. 98. A. A. Long, “Plato’s Apologies and Socrates in the Theaetetus,” in Method in Ancient in Philosophy, ed. Jyl Gentzler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 131. 99. Edward August Quattrocki, “Theme and Structure in Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia” (PhD diss., Loyola University Chicago, 1967). 100. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 87. 101. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 95. 102. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 95. 103. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 95. 104. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 95–97. 105. More emulates Cicero in comparing the orator to a stage actor. See, for example, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Brutus, trans. G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 290; Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, 2.193–94. 106. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 97. 107. Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, trans. James May and Jakob Wisse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1.12–13. 108. Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, 2.337. 109. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 97. The character “More” does not see the possibility of large-scale change, à la Hythloday, given the values of European societies, but he does not suggest that he rejects lesser or long-term reforms. French humanist Guillaume Budé, in a letter to English humanist Thomas Lupset, describes More’s account of Utopia as “a nursery of correct and useful institutions which every man may introduce and adapt [accommodent] transplanted customs to his own city.” R. J. Schoeck, “A Nursery of Correct and Useful Institutions: On Reading More’s Utopia as a Dialogue,” Moreana 6.22 (1969): 28. Budé uses the term accommodent, which means in this context that “Utopian institutions, when introduced, are to be adapted to national customs and religious beliefs.” More, Utopia (ed. Surtz and Hexter), 276.

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110. Cicero, Brutus, 279. 111. Gary A. Remer, Ethics and the Orator: The Ciceronian Tradition of Political Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), chaps. 3, 4. 112. Remer, Ethics and the Orator, chap. 3. 113. Cicero, On Duties, 1.31. 114. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 97. 115. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 97, emphasis added. 116. Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, 1.141; Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 168. 117. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 97. 118. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 97. 119. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 97. 120. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 97. 121. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 101. 122. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 99. 123. According to Hythloday, Christ’s teachings are “far more alien from the common customs of mankind” than even Hythloday’s radical policy proposals. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 99. 124. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 99. 125. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 95. 126. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 53, emphasis added. 127. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 103. 128. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 199. 129. Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, 2.336. Isocrates, Antidosis, in Isocrates II, trans. George Norlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), 256: “With this faculty [that is, rhetoric] we both contend against others on matters which are open to dispute and seek light for ourselves on things which are unknown.” See also Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), I.4.1–3; and Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 3.8.25. 130. Although epideictic oratory is mainly celebratory, not contentious, it has also been used agonistically in both legal and political settings. “The award of praise or blame to a witness may carry weight in the courts, while it is also a recognized practice to produce persons to praise the character of the accused. Further the published speeches of Cicero directed against his rivals in the election to the consulship . . . are full of denunciation.” Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 3.7.2. 131. Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 43. 132. Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, 1.157, 2.84; Cicero, Orator, 42. 133. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 241. 134. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 245. 135. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 159. 136. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 124. 137. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 123. 138. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 123.

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139. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 123. 140. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, in The Basic Political Writings, trans. and ed. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011), 2.3; Garsten, Saving Persuasion, 62–63. 141. Garsten, Saving Persuasion, 62–65. 142. Wegemer, “Christian Humanism in More’s Utopia,” 11. 143. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 123–25. Other such rules to protect against the escalation of divisions and the rise of self-interest were enacted: no campaigns for political office and the doing away with lawyers. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 195. 144. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 89. 145. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 91. 146. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, 101.

chapter 4

Machiavelli Menace to Societas M i c h e l l e T. C l a r k e

C

omparative analyses of Machiavelli and Cicero typically focus on The Prince and its repudiation of certain teachings in On Duties.1 The most famous of Machiavelli’s retorts appear in chapters 16, 17, and 18 of The Prince. Whereas Cicero counsels his reader never to commit injustices, whether through force or deceit, Machiavelli insists that princes must use both the lion and the fox.2 Whereas Cicero holds that it is better to be loved than feared, Machiavelli asserts the opposite, that it is more important for princes to be feared than loved.3 Cicero maintains that cruelty is never expedient, and Machiavelli defends cruelty “well-used.”4 Cicero praises liberality as long as it does not require injustice, whereas Machiavelli sees liberality as acceptable only when a prince can give “what belongs to someone else.”5 Clearly Machiavelli does not endorse several of Cicero’s key conclusions about how a ruler ought to act. But what, if anything, do these disagreements amount to theoretically? That is, do they express a more fundamental point of disagreement between Cicero and Machiavelli about the nature of political life? Or are they relatively minor quibbles, peripheral to deeper and more significant conceptual continuities between them? Both conclusions have found their defenders, who have split mainly over how to read Cicero’s complex discussion of the honorable (honestum) and the advantageous (utile). For some, Cicero’s reiteration of the Stoic dictum that the honestum and the utile never conflict indicates his agreement with the deeper Stoic principle that the honestum is the one and only good.6 In this view, Cicero resolves conflicts between the honestum and the utile by defining them away, such that rulers can be safely advised to do what is morally right in all circumstances—a position that Machiavelli directly contradicts in The Prince, where 86



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he insists that what is good is not always useful and when these ends conflict, rulers must prioritize the latter.7 Others have rejected this characterization of Cicero as a rigid moralist, and with it the notion that Machiavelli’s Prince stands as a radical departure from Ciceronian precedent. On this view, Cicero actually rejects the Stoic precept that the honestum is the one and only good. Highlighting many passages in On Duties where Cicero appears to define and justify the honestum in terms of the utile, these readers position Cicero much closer to Machiavelli on the grounds that both accept expediency as a controlling political value, even as they disagree about what course of action it recommends in particular cases.8 In fact, Cicero’s position on the honestum and the utile lies somewhere in between these alternatives. It is certainly true, as the second group of commentators have noted, that Cicero’s discussion of the virtues in On Duties is more pragmatic than one would expect from a traditional Stoic, who would identify virtue as the one and only good. But neither does it follow that On Duties takes “a giant step away from the defense of the honestum as a higher law that gives whatever limited value it can to the utile” or that it “elevates the utile to the level of an ethical criterion in its own right, making it the norm of the honestum,” as some have claimed.9 Instead, Cicero’s On Duties preserves the normative authority of the honestum but redefines it in terms of the preservation of social order, or societas.10 In what follows, I discuss this crucially important aspect of Cicero’s argument in On Duties to show that Machiavelli’s Prince is a sustained effort to rethink political life in the absence of societas. Cicero and the Normativity of Societas Consistent with traditional Stoic formulae, Cicero identifies the supreme good as that which is ordained for us by nature, and nature with rationality.11 But instead of explicating these precepts with reference to the deep structure of the cosmos, he relates them to a claim about human sociability that delineates the honestum as the maintenance of social partnerships. According to Cicero, human beings are naturally gregarious and delight in the companionship of others.12 We are instinctively drawn together into multiple, overlapping communities that satisfy this basic desire for association in different ways.13 Reason and speech (ratio et oratio) are the media through which we forge these social bonds and craft them into durable and mutually beneficial relationships, such that we reveal ourselves to be creatures who engage in common life in an orderly way.14 Together, these inclinations and endeavors define the honestum and mark “obligations that arise from [a] sense of community” as maximally authoritative.15

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Cicero’s emphasis on sociability allows him to discuss the virtues and their associated obligations in terms of their utility without abandoning a first-order commitment to the morally right.16 For Cicero, the virtues are necessary for the excellence of the individual and for the maintenance of social life, and thus they can be said to serve secondary purposes, but societas itself is according to nature and desirable for its own sake. Hence, wisdom makes us perceptive of “the sense of community between gods and men, and the relationship between man and man [deorum et hominium communitas et societas inter ipsos]” and acquires value from the actions that precipitate from it, especially those “concerned with the fellowship of the human race [societatem].”17 Justice and liberality are “the means by which the adhesion of members to the community, and what we may call communal life, may be preserved [qua societas hominium inter ipsos et vitae quasi communitas continetur].”18 Magnanimity is essential for civic leadership, inuring men to the dangers and vicissitudes of public life, and indeed, “the activities of greatest importance, and [the] ones appropriate to the greatest spirit, are those performed by men who conduct public affairs [qui res publicas regant], because the tasks they handle have the widest repercussions and affect the greatest number of people.”19 Finally, moderation, which Cicero equates with decorum or acting (and even feeling) in accordance with social custom, helps us “win the approval of those with whom and among whom we live.”20 The fact that societas is useful to its members as well as being intrinsically rewarding is what permits Cicero to claim that his argument in On Duties reconciles the honestum and the utile. Although he is keen to stress that human beings find association to be inherently pleasurable and thus would continue to socialize even if all their physical needs were met, Cicero also emphasizes the personal benefits that accrue to those who participate in social life.21 These benefits flow directly from the very gregariousness that draws us together because we typically express our care and concern for others by helping them.22 This is why Cicero holds that “nothing more accords with human nature” than generosity and, conversely, that if a person deprives his neighbor of something, and furthers his own advantage by another’s loss, such behavior flies in the face of nature more than death or poverty or pain or anything which can affect our persons or our external possessions; for first and foremost it undermines the fellowship and alliance between members of the human race [convictum humanum et societatem]. Should the spirit move us to plunder or assault our neighbor for our own profit, that fellowship between the human race which so closely accords with nature must inevitably be dismantled



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[disrumpi necesse est, eam quae maxime est secundum naturam, humani generis societatem].23 Ultimately, Cicero argues, the harm that we do to ourselves by damaging societas outweighs whatever private advantage might have led us to behave dishonorably, just as a body’s limbs would perish if they each “took the notion that it could flourish by appropriating the strength of the adjacent limb,” causing the whole body to weaken and die.24 Even as the concept of societas helps Cicero defend one tenet of Stoicism, it underwrites a significant challenge to Stoic orthodoxy: his contention that justice ranks higher than wisdom among the virtues.25 Following Plato and Aristotle, earlier Stoics had ranked theoretical wisdom as the highest virtue in the belief that none of the other three virtues could be practiced without it.26 But Cicero uses the value of societas to argue for the primacy of justice, the virtue most directly concerned with the maintenance of human fellowship and community. Although it is true that wisdom is required to apprehend the nature and value of societas, he concedes, knowledge is only valuable insofar as it prompts action; the “action that does follow is seen to best advantage when it protects men’s interests [hominum commodis] and is therefore concerned with the fellowship of the human race [societatem]”—that is, when we act justly toward others.27 Indeed, he continues, the priority of justice over wisdom is obvious to “every citizen of merit”: For is anyone so eager to investigate and discover the nature of reality that if, as he pored over and pondered the most significant researches, he was suddenly informed of critical danger to his country and he could lend it help and support, he would not forsake and abandon all those researches even if he thought that he could calculate the number of the stars, or measure the dimensions of the universe? And he would do the very same in the interests or the danger of a parent or a friend. These considerations make us realize that obligations of justice, involving as they do the welfare of mankind [hominum utilitatem] (and nothing should be more hallowed in our eyes), are to be given precedence over the pursuit of knowledge and its obligations.28 Thus, he concludes, “justice is the single virtue which is mistress and queen of all the virtues.”29 Cicero also uses the concept of societas to justify a kind of moral flexibility that sets him apart from traditional Stoics.30 As early as For Murena, he had sought

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to distance himself from dogmatists like Cato, whose moral rigidity was alleged to be a direct product of his Stoicism—a philosophical outlook that Cicero portrays as, ironically, running afoul of nature.31 According to Cicero, Cato was wrong to follow Zeno in believing that our moral judgments should be rendered solely with a view to the intrinsic moral worth of the action under consideration. Rather, he argues, the needs and habits of social life should play a role in shaping our moral judgments, too, such that a wise man will recognize the appropriateness of respecting the opinions of others, responding to a defendant’s pleas for mercy, pardoning minor offenses, and preserving established civic relationships.32 Cicero attributes Cato’s stubborn refusal to do any of these things to the perversity of Stoic philosophy, wherein theoretical consistency is purchased at the expense of the reasonableness and moderation counseled by common sense, ancestral custom, Cato’s natural inclinations, and ultimately nature itself.33 In On Duties, Cicero once again uses the concept of societas to defend the honorableness of apparently immoral actions. For example, having vigorously denounced stealing as “behavior [that] flies in the face of nature” because “first and foremost, it undermines the fellowship and alliance between members of the human race [nam principio tollit convictum humanum et societatem],” Cicero goes on to condone expropriation when it is done for the “communal benefit [communis utilitatis].”34 Although it is generally wrong even for a starving man to take the bread of another, he reasons, “if . . . you are the sort of person who can greatly benefit the state and society in general [qui multam utilitatem rei publicae atque hominum societati] by remaining alive, and if with that motive in mind you deprive your neighbor of something, your deed is not blameworthy.”35 Similarly, he holds that it is acceptable to rob and even kill individuals who do not participate in societas, most notably tyrants.36 His example is the cruel Phalaris, tyrant of Acragas, who was eventually deposed by Roman forces under the command of Scipio Aemilianus—a move that Cicero elsewhere cites approvingly as Sicily’s introduction to Roman mansuetudo (mildness).37 By contrast, Cicero condemns Romulus for killing his brother, Remus, so that he could rule alone, on the grounds that personal advantage is never a valid excuse for violating “the obligations of kinship and humanity [pietatem et humanitatem].”38 All of this is to say that societas forms the normative core of Cicero’s political ethics in On Duties. The book’s primary theoretical innovation is not a radical restructuring of the relationship between the honestum and the utile, as some have argued (i.e., making the utile the controlling objective and leveraging the honestum as a useful tool for achieving it). Instead, On Duties identifies sociability as a primary element of human nature and uses that connection to define the honestum as whatever promotes societas. By mooring political ethics to societas



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in this way, Cicero authorizes a variety of new arguments concerning the nature and limits of moral obligation that have a broadly “Machiavellian” appearance, especially insofar as they give serious attention to political considerations and sometimes even legitimate seemingly “immoral” actions in the name of civic utility. Machiavelli’s Rejection of Societas But the concept of societas is also, crucially, what sets Cicero and Machiavelli apart. Unlike Cicero, Machiavelli, as I will show, has no use for the concept of societas, which he rejects as empirically unsupported and politically dangerous. In On Duties, Cicero presents his claims about human nature as self-evident truths, recognizable to anyone as uncontestable descriptions of who we are, what we want, and by extension what we deserve and owe to others. To anyone wanting further confirmation of our natural sociability—the central truth about ourselves from which all further claims about honorable political conduct are supposed to follow—Cicero points to the fact of association and our possession of faculties that can be readily turned to that purpose.39 For Machiavelli, however, the notion that humans naturally regard one another with goodwill is anything but obvious; indeed, he argues, the evidence supplied by history—including the history of Cicero’s own city, Rome—underwrites an altogether different account of our basic social motivations and political normativity. Machiavelli dispenses altogether with the Ciceronian paradigm in the first chapter of The Prince, which opens with the forceful assertion that “all states, all dominions that have held and do hold empire over men have been and are either republics or principalities.”40 Whereas Cicero would have us believe that just political orders find their root in the innate associational impulses of those who live under them, and in that sense can always lay claim to something like the consent of the governed, Machiavelli depicts political order as inherently coercive.41 Principalities and republics alike are “dominions” that “hold empire over men” (tutti e’ dominii che hanno avuto et hanno imperio sopra li uomini), he writes. His turn from the republican vocabulary and logics of On Duties to the language of imperial rule is unmistakable here, revealing a major shift in thinking from Cicero about the very nature of politics. Cicero’s vision, in which political life is figured as the cumulative product of voluntary bonds and cooperative exchanges radiating outward from the household, has been replaced in The Prince by one where state power is essentially a form of command imposed on a subject population. This manner of thinking about political order shapes virtually everything about The Prince, including what Machiavelli takes to be the central problems

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of political life. In On Duties, Cicero’s conceptualization of political order as an extension of societas leads him to foreground the disputes and uncertainties associated with business partnerships in Roman contract law, particularly their terms of obligation.42 Echoing his own legal arguments concerning business partnerships in Pro Quinctio and Pro Roscio Amerino, Cicero argues in On Duties that virtuous citizenship is primarily a matter of acting in good faith (bona fides) toward political associates, especially when it comes to distributing benefits and repaying debts. Accordingly, the main problem that virtuous citizens must grapple with is determining what good faith demands of them and others in particular situations.43 In The Prince, Machiavelli focuses on how political order is successfully created and maintained, a question that only exists for him because he has rejected Cicero’s answer to it. For Machiavelli, the work of politics goes far beyond anything that Cicero imagines: first, because political life has no real existence prior to the act of founding, and second, because states never fully vanquish the forces that oppose them and must therefore perpetually replay the “primordial moment of acquisition” in which they are established.44 Unsupported by nature and forever unfinished, establishing political order now takes center stage. Machiavelli envisions political order as a form of “dominion” that must always contend with resistance and sabotage from within because he does not believe that human beings have or can be made to have shared purposes. Cicero identifies concord (concordia) as a key feature of societas, by which he means thinking and acting in harmony. Just as business partners (socii) work together to pursue a common aim, social and political societas is built on unity, consensus, and cooperation: citizens enjoy the peace (pax) and tranquility (otium) constitutive of a res publica by sharing resources, working cooperatively, and regarding one another as friends.45 Machiavelli rejects the idea that politics can be coordinated and stabilized in this way because humans want incompatible things. This inconvenient but unavoidable fact about human nature shadows the early chapters of The Prince, in which Machiavelli warns that it is impossible for princes, especially new princes, to satisfy everyone; but it remains relatively unexplored until chapter 9, where he outlines his theory of the political humors. Contrary to Cicero, who holds that everyone who is rational and good seeks honorable leisure, Machiavelli insists that “in every city . . . two diverse humors are found”: one associated with the people, who “desire neither to be commanded nor oppressed by the great,” and the other with the great, who “desire to command and oppress the people.”46 Thus, division and conflict are not only endemic to all political communities, they feed on the very apportioning of power that constitutes political order.



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These and other differences between Cicero and Machiavelli find concentrated expression in their respective bodily metaphors. Cicero’s imagined civic body is made up of functionally differentiated and interdependent parts; the body’s natural state is one of internal harmony; although the integration of the body makes it irrational to promote the well-being of one part over another, some parts are more naturally “fit” to govern the whole than others, and conflict is the always-illicit disruption of the body’s metabolic processes by an uncooperative part. Machiavelli’s civic body, by contrast, is an entanglement of warring humors, intrinsically unstable and continually at risk of total collapse. Neither humor is authoritative; indeed, they occupy no defined “place” in the body and circulate freely, propelled by external stimuli, internal bodily movements, and their own natural tendencies. Sickness ensues when the body becomes unbalanced as a result of humoral excitation, accumulation, stagnation, or depletion, and statecraft attempts to prolong corporeal life by holding the body in a permanent state of equilibrium, interrupting its natural drift toward death.47 Untethered to the concept of societas, Machiavelli openly rejects—and sometimes inverts—Cicero’s reasoning about the virtues. As we have seen, Cicero treats justice as a controlling virtue because of its indispensability to societas. Moreover, the concept of societas informs what Cicero actually means by justice and why he thinks we are motivated to pursue it. Justice, he says, is ensuring that “no person should suffer harm, and . . . observance of the common good [communi utilitati],” concerns that flow naturally from our innate “sense of community [communitate].”48 By contrast, The Prince has no substantial discussion of justice at all: a glaring omission that marks the first and most significant casualty of Machiavelli’s refusal to conceive of the human world in the Ciceronian terms of “community and fellowship [communitatem et societatem].”49 On the subject of what humans owe to one another, Machiavelli believes that nature simply has nothing to say. The normative standing of justice disappears together with the societas that it was once held to preserve and support, leaving Machiavelli to conclude that a prince should “learn to be able not to be good” and “use this and not use it according to necessity.”50 Although explicit references to justice are few and far between, The Prince addresses the subject obliquely through its analysis of faith ( fede) in chapter 18. In On Duties, Cicero says that good faith is “the foundation of justice” and invokes the metaphors of the lion and fox to argue that although force and deceit are “utterly alien to human beings,” deceit is the “more odious” injustice of the two.51 Again, the logic behind the argument here is grounded in the concept of societas. Consistent with his declaration in For Sextus Roscius that a violation of faith disturbs the fellowship of life (vitae societatem), Cicero traces the “bond

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of fellowship [societas]” that unites all human beings and “form[s] the structure of our communal life [vitae societas contineretur]” to faithfully assumed and discharged agreements.52 By the same token, Machiavelli has no problem advising princes to be both lions and foxes because societas plays no role in his conceptualization of political life: responding to necessity is the more urgent— indeed, more real—consideration. That societas is the wedge driving Machiavelli and Cicero apart on this issue becomes apparent when Machiavelli explains what princes who “stay simply with the lion” have failed to “understand,” writing that “a prudent lord . . . cannot observe faith, nor should he, when such observance turns against him, and the causes that made him promise have been eliminated. And if all men were good, this teaching would not be good; but because they are wicked and do not observe faith with you, you also do not have to observe it with them.”53 Necessity compels princes to be faithless (“cannot observe faith”), but the widespread faithlessness of others negates any moral obligation for princes to behave otherwise (“nor should he”). Machiavelli also undercuts Cicero’s argument for the normativity of justice by redeeming avarice. Cicero insists that “there is no vice more squalid than greed [avaritia]” and categorically condemns stealing as unnatural and inimical to societas, holding that “to lay hands on another’s goods for personal gain is more unnatural than death or pain or other hardships of that kind.”54 By contrast, Machiavelli maintains that avarice is perfectly natural to human beings: “it is a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire [È cosa veramente molto naturale et ordinaria desiderare di acquistare], and always when men do it who can, they will be praised or not blamed; but when they cannot and when they do it anyway, here lie the error and the blame.”55 Justice, whatever it is, cannot recruit the support of human nature, which points only in the direction of self-serving expropriation. For Machiavelli, Rome serves as a prime example of how our natural acquisitiveness can be translated into foreign policy, one that contrasts usefully with the more hesitant and uncertain approach to territorial acquisition taken by modern states like France.56 Even here, in glossing Roman imperialism as an expression of humanity’s “very natural and ordinary . . . desire to acquire,” we find Machiavelli jousting with Cicero, who insists that Roman expansion was typically motivated by considerations of justice and pursued fairly.57 Cicero identifies justice as one of two “means by which the adhesion of members to the community [societas], and what we may call their communal life [communitas], may be preserved.”58 The second is a pair of virtues, beneficence (beneficentia) and liberality (liberalitas), which Cicero sees as being especially agreeable to human nature, that is, the natural impulse to assist and protect our



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associates.59 Moreover, Cicero argues that generosity supports the development of societas because we are naturally drawn closer to those with whom we share things; men are “bound together in stable association [firma devinciuntur societate]” when they exchange kindnesses.60 In Machiavelli’s world, liberality enjoys no special normative standing because political communities are always and inevitably divided—in fact, he argues, princely liberality contributes to the intensification of existing civic divisions by offending the people, who tend to be especially burdened by the taxes inevitably required to finance it. In addition, Machiavelli sees no reason to believe, as Cicero does, that liberality is intrinsically attractive and something that “causes us to feel affection towards those in whom we observe it.”61 In place of these sociable responses, Machiavelli predicts that liberality will typically go unrecognized; audiences will focus instead on a prince’s total resources and disdain him if he is poor, whatever the cause. Finally, without the notion that liberality should be practiced with a view to maintaining societas, Machiavelli sees no reason to endorse Cicero’s maxim that liberality is acceptable only insofar as it “does harm to no one.”62 Having declared that a prince “should esteem it little to incur a name for meanness,”63 Machiavelli allows that liberality is permissible when (and only when!) a prince is giving away what he has taken from others. Whereas Cicero believes that honorableness is essentially reducible to properly distributing benefits, Machiavelli focuses instead on prudently managing injury and offense. Given the divisions that rend every political community, a benefit to one party is always a source of injury and offense to the other; indeed, the very existence of the prince is a continual provocation to the few who envy and resent his power. Thus a prince cannot avoid offending some, and because offense is the primary driver of the hatred that is fatal to princely power, he must take as his first order of business “review[ing] all the offenses necessary for him to commit” and administer them in such a way as to minimize their ill effects: by being feared, committing offenses “all at a stroke,” and ensuring that offenses cannot be avenged, preferably by “eliminat[ing] those who can or might offend you.”64 In Machiavelli’s opinion, Cesare Borgia was ultimately ruined by his failure to fully absorb these lessons “notwithstanding the fact that he made use of every deed and did all those things that should be done by a prudent and virtuous man to put his roots in the states that the arms and fortunes of others had given him.”65 Perhaps under the influence of Cicero’s maxim that no obligation is more important than showing gratitude and returning a favor, Borgia had made the disastrous error of allowing Julius II to be elected pope despite the fact that Borgia had once offended him.66 According to Machiavelli, Borgia’s subsequent downfall testifies to how mistaken it is to expect benefits to have a

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controlling influence on men’s behavior. “And whoever believes that among great personages new benefits will make old injuries be forgotten deceives himself.”67 Given the essential conflict between the people and the great that rends every political community, Machiavelli counsels princes to think carefully about which of these two “sides [parti]” he will favor—and, by implication, which he will injure and offend.68 Although he suggests in chapter 6 that it is both possible and advisable for new princes “to stand by themselves” and not “depend on others,” chapter 9 states unambiguously that all principalities are “caused” by either the people or the great.69 Given these alternatives, Machiavelli recommends that a prince ally himself with the people because they are easier to satisfy, more willing to obey, impossible to replace, and too numerous to oppose.70 Although he offers few concrete proposals concerning the “modes” by which a prince can gain the people to himself, Machiavelli’s general advice is that “one who becomes princes through the support of the people should keep them friendly to him” by not oppressing them (a subject he explores in more detail in chapter 19), whereas “one who becomes princes against the people with the support of the great must before everything else seek to gain the people to himself ” by protecting them against oppression by the great.71 On all of these questions—whether princes must ally themselves with one social group against another; if so, which of them he should choose; even which factors should consider in making such a decision—Machiavelli reverses Cicero’s positions in On Duties. According to Cicero, statesmen should avoid partisanship at all costs, as something that is inimical to the societas that ought to stand as their first and most important principal. Citing Plato as an authority on the matter, Cicero admonishes those who “take over the administration of the state” to make “the whole body-politic . . . their concern [totum corpus rei publicae curent]” and “not protect one section [of it] at the expense of the rest.”72 Why? Because to do otherwise weakens the unity and concord that leaders do not themselves create but are nevertheless responsible for protecting and augmenting: “People who consult the interests of one section of the citizens and show indifference to another, introduce a most destructive element into the state, namely dissention and disharmony [seditionem atque discordiam]. The outcome is that some are seen as ‘men of the people [populares],’ others as followers of ‘the best citizens [optimi],’ and few as supporters of the whole community [universorum].”73 Nevertheless, Cicero predicts that virtuous statesmen will find themselves naturally aligned with a city’s best men, its optimates or boni, because decorum requires they consult men of learning and experience before making difficult choices, and conversely, minds “well fashioned by nature” are receptive only to leaders who issue “just and lawful orders.”74

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In addition to rejecting Cicero’s invocation of societas to delegitimate political partisanship, Machiavelli finds little of value in Cicero’s accompanying description of grandi. Whereas Cicero anchors the preservation of Roman societas in the measured solidity of a city’s elite order, Machiavelli attributes much of the fractiousness and instability that he sees as endemic to politics everywhere to the selfishness, rapacity, indecency, enviousness, and disloyalty of such grandi. Whatever their pretensions, he suggests, grandi have a demonstrated history of untrustworthiness and insubordination and cannot be expected to cooperatively engage with, let alone support, one of their rivals, whatever moral complexion a prince’s actions may be said to have.75 By contrast, according to Machiavelli, it is the people—maligned elsewhere by Cicero as a belua, or a wild beast—who offer a prince the greatest hope for political stability, although never Cicero’s imagined societas.76 Dismissing out of hand “that trite proverb, that whoever founds on the people founds on mud,” Machiavelli thus reclassifies the popolo as the steadiest pillar on which to erect a principality and consigns the grandi to the political margins, to be “secure[d] . . . against” but never truly satisfied.77 .

Conclusion Although Machiavelli’s interlocutors in The Prince are many, he singles out Cicero for rebuke again and again, though never explicitly. Why? Because Cicero had seeded into centuries of political education a fiction that had corrupted not just political theory but also—and far more important—political practice. Of all the “imagined republics and principalities” Machiavelli targets in The Prince, Cicero’s concept of societas was perhaps the most influential in the political literature of his time, and for this reason alone it is no surprise that Machiavelli concentrates so much attention on dismantling it.78 In On Duties, Cicero had based his teachings on the fact of association alone, without attending in any serious way to dissociation. Given Machiavelli’s reading of history, including the history of Rome, this normalization of social harmony was unjustified. In obscuring the persistent reality of social conflict, it had failed to account for the fact that political orders are often fragile and easily undone. Machiavelli sets out to repair this problem in The Prince, and the consequence is a radically different political ethics in which expediency rules. Notes 1. See especially Marcia Colish,“Cicero’s De officiis and Machiavelli’s Prince,” Sixteenth Century Journal 9, no. 4 (1978): 80–93; Marcia Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1985); and Gary Remer, Ethics and the Orator:

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The Ciceronian Tradition of Political Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Machiavelli’s Prince has also been usefully compared with Cicero’s On the Orator (Michelle Zerba, “The Frauds of Humanism: Cicero, Machiavelli, and the Rhetoric of Imposture,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 22, no. 3 [2004]: 215–40; Daniel J. Kapust, “Acting the Princely Style: Ethos and Pathos in Cicero’s On the Ideal Orator and Machiavelli’s The Prince,” Political Studies 58, no. 3 [2010]: 590–608), pseudo-Cicero’s Rhetorica ad Herennium (Virginia Cox, “Machiavelli and the Rhetorica ad Herennium: Deliberative Rhetoric in The Prince,” Sixteenth Century Journal 28, no. 4 [1997]: 1109–41), Seneca’s De Clementia (Peter Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007]), Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae (Daniel J. Kapust, “Cato’s Virtues and the Prince: Reading Sallust’s War with Catiline with Machiavelli’s The Prince,” History of Political Thought 28, no. 3 [2007]: 433–48), Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (Paul J. Rassmussen, Excellence Unleashed: Machiavelli’s Critique of Xenophon and the Moral Foundations of Politics [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009]; Waller R. Newell, Tyranny: A New Interpretation [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013]), and various examples of Italian humanist political literature (Felix Gilbert, “The Humanist Concept of the Prince and the Prince of Machiavelli,” Journal of Modern History 11, no. 4 [1939]: 449–83; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume 1: The Renaissance [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978]; and Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000]). Alexander Duff focuses on Machiavelli’s critique of Cicero in his Discourses on Livy (“Republicanism and the Problem of Ambition: A Critique of Cicero in Machiavelli’s Discourses,” Journal of Politics 73, no. 4 [2011]: 980–92). 2. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Obligations, trans. P. G. Walsh (New York: Oxford World Classics, 2000), 1.41; Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 18. 3. Cicero, On Obligations, 2.23; Machiavelli, The Prince, 17. 4. Cicero, On Obligations, 3.46; Machiavelli, The Prince, 8, 17 5. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.42–43; Machiavelli, The Prince, 16. 6. Cicero, On Obligations, 3.11. 7. Machiavelli, The Prince, 15. According to Hulliung, for example, Machiavelli “turns the Stoicism of Cicero upside-down” (Citizen Machiavelli [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983], x). See also Leslie J. Walker, The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli (1951; repr., New York: Routledge, 1992), 278; J. N. Stephens, “Ciceronian Rhetoric and the Immorality of Machiavelli’s Prince,” Renaissance Studies 2, no. 2 (1988): 207; Victoria Kahn, “Virtù and the Example of Agathocles in Machiavelli’s Prince,” in Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 207; and Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 90. 8. This position has been argued for most forcefully in Colish, “Cicero’s De officiis and Machiavelli’s Prince,” and Colish, The Stoic Tradition. See also David S. Fott, “How Machiavellian Is Cicero?,” in The Arts of Rule: Essays in Honor of Harvey C. Mansfield, ed. Sharon R. Krause and Mary Ann McGrail (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009). Zerba also locates an “ethics of expediency” (“The Frauds of Humanism,” 215) in Cicero, but on



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the basis of a careful reading of On the Orator. Without accepting that Cicero elevates expediency as far as Colish claims, J. Jackson Barlow emphasizes Cicero’s stress on the vita activa and holds that Machiavelli “completes Cicero’s intention of treating politics on its own terms” (“The Fox and the Lion: Machiavelli Replies to Cicero,” History of Political Thought 20, no. 4 [1999]: 644) without recognizing significant differences in how they conceptualize politics. Still others maintain that Cicero allows the honestum and the utile to persist as rival ideals, which rulers must balance according to the circumstances (Remer, Ethics and the Orator). 9. Colish, “Cicero’s De officiis and Machiavelli’s Prince,” 90, 86. 10. Andrew Dyck attributes this revision to Cicero’s desire to make Panaetius’s work useful in solving Rome’s political problems (A Commentary on Cicero, On Duties [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997], 31). For a more detailed treatment of the role played by societas in undergirding the entirety of Cicero’s argument in On Duties, see E. M. Atkins, “‘Domina et Regina Virtutum’: Justice and Societas in ‘On Duties,’” Phronesis 35, no. 3 (1990): 258–89. On honor and honorableness in Cicero’s thought more generally, see Margaret Graver, “Honor and the Honorable: Cato’s Discourse in De Finibus 3,” in Cicero’s De Finibus: Philosophical Approaches, ed. Julia Annas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 118–46. 11. Cicero, On Obligations, 3.13, 1.13–14. 12. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.12, 1.50–51, 1.157–58. 13. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.53–57. 14. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.12, 1.50. 15. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.14–15, 1.153; see also 1.155. 16. On the complexities associated with Cicero’s concept of utility, see Walter Nicgorski, “Cicero’s Paradoxes and His Idea of Utility,” Political Theory 12, no. 4 (1984): 557–78. 17. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.153; see also 1.155–56. 18. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.20. 19. Cicero, On Obligations, 192. 20. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.126. Kapust explains how Cicero’s understanding of decorum prevents rhetoric from devolving into mere flattery. “Cicero on Decorum and the Morality of Rhetoric,” European Journal of Political Theory 10, no. 1 (2011): 92–112. Kapust shows that decorum is intimately connected to the maintenance of social bonds. “Rethinking Rousseau’s Tyranny of Orators: Cicero’s On Duties and the Beauty of True Glory,” in The General Will: The Evolution of a Concept, ed. James Farr and David Lay Williams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 175–96. 21. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.153, 1.158, 2.11–15, 2.17. 22. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.12, 1.17. 23. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.42, 3.21–22. 24. Cicero, On Obligations, 3.22. A similar analogy can be found in Livy 2.32. 25. Early in On Obligations, Cicero announces that he will “follow the Stoics chiefly, not translating them, but following my usual procedure of drawing from their wells as much as, and in whatever way, my judgment and inclination dictate” (On Obligations, 1.6). But he considered himself to be an Academic skeptic, as he reminds Marcus later (On Obligations, 2.7–8). On Cicero’s skepticism and its influence on his political philosophy,

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see Michelle Zerba, Doubt and Skepticism in Antiquity and the Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Jonathan Zarecki, Cicero’s Ideal Statesman in Theory and Practice (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); and Walter Nicgorski, Cicero’s Skepticism and the Recovery of Philosophy (New York: Springer, 2016). 26. On wisdom and nature in Stoic ethics, see Marcelo Diego Boeri, “Does Cosmic Nature Matter? Some Remarks on the Cosmological Aspects of Stoic Ethics,” in God and Cosmos in Stoicism, ed. R. Salles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 173–200; and Renè Brouwer, The Stoic Sage: The Early Stoics on Wisdom, Sagehood and Socrates (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 27. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.153, 1.5, 1.15, 1.20–50. 28. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.154–55. 29. Cicero, On Obligations, 3.28; see also 1.20. It must also be noted that Cicero allots far more space in On Obligations to the virtues associated with societas—justice (1.20– 41), kindness and generosity (1.42–59), magnanimity (1.61–92), and decorum (1.93–151)— than wisdom (1.153–60). Indeed, Cicero’s discussion of wisdom is mostly devoted to warning Marcus not to prioritize it over social obligations. 30. As Cicero notes in 3.13–16, On Obligations is concerned with so-called middle duties as opposed to the complete duties of the Stoic sage. 31. Cicero, Mur. 61; see also 64. 32. Cicero, Mur. 61–66. 33. Cicero, Mur. 65–6. For a superb treatment of Cicero’s critique of Cato in For Murena, see Rex Stem, “Cicero as Orator and Philosopher: The Value of the ‘Pro Murena’ for Ciceronian Political Thought,” Review of Politics 68, no. 2 (2006): 206–31. According to Stem, Cicero viewed Cato’s moral inflexibility as being detrimental to the maintenance of political consensus. 34. Cicero, On Obligations, 3.21, 3.30. 35. Cicero, On Obligations, 3.30. 36. Cicero, On Obligations, 3.32. It must be noted that Cicero’s argument here is not that “certain actions, such as tyrannicide . . . are good and expedient even though they violate the moral law” (Colish, “Cicero’s De officiis and Machiavelli’s Prince,” 89). 37. Cicero, Verr. 2.4.73. 38. Cicero, On Obligations, 3.41. 39. See especially Cicero, On Obligations, 1.12, 1.50. 40. Machiavelli, The Prince, 1. 41. On Cicero’s concept of res publica and its basis in “agreement with respect to justice” (70), see Malcolm Schofield, “Cicero’s Definition of Res Publica,” in Cicero the Philosopher: Twelve Papers, ed. J. G. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). 42. Dean Hammer, Roman Political Thought: From Cicero to Augustine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 46–48. On the basis of Cicero’s concept of societas in Roman economic practices and contract law, see Elizabeth Asmis, “The State as a Partnership: Cicero’s Definition of Res Publica in His Work on the State,” History of Political Thought 25, no. 4 (2004): 569–98; and James E. G. Zetzel, “A Contract on Ameria: Law and Legality in Cicero’s Pro Roscio Amerino,” American Journal of Philology 134, no. 3 (2013): 425–44.



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43. Cicero, On Obligations, 3.54–115. 44. Peter Beiner, “Machiavelli’s ‘New Prince’ and the Primordial Moment of Acquisition,” Political Theory 36, no. 1 (2008): 66–92. 45. On the interrelationship of consensus, pax, and otium in Cicero’s thought, see Hannah Cornwell, Pax and the Politics of Peace: Republic to Principate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 46. Machiavelli, The Prince, 9. 47. On Machiavelli’s political repurposing of Galen’s theory of bodily humors, see Anthony J. Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). For a helpful treatment of similar bodily metaphors in early modern France, see Kathryn Banks, “Interpretations of the Body Politic and of Natural Bodies in Late SixteenthCentury France,” in Metaphor and Discourse, ed. Andreas Musolff and Jörg Zinken (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 206–7. 48. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.31, 1.153. See 1.30 for Cicero’s reservations about our ability to think about the interests of others. 49. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.158. 50. Machiavelli, The Prince, 15. 51. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.23, 1.41. 52. Cicero, Rosc. Am. 111; Cicero, On Obligations, 3.69–70. 53. Machiavelli, The Prince, 18. 54. Cicero, On Obligations, 2.77, 3.24; see also 3.21, quoted in full above, and 3.27. 55. Machiavelli, The Prince, 3. 56. Machiavelli, The Prince, 3. 57. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.35–40. Cicero believes that “fair dealing [aequitas] in war” is a long-standing Roman custom, a claim that he substantiates with reference to Rome’s fetial code (Cicero, On Obligations, 1.36) as well as several specific examples of Roman integrity, restraint, generosity, and trustworthiness (Cicero, On Obligations,1.36–40). But he does accuse recent generations of having “desist[ed] from this practice of disciplined behavior” (Cicero, On Obligations, 2.27). Although the Roman empire was once “maintained in a spirit of service” with “magistrates and commanders . . . eager to win the greatest praise solely by endeavoring to protect of providing and allies with justice and fidelity [aequitate et fide],” such that “‘protectorate of the world’ rather than ‘empire’ would have been a truer title” for it (Cicero, On Obligations, 2.26–27), he writes, corrupt leaders like Sulla have since normalized the self-serving and unjust expropriation of Roman enemies and allies alike (Cicero, On Obligations, 2.27–28) with devastating consequences for Roman liberty. 58. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.20. 59. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.20, 1.12. 60. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.54–56, 1.56. 61. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.56. 62. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.43. 63. Machiavelli, The Prince, 16. 64. Machiavelli, The Prince, 8, 17, 8, 3, 7. 65. Machiavelli, The Prince, 7.

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66. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.47. 67. Machiavelli, The Prince, 7. 68. Machiavelli, The Prince, 9. 69. This statement in chapter 9 appears to contradict Machiavelli’s description of ecclesiastical principalities in chapter 11, which are said to “subsist by superior causes.” 70. Machiavelli puts this recommendation most forcefully when he concludes that “for a prince it is necessary for have the people friendly” (The Prince, 9, emphasis added). 71. Machiavelli, The Prince, 9. 72. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.85. 73. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.85. 74. Cicero, On Obligations, 1.147, 1.13. Tellingly, Cicero’s only cautionary example of a city plagued by “great dissensions” (On Obligations, 1.86) consequent to political favoritism is Athens, a democracy, implying that populism is especially prone to fueling social and political conflict (see also Rep. 1.65–69, 3.45). 75. Machiavelli, The Prince, 9. 76. Cicero, Amic. 2.25; see also Cicero, Rep. 3.45. 77. Machiavelli, The Prince, 9, 24. 78. Machiavelli, The Prince, 15; Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought; Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Hans Baron, “The Memory of Cicero’s Roman Civic Spirit in the Medieval Centuries and in the Florentine Renaissance,” in In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism, vol. 1, Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 94–133.

chapter 5

Montaigne in the Mirror of Cicero Eric MacPhail

I

n a passage from the essay “De l’expérience” of Book III of the Essais, first published in 1588, Michel de Montaigne expresses a preference for selfknowledge over philosophical knowledge: “J’aymerois mieux m’entendre bien en moy qu’en Platon.”1 Sometime before his death in 1592, he adjusted this sentence to read “J’aymerois mieux m’entendre bien en moy qu’en Ciceron.”2 The substitution of Cicero for Plato, or a personage of Roman history for an exponent of a philosophical system, slightly modifies the original meaning to express a preference for self-knowledge over historical knowledge.3 In effect, this revised phrase challenges the humanist doctrine of historia magistra vitae, or the notion that we study history to acquire the vicarious experience needed to lead our own lives. “S’entendre en Ciceron” would mean to understand yourself through the historical example of Cicero. Montaigne seems to be telling himself or his readers, “you won’t learn from historical examples if you can’t learn from your own experience.” Vicarious experience is not a proper substitute for personal experience. As if to confirm this lesson, later in the same paragraph we read this declaration: “La vie de Caesar n’a poinct plus d’exemple que la nostre pour nous.”4 Montaigne seems to be quite skeptical of historical exemplarity, especially of the example of the late Roman republic, figured by its two protagonists and antagonists, Cicero and Julius Caesar. Yet the late substitution of Cicero for Plato, perhaps one of the last corrections he ever made to his text, reveals the inevitability of Cicero for Montaigne’s self-expression and selfunderstanding. When revising the last essay in his book, the name of Cicero comes most readily to his mind and to his pen. Montaigne’s antihumanist posture in III, 13 is not characteristic of his manner elsewhere. In the essay “De la vanité,” also from Book III, he expresses a 103

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simultaneous alienation from the present and affinity for the past that, if anything, exaggerates the humanist tradition of communion with the past. As an example of human vanity, Montaigne explains the profound gratification he derived from being granted Roman citizenship by an official act or “authentic bull” that he transcribes at the end of his essay.5 In this context he informs us that he was brought up with the ancient Romans: “Or j’ay esté nourry dés mon enfance avec ceux icy; j’ay eu connoissance des affaires de Romme, long temps avant que je l’aye eue de ceux de ma maison: je sçavois le Capitole et son plant avant que je sceusse le Louvre, et le Tibre avant la Seine.”6 He reserves his greatest affection for republican Rome, which he calls “the state of that ancient Rome, free, just, and flourishing.”7 In fact, Montaigne seems to have been a partisan of the republican forces against the new regime of Julius Caesar: Or j’ay attaqué cent querelles pour la deffence de Pompeius et pour la cause de Brutus. Cette accointance dure encore entre nous; les choses presentes mesmes, nous ne les tenons que par la fantasie. Me trouvant inutile à ce siecle, je me rejecte à cet autre, et en suis si embabouyné que l’estat de cette vieille Romme, libre, juste et florissante (car je n’en ayme ny la naissance ny la vieillesse) m’interesse et me passionne.8 Now I have started a hundred quarrels in defense of Pompey and for the cause of Brutus. This friendship still endures between us; even present things we hold only by imagination. Finding myself useless for this age, I throw myself back upon that other, and am so bewitched by it that the state of that ancient Rome, free, just, and flourishing (for I love neither her birth nor her old age), interests me passionately.9 Montaigne turns to the past and away from the present to shun a society devastated by civil war. He flees “ce siecle” to rejoin “cet autre.” However, when he takes refuge in the past, he finds himself once again embroiled in civil war, or “la cause de Brutus.” Montaigne’s dilemma is that he cannot escape the present in the past, nor can he evade the past in the present, due to the recurrence of civil war as a constant of history. One consequence of such fatal recurrence is that the author of the Essais must contend with the example of Cicero. The rest of this chapter traces Montaigne’s response to the ethical thought and the political choices of Cicero, whose exemplarity Montaigne is never fully able to resist. “De la gloire” (II, 16) To situate Montaigne in relation to Cicero, it is natural to turn to the essay “Considération sur Cicéron” (I, 40), but because I have already taken that turn



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elsewhere, I follow a different, more circuitous route in these pages.10 An equally resounding rebuke to Ciceronian vanity, equal to essay I, 40, can be found in “De la gloire,” where Montaigne faults Cicero for his obsessive care of his own reputation.11 Referring to the lost work De gloria, cited in On Duties 2.31, “De la gloire” denounces Cicero’s notorious vainglory: Je croy que, si nous avions les livres que Cicero avoit escrit sur ce subject, il nous en conteroit de belles: car cet homme là fut si forcené de cette passion que, s’il eust osé, il fut, ce crois-je, volontiers tombé en l’exces où tombarent d’autres: que la vertu mesme n’estoit desirable que pour l’honneur qui se tenoit tousjours à sa suite, Paulum sepultae distat inertiae / celata virtus. Qui est un’ opinion si fauce que je suis dépit qu’elle ait jamais peu entrer en l’entendement d’homme qui eust cet honneur de porter le nom de philosophe.12 I believe that if we had the books that Cicero had written on this subject, he would tell us some good ones; for that man was so frenzied with this passion that if he had dared, he would, I believe, have readily fallen into the excessive view into which others fell, that virtue itself was desirable only for the honor that always attended it: There is little difference ’twixt buried idleness and hidden virtue. Which is an opinion so false that I am vexed that it could ever have entered the head of a man who had the honor of bearing the name of philosopher.13 Montaigne is ashamed that a supposed philosopher like Cicero could have subscribed to such a palpably false opinion as the one expressed in the Horatian ode he just quoted.14 Well, Cicero didn’t write Horace’s odes; Horace did. The notion that Montaigne purports to disdain here, that virtue is merely a means to the end of honor and social status, is precisely the very Roman prejudice that Cicero sets out to fight in a series of philosophical dialogues that Montaigne studies with great care and cites with great prolixity throughout “De la gloire.”15 In other words, Montaigne uses Cicero against Cicero, and whichever side he takes, he is a Ciceronian. The basic premise of Montaigne’s essay on glory, as of Cicero’s prescriptive comments on the subject, is that virtue ought to be its own reward. We should do the right thing even when no one is looking. To expound his views on the subject and illuminate them with authoritative examples, Montaigne follows Cicero step by step. His main guide is On the Ends of Good and Evil, Books 2 and 3, where the speaker M. Tullius Cicero develops the Stoic doctrine of eudoxia against the Epicurean speaker L. Manlius Torquatus. For Cicero, Stoics

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Chrysippus and Diogenes held that glory had no intrinsic value but only an instrumental value or utilitas, whereas the Academic philosopher Carneades held the opposite view. De bona autem fama (quam enim appellant εὐδοξίαν aptius est bonam famam hoc loco appellare quam gloriam) Chrysippus quidem et Diogenes detracta utilitate ne digitum quidem eius causa porrigendum esse dicebant; quibus ego vehementer adsentior. Qui autem post eos fuerunt, cum Carneadem sustinere non possent, hanc quam dixi bonam famam ipsam propter se praepositam et sumendam esse dixerunt, esseque hominis ingenui et liberaliter educati velle bene audire a parentibus, a propinquis, a bonis etiam viris, idque propter rem ipsam, non propter usum, dicuntque, ut liberis consultum velimus, etiamsi postumi futuri sint, propter ipsos, sic futurae post mortem famae tamen esse propter rem, etiam detracto usu, consulendum.16 About good fame [the term being a better translation in this context than “glory” of the Stoic expression eudoxia] Chrysippus and Diogenes used to aver that, apart from any practical value it may possess, it is not worth stretching out a finger for; and I strongly agree with them. On the other hand their successors, finding themselves unable to resist the attacks of Carneades, declared that good fame, as I have called it, was preferred and desirable for its own sake, and that a man of good breeding and liberal education would desire to have the good opinion of his parents and relatives, and of good men in general, and that for its own sake and not for any practical advantage; and they argue that just as we study the welfare of our children, even of such as may be born after we are dead, for their own sake, so a man ought to study his reputation even after death, for itself, even apart from any advantage.17 Montaigne is a little more verbose and comes back to Carneades after a long detour through Epicurus, also suggested by Cicero. Chrysippus et Diogenes ont esté les premiers autheurs et les plus fermes du mespris de la gloire; et, entre toutes les voluptez, ils disoient qu’il n’y en avoit point de plus dangereuse ny plus à fuir que celle qui nous vient de l’approbation d’autruy. . . . Ces philosophes là disoient que toute la gloire du monde ne meritoit pas qu’un homme d’entendement estandit seulement le doigt pour l’acquerir: Gloria quantalibet quid erit, si gloria tantum est?



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je dis pour elle seule: car elle tire souvent à sa suite plusieurs commoditez pour lesquelles elle se peut rendre desirable. Elle nous acquiert de la bienveillance; elle nous rend moins exposez aux injures et offences d’autruy, et choses semblables. . . . Carneades a esté chef de l’opinion contraire, et a maintenu que la gloire estoit pour elle mesme desirable: tout ainsi que nous ambrassons nos posthumes pour eux mesmes, n’en ayans aucune connoissance ny jouissance.18 Chrysippus and Diogenes were the first and the firmest exponents of the disdain for glory; and they said that of all pleasures there was none more dangerous or more to be avoided than what comes to us from the approbation of others. . . . Those philosophers said that all the glory in the world did not deserve that a man of understanding should so much as stretch out his finger to acquire it: What’s in the greatest glory, if it be but glory? I mean for itself alone; for it often brings in its train many advantages for which it may become desirable. It gains us good will; it makes us less exposed to insults and injuries from others, and the like. . . . Carneades was the protagonist of the opposite opinion, and maintained that glory was desirable for itself; just as we embrace our posterity for itself, though we have no knowledge or enjoyment of it.19 Immediately following the mention of Carneades comes Montaigne’s indignant denunciation of Cicero, who agrees with the Stoics after all: “quibus ego vehementer adsentior.” Montaigne cannot bring himself to admit that he shares an opinion with Cicero. In between the Stoics and Carneades, “De la gloire” takes up the case of Epicurus, translating from Cicero the letter that Epicurus wrote on his deathbed to Hermachus: “Ce pendant que je passois l’heureux et celuy-là mesmes le dernier jour de ma vie, j’escrivois cecy, accompaigné toute-fois de telle douleur en la vessie et aux intestins, qu’il ne peut rien estre adjousté à sa grandeur. Mais elle estoit compensée par le plaisir qu’apportoit à mon ame la souvenance de mes inventions et de mes discours.”20 For Cicero, this is the merest hypocrisy since the pleasure afforded Epicurus by the memory of his writings is incompatible with his own philosophy of pleasure and pain being strictly corporeal.21 Somewhat more indulgent of these doctrinal inconsistencies, Montaigne takes Epicurus’s letter and his arrangement to commemorate his own birthday, equally from Cicero, as an instance of the natural duplicity of human nature: “Mais nous sommes, je ne sçay comment, doubles en nous mesmes, qui faict que ce que nous croyons, nous ne le croyons pas, et ne nous pouvons deffaire de ce que nous

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condamnons.”22 No one practices what he preaches, neither Epicurus, nor Cicero, nor Montaigne. So far, these reminiscences of Cicero come from the 1580 version or a text of the essay. When he revisited his essay on the Exemplaire de Bordeaux or C text, Montaigne added several untranslated quotations from Cicero’s philosophical dialogues as a testimony to his deep immersion in Cicero philosophicus at the end of his life. He added a paragraph, inspired by Book II of On the Ends, where he reiterates the lesson that we should refrain from dishonest behavior even when we could get away with it and even when it is allowed by law. The examples from Roman law involve those who do and do not discharge their duties as executors of a last will and testament when they are the only ones who know the disposition of the testator and thus run no risk of detection of fraud. While Cicero admires the integrity of Sextus Peducaeus, Montaigne finds it merely routine: “Ce que S. Peduceus fit, de rendre fidelement ce que C. Plotius avoit commis à sa seule science de ses richesses, et ce que j’en ay faict souvent de mesme, je ne le trouve pas tant louable comme je trouverois execrable qu’il y eut failli.”23 Why, we might ask, is Montaigne telling us this, unless he is eager for glory, like Epicurus on his deathbed? At the end of the paragraph, Montaigne added a quote from On Duties that conflates god and conscience in a way that could be problematic for Christian readers: “Meminerint Deum se habere testem, id est (ut ego arbitror) mentem suam.”24 The context is the officium of friendship, which, according to Cicero, ought to be preferred to riches, honors, and pleasures but not to one’s duty to the state or to justice. The judge who passes judgment on his friend must subordinate friendship to justice. He must remember that God is his witness, and God means conscience, which is the most divine faculty we have: “Cum vero iurato sententia dicenda est, meminerit deum se adhibere testem, id est, ut ego arbitror, mentem suam, qua nihil homini dedit deus ipse divinius.”25 Montaigne leaves out the last clause of this phrase, thus emphasizing the self-sufficiency of conscience, which replaces God as our most effective surveillance system. In this way, Montaigne has elicited the atheist potential of Ciceronian ethics. In the subsequent pages of his essay on glory, Montaigne adds, always on the Exemplaire de Bordeaux, two more quotations from On Duties, three from On the Ends, one from the Tusculan Disputations, and one from On the Nature of the Gods. This is consistent with his practice throughout the Exemplaire de Bordeaux, where Pierre Villey, in his chronology of Montaigne’s life, counts 110 quotations from Cicero’s philosophical dialogues, more than from any other author during this final stage of composition of the Essais.26 It appears that Montaigne became more comfortable with appealing to Cicero’s authority as he grew older.



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The last two quotations from Cicero in II, 16 occur at the end of the essay, where the argument pivots sharply from a philosophical critique of la gloire to an apology for any motive, however false, that will induce people to obey the law. If the spurious allure of glory compels people to do their duty, who is Montaigne to object? “Si toute-fois cette fauce opinion sert au public à contenir les hommes en leur devoir; qu’elle accroisse hardiment et qu’on la nourrisse entre nous le plus qu’on pourra.”27 At this point, Montaigne added, on the Exemplaire de Bordeaux, Plato’s endorsement of good reputation as a spur to virtue. God ensures, according to Montaigne’s version of Plato, that good people have a good reputation. Montaigne cannot resist observing that Plato and his spokesman Socrates always resort to divine agency when human agency fails, like the tragic poets who have recourse to the deus ex machina when they cannot figure out how to end their plays: “Ce personnage et son pedagogue sont merveilleux et hardis ouvriers à faire joindre les operations et revelations divines tout par tout où faut l’humaine force; ut tragici poetae confugiunt ad deum, cum explicare argumenti exitum non possunt.”28 The Latin quotation is from Cicero’s De natura deorum where the Epicurean Velleius rebukes the Stoics for taking refuge in divine providence to explain natural processes, just as the tragic poets bring in a god to untangle their plot.29 What is this Epicurean voice doing in Montaigne’s essay? Are we to understand that glory, like divine providence, is a salutary illusion, a “noble lie” as Plato says in the Republic? Montaigne, by the way, remembers Plato’s noble lie in the “Apologie de Raymond Sebond.”30 Ciceronian theology seems to prompt Montaigne to recognize the atheist potential of Ciceronian ethics, insinuating an equivalence between God and glory. If you believe in one, you’ll believe in the other. The very last words of Cicero that we hear in “De la gloire” appear just as Montaigne has second thoughts about his appeal to the instrumental value of gloria. He expresses these thoughts in a play on words. The French word honneur can be used to denote an intrinsic value, that which is honorable, or an extrinsic one, good reputation; the two meanings can be antagonistic, as Montaigne demonstrates in the last phrase of his essay: “Toute personne d’honneur choisit de perdre plustost son honneur, que de perdre sa conscience.”31 At the same time he added this epilogue, Montaigne inserted into an adjacent sentence a reflection by Cicero on popular usage: “Ut enim consuetudo loquitur, id solum dicitur honestum quod est populari fama gloriosum.”32 For the people, honestum and gloriosum are synonyms; for Cicero they are antonyms. The philosopher separates what the people conflate. Montaigne is in fundamental agreement with the philosopher, but he cannot ignore the authority of popular usage. So his essay is inconclusive.

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“De l’utile et de l’honneste” (III, 1) “De la gloire,” including its C-text additions, reminds us of how much Montaigne depends on Cicero and how this dependence annoys him. As the essays expanded from two books in 1580 to three in 1588 and as the author continued to revise them until his death in 1592, they explore, in tandem if not in sympathy with Cicero, the notion of honestum or that which is honorable regardless of whether it is recognized and rewarded. In Book III of On Duties, Cicero proposes an infallible formula for judging our duty in those cases where what is advantageous seems to conflict with what is honorable. Whereas other philosophical sects insist that the honorable should be preferred to the advantageous, Cicero prefers the Stoic attitude according to which whatever is honorable is also advantageous, nor can anything be to our advantage which is not honorable: tamen splendidius haec ab eis disseruntur, quibus, quidquid honestum est, idem utile videtur nec utile quicquam, quod non honestum, quam ab iis, quibus et honestum aliquid non utile et utile non honestum.33 and yet the discussion of these problems, if conducted by those who consider whatever is morally right also expedient and nothing expedient that is not at the same time morally right, will be more illuminating than if conducted by those who think that something not expedient may be morally right and that something not morally right may be expedient.34 This is all very well in theory, but it does not work out so neatly in practice in ancient Rome or in modern France. The Renaissance inherited from Cicero the pairing of utile and honestum, which became a broadly diffused commonplace in sixteenth-century political theory.35 In this context, the third book of the essays opens with an ostensibly anti-Ciceronian essay titled “De l’utile et de l’honneste.” Essentially the essay admonishes any would-be disciple of Cicero: if you prefer l’utile, stay out of ethics; if you are attracted to l’honneste, stay out of politics. They are separate realms. The French Wars of Religion, with their relentless treachery, assassinations, and massacres, had sufficiently disproven the naive formula “nec utile quicquam quod non honestum.” Consequently, essay III, 1 admits that every state has public offices that, although necessary, are entirely vicious, and the narrator gladly resigns these offices to those more obedient and supple, that is, less honest, than himself. Politics, he declares, require treason and falsehood and worse: “Le bien public requiert qu’on trahisse et qu’on mente et qu’on massacre.”36 Under these circumstances, ethics would seem to require the abstention from politics.



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The narrator of III, 1 is proud of his public service but jealous of his independence. He follows the just cause “right to the fire, but not into it,” or without sacrificing either his life or his integrity.37 His model in this difficult transaction is Cicero’s correspondent Titus Pomponius Atticus: “Fut-ce pas Atticus, lequel se tenant au juste party, et au party qui perdit, se sauva par sa moderation en cet universel naufrage du monde, parmy tant de mutations et diversitez?”38 Atticus was loyal to the senatorial cause without succumbing to partisan spirit. He practiced abstention but not neutrality. Neutrality is not allowed in times of civil war according to a tradition that goes back to Solon and echoes through Cicero, Erasmus, and Jean Bodin, but abstention is permitted “for private men” like Atticus or Montaigne.39 We will see that this slightly specious distinction, between abstention and neutrality, can be applied to the roles of Atticus and Cicero in the latter’s Epistulae ad Atticum. Certainly, where we see a model of abstention, others have read “De l’utile et de l’honneste” as a plea for disobedience and resistance to the prince.40 In either interpretation, the essayist refuses to support the absolute monarchy. The prince, designated as “Le Prince” in a likely allusion to Machiavelli, represents for Montaigne the limit case of the compatibility of utile and honestum.41 There are inevitably emergencies where the prince must betray his word and sacrifice his honor for reasons of state, or “le besoing de son estat.”42 Some have read this demoralized admission as an implicit apology for the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of August 24, 1572, where King Charles IX had to defend the state at the cost of his own honor: “il le falloit faire” concedes Montaigne.43 On the Exemplaire de Bordeaux, Montaigne added a quote from On Duties to qualify his approval: “sed videat ne quaeratur latebra perjurio.”44 If you are going to break your word, Montaigne tells his prince in the voice of Cicero, at least refrain from making excuses for your perjury. Cicero’s role here is to attenuate the stark Machiavellism of the original passage: his job is to remoralize the demoralizing truth. This brief Ciceronian extract prepares a more sustained engagement with Cicero near the end of the essay on the Exemplaire de Bordeaux. This whole section develops a sort of political casuistry where Montaigne considers those who break their word or otherwise subordinate honor to public utility. One of the cases involves the Corinthian tyrannicide Timoleon, who killed his own brother to liberate the Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily. In this way, Montaigne says, he purchased “utilité” at the price of “honnesteté” since he committed fratricide.45 This trade-off seems justifiable, on the whole. But the trick that the Roman Senate played on some Italian cities to increase public revenue was not, and Montaigne retells it from Cicero’s On Duties.46 This kind of extortion reminds

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Montaigne of similarly “ugly examples” from France’s civil wars, which promote a false notion of utility, unduly alienated from morality.47 For Cicero, the Senate in this instance behaved no better than pirates, and he asks indignantly, “How far will they dare to say that something is useful if it is not honorable?”48 Montaigne may have taken this question personally. As far as Timoleon, he answers, but no more than that. Certainly, he shares Cicero’s disdain for senatorial piracy. He also tries to one-up Cicero by rejecting the argument of certain anonymous casuists who think that it is all right to break your word to thieves.49 Most commentators assume that Montaigne has in mind Book III of On Duties, where Cicero examines at great length the case of the Roman general Regulus, who kept his word to his Carthaginian captors at the risk of his own life. Evidently, Roman popular morality considered Regulus a fool, but Cicero defends him and insists that it is our duty, our officium, to keep our word even to our enemy. The only exception he will recognize to this rule is the case of an oath sworn to praedones, which can be translated as thieves or pirates, because they are the enemies of humankind and cannot invoke the law of war or “ius belllicum.”50 It is not easy to say whether Montaigne really has this passage in mind, because the notion of ius belllicum is foreign to his argument, but if he does, he wants to show that he has an even more scrupulous sense of duty than the author of On Duties. It has also been suggested that Montaigne follows the traces of Bodin’s Six livres de la République, book 5, chapter 6, where we read in the margins “faith pledged to brigands and pirates must be kept” with examples from Roman history (but not from Cicero).51 In any case, Montaigne is in fundamental agreement with Cicero about the primordial duty to keep one’s word. In conclusion, essay III, 1 considers the case of a prince who never sacrificed honor to utility, the Theban general Epaminondas. Epaminondas represents the confluence or alliance of politics and morality: he is the Ciceronian prince, for whom nothing is useful unless it is honorable. He does not have many colleagues. On balance and after a final, condensed quotation from Cicero, Montaigne arrives at substantially the same conclusion as his Roman forebear: it is wrong to think that an action is honorable as long as it is useful.52 Cicero’s uncompromising view of the proper relationship of utile and honestum serves Montaigne as a buffer against the rampant Machiavellism of his era.53 In effect, Montaigne has no quarrel with Cicero’s theory, only with his practice. It is the life, not the work, that bothers him. The essay on anger from Book II articulates the basic premise of Montaigne’s critique: “Le dire est autre chose que le faire.”54 Saying is not doing, and unless you do what you say, you cannot convince us. The essay from which this epigram is cited compares Cicero



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to Seneca on the subject of contempt for death: “Que Cicero, pere d’eloquence, traite du mespris de la mort; que Seneque en traite aussi: celuy là traine languissant, et vous sentez qu’il vous veut resoudre de chose dequoy il n’est pas resolu; il ne vous donne point de coeur, car luy-mesmes n’en a point; l’autre vous anime et enflame.”55 Cicero just does not put his heart into it; he does not reveal his true convictions. This attitude can help us better understand the essay where Montaigne offers his principal assessment of Cicero, “Des livres.”56 Already in 1580, what Montaigne admires most in Cicero’s work are the philosophical dialogues, from which he draws so liberally in revisions to his book. Otherwise, and although it may be heretical to say so, he finds Cicero’s style tedious, with too many detours.57 Why can’t he just get to the point? It took a lot of nerve for Montaigne to say that about someone else. Seneca and Plutarch are his favorites, but he also enjoys Cicero’s Letters to Atticus, because they reveal their author’s “humeurs privées” or “personal humors.”58 If we think of “De la colere,” we can say that the Letters to Atticus are the one place where Cicero puts his heart into it. Consequently, we ought to be on the lookout for traces of this correspondence in the Essais. Essays and epistles are potentially self-portraits; both can serve as a mirror of the writer. But can they also be a mirror of the reader? “De la vanité” (III, 9) Montaigne leaves tantalizing traces of his perusal of the Epistulae ad Atticum in his essay on vanity, where he transcribes his title of Roman citizenship. As an introduction to the topic of his Roman sympathies, he draws an analogy between French civil wars and Roman civil wars. As long as the ancient laws of the French monarchy are in force, he proclaims, he will stay put; if things get to the point where the competing parties are equally dubious, he will leave France. Autant que l’image des loix receuës et antiennes de cette monarchie reluyra en quelque coin, m’y voilà planté. Si elles viennent par malheur à se contredire et empescher entr’elles, et produire deux pars de chois doubteux et difficile, mon election sera volontiers d’eschapper et me desrober à cette tempeste.59 As long as the image of the ancient and accepted laws of this monarchy shines in some corner, there will I be planted. If by bad fortune they come to contradict and interfere with each other, and produce two sides dubious and difficult to choose between, my choice is likely to be to steal away and escape from that tempest.60

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We may assume that in 1588, the Holy League and the Huguenots impressed Montaigne as “two sides dubious and difficult to choose between.” Pivoting to Roman history, he claims that he could easily have chosen between Caesar and Pompey, between the usurper and the Republic, but he would not have known what to do with the triumvirate that followed the Battle of Philippi: “Entre Cesar et Pompeius je me fusse franchement declaré. Mais entre ces trois voleurs qui vindrent depuis, ou il eust fallu se cacher, ou suyvre le vent.”61 Of course, Montaigne does not have to choose between Caesar and Pompey, so his decisiveness is merely conjectural. Yet we cannot help but remark that this choice, which seems so easy to Montaigne, proved so difficult for Cicero, as is abundantly documented in his correspondence with Atticus. Montaigne could have made Cicero’s choice, he claims, even if he cannot make his own. Cicero was famous for his indecisiveness during the civil war between Caesar and Pompey in 49 BCE. In proverbial terms, he was known for sitting on two seats. In a plaintive missive dated April 3, 49 BCE, Cicero implores Atticus to send him advice on how to exit his intolerable dilemma. He readily admits his infringement of Solon’s law against political neutrality in times of civil war. Yet unless Atticus advises him otherwise, he will continue to vacillate: “nisi si tu aliter censes, et hinc abero et illim.”62 This letter is one of the possible sources of Erasmus’s adage 602, Duabus sedere sellis or To sit on two stools, which applies to those who favor first one side, then the other, in a dispute or, more pertinently, to those who will not take sides in civil war.63 We have already seen Montaigne’s scorn for neutrality in civil conflict: “De se tenir chancelant et mestis, de tenir son affection immobile et sans inclination aux troubles de son pays et en une division publique, je ne le trouve ny beau ny honneste.”64 Cicero’s neutrality does not even meet his own standard of honestum. Surely, this is the point where Montaigne should break definitively with Cicero, over his scandalous neutrality. In the course of his rambling meditation on vanity, Montaigne cannot help but retrace Cicero’s steps. The author of “De la vanité” is a restless, itinerant spirit who feels unmoored or alienated from his own home and, consequently, his own name. He feels more at home abroad than at the château de Montaigne. Apparently, his neighbors did not understand this behavior and so, to account for his travels, he came up with a pithy, epigrammatic saying: “je sçay bien ce que je fuis, mais non pas ce que je cerche.”65 Renaissance compilers and their legion of readers would have had no trouble recognizing in this phrase a vernacular version of a formula first used by Cicero in another vacillating appeal to Atticus. Cicero knows that Atticus favors the cause of Pompey, and so does Cicero, who famously said that he would rather be vanquished with Pompey than be victorious with his adversaries.66 The trouble is that Cicero favors the



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old Pompey, not the new one “who takes to his heels before he knows where he is running or whom he is running from.”67 Because Pompey is incompetent and unreliable, Cicero does not have anywhere to turn. He knows whom to flee but not whom to follow: “ego vero quem fugiam habeo, quem sequar non habeo.”68 This “celebrated epigram,” as Shackleton Bailey calls it, was already famous in antiquity, perhaps even before the publication of Letters to Atticus.69 In Book 6 of his Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian cites Cicero’s line to Atticus in a chapter devoted to the rhetorical quality known as urbanitas. Though perhaps biased by his affection for the prince of Latin eloquence, Quintilian is amazed at Cicero’s urbanity: “mira quaedam in eo videtur fuisse urbanitas.”70 So prolific was the Roman orator at witty sayings or facete dicta that his freedman Tiro made a collection of them in three books, which circulated sooner and perhaps more widely than the letters and speeches themselves.71 Later in the same chapter, Quintilian mentions a certain Domitius Marsus, who wrote a treatise on urbanity dividing the topic into three genres: honorificum, contumeliosum, and medium, which he also called in Greek ἀποφθεγματικόν.72 Because all three categories are exemplified by quotations from Cicero, Marsus’s treatise, like Tiro’s compilation before it and Quintilian’s chapter after it, may well have served as a collection of apophthegmata Ciceroniana. To exemplify the genus contumeliosum or vituperative style of urbanity, Marsus quoted Cicero’s complaint to Atticus: “habeo quem fugiam, quem sequar non habeo.”73 Quintilian’s near contemporary Plutarch includes this saying in his collection Apophthegmata regum et imperatorum (Moralia 205C), and in late antiquity, Macrobius repeats the saying in a chapter of Saturnalia devoted to Cicero’s famous jokes. Unlike Quintilian, Macrobius quotes the line exactly as it is given in the manuscript tradition of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus: “ego vero quem fugiam habeo, quem sequar non habeo.”74 Erasmus collected the phrase in Book IV of his Apophthegmata, under the rubric “Neutra pars placet” or “neither party pleases,” as the fourteenth of seventy-one sayings attributed to Cicero, substituting the verb scio for habeo: “Quem fugiam scio, quem sequar nescio.”75 This is the version Montaigne seems to have followed, after adjusting the relative pronouns to suit his own circumstances: “je sais ce que je fuis mais non pas ce que je cherche.” He substitutes ce que or “what” for quem or “whom,” because his choice is not between two generals but between two factions or two political parties. When Montaigne does not know whom to follow, he follows Cicero. In his later years, Montaigne was drawn to the familiar features of the portrait that emerges from Cicero’s letters and dialogues. He admires the ethicist who refused to compromise with the utilitarian morals of his era, and he often

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borrows Cicero’s words to finish his own thoughts and sentences. He feels that Cicero reveals himself most fully in his correspondence with Atticus, as a man without a party and a spectator of national ruin. Long before Montaigne, Cicero confronted the dilemma of civil war: how to choose between “deux pars de chois doubteux et difficile.”76 His solution was irresolution. Cicero was a prevaricator, a cunctator, a nonaligned Roman. It may be invidious to call him the preceptor of the essayist, who nervously denounces the ambitious vanity of Rome’s greatest orator while discreetly honoring the precedent of the man who knew better how to flee than how to follow. Ultimately, Montaigne is a sort of involuntary Ciceronian, who loudly decries Ciceronian eloquence but compulsively returns to Cicero’s work as to a mirror in which to examine the ethical and political problems of his own society. Notes 1. Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. V. L. Saulnier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), III, 13, 1073B; “I would rather be an authority on myself than on Plato” (Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957], 822). All quotations of Montaigne are taken from the Saulnier edition. I have used Donald Frame’s English translation throughout. The essays are cited by book, chapter, page, and couche: A for 1580, B for 1588, and C for Montaigne’s handwritten revisions on his copy of the 1588 edition now in the municipal library of Bordeaux, known as the Exemplaire de Bordeaux. 2. “I would rather be an authority on myself than on Cicero” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 822). 3. For a different and more ingenious reading of this substitution of proper names, see Kathy Eden, “Cicero’s Portion of Montaigne’s Acclaim,” in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Cicero, ed. William Altman (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 54. 4. Montaigne, Les Essais, III, 13, 1073–74B; “The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 822). 5. Montaigne, Complete Works, 764. 6. Montaigne, Les Essais, III, 9, 996B; “Now, I have been brought up from childhood with these dead. I was familiar with the affairs of Rome long before I was with those of my own house. I knew the Capitol and its location before I knew the Louvre, and the Tiber before the Seine” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 762). 7. Montaigne, Complete Works, 763. 8. Montaigne, Les Essais, III, 9, 996–97B. 9. Montaigne, Complete Works, 763. 10. Eric MacPhail, “Considerations on Cicero and Montaigne,” Montaigne Studies 27 (2015): 11–21. 11. Montaigne, Les Essais, II, 16. 12. Montaigne, Les Essais, II, 16, 620–21. 13. Montaigne, Complete Works, 470.



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14. Montaigne quotes here Horace, Carmina, 4.9.29. 15. These dialogues are On Duties, On the Ends, Tusculan Disputations, and On the Nature of the Gods. For Cicero’s critique of the Roman honor code, see A. A. Long, “Cicero’s Politics in De officiis,” in Justice and Generosity: Studies in Hellenistic Social and Political Philosophy. Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium Hellenisticum, ed. André Laks and Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 213–40. 16. Cicero, De finibus, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 3.57. 17. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Ends, trans. H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1914), 275–77. 18. Montaigne, Les Essais, II, 16, 619–20. 19. Montaigne, Complete Works, 468–70. 20. Cicero, On the Ends, 2.96; Montaigne, Les Essais, II, 16, 620; “While I was passing the happy and the very last day of my life, I was writing this, afflicted all the while with such pain in the bladder and intestines that nothing could be added to its greatness. But it was compensated by the pleasure which the remembrance of my discoveries and my teachings brought to my soul” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 469). 21. Cicero, On the Ends, 2.98. 22. Cicero, On the Ends, 2.101; Montaigne, Les Essais, II, 16, 619; “But we are, I know not how, double within ourselves, with the result that we do not believe what we believe, and we cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 469). 23. Cicero, On the Ends, 2.58; Montaigne, Les Essais, II, 16, 621C; “What S. Peduceus did in faithfully returning the money that C. Plotius had entrusted to his sole knowledge, and what I have often done in the same way, I do not consider so laudable as I should consider it execrable for him to have failed to do it” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 470). 24. Cicero On Duties, 3.44; Montaigne, Les Essais, II, 16, 621C; “Let them remember that they have God as witness, that is to say (as I believe), their own conscience” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 471). 25. Cicero, On Duties, trans. Walter Miller (London: Heinemann, 1913), 313; “But when he comes to pronounce the verdict under oath, he should remember that he has God as his witness—that is, as I understand it, his own conscience, than which God himself has bestowed upon man nothing more divine.” 26. Montaigne, Les Essais, xxxviii. 27. Montaigne, Les Essais, II, 16, 629A; “However, if this false opinion is of service to the public in keeping men within their duty; let it grow boldly and let it be fostered among us as much as possible” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 477). 28. Montaigne, Les Essais, II, 16, 629C; “This person and his teacher are marvelous and bold workmen at bringing in divine operations and revelations everywhere that human power fails: as the tragic poets have recourse to a god when they cannot unravel the end of their plot” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 477). 29. Montaigne refers here to Cicero, De natura deorum, 1.53. 30. Montaigne, Les Essais, II, 12, 512. 31. Montaigne, Les Essais, II, 16, 630C; “Any person of honor chooses rather to lose his honor than to lose his conscience” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 478). 32. Cicero, De Finibus 2.48; “In common parlance ‘moral’ (honourable) means merely that which ranks high in popular esteem” (On the Ends, trans. H. Rackham, 137).

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33. Cicero, De officiis, ed. Michael Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 3.20. 34. Cicero, On Duties (trans. W. Miller), 287–85. 35. Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, trans. Robert Rovini (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 196. 36. Montaigne, Les Essais, III, 1, 791C; “The public welfare requires that a man betray and lie and massacre” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 600). 37. Montaigne, Complete Works, 601. Montaigne’s phrase echoes the famously ironic formula of Rabelais’s narrator Maître Alcofrybas: “jusqu’au feu exclusif ” or “up to the fire” but not into it. 38. Montaigne, Les Essais, III, 1, 792B; “Was it not Atticus who, holding to the just side and the losing side, escaped by his moderation in that universal shipwreck of the world amid so many revolutions and divisions?” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 601). 39. Montaigne, Complete Works, 601; Solon in Marcus Tullius Cicero, Letters to Atticus, ed. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 217; Erasmus adage 602, Duabus sedere sellis/To sit on two stools, in Erasmus, Adages, trans. R. A. B. Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 68; Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la République (Paris, 1583; Aalen: Scientia, 1961), 655–56. 40. See Géralde Nakam, Les Essais de Montaigne, miroir et procès de leur temps (Paris: Nizet, 1984), 255–61. 41. Montaigne, Les Essais, III, 1, 799B. 42. Montaigne, Les Essais, III, 1, 799B. 43. Montaigne, Les Essais, III, 1, 799B; “it had to be done” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 607). See Jean-Louis Bourgeon, “Montaigne et la Saint-Barthélemy,” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne (1994): 101–9. 44. Cicero, On Duties, 3.106; Montaigne, Les Essais, III, 1, 799C; “but let him beware that he is not seeking a pretext for perjury” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 607). 45. Montaigne, Les Essais, III, 1, 800C; “and it justly pricked his conscience that it had been necessary to purchase the public advantage at such a price in honorable conduct” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 607). 46. Cicero, On Duties, 3.87–88. 47. Montaigne, Complete Works, 608. 48. “Quo usque audebunt dicere quicquam utile quod non honestum?” (Cicero, De Officiis, 3.87). 49. Montaigne, Les Essais, III, 1, 801C. 50. Cicero, De Officiis, 3.107. 51. “La foy donnee aux brigands, et pirates doit estre gardee” (Bodin, Les six livres, 814). See the annotation to III, 1 in the new Pléiade Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Jean Balsamo et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 1717. 52. “‘Non igitur patria praestat omnibus officiis?’ ‘Immo vero, sed ipsi patriae conducit pios habere cives in parentes’” (Cicero, De Officiis 3.90; “Well then, are not the claims of country paramount to all other duties? Aye verily, but it is to our country’s interest to have citizens who are loyal to their parents” [trans. W. Miller, 365–67]). Montaigne conflates this dialogue into the assertion “Non enim patria praestat omnibus officiis, et ipsi conducit pios habere cives in parentes” (Les Essais, III, 1, 802C; “For our country does not come before all other duties; and it is good for it to have citizens who are dutiful to their parents” [Montaigne, Complete Works, 609]), which misses the point of the original.



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53. Here I am closer to Nakam than to Friedrich on the contested question of Montaigne’s Machiavellism. Goumarre (“La Morale et la politique: Montaigne, Cicéron et Machiavel,” Italica 50 [1973]: 285–98) does well to adjudicate the question in reference to Montaigne’s Ciceronianism. 54. Montaigne, Les Essais, II, 31, 715A; “Saying is one thing and doing is another” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 541). 55. Montaigne, Les Essais, II, 31, 716A; “Let Cicero, the father of eloquence, treat of the contempt of death, and let Seneca treat of it too. The former drags it out languidly, and you feel that he wants to persuade you of something of which he is not persuaded; he gives you no heart, for he has none himself. The other animates and inflames you” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 541). 56. Montaigne, Les Essais, II, 10. 57. Montaigne, Les Essais, II, 10, 413A. 58. Montaigne, Les Essais, II, 10, 414A; Montaigne, Complete Works, 302. 59. Montaigne, Les Essais, III, 9, 994B. 60. Montaigne, Complete Works, 760. 61. Montaigne, Les Essais, III, 9, 994B; “Between Caesar and Pompey I should have declared myself openly. But among those three robbers who came after, I should have had either to hide, or to follow with the wind” (Montaigne, Complete Works, 760). 62. Cicero, Ad Atticum, vol. 2, ed. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 10.1.2; “unless you think otherwise I shall stay away from either camp.” 63. Erasmus, Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami (Amsterdam, 1969–), II–2:128–29. References are to ordo, volume, and page number. 64. Montaigne, Les Essais, III, 1, 793B; “To keep oneself wavering and half-and-half, to keep one’s allegiance motionless and without inclination in one’s country’s troubles and in civil dissensions, I consider neither handsome nor honorable” (Montaigne, Compete Works, 601). 65. Montaigne, Les Essais, III, 9, 972B; “I know well what I am fleeing from, but not what I am looking for” (Montaigne, Compete Works, 743). 66. Cicero, Ad Atticum, 8.7.2. 67. Cicero, Ad Atticum, 8.7.2. 68. Cicero, Ad Atticum, 8.7.2. 69. Cicero, Letters to Atticus, 4:334. 70. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 6.3.3; Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, trans. Donald Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 65; “I think he had a really remarkable quality of urbanity.” 71. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 6.3.5. 72. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 6.3.108–9; “the honorific, the derogatory, and the neutral.” 73. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 6.3.109; “I know whom to avoid, I don’t know whom to follow.” 74. Macrobius, Saturnalia, 2.3.7. 75. Erasmus, Opera omnia, IV–4:354; “I know whom to flee but not whom to follow.” 76. Montaigne, Les Essais, III, 9, 994B.

chapter 6

Thomas Hobbes, Cicero, and the Road not Taken Daniel J. K apust

T

he story I want to tell here is the story of a road not taken by Thomas Hobbes. It centers on his relation to and rejection of Cicero, and it begins with an observation: some of the eighteenth century’s most perceptive critics of Hobbes—Shaftesbury, Hume, and Smith—were, in different respects, Ciceronians.1 This is not simply to say that they knew Cicero and were influenced by him. Rather, they shared certain fundamental premises with each other that have a distinctly Ciceronian quality: the fact of human sociability, a fact with normative import; the origins of human virtues in sociability; the key role of intersubjectivity in the formation of the human personality and the development of the virtues; the noncontractual foundations of human society. These premises, located in Cicero and deployed against Hobbes by his eighteenth-century critics, was rejected in one form or another by Hobbes. It is no wonder that Hobbes was, in many respects, the bête noire of these eighteenth-century sentimentalists. None of these figures had much use for Hobbes’s apparent egoism, his rationalistic account of contract, his seemingly limited moral psychology, or his asocial view of human nature. Hobbes’s engagement with and rejection of a number of Cicero’s key claims about sociability and language, which profoundly shaped his thought, also shaped subsequent reactions to and rejections of Hobbes. In this regard, I think it is useful to turn to Hobbes’s rejection of Cicero to see just where and how they differ and to see how Hobbes’s critical engagement with Cicero shaped his own thought and the century that followed. Hobbes will serve, in this regard, as something of an outlier in the confines of this volume, insofar as I’ll call him an anti-Ciceronian and a key figure in the anti-Ciceronian tradition. That such a turn to Hobbes is warranted is sufficiently clear, as Hobbes knew Cicero and knew him well, as would any university-trained English thinker of 120



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the seventeenth century, as Torrey Shanks documents.2 This much is clear not just from Quentin Skinner’s reconstruction of Hobbes’s humanist background and the educational culture of late sixteenth-century England but also from Hobbes’s references to Cicero by name, whether in his early invocation of Cicero’s On the Ideal Orator in defense of Thucydides’s style in his 1627 essay The Life and History of Thucydides, or in his twelve direct mentions of Cicero in Leviathan. Hobbes also disliked a lot about what he read in Cicero, or what Ciceronians—especially those Skinner calls neo-Romans—of various stripes argued.3 That he developed his account of rhetoric in opposition to what he read from Cicero has been argued by Garsten in Saving Persuasion; that his account of liberty was aimed at neo-Ciceronians of various stripes has been argued by Skinner.4 What I want to do in this chapter is suggest that Hobbes is more deeply anti-Ciceronian than many have appreciated, and his anti-Ciceronian tendencies makes sense of why eighteenth-century Ciceronians—especially Shaftesbury, Hume, and Smith—had so little use for Hobbes’s argument. In this regard, Hobbes is a pivotal figure in what might be called an anti-Ciceronian tradition in political thought. I begin with a discussion of Cicero’s account of founding in three of his works—On Invention, For Sestius, and On the Ideal Orator—connecting this discussion to his broader commitment to human sociability and the natural development of human virtue in On Duties and On the Commonwealth. Highlighting the role of reason and eloquence in Cicero’s account, I then turn to Hobbes’s account of the formation of language and his claim that the earliest languages were not copious, which paves the way for my discussion of the unnaturalness of human sociability and the problems associated with persuasion. I conclude with a comparison of Hobbes and Cicero, focusing especially on the place of two different emotions in their persuasive projects—shame for Cicero and fear for Hobbes. Cicero on Founding, Speech, and Sociability Cicero provides us with three accounts of founding—one, in his early rhetorical treatise On Invention, a second in his speech For Sestius, and a third in his dialogue On the Ideal Orator. In these accounts, he posited an asymmetry of knowledge between his founders and the masses, with the founders understanding things the masses could not and from which the masses could benefit. Moreover, in these presentations, Cicero’s hypothetical natural state features dispersed humans being brought together by the founder’s eloquent speech. In his earliest philosophical-rhetorical work, On Invention, Cicero tells a story of human dissociation transformed into association by means of eloquence.5

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For there was a time when men wandered [vagabantur] at large in the fields [in agris] like animals [bestiarum] and lived on wild fare; they did nothing by the guidance of reason [ratione animi], but relied chiefly on physical strength [viribus corporis]; there was as yet no ordered system of religious worship [divinae religionis] nor of social duties [humani offici]; no one had seen legitimate marriage [nuptias legitimias] nor had anyone looked upon children whom he knew to be his own [certos liberos]; nor had they learned the advantages of an equitable code of law [ius aequabile]. And so through their ignorance and error blind and unreasoning passion [caeca ac temeraria . . . cupidita] satisfied itself by misuse of bodily strength, which is a very dangerous servant.6 This is what Mary Nyquist calls the “topos of civil privation”—the description of humans without: without the benefits of culture, of law, of morality.7 Such a topos is by no means isolated to Cicero in Roman antiquity; we can see it in Lucretius as well. Yet for Cicero, the animal—or rather, bestial quality— of these people is, unlike what it was for his contemporary Lucretius, a decidedly bad thing.8 These are humans, to be sure, but they are not yet fully human—they are, to recall Adam Smith’s account of unsocial humans, “human creatures.”9 In this context, a man—“great and wise I am sure” (magnus et sapiens)— realized the “power [materia] latent in man and the wide field offered by his mind for great achievements [maximas res] if one could develop this power and improve it by instruction [praecipiendo].” This individual finds humans “scattered [dispersos] in the fields [agros] and hidden in sylvan retreats [silvestribus abditos] when he assembled and gathered them [compulit unum in locum et congregavit] in accordance with a plan [ratione]; he introduced them to every useful [utilem] and honorable [honestam] occupation, though they cried out against it at first because of its novelty; and then when through reason and eloquence [propter rationem atque orationem] they had listened with great attention, he transformed them from wild savages into a kind and gentle folk [ex feris et immanibus mites reddidit et mansuetos].”10 Cicero doubts that this could have happened if this person had been characterized by “a mute and voiceless wisdom” (tacita inops dicendi sapienta). This wisdom, in turn, when combined with eloquence, enabled men to “learn to keep faith [fidem] and observe justice [iustitiam] and become accustomed to obey others voluntarily [sua voluntate consuescerent] and believe not only that they must work for the common good but even sacrifice life itself.” Cicero doubts that it had been possible “unless men had been able by eloquence [eloquentia] to persuade [persuadere] their fellows of the truth of what they had



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discovered by reason [ratione]?” Such speech must have been “powerful and entrancing”—gravi ac suavi.11 Cicero’s second founding moment is in the speech For Sestius. For which of us, gentlemen, does not know the natural course [naturam rerum] of human history—how there was once a time, before either natural or civil law had been formulated [naturali neque civile iure], when men roamed, scattered and dispersed over the country [per agros ac dispsersi vagarentur], and had no other possessions than just so much as they had been able either to seize by strength and violence, or keep at the cost of slaughter and wounds? So then those who [qui] at first showed themselves to be [exsisterunt] most eminent for merit and wisdom [virtute et consilio praestanti], having perceived the essential teachableness [docilitatis] of human nature, gathered together into one place [unum in locum congregarunt] those who had been scattered abroad, and brought them [transduxerunt] from that state of savagery to one of justice and humanity [ex feritate illa ad iustitiam atque ad mansuetudinem].12 Also in For Sestius, Cicero gives a chronological and quasi-historical account of the transition from savagery to civilization: “Then things serving for common use [commune utilitatem], which we call public [res . . . publicas], associations of men [conventicula hominum], which were afterwards called states [civitates], then continuous series of dwelling-places which we call cities [urbis], they had enclosed with walls, after divine and human law had been introduced [invento et divino iure et humano moenibus saepserunt].”13 Finally, Cicero says (or rather, has Crassus say) something similar, although much abbreviated, in On the Ideal Orator: “what other force [vis] could have gathered the scattered members of the human race into one place [disperses homines unum in locum congregare], or could have led them away from a savage existence in the wilderness to this truly human, communal way of life [a fera agretique vita ad hunc humanum cultum civilemque deducere], or, once communities had been founded [constitutes civitatibus], could have established laws, judicial procedures, and legal arrangements [leges, iudicia, iura]?”14 In On Invention and On the Ideal Orator, we find Cicero using identical terms (dispersos, unum in locum congregare, feris, eloquentia) and related terms (iura/iustitia, leges/legitimas). In On Invention, On the Ideal Orator, and For Sestius, Cicero’s founders have virtue: magnus sapiens, virtute, consilio. For Cicero, language—specifically the combination of ratio and oratio—is the key mechanism by which scattered (disperos) humans are brought together (congregare)

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into one place, transforming what had been wild and uncivilized (bestial in On Invention) into what is distinctly human. Yet even if humans, prior to civilization, were in a sense not quite fully human, they must have been able to understand one who was wiser than themselves. Cicero’s founder persuades: he does not bring language to those without it, and one can only persuade those who are capable of some level of understanding. Prior to founding, humans are characterized by a capacity for sociability, a capacity that is immanent. Cicero’s founder, then, is eloquent and wise, wiser than those he brings together, but acting from motives that seem (on the face of it) to be caring. He is the impetus for association and brings clear benefits to those who he renders associates; he works with material that has potential but has not yet been actualized. This material, even if dissociated, is naturally suited for association. In On Duties, Cicero fleshes out how nature brings humans together “for the fellowship both of common speech and of life.” The Latin is instructive—natura vi rationis hominem conciliat homini et ad orationis et ad vitae societatem. According to Cicero, nature “drives him to desire that men should meet together and congregate [coetus et celebrationes], and that he should join them himself.”15 Cicero rejects here, as he does in On Friendship 26, what J. G. F. Powell calls the weakness theory of association, evident in Polybius Book VI (a source Cicero knew), but most particularly—and most politically salient, for Cicero— in Epicurean philosophy. As Powell notes in the context of discussing Cicero’s On Friendship, the weakness theory held that “friendship, like other forms of human association, was originally a sort of contract for mutual protection, thus based entirely on expediency.”16 Cicero will have none of this view, either in On Friendship or in the following passage from On Duties: It is not true, as some claim, that men embarked upon communal life and fellowship in order to provide for life’s necessities [necessitatem vitae]. . . . In that case, if everything needed for sustenance and comfort were provided by a magic wand, so to speak, then any talented man would drop all his business and immerse himself completely in learning and knowledge. But it would not be like that: he would flee from loneliness [solitudinem fugeret], seeking a companion for his studies; he would want both to learn and to teach, both to listen and to speak.”17 Humans are, as we see, like bees naturally inclined to live in groups—natura congregate.18 Like bees (apium), humans are naturally gregarious (congregabilia natura sint). Indeed, it is our “sociability, which conforms so greatly to our nature [haec communitas, quae maxime est apta naturae].”



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Humans are sociable by nature, and the very thing that enables us to be sociable is our rational linguistic capacity. Of course, there is a certain circularity here, but it seems to me that when Cicero talks about human beings as dissociated (dispersos), he is telling a story to explain how human communities centered on justice come to be via an interactive process between mass and elite. Rather than conceive it as circular, we may view it as a relationship of mutual constitution. This mutually constitutive process is only possible because of the human capacity for speech and reason. Even if it is the case that some are more attuned to the possibilities of human nature, it is also the case that they must persuade others to come along by means of language, a language that must have been shared. These founders, or leaders, are more “mediators in a process in which reason and speech can reveal ever more of the fullness of nature’s intent in human sociality, and human communities in turn allow and facilitate the development of reason and speech.”19 Cicero has Scipio sum it up thus at On the Commonwealth 1.39, a famous passage in which Scipio suggests, “The first cause of its [the commonwealth’s] assembly is not so much weakness as a kind of natural herding together of men: this species is not isolated or prone to wandering alone” (non tam imbecilitas quam naturalis quadam hominum quasi congregatio).20 As Walter Nicgorski remarks of the similar passage in On Invention, “Cicero makes absolutely clear that the primal state that he is describing is one of dispersal and self-centered existence.” And yet, as he continues, “Solitary and bestial beginnings for humankind do not . . . serve as the norm of nature,” with Cicero being “in essential agreement with Aristotle’s teaching in the Politics that the ‘polis’ begins for the sake of life but continues for the sake of the good life.”21 It is worth paying some attention to just what it is about humans that enables us to be naturally sociable. For Cicero, agreement is immanent—all it takes is a certain sort of individual to actualize it. It is not natural, in the sense that the sociability of bees is. This is Cicero’s founder, whom Nicgorski describes aptly: “leaders, with their instruments of speech and reason, are envisioned by Cicero as critical in his idealized descriptions of the forming of the first political communities. In other words the very process of consenting, and specifically consenting to a rightful arrangement, will involve those disposed and prepared to use the instruments of speech and reason as well.”22 But these speakers face an audience that must be capable of understanding them. Hobbes on Origins and Language Foundings are not Hobbes’s strong suit. It’s not quite clear, if we take him to be speaking in any sense historically or quasi-historically, how a sovereign comes into being from the natural condition of humankind. We need a sovereign,

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to be sure, to stay out of the war of all against all, and Hobbes even tells us what sort of thing we would need to say to “erect such a Common Power”: “I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this or that Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner.”23 Hobbes doesn’t think we actually do say something like this, or that something like this has been said—he uses conditional language (“as if every man should say to every man”). More important than whether we do or don’t say the words, though, is the effect the words produce: they entail that the multitude “appoint one Man, or Assembly of men, to beare their Person; and every one to own, and acknowledge himself to be Author of whatsoever he that so beareth this person, shall Act, or cause to be Acted.”24 This is the “Generation of that great l eviathan,” or as he shortly after calls it, the “Mortall God.” At the end of chapter 17, to be sure, Hobbes notes that one can attain sovereign power in one of two ways: “by Naturall force . . . or by Warre,” or “when men agree amongst themselves, to submit to some Man, or Assembly of men, voluntarily, on confidence to be protected by him against all others.”25 Why we might prefer this man (or woman, to be fair to Hobbes), or these men, is not particularly clear.26 Indeed, the lack of clarity over how we come to have foundings is no accident: Hobbes does not use the word “founder” often in Leviathan; in fact, it appears just four times, as far as I can see. One of those instances—a not particularly substantive one—is in chapter 40, where Hobbes refers to Moses as a founder, and one who had sovereign power in just the sort of way that he says founders should. More interesting are the other three cases, which are to be found in chapter 12, “Of Religion.” There, after describing the seeds (semina) of religion, unique to humans, he uses an agricultural metaphor, suggesting that they “have received culture [culturam nacta sunt] from two sorts of men. One sort have been they, that have nourished, and ordered them, according to their own invention [Religionum authores extiterunt]. The other, have done it, by Gods commandment, and direction: but both sorts have done it, with a purpose to make those that relyed on them, the more apt to Obedience, Lawes, Peace, Charity, and civill Society [Vtrorumque autem consilium erat intiatos suos sibi reddere obedientiores].” The religion cultivated by those who have not proceeded by God’s command “is a part of humane Politiques, and teacheth part of the duty which Earthly Kings require of their subjects.” For Hobbes, these “were all the founders of Common-wealths, and the Law-givers of the Gentiles” (Illorum Religiones a Legislatoribus Gentium).27 These “authors [authores] of the Religion of the Gentiles,” says Hobbes, “observing [animadvertissent] the second ground



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for Religion, which is mens Ignorance of causes,” made use of this ignorance, “ascribing the cause of Foecundity, to Venus,” for example.28 The same “Legislators of the Gentiles” (authores, again) were careful to represent these gods by “Images, both in Picture, and Sculpture; that the more ignorant sort, (that is to say, the most part, or generality of the people,) thinking the Gods for whose representation they were made, were really included, and as it were housed within them, might so much the more stand in feare of them.”29 These “authors” developed elaborate systems of divination, enabling them “with gentlenesse, and dexterity, [to] take hold of their fear, and ignorance.”30 This leads to a starkly Hobbesian conclusion about “the first Founders [Fundatores], and Legislators [Legislatores] of Common-wealths amongst the Gentiles,” who aimed “only to keep the people in obedience, and peace,” and thus have “in all places” established religion along the lines Hobbes describes.31 The end result of such “Institutions” was that “the common people in their misfortunes . . . were the less apt to mutiny against their Governors.”32 MacKendrick points to Cicero’s On Divination as a possible source for Hobbes in chapter 12, especially when it comes to Hobbes’s account of religion’s seeds and uses, neither of which is consistent with another possible Roman source, Lucretius. Lucretius certainly sees that religion is put to political use, but unlike Hobbes and Cicero, he thinks it is generally a bad thing insofar as it greatly increases human anxiety and greatly decreases human happiness.33 In spite of the classical pedigree of Hobbes’s argument here, there is something distinctively duplicitous about these founders, a quality that distinguishes it from Cicero’s: like Cicero’s founders, they have a certain asymmetry of knowledge when compared with the “generality of people”; they see not only the ignorance of the people but how this ignorance can be used for political ends. They use this asymmetry to manipulate the ignorant masses into obedience. To be sure, the ignorant people do in fact get something good from this manipulation—chiefly peace—but they are also kept in fear of invisible powers, fear that prevents them from rebelling against their earthly sovereigns. As an act of founding, it is hardly inspiring, and gone is the cooperative language of Cicero, let alone the otherregarding dimensions. If we do not see inspiration here, we see it elsewhere in Hobbes: namely, in his account of the Adamic language and thus the origins of human language more broadly. We may begin by noting what Hobbes has to say about Adam, a figure who, as Dawson points out, towered “over seventeenth-century writers” concerned with language. Dawson quotes Milton, who has Adam say, in Paradise Lost:

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I nam’d them, as they pass’d, and understood Their nature, with such knowledge God endu’d My sudden apprehension.34 Adam and his language, gifted by God and immediately connected to the things he named, suggested that there might be “a natural link between word and thing,” according to Dawson,35 and the King James Bible is illustrative here: “And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him” (Genesis 2:19–20). The link between name and thing is unmediated, and in this passage, we glimpse what Dawson calls “the idyll of the divine tongue,” a language in which there is a unity between words—Adam’s utterances—and things—the objects he names.36 On the face of things, Hobbes accepts the account of Genesis. Yet as might be expected, he has his own distinctive take on Adamic speech. In a discussion that is found solely in Leviathan, Hobbes credits God with being “first author of Speech,” adding “the Scripture goeth no further in this matter.”37 This led into something of a novel claim, on Hobbes’s part: he holds that “language always was arbitrary; even Adam’s language did not naturally denote things”—a point he makes in De Homine.38 But in Leviathan, he emphasizes that “God’s initial and limited authorisation” led to Adam arbitrarily creating new names, noting in the Latin (and not the English) that Adam was the first author of speech (sermonis author primus fuit Adam). Thus, although God created Adam already speaking, Adam went on “to adde more names, as the experience and use of the creatures should give him occasion.” As Hobbes puts it in the Latin, “eodem modo rebus aliis alia nomina imponere.” This language was sufficient, “though not so copious, as an Orator or Philosopher has need of.” The sparse quality of Adam’s language is reflected in the fact that he was not (according to Scripture) taught “the names of all Figures, Numbers, Measures, Colours, Sounds, Fancies, Relations; much less the name of Words and Speech.”39 This simple Adamic and human-augmented post-Adamic language persisted, according to Hobbes, until it “was again lost at the tower of Babel, when by the hand of God, every man was stricken for his rebellion [rebellione], with an oblivion of his former language.” With God’s punishment, humans were “forced to disperse themselves [dispergere se] into severall parts of the world,” bringing about “the diversity of Tongues” [Linguarum varietas]; over the long passage of time, these successor languages “grew every where more copious.”40



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A good deal is going on in Hobbes’s account of the origins of language, and I note two features that are important for my discussion. First, Hobbes denies that the earliest language is copious, linking the quality of copiousness to the orator and philosopher, and hence suggests that they share a certain disposition to language in common. Hobbes’s first speakers would not have, and could not have, deployed oratio, as did Cicero’s founders, because copious language is characteristic of rhetorically inflected speech; without copiousness, persuasion would seem a difficult task. Second, he traces the (forced) dispersal of humans to God’s punishment for their rebellion, along with the diversity of human language. Hobbes and Cicero on Consensus and Convention Humans are scattered for Hobbes, as they were with Cicero; they both use Latin terms deriving from the verb dispergo. What brings them together for Hobbes? The answer, as we have seen, is not what it was for Cicero—oratio. On the face of it, the source of unity is a desire for security—to be, in the Latin securitas, without care (se-cura, which is the etymology of the word Hobbes uses in the Latin). This is evident throughout Hobbes’s systematic writings. Why there is so much care, or worry, is also clear in Elements, De Cive, and Leviathan, though he puts things most forcefully at the beginning of chapter 17 in Leviathan: “The finall Cause, End, or Designe of men, (who naturally love Liberty, and Dominion over others,) in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, (in which we see them live in Common-wealths,) is the foresight [cura] of their own preservation [conservationis], and of a more contented life thereby.”41 The dilemma lurking behind the Hobbesian covenant, though, is that by Hobbes’s own account, humans can’t quite agree, naturally speaking, on the descriptors that adhere to those who obey or disobey the natural laws. Naturally speaking, humans will use different names to signify such things as affect us . . . because all men be not alike affected with the same thing, nor the same man at all times, are in the common discourses of men, of inconstant signification. For seeing all names are imposed to signifie our conceptions [conceptions thus precede names]; and all our affections are but conceptions; when we conceive the same things differently, we can hardly avoyd different naming of them. For though the nature of what we conceive, be the same; yet the diversity of our reception of it . . . gives every thing a tincture of our different passions.42 It is no wonder, then, that Hobbes understands that “the names of Vertues, and Vices,” naturally speaking, “can never be true grounds of any ratiocination.”43

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Humans stand in reference to each other in their language use as do the inhabitants of democratic Athens during the plague or the Corcyreans during the civil war in Thucydides’s Histories. Hobbes’s translation is instructive, given that he prefers to use the terms “name” and “signification” to translate the Greek, the very words he used later in Leviathan: “The received value of names imposed for signification of things, was changed into arbitrary. For inconsiderate boldness, was counted true-hearted manliness: provident deliberation, a handsome fear: modesty, the cloak of cowardice: to be wise in every thing, to be lazy in every thing.”44 If it is the case that humans, naturally speaking, are akin to those inhabiting Thucydides’s civil war–ridden Corcyra, it is no wonder that Hobbes thinks, as he argues in chapter 5, that without “the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge [Rationem Iudicis], to whose sentence they will both stand,” parties at odds will “either come to blowes, or be undecided” since there is no “right Reason constituted by Nature” (defectu rectae Rationis a natura constitutae).45 In effect, Hobbes is denying precisely the rational-linguistic dimension of human sociability that Cicero takes for granted and sees as actualized by his eloquent founders. We can well understand that Hobbes was profoundly skeptical about human moral language, a skepticism that was part of his broader “concern about semantic instability.”46 Hobbes thought that there was “no natural right reason, and therefore no univocal application of words, but as many applications are there are different interpretations.”47 Words, for Hobbes, are (at least naturally speaking) expressions of “the speaker’s ideas,” and our ideas vary a good deal from person to person. Thus, at the end of chapter 15, he argues that “Good, and Evill, are names that signifie our Appetites, and Aversions; which in different tempers, customes, and doctrines of men, are different: And divers men, differ not onely in their Judgement on the senses, of what is pleasant, and unpleasant to the tast, smell, hearing, touch, and sight; but also what is conformable, or disagreeable to Reason, in the actions of common life.”48 This is especially the case, though, as Dawson points out, when it comes to moral language, a point Hobbes makes most famously in the passages from chapter 4 we encountered above. It is also clear, for Hobbes, that getting humans to agree is not a task for any particularly persuasive person but for the passions working in tandem with reason; his natural laws are “the true Morall Philosophie,” and they solve the “Disputes, Controversies, and at last War” that come from the very inconstancy of our moral language, inconstancy that derives from the fact that “Good, and Evill, are names that signifie our Appetites, and Aversions.”49 Naturally speaking, humans are disposed not to agree with each other and not to be able to engage in any common process of rational-linguistic sociability.



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Hobbes’s departure from Cicero on language is not total: he does not deny that humans differ from beasts with respect to or by means of speech, or what he calls sermo in the Latin; absent speech, “there had been amongst men, neither Common-wealth, nor Society, nor Contract, no more than amongst Lyons, Bears, and Wolves.”50 For Hobbes as for Cicero, speech can bring about tremendous benefits, but whereas nonhuman animals (animantia bruta in De Cive and Animalia illa in Leviathan) have voice (vox in both De Cive and Leviathan), they do not have the art of words (verborum arte in Leviathan and De Cive).51 One is here reminded that copiousness did not characterize the Adamic speech, just as we may recall that Cicero’s founders were wise and eloquent. We may also recall here that in chapter 10 of Leviathan, Hobbes states that “eloquence is power; because it is seeming prudence,” an emphasis I have added to highlight his negative description.52 Humans and beasts differ in crucial ways for Hobbes. It is worth pointing out that when he introduces these differences in chapter 17 of Leviathan, in passages that share features with similar passages in Elements and De Cive, he refers to those “living creatures, as Bees, and Ants, [that] live sociably [pacifice . . . inter se vivunt] one with another,” only to deny that humans are like them.53 The reasons for his denial involve human psychology—competitiveness, desire for eminence, vanity, sensitivity to perceived injury. Strikingly, though, he homes in on the absence of reason (ratio) and speech (sermo) in nonhuman animals to explain the ease with which they are able to live together. Without the things that make us distinctively human, for Cicero, and allow us to come together in the first place, these creatures are naturally sociable precisely because they are absent—thus “the agreement of these creatures is Naturall; that of men, is by covenant only, which is artificall.” His word for agreement is consensio; his word for covenant, pactis.54 Conclusion Hobbes came around to Cicero in the end—so one might summarize part of Skinner’s argument in the magisterial Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. As Skinner puts it early in his argument, “By the time he came to publish Leviathan in 1651, he had arrived at the conclusion that, in the moral but not in the natural sciences, the methods of demonstrative reasoning need to be supplemented by the moving force of eloquence.”55 Skinner cites, in particular, a passage from the Review and Conclusion, in which Hobbes states, “Reason, and Eloquence, (though not perhaps in the Naturall Sciences, yet in the Morall) may stand very well together. For wheresoever there is place for adorning and preferring of Errour, there is much more place for adorning and preferring of Truth, if they have it to adorn.”56 Hobbes’s language of adornment is, as Skinner has

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shown, connected to the classical rhetorical virtue of ornatus, a key element of Ciceronian elocutio.57 Perhaps he had come around to copiousness after all. Now it seems that Skinner is correct here, if we take Hobbes to have been reflecting on his prior rhetorical practice in Elements and De Cive. But Cicero and Hobbes still stand far apart when it comes to founding even by the time we come to Leviathan. It is worth noting that Hobbes’s endorsement of eloquence is somewhat limited—note his use of “may,” along with the conditional “if.” Even if we grant that in his own use of language, Hobbes embraced rhetoric, we are still left with a key fact to be explained, given his departure from Cicero in so many respects. How, though, would Hobbes think it possible for humans to bring about agreement at all if we are to take the natural condition of humankind—dissociated and fearful—as anything literal? Now there is very good reason to think, in spite of the arguments of Rousseau in the Social Contract, that Hobbes is not being serious.58 He himself says as much, after all, in chapter 13, where he reflects on the objection that “there was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this,” granting “I believe it was never generally so, over all the world.”59 Yet it is nonetheless true that he seems to think he needs to explain institution, a term he uses at Elements 19 to differentiate the “natural concord” of the “irrational creatures” from humans, who “govern themselves . . . by arbitrary institution.”60 Hobbes uses the language of institution, again, at the beginning of Leviathan 18—and there, remarkably, he refers to men—echoing the language of Lucretius—voluntarily (sponte sua) covenanting one by one with each other. He does not say how they do this. However they do it, though, it is different from how nonhuman animals do it. It is no accident that Hobbes thinks it is very important for us to set up a sort of meta-ethical language that can give fixed content to our otherwise radically unstable terms, a task he achieves in chapters 14 and 15 of Leviathan, where he provides an account of the natural laws. This content can be fixed, we should note, because Hobbes has recourse to what he takes to be dictates of reason— that is, his account of the law of nature, “a Precept, or generally rule, found out by reason.”61 In effect, Hobbes solves in those two chapters the language problem he describes earlier in Leviathan, providing content to the subjectivist moral terminology that could serve as no true grounds of reasoning in chapter 4. Yet he winds up establishing, by a certain kind of reason, the things that Cicero sees as containing their seeds in human sociability. Thus, Cicero has Scipio remark, after referring to “a kind of natural herding together of men” (On the Commonwealth I.39a), that this sociability is “what we can call seeds [quasi semina]; nor can we find any deliberate institution [institutio] either of the other virtues or of the commonwealth itself.”62 He says something quite similar at Tusculan



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Disputations III.2: “The seeds [semina] of virtue are inborn in our dispositions and, if they were allowed to ripen [si adolescere liceret], nature’s own hand would lead us on to happiness of life.”63 Nicgorski suggests that it is in fact our “innate sense of shame (verecundia)” that constitutes “the very seeds of virtue”; as he remarks earlier, “Verecundia, perhaps best translated as sense of shame or moral sensibility, is the basis and source for not only the specific virtue of temperance but also morality and right itself.”64 Nicgorski cites On Duties 1.148, where Cicero, in criticizing the Cynics, says that “without that [i.e., a sense of shame, verecundiae] nothing can be upright, and nothing honourable.”65 It is no wonder that Cicero, by contrast to Hobbes, does not think humans are radically incapable of coming to agreement about moral terminology without a third party. Indeed, humans are, for Cicero, well equipped to figuring out a good deal of their moral duty just by virtue of their constitutions as rational and social creatures. Hobbes might well respond to this line of argument, as he does in chapter 13 of Leviathan, in this way: “Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where no Law, no Injustice. . . . Justice, and Injustice are none of the Faculties neither of the Body, nor Mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world [qui in mundo solitaries esset & unicus], as well as his Senses, and Passions. They are Qualities, that relate to men in Society, not in Solitude”— or as he puts it in the Latin, non autem quatenus Hominis, sed quatenus Civis.66 In short, Hobbes could simply say that if Cicero were right, we could find someone with a sense of justice who lived alone, which would be absurd. That this is a somewhat unfair objection to the sort of argument we’ve encountered in Cicero is, I think, fairly clear. Not only does it deny as a premise what Cicero takes for granted—the innate sociability of human beings—but it also denies, even if we grant the possibility of, say, a feral child as encountered in the narrative of the wolf boy of Aveyron (documented roughly a century later by Itard), that morality is innate in the sense Hobbes suggests. For Cicero, morality emerges in and through sociolinguistic practices; it is not simply there in a fully developed form. Cicero might well respond to Hobbes by saying that if we take his account to be anything close to literal, it is patently absurd, as the possibility of covenant requires the existence of a language that would allow humans to cooperate, yet the existence of a language is impossible without covenant. That is, language must precede sociability, for Hobbes, if we are to take him literally in his account of the seeds of religion; yet language cannot precede sociability, partly because prior to sovereignty, humans lack the conceptual apparatus to allow them to reach thick agreement of any kind, and partly because humans living in isolation would be unable to communicate. More likely operative than an explanatory depiction of our natural state, of course, is the persuasive

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dimension of Hobbes’s account. Hobbes is persuading his readers of the very real possibility that they might encounter a set of horrific alternatives if they do not content themselves with a certain form of civil association; he is not explaining how they have come to be associated in the first place. The irony is that beyond Hobbes turning Cicero upside down in so many ways, some of which we have encountered here, he does so when it comes to the problem of civil war. Although it is a commonplace that Hobbes’s philosophy was profoundly shaped by civil war and its prospect, so is it the case that Cicero’s philosophy was profoundly shaped by the tumult of his times, a point made quite effectively by Benjamin Straumann.67 Yet while Hobbes has recourse to an authoritarian figure who solves the problem of natural disagreement and linguistic incoherence, Cicero does not; whereas Hobbes locates the solution to the problem outside conventional language itself, Cicero does not. Instead, Cicero tries to do two things, each of which is a decidedly non-Hobbesian move. First, he tries to draw young people to the cause of the republic and participation in its public life, evident at many points in On Duties (e.g., 1.19, 1.28) but most striking at 1.72: “those who are equipped by nature to administer affairs must abandon any hesitation over winning office and engage in public life. For only in this way can either the city be ruled or greatness of spirit be displayed.”68 He is clearly addressing his son, as he does explicitly at 2.44 and 3.6, but he is also addressing, as M.T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins note, “young Romans of the governing class”; they point to 1.117, 1.121, 1.147, and 2.44–51 as evidence, along with this well-known passage from On Divination: For what greater or better service can I render to the commonwealth than to instruct and train the youth—especially in view of the fact that our young men have gone so far astray because of the present moral laxity [his praesertim moribus atque temporibus, quibus ita prolapse est] that the utmost effort will be needed to hold them in check and direct them in the right way? Of course, I have no assurance . . . that they will all turn to these studies. Would that a few may! Though few, their activity may yet have a wide influence in the state [in republica late patere poterit industria].69 Cicero’s other strategy, as I have argued elsewhere, is to educate his readers’ longing for glory toward socially beneficial ends and away from the pernicious example of Caesar, someone who was so fixated on his glory that he waged war on Rome: “he overturned all the laws of gods and men for the sake of the preeminence that he had imagined for himself in his mistaken fancy.”70 Cicero does so not just by holding out the beautiful rewards of true glory but also by



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excoriating the ugly shamefulness of those like Caesar and Mark Antony. Thus he refers to how hateful (detestabilior) is the “monstrousness [immanitas] of those who have savaged [lacerarunt] their country with all manner of crime.”71 The sense of shame (verecundia) encountered above is a key target of Cicero’s persuasive project. In the end, Hobbes’s attack on Cicero’s account of the origins of society— its naturalness, its connection to the human capacity for language—and the sociolinguistic dimensions of human virtue leaves readers with a choice about what sort of emotions are to be cultivated and why. Here it is noteworthy, by way of conclusion, what Adam Smith, who had little use for Hobbes (and quite a lot of use for Cicero), had to say about Cicero in part VII of Theory of Moral Sentiments in a section he introduces thus: “The first, among whom we may count all the ancient moralists, have contented themselves with describing in a general manner the different vices and virtues, and with pointing out the deformity and misery of the one disposition as well as the propriety and happiness of the other, but have not affected to lay down many precise rules that are to hold good unexceptionably in all particular cases.”72 Cicero stands out here, especially Book 1 of On Duties, which seeks to “direct us to the practice of the four cardinal virtues.” Smith characterizes Cicero, along with Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, thusly: “By the vivacity of their descriptions they inflame our natural love of virtue, and increase our abhorrence of vice”; the science “most susceptible of the embellishments of eloquence,” moral philosophy is also “capable of producing upon the flexibility of youth, the noblest and most lasting impressions.”73 That Cicero chose to do so in a moment of grave personal and political turmoil— and that Hobbes did not—is testimony to just why Cicero played the role he did for Shaftesbury, Hume, Smith, and so many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century revolutionaries, a role he may yet play for we who confront cynical dishonesty and shameless self-seeking in our own public life. Notes 1. In addition to my forthcoming chapter, “Cicero and Eighteenth-Century Political Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cicero’s Philosophy, see also Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), for a classic account of Cicero’s place in the eighteenth century. MacKendrick’s overview of Cicero’s reception in The Philosophical Books of Cicero (London: Duckworth, 1989) is helpful on Hume. 2. Torrey Shanks, Authority Figures: Rhetoric and Experience in John Locke’s Political Thought (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), 23–24. 3. See Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), for a discussion of the humanist background; see

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Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), on Hobbes and republicanism. 4. See Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). This is an account that ought to be approached with some caution; whereas Hobbes certainly was skeptical about the kind of judgment presupposed by Ciceronian rhetoric, he is not quite so antirhetorical as he seems. On this point, see Shanks, Authority Figures, 9. In addition to Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 5. I use the terms “dissociation” and “association” deliberately, given their etymologies: both derive from the verb socio, related to the noun socius, which is related to societas. Societas is a concept of central importance to Cicero’s moral and political theory. 6. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Invention, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), I.2. 7. Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 261. 8. On Lucretius’s favorable view of nonhuman animals, see Adrienne M. Hagen, “Natural Hierarchy in Greco-Roman Thought” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin– Madison, 2016). 9. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982). On the pointed irony of this language in Smith, see Charles L. Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 106. 10. Cicero, On Invention, I.2. 11. Cicero, On Invention, I.3. 12. Marcus Tullius Cicero, For Sestius, in Cicero: Pro Sestio and In Vatinum, trans. R. Gardner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 91. 13. Cicero, For Sestius, 91. 14. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, trans. James M. May and Jakob Wisse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). The Latin consulted is Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 15. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1.12. The Latin consulted is Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 16. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Laelius, On Friendship, and The Dream of Scipio, trans. J. G. F. Powell (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1990), 93. 17. Cicero, On Duties, 1.158. 18. Cicero, On Duties, 1.157. 19. Walter Nicgorski, Cicero’s Skepticism and His Recovery of Political Philosophy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 175. 20. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, trans. J. E. G. Zetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1.39a. The Latin consulted is Cicero, De Republica and De Legibus, trans. and ed. C. W. Keys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928).



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21. Nicgorski, Cicero’s Skepticism, 174. 22. Nicgorski, Cicero’s Skepticism, 179. 23. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 260. 24. Hobbes, Leviathan, 260. 25. Hobbes, Leviathan, 262. 26. For an excellent collection of essays dealing with gendered interpretations of Hobbes, see Nancy Hirschmann and Joanne H. Wright, Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). 27. Hobbes, Leviathan, 170. 28. Hobbes, Leviathan, 172. 29. Hobbes, Leviathan, 174. 30. Hobbes, Leviathan, 174, 176. 31. Hobbes, Leviathan, 176. 32. Hobbes, Leviathan, 178. 33. See, for example, Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 5.86. 34. Quoted in Hannah Dawson, Locke, Language, and Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 102. 35. Dawson, Locke, Language, 102. 36. Dawson, Locke, Language, 103. 37. This is not what Hobbes says in the Latin Leviathan, where he states “Sermonis author primus fuit Adam, qui creaturas, quas ad conspectum ejus adduxit Deus, Nominavit.” One of the many joys of having Deborah Baumgold’s “three-text” edition of Hobbes is that finding such unique passages is greatly simplified. See Deborah Baumgold, ThreeText Edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Political Theory: The Elements of Law, De Cive, and Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Throughout this chapter, I consult Baumgold, in addition to the Warrender edition of De Cive (Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The Latin Version, ed. Howard Warrender [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983]), the Malcolm edition of Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]), and the Gaskin edition of Elements (Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic: Part I: Human Nature; Part II: De Corpore Politico; with Three Lives, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999]). For other works, the Latin consulted is the Molesworth edition (Thomas Hobbes, Opera philosophica quae latine scripsit, ed. William Molesworth [London: J. Bohn, 1839–45]). 38. Dawson, Locke, Language, 113. 39. Hobbes, Leviathan, 48. 40. Hobbes’s account of Babel, especially his Latin word choice, may be compared with the Latin Vulgate of Jerome, which I intersperse with the King James rendition of Genesis 11:1–9: “And the whole earth was of one language [labii], and of one speech [sermonum] . . . And they said one to another, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name [celebremus nomen nostrum], lest we be scattered [dividamur] abroad upon the face of the whole earth . . . And the l ord said, Behold, the people is one [unus est populus], and they have all one language [unum

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labium]; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound [confundamus] their language [linguam], that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the l ord scattered them [divisit eos] . . . Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the l ord did there confound the language [confusum est labium] of all the earth; and from thence did the l ord scatter [dispersit] them abroad upon the face of all the earth.” We can see, then, that the Adamic language held until humans sought to become something more than themselves at Babel, and the primordial language of Eden was divided, just as humans were dispersed throughout the world. Whereas the Vulgate uses dispergo in just one case, Hobbes only uses dispergo. 41. Hobbes, Leviathan, 254. 42. Hobbes, Leviathan, 62. 43. Hobbes, Leviathan, 62. 44. Thomas Hobbes, Hobbes’s Thucydides, ed. Richard Schlatter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1975), 222. 45. Hobbes, Leviathan, 66. 46. Dawson, Locke, Language, 142. 47. Dawson, Locke, Language, 142. 48. Hobbes, Leviathan, 242. 49. Hobbes, Leviathan, 242. 50. Hobbes, Leviathan, 48. 51. The Latin consulted for De Cive is the Warrender edition. 52. Hobbes, Leviathan,134. 53. Hobbes, Leviathan, 258. 54. Hobbes, Leviathan, 258–60. 55. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 5. 56. Hobbes, Leviathan, 1133. 57. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 372. 58. Particularly illustrative is the following passage from the Geneva Manuscript of Social Contract: “Hobbes’s error is therefore not to have established the state of war among men who are independent and have become sociable but to have assumed this state to be natural to the species, and to have given it as the cause of the vices of which it is the effect” (159). 59. Hobbes, Leviathan, 194. 60. Hobbes, Leviathan, 201. 61. Hobbes, Leviathan, 198. 62. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, 1.41. 63. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), III.2. 64. Nicgorski, Cicero’s Skepticism, 216, 111. 65. Cicero, On Duties, 1.148. 66. Hobbes, Leviathan, 196. 67. Benjamin Straumann, Crisis and Constitutionalism: Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).



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68. Cicero, On Duties, 1.72. 69. Cicero, On Duties, xvii; Marcus Tulius Cicero, On Divination, in Cicero: De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, trans. William Armistead Falconer (London: William Heinemann, 1927), II.4–5. 70. See Daniel J. Kapust,“Rethinking Rousseau’s Tyranny of Orators: Cicero’s On Duties and the Beauty of True Glory,” in The General Will: The Evolution of a Concept, ed. James Farr and David Lay Williams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 175–96; Cicero, On Duties, 1.26. 71. Cicero, On Duties, 1.57. 72. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 328. 73. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 329.

chapter 7

Locke and Cicero on Property, Labor, and Value E m i ly C . Nac ol

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e know with some confidence that John Locke prized one of Cicero’s texts—specifically, On Duties—more than almost any other piece of written work. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke makes the following recommendation for parents and teachers seeking to instruct a child in virtue: The knowledge of virtue, all along from the beginning, in all the instances he is capable of, being taught him, more by practice than by rules; and the love of reputation, instead of satisfying his appetite, being made habitual in him; I know not whether he should read any other discourses of morality, but what he finds in the bible; or have any system of ethics put into his hand, till he can read Tully’s offices, not as a schoolboy to learn Latin, but as one that would be informed in the principles and precepts of virtue, for the conduct of his life.1 Locke thinks children should be reared to be ethical members of society primarily through experiential learning rather than by memorizing rules for virtuous living set out in books. Two texts, however, earn his approval as the first written guides for the young who are trying to learn “the proper conduct of life”: the Christian Bible, and Cicero’s On Duties. Cicero’s letter to his son, which argued for the great promise of human sociability while carefully laying out the dilemmas our mutual dependence can pose for an ethical person pursuing a life of politics, is the treatise on virtuous living that Locke insists a young person must understand before continuing his literary education for virtue.2 In spite of this ringing endorsement, Cicero is rarely named in Locke’s oeuvre as a whole and never in his explicitly political writings. In addition to his 140



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full-throated praise for On Duties in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke briefly mentions “Tully” in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, The Reasonableness of Christianity, his notes on the epistles of St. Paul, and some of his letters.3 Although Cicero’s influence on him is undeniable, he does not often draw direct connections between Cicero’s ideas and his own. Readers looking for a strong link between these thinkers must work mostly with resonances rather than references, particularly when it comes to Locke’s political thought. This chapter explores connections between Cicero and Locke in their thinking on communities as political economies structured by property relations. On the face of it, this might seem an odd point of comparison. Cicero’s direct engagement with questions of political economy and property is scant and passes relatively unnoticed in the extant literature on his thought, whereas Locke’s views are well-worn scholarly ground and can be explicated without reference to Cicero.4 I argue that there is an important affinity between them. Much like Cicero, Locke constructs a theory of property that depends heavily on a prior understanding of humans as sociable creatures with duties to each other. Both thinkers view a person’s relationship to his property (and the property of others) as not merely political or economic but also a moral bond that is crucial to the development of good character and ethical social relations. My purpose is twofold: to generate a fruitful comparison between Cicero and Locke on property and the character of political economy more generally, and to think about how Cicero’s thought may have shaped Locke’s well-known views on these questions. In the first section, I focus on On Duties to lay out Cicero’s account of how people may be said to have private property and how their social relations and moral characters depend on their relationship to their possessions and those of others. Then I look at Locke’s arguments for an individual’s right to private property, centering his views on labor as not only the grounds for making property claims but also the basis of moral development and healthy social relations. I argue that Cicero’s and Locke’s respective views on property share the insight that labor is critical to human sociality and politics and that such a reading gives proper weight to their attention to society and individuals. Cicero and the Problem of Private Property Cicero held property, dedicated time and energy to managing his wealth, and stood as a political advocate for the wealthy. But in his ethics and political philosophy, his comments on property are not systematic and contain ambiguities that puzzle his interpreters.5 One is philosophical: does he think private property is natural or not? Another is moral: is personal property something one should pursue and accumulate? Or is it something to be wary of, if one is aiming for a

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life of honor? On Duties is a key text where Cicero confronts—and perhaps does not completely answer—these questions, but he at least gives readers an argument that political concord partly depends on how well property relations are managed. Cicero’s account of justice—the key to social harmony—deals in both persons and things: “Of justice, the first office is that no man should harm another unless he has been provoked by injustice: the next that one should treat common goods as common and private ones as one’s own.”6 A key condition of Ciceronian justice is treating different kinds of property appropriately, a concern he articulates separately from his claim that just living requires doing no harm to other people unless provoked. Much as Locke will, Cicero sets for himself a difficult task when it comes to explaining exactly how humans can make a legitimate claim to private property. He starts from the assumption that the natural world was given to all people in common, an idea that guides at least one course of action when it comes to how property is seen and treated. As he writes, “Everything produced on the earth is created for the use of mankind, and men are born for the sake of men, so that they may be able to assist one another. Consequently, we ought in this to follow nature as our leader, to contribute to the common stock the things that benefit everyone together, and by the exchange of dutiful services, by giving and receiving expertise and efforts and means, to bind fast the fellowship of men with each other.”7 Here, we get a fuller sense of what it means to “treat common goods as common.” It is a stronger imperative than simply urging men not to claim property from the commons for themselves without cause. It requires an active relationship to resources humans hold collectively and demands their time, care, and skill—or what we might call their labor. This effortful approach to common goods is a critical aspect of honoring the sociable nature of humanity and recognizing that “men are born for the sake of men,” to be helpful to one another.8 The decree of nature is thus clear: all things belong to humans as members of humankind, and this generates a set of duties toward the common world. The other half of Cicero’s thesis on the relationship between justice and property acknowledges that not all property stays common. He must explain how individuals can claim personal property without grossly violating the edicts of nature. His answer is conventional, based in observations of practices found in the social and political world. Admitting that “no property is private by nature,” he suggests that people claim property, particularly land, in a number of ways: “by long occupation (as when men moved into some empty property in the past), or by victory (when they acquired it in war), or by law, by settlement, by agreement, or by lot.”9 The origin of private land ownership can thus come from a number of sources—human initiative, violence and conquest, consent, and law.10



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In the present, Cicero argues that “each man should hold on to whatever has fallen to him” from the common stock.11 He does not devote much energy to explaining how people can coherently claim personal property from a common pool; rather, he simply suggests that this is what people do and have done out of need or desire, and he intimates that private property should be protected. At first glance, then, private property appears to be nothing more than a legal construct with a thin connection to the natural tendencies of humans. As Cicero explains the proper orientation to private and common property, “whatever is assigned by statutes and civil law should remain in such possession as those laws may have laid down, but the rest should be regarded as the Greek proverb has it: everything is common among friends.”12 Here he acknowledges that private property is first a matter of convention and then marked out by law, whereas common property is foundational to a rich network of moral relationships existing beyond law and politics. Earlier in On Duties, however, Cicero links respect for private property to honoring natural social relations among people when he warns that any person who tries to take or claim the private property of another “will be violating the law of human fellowship.”13 This is not an argument that helping oneself to another’s property violates the positive legal code of a community but a claim that such behavior transgresses an unwritten natural or moral law that binds humans together.14 Cicero blurs the line between nature and politics here: how individuals treat the property of others is a matter of virtue and not simply law, and it bears some connection to the natural responsibility to preserve human sociality and kinship beyond the legal code enforced by the state. Although Cicero posits that respecting the personal possessions of others is just and critical to the preservation of human fellowship, private property still remains for him a matter of convention and law. Furthermore, its protection may be the raison d’être for the state.15 In Book II of On Duties, Cicero stresses this point repeatedly. He claims there that “political communities and citizenships were constituted especially so that men could hold on to what was theirs. It may be true that nature first guided men to gather in groups; but it was in the hope of safeguarding their possessions that they sought protection in cities.”16 Likewise, his account of the purposes of city and citizenship is rendered in the language of private property: “it is the proper function of a citizenship and a city to ensure for everyone a free and unworried guardianship of his possessions.”17 The founding and durability of the city depends on its ability to guarantee private property, and thus the first responsibility of public officials is to make sure that individuals may keep what is theirs by convention.18 Neal Wood interprets this as a formalization of the natural: “States are natural in that

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they arise out of human sociality. States are also natural in so far as they satisfy the natural wants of man, and as we have seen, the desire for possessions seems to be basic to human nature.”19 It is possible to read this as convention generating a need for political institutions. Although natural sociability may bring human beings together, settling their conventional property relations is a prime motivation for a turn to politics and the state. While Cicero’s explicit arguments about property refer mostly to land, he also has much to say about wealth in general—its acquisition, purpose, and distribution. He was keenly interested in wealth acquisition personally, but On Duties reveals Cicero’s ambivalence about whether wealth may support an honorable life. As we have seen, he holds steadfast to the views that common property is a proper moral object of care and concern, whereas the private property of individuals is something ordinary citizens and public administrators should respect. But what of the moral life of the owner of private land and movables? Cicero ponders whether the pursuit of land, money, and goods is a worthwhile endeavor for an ethical person, and he gives some attention to the question of whether people have duties to dispense of or share their wealth in particular ways. The clearest statement of Cicero’s view comes in Book I of On Duties, wherein he advises his son not to chase desires and pleasures unabated. He especially instructs him to avoid desiring money too much, commenting that “nothing is more the mark of a mean and petty spirit than to love riches; nothing more honourable and more magnificent than to despise money if you are without it, but if you have it to devote it to liberality and beneficence.”20 Pursuing wealth is not a path to goodness, and it might obstruct the cultivation of virtue if given too much attention or power.21 This insight carries over into Cicero’s instructions for those who find themselves with plenty of money. In particular, he wants wealth to serve as an instrumental good for the exercise of another dimension of justice: liberality. He cautions against putting it “at the command . . . of lust and luxury” when it ought to be at the service of justice, specifically liberality.22 Used properly, wealth can help sustain bonds among people rather than be a source of conflict in society. Lest this seem too sanguine, Cicero’s account of how wealth may be used to practice liberality is peppered with caveats. In general, he finds it better to be liberal with personal services than with wealth, as the latter is finite. He observes that “many have squandered their patrimony by improvident gifts of money. But what is more foolish than to ensure that you are no longer able to do the very things that you enjoy doing? Moreover, the giving of money brings robbery in its wake. For when men, because of their giving, begin to be in need themselves, they are forced to lay their hands on other’s goods.”23 The warnings are



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strong—being too lavish with gifts may make a person’s life less pleasant and enjoyable and turn him to corruption and crime. It is better, Cicero argues, to practice moderation when it comes to being liberal with money and goods. Sharing with others is certainly the most virtuous use of one’s personal wealth, but one should not leave the coffers open too widely.24 Although it is virtuous to share one’s material resources with others, doing so requires a fair bit of prudence. This advice about the prudent use of wealth mirrors Cicero’s views on the most honorable ways to acquire it. While he advocates for a life of philosophical reflection and public service, he acknowledges that some members of society will focus their attention on becoming quite rich. For these people, personal wealth should be pursued with honor, and “not dishonourably and invidiously acquired.”25 Furthermore, it ought “to be preserved, and also to be increased, by carefulness and thrift.”26 Accumulating wealth can be achieved through good practices guided by reason and industry, Cicero thinks.27 It is difficult to systematize Cicero’s thinking on property, but we can draw some general conclusions. First, property holds an important place in his reflections on how a social order can be supported and preserved. Communal property, a grant of nature, requires that all people invest their capacities and resources in its preservation and development. Private property is a matter not only of nature simpliciter but also of human artifice and convention. It is largely a legal construct, but respect for its boundaries is a legal requirement and a moral or natural one. The question of what to do with one’s personal holdings is a more vexed one for Cicero. Whereas the acquisition of property is not the most honorable pursuit for Cicero, if it is done without injustice, it is “not, of course, to be disparaged.”28 Amassing wealth and using it pose, he thinks, a novel set of moral challenges that require prudence and caution if one is to honor the social fabric on which all are dependent for happiness and security. As Barlow rightly comments, “because it is a social creation through the cooperation of many, economic life is governed by principles of justice, which is concerned with the way people act toward one another,” according to Cicero.29 Thus economic questions about property and wealth are always moral ones for him. In the next section, I turn to Locke’s reflections on property and sociability, which in some ways reflect the themes Cicero introduces. Like Cicero, Locke begins from the idea that all humans hold the world and its resources in common, but from there their paths diverge. Locke argues for private property as originating in a natural rather than a legal right, and most of his account of property is famously dedicated to explaining how this can be so. We find Locke and Cicero meeting again, however, in their insistence that property acquisition may open a path to harmonious and improved social relations, if done properly.

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Locke, Labor, and the Claim to Private Property Locke’s account of property, particularly his arguments in chapter 5 of the Second Treatise of Government, begins from a premise not far from what Cicero claims in On Duties but reframed theologically. He starts with a puzzle: if God has granted the Earth and its many resources “to mankind in common,” then how can it be shown “how men might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to mankind in common, and that without any express compact of all the commoners”?30 Locke agrees with Cicero’s claim that common property is the natural state of human affairs, yet he wants to argue that private property is also natural to humans, and not a matter of convention or law.31 How can the right to have personal property be knowable and recognizable to humans prior to the formation of a political community? Locke’s purpose is to show how—even though “no body has originally a private dominion, exclusive of the rest of mankind”—someone can legitimately claim something for his own use or benefit from the common pool without recourse to law or political institutions.32 Famously, the key to this kind of natural claim is labor. Locke argues that each human has ownership of his own body and the labor it can perform, and once he puts that labor to work on common resources, anything he extracts or improves is rightfully his.33 For Locke, labor is an unambiguous path to private ownership. He comments that “it is plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could.”34 Thus, the work of a person’s body is key: others see “the first gathering” from the natural world and acknowledge its work as a clear and unmistakable sign of private possession, without any kind of mediation by the state or positive law. Furthermore, this observation sets up obligations—Locke notes that once a person has “subdued, tilled and sowed” any piece of land, everyone must recognize that it is his property, “which another had no title to, nor could without injury take from him.”35 Labor thereby demarcates what belongs to the laborer and confers certain responsibilities on others.36 Locke’s account of the progression from the “earth in common” to individual ownership seems straightforward in its logic. Humans own their bodies and their own labor, which they mix with commonly held resources to appropriate what they need or desire. This labor is visible and intelligible to others, and private property claims are thus initially grounded in the natural bodies and relations of humans to each other, with no recourse to politics.37 But this natural world of property relations—private and common—is not without limits and obligations to others. As with Cicero, sociability and duty underwrite Locke’s account of property and acquisition.



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Built into Locke’s account of how people can claim the fruits of their labor by natural right is a fairly robust set of reminders that they exist in a social world of others who need resources, too. Lockean subjects surely know this all along, as they know not to take the property claimed by another’s labor. There are limits on the laborer, too: a laboring person may keep what he produces, “for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to,” but Locke says this holds only “where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.”38 Here we see a restriction on acquisition, albeit one left open to interpretation. People can claim whatever they extract or produce with their bodies, but they must be mindful of how much they take and its quality, being sure to leave something equitable for others who labor. This is a firm obligation, one they can presumably know by dint of reason.39 But what does it actually mean to leave behind “enough and as good?” Locke expects people to determine this for themselves, perhaps under the watchful eyes of others who are laboring and claiming property from the commons with them. Beyond the sufficiency limitation, Locke suggests another way people can know with more certainty the limits on what they can claim—no one may take more than he can use or enjoy. As he writes, “Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.”40 When people take more land than they can cultivate or more resources than they can consume or use, they violate this important condition and turn away from their obligations to God and other humans (figured here as God’s creations) who might have used and enjoyed these goods.41 Thus, between the sufficiency limitation and the spoliation proviso, Locke situates individual property seekers and claimants in a social context constituted by duties to others.42 Locke’s story about property establishes two arguments: that individuals may claim private property as a right of nature, without recourse to law or political consent, and that they can understand the limits on how far this right extends. His story about labor, property, and obligation extends further into the realm of positive sociality, however. It is certainly a moral imperative that no one take more than he can use, but this obligation is a matter of refraining from harm. Locke casts it as a decision that nearly cancels out private acquisition, commenting, “he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all.”43 What this language of neutralization or non-harm obscures is the degree to which laboring is a positive moral injunction for Locke, one that is good for the individual and for society. Bound up in Locke’s tale of property acquisition is a deeper story about the morality of labor in a shared ethical and political economic context. Chapter 5 of the Second Treatise is rich with the suggestion that people who seek property by appropriate means—through labor—are fulfilling moral

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obligations to God, themselves, and others. As Locke writes in paragraph 34, God gave the Earth to all men in common with the intention that they would use it for their sustenance and enjoyment, but there is one type of person who is especially well positioned to take advantage of this gift. He asserts that “[God] gave [the world] to the use of the industrious and the rational (and labour was to be his title to it); not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious.”44 The implication is that property acquisition, although essential for survival, also serves another purpose: the cultivation and demonstration of the virtues of rationality and industry, which are developed through the habit of labor. Thus, man labors not only for his survival and material gain but for his own moral benefit. In an early note on labor in his 1661 commonplace book, Locke comments that “we ought to look on it as a mark of goodness in God that he has put us in this life under a necessity of labour: not only to keep mankind from the mischiefs that ill men at leisure are very apt to do: but it is a benefit even to the good and the virtuous, which are thereby preserved from the ills of idleness or the diseases that attend constant study in a sedentary life.”45 Although labor certainly provides necessary material goods, the benefits that Locke focuses on are moral and physiological ones for individuals—laboring, even for a few hours a day, develops rationality and industry, lessens the allure of vice, and strengthens the body. But Locke’s use of “mankind” here gestures toward a broader argument that individuals who labor (and claim property through labor) also contribute to society. He concludes this note by reflecting, “if the labour of the world were rightly directed and distributed there would be more knowledge, peace, health, and plenty in it than now there is. And mankind be much more happy than it is now.”46 This suggests that managing labor might be a worthwhile political or social project to direct the production of goods desirable for an entire society, including moral ones.47 In the Second Treatise, Locke focuses on the material side of the societal benefits provided by an industrious laborer. He writes that “he who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen, but increase the common stock of mankind: for the provisions serving to the support of human life, produced by one acre of inclosed and cultivated land are (to speak much within compass) ten times more than those which are yielded by an acre of land of an equal richness lying waste in common.”48 This is a recasting of his earlier comment that a person who encloses land and labors on it, if he leaves enough for others, “does as good as take nothing at all.”49 The argument is that the person who develops land ultimately gives to the commons more than he takes from it through his reason and industry. The injunction to labor, if followed, corresponds most rigorously to the law of nature that requires that a human preserve himself and his



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fellow humans. This is important enough that Locke ultimately comments that the number of people in a commonwealth is more important than vast expanses of land, and “that the increase of lands and the right employing of them is the great art of government.”50 Because labor increases the value of land and other raw materials, as well as the character of the individual laborer, it is so critical to the social fabric that it should be an object of political management in a post–stateof-nature world. Locke’s theory of property—and his comments on labor in particular— offer more than a story of individual acquisition vis-à-vis the efforts of other laboring subjects. They are also an account of sociality structured and supported by relations of ownership and production and value-creation. Although an important part of Locke’s story involves how individuals may be said to extract personal property from a world in common via labor, equally significant is his claim that labor demands the kind of reason that acknowledges the presence and requirements of others and the sort of virtue that orients the laborer toward producing value for himself and humankind. Cicero, Locke, and the Morality of Political Economy It is difficult to draw a straight line from Cicero’s thought to Locke’s, particularly when it comes to their political thinking. One way forward is to think about the relationship between their views on property. Neal Wood, perhaps the strongest advocate for this line of argumentation, remarks that “in light of the centrality of private property in early modern political thought and Cicero’s impact on the major early modern thinkers, one of his historically most significant conceptions would appear to be that of property, the emphasis given to it, and the function of the state in its preservation.”51 Wood’s exploration of Cicero’s account of property, while nuanced, accents the role of the individual as a claimant of private possessions, a person who then becomes an individual citizen whose property is guaranteed by the state. This approach positions Cicero as an ancient prototype for Locke, particularly if we read Locke as a pre-capitalist “possessive individualist.”52 Although we cannot and should not draw sharp equivalences between Cicero’s context and Locke’s, we can find points of similarity between their views, as Wood does. In this chapter, I argue that the clearest point of similarity between them is not a shared emphasis on the individual’s right to property and subsequent relationship to the state but the more social dimensions of their accounts of property. Cicero and Locke are interested in how property (common and private) mediate human relationships and generate forms of sociality.

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Readers of Locke should notice that some of the Ciceronian view appears in his account of property, labor, and the natural world. Locke spells out that man’s relationship to the natural world is one of productivity and value-creation through labor, an idea Cicero also considers. This notion of “value” is broadly construed. It is not only the case that human ingenuity and labor increase the value of the raw materials present in the natural world but also that they improve the lives of individuals and communities. This is the most important ethical insight into political economy the two men share, and it shows them to be attuned to the rich possibilities of social life. Relatedly, Locke theorizes labor as valuable enough to society to be a proper object of governance, an idea that is important to later eighteenth-century political economists. We catch a faint glimpse of this idea in Cicero first. It is possible to argue convincingly that Cicero and Locke are mainly interested in what boundaries—natural or legal—can be drawn and enforced regarding private property, particularly land.53 But training our eyes on this point of agreement between them obscures what else they have in common: theorizing a proper human relation to the natural world and reflecting on what that relationship produces materially and morally. Both thinkers are interested in how humans acquire property and what they make of it, figured as high-stakes problems for the moral life of individuals and communities. For Locke, what humans make of property is a crucial part of the story of how they rightfully acquire it. As Duncan Kelly points out, “Locke . . . moves beyond Cicero towards his analysis of property rights grounded in cultivation and mixing of labour with an object. This claim has no basis in Cicero’s discussion of the origin of private property in first, and then lengthy, occupation.”54 For Cicero, aside from his brief and unexplored reflection in On the Commonwealth that the “common law of nature . . . forbids anything to belong to anyone except someone who knows how to employ and use it,” there is no connection between right and labor.55 There is, however, a firm elaboration of the idea that labor makes human social life possible in Book II of On Duties, a valorization of human rationality and industry that anticipates what Locke will argue later. In On Duties II.12–15, as part of a general argument that human beings are the greatest sources of help and harm to one another, Cicero considers how human efforts have created a better material and social life out of the common world. Before a rhetorical question—“Why do I need to enumerate the multitude of arts without which there could be no life at all?”—he gives a detailed mapping of how human ingenuity and work have generated “fruits and benefits” from inanimate objects like land, earth, and sea as well as from the animal kingdom.56 By labor, he argues, humans have devised, adapted, and participated



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in increasingly complex systems of agriculture, husbandry, navigation, and trade. Secondarily, labor gives rise to the arts and sciences and to systems of justice and politics. Nothing less than civilization—all that humans hold valuable— depends on the human capacity to render productive the natural world, an idea that is of central importance to Locke, too. As Locke argues explicitly in the Second Treatise, labor “puts the difference of value on everything,” which benefits not only the laborer who can claim the yields of his labor but also his fellows. As he writes, “I think it will be but a very modest computation to say that of the products of the earth useful to the life of man, nine-tenths are the effects of labour, and cast up the several expenses about them, what in them is purely owing to nature, and what to labour, we shall find that in most of them 99/100 are wholly to be put on the account of labour.”57 Labor produces real material value from the raw materials of the natural world; it improves what is left to humans by God and nature. By labor, Locke frequently means a complex system of cooperation akin to the one Cicero links to the survival and development of civilization. In a striking reflection on the provenance of a simple loaf of bread, Locke observes, For ’tis not barely the ploughman’s pains, the reaper’s and thresher’s toil, and the baker’s sweat is to be counted into the bread we eat; the labour of those who broke the oxen, who digged and wrought the iron and stones, who felled and framed the timber employed about the plough, mill, oven, or any other utensils, which are a vast number, requisite to this corn, from its being seed to be sown to its being made bread, must all be charged on the account of labour, and received as an effect of that; nature and the earth furnished only the almost worthless materials, as in themselves.58 Whereas Locke does not carry this analysis further to think about how the story of a whole civilization—one with professions, infrastructure, and governance— might be contained in a single bite of bread, as Cicero might suggest, they tell congruent accounts of political economy. The labor of humans, and their specialization and cooperation, renders value from the common world and provides what Locke calls the “conveniences of life.” For Cicero, this kind of labor and attention takes two paths—one of care and attention to common property, and one of the proper use of personal possessions. These are matters of justice and are thus integral to supporting a shared life among people. For Locke, labor and attention generate personal ownership in the first instance, but they also serve as the basis for a shared political economy of production and exchange that should benefit all by generating greater conveniences and perhaps more peace,

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knowledge, and happiness for those who live in the confines of this productive society.59 For its apparent value as a foundation of shared life, labor is a prominent object of governance in Locke’s thought, particularly his later thought. It is possible to find the seed of this idea in Cicero’s ethics. In On Duties III.63, in a discussion of profit and fraud, Cicero makes a brief but suggestive claim that foreshadows much of what we find in early modern political economy, one about the true wealth of political communities: “I see that Hecaton of Rhodes, Panaetius’ pupil, said in the books about duty that he wrote for Quintus Tubero, that a wise man would, without acting contrary to customs, laws, and established practices, take account of his personal wealth. For we do not wish to be rich for our own sake alone, but for our children, our friends, and most of all for the political community. The capacities and resources of individuals are the riches of the city.”60 Obviously, Cicero is arguing that it matters how people acquire wealth and what they do with it, and that the wealth of individuals should contribute to common life rather than diminish it. Yet he also intimates that individual capacities are integral to the prosperity of a city, which mirrors his earlier discussion of how human potential for invention, creation, and work has generated goods and benefits for all who live together in a polity. It takes us back to his initial insistence in On Duties that humans must apply intelligence and effort to the resources they hold in common, not just the ones they hold privately. Locke picks up this insight about the capacities of humans to reason and innovate—key dimensions of his concept of labor—and uses it to formulate a political desideratum. That is, an essential component of the art of government should be to understand the value of labor and direct it properly. We see him working through this idea in the 1660s, when he observes glumly in his commonplace book that humankind has less in the way of material goods than it might and much more in the way of “ignorance and brutality.” The blame lies squarely with “the carelessness and negligence of the governments of the world, which, wholly intent upon the care of aggrandizing themselves, at the same time neglect the happiness of the people and with it their own peace and security.” The solution, he argues, is for governments to “suppress the arts and instruments of luxury and vanity” and throw their weight behind what he calls “honest and useful industry” as a worthwhile endeavor for their peoples.61 As already noted, this idea appears again in the Second Treatise, where we find Locke intimating that productive people are more important than simple land holdings and that finding ways to employ people to wrest value from land is “the great art of government.” A great prince, he thinks, will have the foresight to “secure protection and encouragement to the honest industry of mankind against the oppression



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of power and the narrowness of party,” for the good of the commonwealth.62 Aside from establishing the natural primacy of property rights, Locke’s argument in chapter 5 of the Second Treatise is for the value of people and the work of their hands and minds. If these capacities could be directed to the benefit of all, so much the better, according to Locke.63 Here I find a further connection between Cicero and Locke beyond what Wood articulates, one that asks us to reconsider how strongly either thinker stands as a possessive individualist. To be sure, Cicero and Locke zero in on the questions of how individuals may claim private property and to what degree personal possessions may be held by right. Both are interested in the skills and capacities of individuals in relation to the material world first given to humans in common. In Cicero’s account, laboring and acquisitive individuals are always embedded in a rich social context, and they carry obligations to serve their fellow humans by conducting just economic relations and supporting the social fabric. In political economy terms, this means that humans are compelled to dedicate their minds and hands to the preservation and cultivation of common property as well as to understanding their personal property as an instrumental good that may be used to serve others. For Locke, too, labor is a moral imperative, not just for its individual benefits. The Lockean individual is a laborer positioned between God and society who must use his rationality and industry to honor his maker and contribute to the whole. A reading of Locke and Cicero on property and labor may thus slightly temper the urge to interpret either of them as strict individualists and instead create an opportunity to regard them as theorists interested in how individuals move in a common material and social world, using their minds and hands to generate value. Notes 1. John Locke,“Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” in Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), §185. 2. This nod to the importance of On Duties may simply indicate that Locke was an educated man of his time. It was commonly taught in schools and universities in the seventeenth century, including at Westminster, where Locke was educated as a young boy. John Marshall comments that Cicero, and On Duties in particular, had special significance for Locke: “By the time of Locke’s death Cicero had become the author of whose works Locke possessed most copies after Boyle and himself, including at least seven different editions of On Duties . . . Perhaps most remarkable of all indications of the importance of Cicero to Locke in the last twenty years of his life, however, is the existence among Locke’s manuscripts on Cicero of several pages in which he worked out an exact chronology of Cicero’s life and major works. This is one of only two such

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chronologies that Locke composed. The other was of Jesus Christ.” John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 301. 3. Tim Stuart-Buttle presents Locke’s admiration for Cicero as an oddity, noting his “strident, lifelong opposition to non-theological ethical theories,” which he “articulated, in part, thought his pronounced scepticism regarding the general value of ancient moral philosophy.” Stuart-Buttle argues that Locke read Cicero as a kind of moral skeptic, which allowed him to elevate him above other ancients. Tim Stuart-Buttle, “Locke’s Cicero: Between Knowledge and Faith,” in Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Subha Mukherji and Tim Stuart-Buttle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 254, 266. 4. The best-known comparison of Cicero and Locke on property and politics is found in Neal Wood’s work. Wood reads Cicero as an “enlightened individualist” who presages Locke, a reading I question later in this chapter. Neal Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 115. 5. J. Jackson Barlow, “Cicero on Property and the State,” in Cicero’s Practical Philosophy, ed. Walter Nicgorski (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2012), 212. Wood reads Cicero as less ambiguous on this question and comments that “Cicero’s passion for the acquisition of property seems to have been a basic factor in his politics” (Neal Wood, “The Economic Dimension of Cicero’s Political Thought: Property and State,” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne De Science Politique 16, no. 4 [1983]: 741). Wood argues elsewhere that although other ancient thinkers attended to the question of property, Cicero was really the first for whom property was essential (Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 105). Wood may overstate the case here, as Barlow intimates, but he rightly establishes property questions in Cicero’s thought as worthy of study. 6. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), I.21. All citations from Cicero’s On Duties are from this edition and are quoted by book and paragraph number. 7. Cicero, On Duties, I.21. 8. This is likely why Barlow comments, “Cicero’s purpose in Book I is not to explain how common property becomes private, but to emphasize that justice is the common thread in all human relationships” (Barlow, “Cicero on Property and the State,” 224), including ones structured by common and private property relations. Barlow correctly stresses, in dialogue with Wood, that Cicero’s work on property is part and parcel of his moral theory rather than simply foundational to his theory of state power. 9. Cicero, On Duties, I.21, emphasis added. 10. Cicero largely stays with these kinds of acquisition stories in On Duties, and he insists that although private property is conventional and not natural in its origins, it has important legal and social status and must be protected. In De Re Publica’s dialogue, we find Scipio floating a radically different idea—that natural ownership is due to the person who knows what to do with a resource. There he comments that “the common law of nature . . . forbids anything to belong to anyone except someone who knows how to employ and use it” (Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, ed. James E. G. Zetzel [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], I.27). Although we do



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not see this idea anywhere else in Cicero’s oeuvre, it shares something important with Locke’s account of natural rights to property. As Locke notes (John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, in Political Writings, ed. David Wootton [Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003], §34), property belongs to “the rational and the industrious” who are capable of not only using it but also improving it, using both reason and experiential knowledge. See also note 42. 11. Cicero, On Duties, I.21. 12. Cicero, On Duties, I.51. 13. Cicero, On Duties, I.21. This is probably why Wood comments that although Cicero “never contended that men have a natural right to property, one’s entitlement to his own possessions appears to be more than a civil right” (Wood, “The Economic Dimension,” 743, emphasis added). See also Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 112. 14. See Xavier Márquez,“Between Urbs and Orbis: Cicero’s Conception of the Political Community,” in Cicero’s Practical Philosophy, ed. Walter Nicgorski (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2012), 195. 15. Wood insists on this point, while still acknowledging the connection to nature. He argues that the “state, if it is an authentic state, conforming to the precepts of natural justice, legally formalizes and protects, so it seems, what we have legitimately acquired for our own use from the common bounty of nature. The primacy of private property is underwritten by the law of nature and institutionalized by civil law” (Wood, “The Economic Dimension,” 743). 16. Cicero, On Duties, II.73, emphasis added. 17. Cicero, On Duties, II.78. 18. Cicero, On Duties, II.73. Cicero emphasizes that this means that personal property is safe not only from the whims of other people within the political community but also from public confiscation by the state. In fact, he emphasizes the latter more strongly. Wood stresses that this reflects Roman law in Cicero’s time, under which owners had an absolute legal right to do with their property whatever they wished, without interference. Wood, “The Economic Dimensions,” 748. 19. Wood, “The Economic Dimension,” 750. 20. Cicero, On Duties, I.68. 21. See, for example, Cicero’s comment that “things are in a bad way when what ought to be achieved through virtue is attempted by means of money” (Cicero, On Duties, I.22). 22. Cicero, On Duties, I.92. 23. Cicero, On Duties, II.55. 24. Cicero also stresses that it is vicious to be lavish with the resources of others; one can only be generous with one’s own wealth. See, for one example, On Duties, II.85. 25. Cicero, On Duties, I.92. 26. Cicero, On Duties, II.87. 27. The emphasis on rationality, prudence, and work leads Wood to read Cicero as a proto-Lockean, commenting that he “evidently thinks that the individual with large possessions, by the very fact of the size and value of his holdings, demonstrates industry, skill, and even rationality superior to the smallholder and the impoverished, and hence has a natural claim to a greater share” (Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 112).

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28. Cicero, On Duties, I.92. 29. Barlow, “Cicero on Property and the State,” 225. 30. Locke, Second Treatise, §25. 31. Like Cicero, Locke seems to have land in mind, at least in this part of the Treatise. As he comments, “the chief matter of property” is “the earth itself ” (Locke, Second Treatise, §32). On the centrality of land claims, see Neal Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); and Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 165. 32. Locke, Second Treatise, §26, emphasis added. Wood correctly argues that Locke borrows extensively from the discourses of early modern agricultural “improvers.” One consequence of this is that when Locke refers to the “commons,” he uses different referents: the world given to men in common by God at the beginning of time, the Americas (see also note 48), and the “commons in England,” public land that belonged to parishes. In the case of the latter, consent was required. This chapter focuses largely on the two former cases. Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism, 57. 33. This connection between property and personhood is shared between Locke and the Stoics more generally. Barlow notes that although Cicero might have agreed with Locke’s view that individuals had self-ownership, it is not evident that he used this as the basis for property claims or economic relations. Barlow, “Cicero on Property and the State,” 224. Duncan Kelly notes this resonance as well and remarks that Epictetus might have been the stronger influence on Locke’s thinking about self-ownership. Duncan Kelly, The Propriety of Liberty: Persons, Passions, and Judgment in Modern Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 49. 34. Locke, Second Treatise, §28, emphasis added. 35. Locke, Second Treatise, §32. 36. Locke famously comments that “the turfs my servant has cut . . . become my property” without requiring the consent of every other person (Second Treatise, §28). If mixing one’s labor with the commons generates a property claim, it seems that the turfs would belong to the servant. But due to a prior agreement with his master, the servant does not claim the turfs as his. Andrew Sartori comments that labor does not therefore have to generate a property claim; it only needs to have the potential to generate a claim for Locke’s theory to hold. Andrew Sartori, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 19. 37. It should be acknowledged that this is only part of chapter 5 of the Second Treatise’s story about property relations; Locke also theorizes the invention of currency and consent by all to adopt it as a medium of exchange, and he considers how the introduction of money circumvents the limits natural law sets on property acquisition. See Locke, Second Treatise, §37, 46–47. 38. Locke, Second Treatise, §27, emphasis added. This is frequently called the “sufficiency limitation.” 39. In Second Treatise, §6, Locke asserts that humans have two natural obligations— to preserve themselves and then, as far as possible, to preserve the rest of their species.



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Leaving “enough and as good” while taking what one needs (and perhaps wants) is surely a case of following both duties. 40. Locke, Second Treatise, §31. 41. See also Locke, “Some Thoughts,” §110, where he stresses that “the desire of having more in our possession and under our dominion than we have need of ” and “covetousness” are “the root of all evil” and therefore must be trained out of children by teaching them to practice liberality, à la Cicero. 42. As the population grows, this becomes more challenging. The sufficiency limitation is not terribly taxing at the starting point of Locke’s “state of nature” thought experiment and perhaps not even in places in the empirical world when there are fewer people and abundant land. But as people multiply and more land is developed, it becomes less obvious what constitutes “enough and as good” for others and less clear that people will not struggle over limited resources (Sartori, Liberalism in Empire, 18). Wood notes that these inevitable changes simply shift the meaning of “enough and as good” from land to movables: “with the growth of population and the concentration of human settlement, the sufficiency limitation could be overcome because labor, industry, and improvement could so increase the productivity of land as to multiply substantially the fruits of the earth, thereby providing a plentiful supply for all” (Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism, 56–57). 43. Locke, Second Treatise, §34. 44. Locke, Second Treatise, §34. 45. Locke, “Labour,” in Political Writings, ed. David Wootton (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003), 440. Here Locke focuses on manual labor associated with agriculture, crafts, and mechanical arts. 46. Locke, “Labour,” 442. 47. Locke penned a hard-nosed version of just such a proposal some thirty years later— a policy memorandum for poor relief reform. The centerpiece is a series of detailed plans for setting the so-called idle poor to work, including children. Locke’s justification for this program is that it will produce better moral character in the poor, greater social order, and perhaps some material wealth, although arguably he is more interested in morality and order as the proper object of these policies. See John Locke, “Draft of a Representation Containing a Scheme of Methods for the Employment of the Poor. Proposed by Mr Locke, the 26th October 1697,” in Political Writings, ed. David Wootton (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003), 446–61. 48. Locke, Second Treatise, §37, emphasis added. This passage comes in Locke’s assessment of the Americas, which he describes as rich in land, but he designates this land as “waste” because he thinks it uncultivated. Scholars have rightly insisted that Locke’s account of labor and property relations ought to be situated in the context of his involvement in England’s colonial projects and policy and that we should read his views on the Americas as “waste land” in light of his political connections. The debate around this question is ongoing. See especially Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); James Farr, “Locke, ‘Some Americans,’ and the Discourse on ‘Carolina,’” Locke Studies 9 (2009): 19–77; and James Tully, “Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights” in An Approach to Political

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Philosophy: Locke in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 137–76. See also Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 164–70; and David Armitage, “Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,” in Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 90–113. 49. Locke, Second Treatise, §33. 50. Locke, Second Treatise, §42, emphasis added. Wootton offers an intriguing interpolation in this passage, suggesting that “lands” might well be “hands” in the original text. Mark Goldie, in his edition of the Second Treatise, comments that “lands” is likely correct, but that this particular passage has vexed interpreters, precisely because “Locke’s general view is that governments should aim to increase population and labour productivity rather than merely extend territory” (John Locke, Second Treatise of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Mark Goldie [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016], 173). Hence, we should read this passage as a call to increase the productivity of the land through human labor. 51. Wood,“The Economic Dimension,” 740. Wood finds other similarities, too: “the view that the security of possessions is a basic goal of the state, the beginning of a distinction between state and society, a clear separation between state and government, the idea that government officials hold their positions in trust and are obligated to serve the governed, and the doctrines of the mixed constitution and tyrannicide” (Neal Wood, The Politics of Locke’s Philosophy: A Social Study of “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983], 29). 52. Particularly in his book on Cicero, Wood draws heavily on C. B. Macpherson’s account of Locke and Thomas Hobbes as “possessive individualists” to read Cicero as a very early theorist of an “enlightened economic individualism” (Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 111, 116). See also C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). 53. This is Wood’s strategy—to show that “landed property was the foundation of wealth, power, and prestige” for Locke and Cicero and that “the civil law of both clearly defined and secured ownership of property” (Wood, “The Economic Dimension,” 746). Wood is right, but there are other resonances between Cicero and Locke that are worth our attention, too. 54. Kelly, The Propriety of Liberty, 50. 55. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, I.27. See also note 10. 56. Cicero, On Duties, II.15, 14. 57. Locke, Second Treatise, §40. 58. Locke, Second Treatise, §43, emphasis added. 59. See Locke, “Labour,” 442. Waldron appropriately stresses that labor is not wholly a gift to humankind from God—it is not always pleasant and may register as a curse. But it remains important “because of the sort of activity it is. God has commanded us not just to do something but to do something that will make use of His endowment and make it capable of supporting even greater numbers of the beings he might create” (Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 164). 60. Cicero, On Duties, III.63, emphasis added. 61. Locke, “Labour,” 442. As we have seen, Cicero also holds luxury in some suspicion.



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62. Locke, Second Treatise, §282. 63. Again, it has to be mentioned that by the 1690s, Locke was willing to realize this vision politically through brutal means, setting the poor and mostly unpropertied to grinding, dull labor for the moral and material benefit of society and the state, and using the full force of the penal system, parish system, and the navy to set people to work. See Locke, “Draft of a Representation.”

chapter 8

Smith and Cicero on Anger, Resentment, and Retributive Justice M i c h e l l e A . S c h wa r z e

D

espite the recent interest in the classical sources of Adam Smith’s moral and political thought, including the connection between Cicero and Smith in particular, the relationship between Ciceronian and Smithean accounts of justice remains underexplored.1 Gloria Vivenza, who has written extensively on Smith’s debts to the ancients, argues that the sense of justice Smith describes in The Theory of Moral Sentiments is more broadly derived from Aristotle, given the “attention to circumstances” in shaping appropriate resentment, though she claims Smith’s focus on resentment is “ultimately Platonic in origin.”2 Whereas Vivenza, along with Charles Griswold, suggests that Cicero influenced Smith’s account of the difference between natural and acquired rights, no commentator has yet traced the influence of Cicero’s moral psychology and political theory on Smith’s theory of justice proper.3 The relative silence in the literature notwithstanding, Smith’s conception of justice directly addresses what he and Cicero both see as the real threat of disharmonious or “violent” passions on individual happiness and justice more broadly. Smith and Cicero may seem to take distinct positions on the moral value of emotions broadly and anger or resentment specifically, but I argue here that Smith internalizes many Ciceronian concerns with the disordering and overwhelming effects of resentment toward those who injure us. Most clearly in On Duties and the Tusculan Disputations, which he wrote as an attempt to popularize Stoic philosophy around 45 BCE, Cicero vehemently rejects resentment as a motive for any kind of virtue, including justice, because it tends to be experienced and expressed immoderately when felt on our own behalf, eschewing retributive justice in favor of harsh punishments without an eye to rehabilitation. Like his Roman predecessor, Smith worries about the particular psychological and 160



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social effects of resentment, which leads him to advocate only for the resentment we feel on behalf of others—that is, spectatorial resentment—as the proper grounds for justice.4 In addition, Smith develops norms of judgment for spectatorial resentment based on intersubjective standards of propriety that closely resemble Ciceronian decorum, including in their recommendations for the moderation of punishment.5 Perhaps most strikingly, in developing his account of spectatorial resentment, Smith uses a Ciceronian device—moral spectatorship— to create an alternative to Stoic excision of passions and the “cooling” of resentment Cicero thought necessary for curbing its bad effects. In doing so, Smith is able to address Cicero’s worry about the exceptional difficulty of either kind of self-moderation for anyone but the “truly wise,” making political life more practical and stable. In this chapter, I proceed to elucidate the Ciceronian influences in Smith’s theory of justice. First, I briefly review Cicero’s virtue ethics as it is articulated in On Duties, focusing especially on his warnings about emotional “perturbations,” including his singular concern with the violent passion of resentment and his conception of the rightly ordered mind as virtuous and tranquil. Central to my discussion is the immoderation and unseemliness of first-person resentment for Cicero, which leads to excessive rather than proportionate punishment in the case of injury. I highlight that Cicero does not denounce all resentment but instead provides a suggestive account of the positive duties of justice that relies on “severity” in punishment. In the second part, I expound on Smith’s theory of justice, which is founded on our sense of righteous indignation to the injury of others. I illustrate how Smith’s theory is sensitive to many of Cicero’s particular concerns with the psychological and social effects of resentment. Like Cicero, Smith sees resentment on behalf of ourselves as immoderate and threatening to happiness (understood as psychological tranquility). I show how Smith solves this problem by repurposing Ciceronian concepts such as spectatorship and propriety (decorum) for practical ethical ends. Finally, I conclude by reconsidering the distance between each thinker on justice, and from the Stoics, by analyzing an example from Cicero’s Catilinarians that Smith cites in Part VI of The Theory of Moral Sentiments as evidence of anger governed by “noble propriety.” Cicero on Justice and Resentment Along with other ancient moral and political thinkers, Cicero is at times skeptical of the role emotions should play in motivating virtue. He argues that things must be sought for their own sake to be virtuous rather than as the result of their emotional appeal or because of their connection to one’s interest. Justice, as well

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as all other virtues he discussed in Book I of On Duties, are supposed to be pursued for their intrinsic value.6 When we act virtuously to indulge an emotion, however, we lose sight of right reasons for being virtuous or, worse, pursue it for the wrong ones. Emotions also compromise moral freedom. In arguing against Plato’s position in the Republic that philosophers need to be convinced to rule (it also happens to be just for them to do), Cicero insists that “something that is done rightly is only just if it is voluntary.”7 By “voluntarily,” he seems to suggest here and elsewhere that virtue emerges when we are “obedient” solely to reason; when we are moved by what he calls “disturbed movements of the spirit” and what the Greeks called pathe, we allow those motives that should be subordinate to dominate and overcome our rational capacity for virtuous action.8 Characteristic of the virtuous person for Cicero is a well-ordered soul directed by reason—indeed, he goes so far as to synonymize virtue with “right reason.”9 As he neatly summarizes it, a dutiful person is one for whom “reason therefore commands, and impulse obeys.”10 Nowhere is Cicero’s concern with the corrupting or enslaving elements of emotions more evident than in his treatment of anger and resentment. Drawing on Stoic ethical thought, he emphatically tells us that “with anger nothing can be done rightly, nothing judiciously.”11 Throughout On Duties, Cicero claims that what I refer to as resentment—namely, “anger” and “bitterness” felt toward those who commit injury—must be avoided at all costs because of its disruptive psychological and problematic social effects.12 Distancing himself from Peripatetics and “those who think we should be deeply angry with our opponents,” Cicero argues that a “great-spirited and courageous man” is one who cultivates an “affable temper and what is called loftiness of spirit.”13 Indulging anger, he claims, only makes us “unhelpfully and hatefully sour” toward our enemies because we subordinate reason to passionate whims; we are made happier by resisting anger, as “violent” passions are “enemies in a high degree to the peace of the mind and a tranquil life.”14 Cicero’s arguments against anger are the most vehement in Book IV of Tusculan Disputations, “On other perturbations of the mind,” wherein he proclaims that “anger is altogether irrational.”15 Anger does not even appear to be appropriate in battle: Cicero tells us that the great Scipio Africanus was not motivated by it in his conquests, and Hector and Ajax supposedly “conversed together, calmly and quietly, before they engaged.”16 It should not be surprising that Cicero adopts and modifies the Stoic definition of anger in this book. He deems it a “lust of punishing anyone who, as we imagine, has injured us without cause,” always indicative of an “exaggerated appetite” mistaken about the cause of injury and its magnitude.17 In this description, anger and resentment appear to push us



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toward injustice rather than justice. They encourage us to inflict disproportionate injury on others that allows underlying “desiring positions” like fear, honor, command, power, and glory to be sated.18 They further ignore the duties of justice owed even to those who injure us.19 Cicero’s primary concern with the influence of emotions like resentment in virtue stems from his concern with moderation rather than emotions per se. In On Duties and the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero only denounces anger when it elicits disproportionate responses. In the Tusculan Disputations, he explains that the threat of any perturbation of the mind is that it is on “slippery ground, and being once set forward, glides on headlong and cannot by any means be stopped.”20 Anger is an undesirable motive for action because it is so directionless and overwhelming that it precludes the moderation necessary for virtue (or, indeed, for happiness). As he powerfully argues, “anger, too, when it disturbs the mind any time, leaves no room to doubt its being madness . . . To what length will anger not go? Even as far as madness. Therefore we say, properly enough, that angry men have given up their power, that is, they are out of the power, advice, reason, and understanding.”21 Anger “crowds out” other elements of virtuous action and compromises freedom insofar as the latter requires reason to realize. Resentment also calls for exaggerated responses, like revenge and appalling “new” punishments, including cannibalism of one’s progeny.22 Cicero seems to conclude that “it is particularly when punishing that one should restrain one’s anger: a man who is angry when he goes to punish will never maintain that intermediate course between too much and too little that the Peripatetics approve.”23 In other words, anger, resentment, and other perturbations are expressed so strongly that attempts to moderate them by wise men or more imperfect individuals are often futile.24 At the heart of this concern with the immoderate expression of anger and resentment is a subtler and more important caveat on Cicero’s part: a warning about wholly indulging any of our selfish thoughts or emotions. We must keep anger “far from us” when we punish because we are otherwise liable to be inconstant in our reactions to it across time or people.25 Much of resentment’s tendency toward immoderation is linked to our first-person experience of it for Cicero. Indeed, most of the examples of resentment gone too far that he provides are stories of actions driven by resentment on one’s own behalf. Aside from the example of the cannibalism of the sons of Atreus, Cicero tells us that that “even in disputes that arise with our greatest enemies, and even if we hear unworthy things said against us,” we must not punish out of resentment.26 Our explicit aim, like that of a surgeon who operates for the sake of a patient, should be to “make it clear that any sharpness there may be in the reproof has been

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adopted for the sake of the person who is being reproved,” or, as Cicero explains earlier in Book I, “that we may exercise severity for the sake of the republic.”27 Replacing ourselves with others as the indirect object of our resentment makes us more reluctant to indulge its extravagancies and more likely to ensure its end is useful and not destructive. Beyond its moderating effects, Cicero prescribes perspectival distance in the experience of anger and resentment for a much more important reason, one that Smith echoes: first-person resentment is unseemly and unlikely to garner moral approval. Cicero suggests here that the opinion of spectators can influence not only perceptions of right but also the content of right. Punishments motivated by first-person resentment are morally wrong because they cannot “be approved by those who are present.”28 When we take revenge out of resentment toward those whom we feel have injured us, spectators are unlikely to approve of others, and the approval of others is something that matters to us a great deal.29 Elsewhere, he draws connections between the perception and content of right. Famously, for Cicero virtues are governed by decorum, or roughly “seemliness,” which consists of honorable behavior appropriate to particular circumstances that harmonizes one’s actions and one’s nature.30 Decorum is “completely blended with virtue”; all those things that are virtuous are indeed seemly.31 Decorum is also intersubjective: it is “attentive to the standards and demands of . . . observers.”32 The expression of first-person resentment is prohibited precisely because others find it impossible to approve (or perhaps approve in the same degree), and thus it is unseemly. Nevertheless, when Cicero turns to describe the positive duties of justice, he does so with the language of appropriate or well-regulated resentment. Just as spectators naturally disapprove of expressions of first-person resentment in Cicero’s account, they disapprove of failures to uphold the first duty of justice (the harm prohibition), which requires individuals to prevent the injury of others when possible. Cicero claims that the “man who does not defend someone, or obstruct injustice [i.e., injury] when he can, is at fault just as if he had abandoned his parents or his friends or his county.”33 Whether “hindered by indifference, laziness, inactivity or some pursuits or business of their own,” those who fail to defend others are unjust because “they abandon those whom they ought to protect.”34 Those who uphold justice must exert effort and practice “severity” in punishment such that it is “useful” but not “insulting.”35 In other words, Cicero’s retributive justice always has an eye toward the public good rather than the victim’s ego or desire for revenge. Retributive punishments are done from “fairness,” or are those that treat individuals as equal before the law, and not as a result of immoderate anger (“for surely anger should be denied on all occasions”).36



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Nevertheless, fairness requires severity on behalf of others instead of simple meek application of the law.37 The demands of justice are such that resentment might be useful to help us in upholding them, even though we should avoid yielding to our desire for vengeance in our own case. Aside from motivational efficacy, Cicero gives us another reason to think resentment and anger are not universally unmerited: human imperfection. Here he sides with Aristotle and contra Stoicism in claiming that resentment can be useful for imperfect beings. Scholars have noted the complicated nature of Cicero’s Stoicism elsewhere, but it becomes particularly evident in his treatment of anger in Book IV of the Tusculan Disputations.38 After it is decided that the Peripatetic’s denial that ardent desires “either can or should be plucked up by the roots” is a claim worth attending to, Cicero admits that some characters, like soldiers, should be allowed to be angry and that rhetoricians should be able to inspire anger to motivate action in certain cases. Chief among these are those circumstances in which orators need “to touch the passions, where reason cannot be come at.”39 Of course, he notes that these exceptions do not apply to wise men, who must exercise self-command as traditionally prescribed by Stoicism. But once he turns to treat those who are affected by emotional disturbances despite a desire that they not be (i.e., the rest of humankind), his prescriptions for how to deal with anger and resentment shift from prohibitions to redirections: Now, you should put those out of the way whom they endeavor to attack till they have recollected themselves; but what does recollection here imply but getting together again the dispersed parts of their mind into their proper place? or else you must beg and entreat them, if they have the means of revenge, to defer it to another opportunity, till their anger cools. But the expression of cooling implies, certainly, that there was a heat raised in their minds in opposition to reason; from which consideration that saying of Archytas is commended, who being somewhat provoked at his steward, “How would I have treated you,” said he, “if I had not been in a passion?”40 Cicero’s advice to imperfect beings concerns “cooling” but not eliminating anger—ordering the mind before actions are taken out of anger—which is to say that anger should be subordinate to both reason and decorum. What is more, Cicero invites us to broaden our understanding of imperfect beings to include a majority of the populace. He clearly distinguishes himself from the Stoics by claiming that he is giving advice not only for the wise who can free themselves from passion but also for weak and otherwise imperfect humans who are frequently stricken with emotional perturbations, including himself.41

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It should be no surprise that Cicero is so humble about the potential to overcome grief here: the Tusculan Disputations were penned after the death of his daughter, Tullia, which deeply affected him. As I note later, Cicero’s difficult relationship with Stoicism, including his skepticism about the ability to exercise self-command sufficiently, is something that Smith echoes in his own admiration of Stoicism, idealized in the man of wisdom and virtue who dominates an entire chapter on virtue added in the last edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, his realistic moral psychology, and his reliance on general rules of morality for much of popular moral action. Of course, Cicero ultimately endorses an apparently Stoic solution to the threat emotions pose to happiness—even for imperfect beings—at the end of Book IV of the Tusculan Disputations. He concludes the book by declaring that “the cause of perturbations is now discovered, for all of them arise from the judgment or opinion, or volition.”42 When we are motivated by passion, we are generally mistaken about the true source of happiness or virtue. Cicero is Kantian (to be anachronistic) in his explanation of moral weakness: weakness in the form of submission to the passions is nevertheless an act of free choice. Individuals are vicious because they have made poor judgments or formed bad opinions about either moral ends or the means they should use to achieve those ends.43 The appropriate solution is philosophy. “Philosophy undertakes to eradicate this error, as the root of all our evils,” Cicero explains, and it teaches us to “suffer ourselves to be cured” of grief, anger, and other emotional disturbances that keep us from happiness and virtue.44 Despite some wavering about the role of resentment in useful actions, Cicero is consistent in his concern with its deleterious effects on happiness and virtue. However, on closer examination, we see that Cicero in fact allows for some expressions of anger and resentment, namely, those that are moderate and done for the sake of others or the public good. He insists on the importance of retributive justice that focuses on proportionate punishment and ensures that our basic positive duties of justice can be upheld. As we will see in the next section, Smith weaves these Ciceronian threads into a theory of justice such that a certain kind of resentment—spectatorial resentment—actually garners moral approval on Ciceronian grounds. Smith on Resentment and Justice Although he famously lauds it as the sole motive for justice, Smith was much less sanguine about the psychological effects of resentment than has often been suggested. Like Cicero, Smith recognizes resentment as disruptive to the psychological tranquility that makes up the greater part of happiness, and, like Cicero,



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he is peculiarly concerned with first-person resentment and its immoderate expression. Smith’s arguments against first-person resentment are based on similar reasoning as Cicero’s: for Smith, first-person resentment (indeed, all emotions) are either virtuous or vicious—praiseworthy or blameworthy, in Smith’s terms—depending on whether they meet intersubjectively formed standards of propriety akin to decorum.45 Yet Smith ultimately comes to embrace secondperson, or what I call spectatorial resentment, as the proper motive for justice because its perspectival distance naturally moderates it to a degree with which any impartial spectator could agree. Spectatorial resentment is felt sympathetically and thus is weaker than its first-person form. Essentially, then, Smith shares Cicero’s particular concerns with resentment but is able to nonetheless endorse a particular kind on Ciceronian grounds. To appreciate why what Smith terms the “unsocial passion” of resentment is a problematic motive for justice, we first need to understand how the process of moral spectatorship he develops in The Theory of Moral Sentiments otherwise tends to produce a harmonious “mutual sympathy” essential to human happiness and social order. In this section, I analyze Smith’s two-stage treatment of resentment: first as a violent passion experienced by individuals when they consider themselves to be wronged (first-person resentment), and then from the perspective of the individual who observes injustice and experiences a sympathetic response (spectatorial or second-person resentment). This two-stage analysis is a product of Smith’s phenomenological account of moral development in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he first considers the passions we feel as sufferers rather than sympathizers and moves to our role as spectators in assessing the merit of others’ conduct and ultimately to judgments we make from the third-person perspective of the impartial spectator. As we shall see, experience of first-person resentment often fails to produce psychic harmony and garner approval according to Smith—much as it failed to garner the approval of spectators according to Cicero—because of the violence of the feeling. In Smith’s moral theory, the process of moral spectatorship tends toward spontaneous order if and when it achieves a harmonious “mutual sympathy” between the emotions we experience and the sympathetic reaction of others. Sympathy for Smith is not an emotion like pity but rather, as he carefully notes at the outset of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever.”46 Sympathy is the process whereby individuals imaginatively enter into the psychological state of one another, deem their emotional state as proper or improper, and finally judge their actions as meritorious or blameworthy, ideally from the perspective of an imagined “impartial spectator.” When

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successful, this process produces the “most perfect harmony of sentiments and affections” among individuals.47 Mutual sympathy is critical to happiness for Smith, because the latter is fundamentally composed of the psychic order that results from this “concord” of our emotions in themselves and in relation to our fellows. He stresses the connection between happiness and mutual sympathy from the memorable first sentence of The Theory of Moral Sentiments: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”48 Indeed, the two greatest components of happiness—tranquility and being a “beloved” object of another person’s sympathy—are pleasant largely because they are harmonious.49 Again, note the similarity with Cicero here, who suggests that happiness is inextricably tied to tranquility of mind.50 Moreover, beyond the pursuit of happiness, Smith follows Cicero in arguing that we find order or harmony to be naturally pleasing. In a discussion of the effects of utility, he argues that the harmony or “fitness” of various systems, including political systems or even machines, naturally evokes our approval and “renders the very thought and contemplation of [them] agreeable.”51 Just as we pursue the harmony essential to happiness, Smith tells us we also naturally seek to reduce the discord of “fear and anxiety, the great tormentors of the human breast.”52 In his early essay “Principles which lead and direct Philosophic Inquiries; as Illustrated by the History of Astronomy,” he focuses on how we reduce anxieties prompted by the occurrence of seemingly disordered events. For Smith, “wonder” is the psychological principle that spurs us to attempt to explain phenomena in systematic ways so we might assuage the discomfort we experience from disorder.53 The “Principles” is the occasion for Smith’s first use of the metaphor of the invisible hand, which occurs when he refers to the “invisible hand of Jupiter,” to which polytheists appealed to account for “the irregular events of nature” that they “ascribed to his favour, or his anger.”54 I note here in passing that Smith’s argument in this essay about the effects of discordant resentment in the face of injustice are critical for understanding his theory of justice and telling for his account of religiosity.55 Resentment is paradigmatic of the inherently painful and disharmonious emotions we experience despite our desire for psychic harmony. Smith introduces resentment by remarking how difficult the passion is to command, describing it as “harsh, jarring, and convulsive” and “altogether destructive of that composure and tranquility of mind which is so necessary to happiness,” before turning to a discussion of resentment as one of the “unsocial passions.”56 Why is resentment classed as an unsocial passion? Because the passions we ourselves



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experience are more intense than a spectator can experience when sympathizing with us, Smith argues that we must learn to temper the expression of our passions to a degree to which others can successfully enter it to achieve the pleasant “concord” of mutual sympathy.57 Such moderation is particularly difficult in the case of resentment. To gain the sympathy of others, hatred and resentment “must always be brought down to a pitch much lower than that to which undisciplined nature would raise them.”58 Our nature must be disciplined, and we admire those who are able to command the violent passions, in part because of their very rarity. We “admire that noble and generous resentment which governs its pursuit of the greatest injuries, not by the rage which they are apt to excite in the breast of the sufferer, but by the indignation which they naturally call forth in that of the impartial spectator.”59 Note the parallels to Cicero on Smith’s description of the spectator’s view of immoderate resentment, and the similarity between the “noble and generous resentment” he describes and Cicero’s account of severity in punishment. Interestingly, this is Smith’s first use in The Theory of Moral Sentiments of the phrase “impartial spectator,” suggesting how self-command in particular requires ascending from being simple spectators to becoming impartial ones—first of others and later of ourselves— and the necessary connection between impartiality and justice. If our reactions to injustice and the administration of justice both require impartiality, the fact that justice is grounded in a passion liable to be highly partial and difficult to control is potentially problematic for individual happiness and social concord. If resentment is a passion that destroys the tranquility constituting happiness, Smith nonetheless argues that any attempt to extirpate it rather than restrain it are misguided. Here his argument overlaps with and diverges from the Ciceronian account. According to Smith, the Stoics’ “opinion” concerning the government of the world “by the all-ruling providence of a wise, powerful, and good God” led them to suggest that we should regard every event, even an instance of injustice, as being necessary and “as tending to promote the general order and happiness of the whole.”60 Whatever his debt to the Stoics otherwise, Smith speaks of the utility of resentment as a motivating passion rather than any equanimity inspired by the belief in the general order of providence.61 He distances himself from the Stoics by insisting that “no speculation of this kind, however, how deeply soever it might be rooted in the mind, could diminish our natural abhorrence for vice,” arguing instead that we need the perturbing passion of resentment to motivate our concern for injustice.62 Smith’s more extended discussion of the Stoics in the first five editions of The Theory of Moral Sentiments is even more pointed.63 After first offering an admiring account, praising the Stoic sage who “never complains of the destiny of providence, nor thinks the universe in

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confusion when he is out of order,” he nonetheless concludes that the “philosophy of the stoics” is “a philosophy which affords the noblest lessons of magnanimity, is the best school of heroes and patriots, and to the greater part of whose precepts there can be no other objection, except that honourable one, that they teach us to aim at a perfection altogether beyond the reach of human nature.”64 Like Cicero, Smith focuses (here and elsewhere) on the Stoic emphasis on harmony as critical for happiness and casts doubt on the universal applicability of Stoic dictates for moral behavior.65 But unlike Cicero, Smith insists that resentment is both natural and necessary for society, despite its disagreeable nature, aligning him more with the Peripatetics.66 To explain how such a disagreeable passion might still be a legitimate motive for justice, Smith develops his account of resentment by delineating a particular type of resentment: second-person, or spectatorial, resentment. Generally, he explains that although gratitude is the sentiment that “most immediately and directly” prompts us to reward someone for her intentions, resentment is the passion that prompts us to punish.67 But he quickly shifts his focus to spectators of injustice, who are deeply drawn to the plight of victims because of a double sympathy with them: as spectators we first sympathize with the “sorrow” or “distress” of the person harmed, which in turn “seems to serve only to animate our fellow-feeling with his resentment against the offender.”68 Invigorated by sympathetic resentment, we call for retaliation against the offender and seek to aid the victim, but we do so in a proportionate way—which, of course, Cicero delineates as our positive duty of justice.69 Our double sympathy with victims can even be pleasurable at times, as the proportionate retaliation against criminals can lead spectator and victim to be “rejoiced” and “delighted” when they share in mutual sympathy. Despite this use as a motivation for retributive justice, Smith is keen to highlight the painful “horror,” “indignation,” and urge to inflict “evil” that simultaneously attends resentment.70 Our sympathetic tie to the victim is so strong that, if he perishes, we sympathize not only with the “real resentment” of his friends and relations but also with the “imaginary resentment which in fancy we lend to the dead, who is no longer capable of feeling that or any other human sentiment.”71 What Smith calls “imaginary resentment”—a nod to the necessary role of the imagination in moral spectatorship—in fact explains the source of claims about superstitious tales of ghosts haunting murderers and other extraordinary punishments we imagine the unjust suffer and highlights the thoroughly engrossing nature of spectatorial resentment.72 The resentment we experience in witnessing injustice, or even in reading about the crimes of a Borgia or a Nero, embroils us in a discordant emotional state:



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Our sense of the horror and dreadful atrocity of such conduct, the delight which we take in hearing that it was properly punished, the indignation which we feel when it escapes this due retaliation, our whole sense and feeling, in short, of its ill desert, of the propriety and fitness of inflicting evil upon the person who is guilty of it, and of making him grieve in his turn, arises from the sympathetic indignation which naturally boils up in the breast of the spectator, whenever he thoroughly brings home to himself the case of the sufferer.73 Smith’s language is unusually highly pitched here, producing in the reader the experience of indignation boiling in the breast of the spectator of injustice. Again, Smith shares Cicero’s concerns with the thoroughly overwhelming nature of resentment and the problems it poses for individual happiness understood as tranquility. Smith’s inevitable embrace of spectatorial resentment results more from his confidence about its inspiration of proportionate punishment and his concerns about moral weakness. His remark about the indignation we feel when the criminal escapes “due retaliation” recalls an earlier passage where he speaks even more strongly about retaliation, in this case regarding the murder of the innocent: “And with regard, at least, to this most dreadful of all crimes, Nature, antecedent to all reflection upon the utility of punishment, has in this manner stamped upon the human heart, in the strongest and most indelible characters, an immediate and instinctive approbation of the sacred and necessary law of retaliation.”74 Smith’s elevation of retaliation as “sacred and necessary” is not accidental. We see here why spectatorial resentment is a legitimate source of motivation for punishment for Smith. Not only is this kind of resentment approved by others because it is naturally moderated through perspectival distance; it is vital to motivating the duties of justice that might otherwise be difficult to exact from imperfect beings, whose self-interested concerns or weak self-command might otherwise intervene. Conclusion To conclude, I turn to an example that illustrates the close connection between the Smithean and Ciceronian positions on resentment: Cicero’s first Catilinarian. The Catilinarians were a series of speeches generally lauded for their rhetorical style that Cicero delivered either to the Senate or to the general public, exposing Catiline’s plot to murder Cicero and seize control of the government after a failed election.75 Cicero makes the case initially for Catiline’s treason and eventually for his seizure and execution by the Roman republican army. Cicero

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passionately begins the first by imploring the Senate: “Does not the alarm of the people, and the union of all good men—does not the precaution taken of assembling the senate in this most defensible place—do not the looks and countenances of this venerable body here present, have any effect upon you?”76 From the outset, he expresses his anger against Catiline, not on behalf of himself but on behalf of “all good men”—and presumably his fellow senators—who serve as proper spectators to his speech and have served as spectators to the conspiracy. In attempting to rouse the support of these spectators to his speech, Cicero laments the absence of the severity he explains is vital to the protection of the republic by maintaining just punishment in On Duties. “There was once such virtue in this republic,” he editorializes, “that brave men would repress mischievous citizens with severer chastisement than the most bitter enemy.”77 True citizens take actions against injustice, including repression and silencing of speech. Despite their obvious connection to the just and impassioned punishment of criminals, these passages are relevant for our purposes because Smith himself cites them as ideal examples of the (albeit rhetorical) expression of resentment. Smith famously added an additional part to The Theory of Moral Sentiments in the final and sixth edition in which he expands on his notion of self-command and its connection to virtue. He reiterates some of the concerns with anger outlined above before turning to what he considers its “proper expression.”78 As he puts it, “The command of anger, however, does not always appear in such splendid colours. Fear is contrary to anger, and is often the motive which restrains it; and in such cases the meanness of the motive takes away all the nobleness of the restraint . . . There is always something dignified in the command of fear . . . It is not so with the command of anger. Unless it is founded altogether in the sense of decency, of dignity, and propriety, it never is perfectly agreeable.”79 Far from decrying anger, Smith claims that it is difficult to sympathize with those who can master their anger for reasons other than a sense of propriety. We do not admire those Stoics who pursue ataraxia for the sake of individual tranquility and happiness and who are deaf to the cries of fellow human beings who suffer. It is unjust not to be angry when the circumstances call for it. By contrast, Smith insists that the proper expression of “just indignation” is exemplified by “the Catilinarians of Cicero.”80 Cicero’s speeches “derive their whole beauty from the noble propriety with which this passion is expressed. But this just indignation is nothing but anger restrained and properly tempered to what the impartial spectator can enter into. The blustering and noisy passion which goes beyond this, is always odious and offensive, and interests us, not for the angry man, but for the man with whom he is angry.”81 “Just” indignation is



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always based on propriety, and thus is always context-dependent. It is not immoderate or disproportionate to the initial stimuli, as such exaggerated expressions of resentment will always be morally “odious” to any spectator (as Cicero argued). Moreover, such expressions are counterproductive because they tend to inspire sympathy for the alleged injurer instead. To have recourse to the sympathy of others when we feel angry, we must express it appropriately or decorously. As Cicero suggested, anger or resentment acted on for the sake of others is much more likely to be approved of by bystanders. First-person anger or resentment will always be suspect to spectators, for, as Smith explains throughout The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the tragedy of sympathy is that we are imaginatively limited in our ability to put ourselves in others’ shoes, and this limitation is most frequently overcome when we observe and share in joy, not grief. Smith recognizes and laments this psychological shortcoming, which he argues elsewhere drives our easy but perverse worship of wealth and greatness.82 This perversion makes the need for appropriate expressions of resentment, including those felt on behalf of victims, even more vital. The moral beauty of righteous indignation lies in both its recognition of the dignity of others and the command exerted to control one’s own anger when one has been wronged. Smith’s theory of justified resentment is therefore at once Ciceronian in its normative justification and demonstrated well rhetorically by Cicero. For Smith, as for Cicero, propriety governs all social and moral interactions, including the expression of emotional perturbations like anger. Despite their apparent Stoicism, Smith and Cicero both allow for actions done out of resentment to be vindicated, as they might actually be required for retributive justice. But Smith diverges from Cicero in his overall assessment of the importance of resentment for individual happiness, because of his sober realization that much of the moral world is spontaneously disordered.83 Any appeal to overcome anger in the service of individual happiness would be inappropriate, as Cicero demonstrates in his Catilinarian speeches. We should instead seek to ennoble anger and resentment by distancing them from our immediate experiences and filtering them through our sense of humanity. Notes 1. For research on the classical influence in Smith’s works, see Stephen Darwall, “Sympathetic Liberalism: Recent Work on Adam Smith,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 28, no. 2 (1999): 139–64; Charles Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of the Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Ryan Patrick Hanley, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Daniel J. Kapust and Michelle Schwarze, “The Rhetoric of Sincerity: Cicero and Smith on Propriety and

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Political Context,” American Political Science Review 111, no. 1 (2016): 100–111; Leonidas Montes, Adam Smith in Context: A Critical Reassessment of Some Central Components of His Thought (New York: Palgrave, 2004); Gloria Vivenza, Adam Smith and the Classics: The Classical Heritage in Adam Smith’s Thought (New York: Oxford, 2001); and Gloria Vivenza, “Justice as a Virtue—Justice as a Principle in Adam Smith’s Thought,” Revista Empresa y Humanismo 13, no. 1 (2010): 297–332. 2. Vivenza, Smith and the Classics, 81. See also Lisa Hill,“The Role of Thumos in Adam Smith’s System,” in New Perspectives on Adam Smith, ed. Geoff Cockfield, Ann Firth, and John Lauren (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2007). 3. Vivenza, “Justice as a Virtue,” 303; Griswold, Smith and the Virtues. 4. For the importance of spectatorial resentment to the liberal tradition, see Michelle Schwarze, Recognizing Resentment: Sympathy, Injustice, and Liberal Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 5. For the relationship between decorum and propriety, see Kapust and Schwarze, “The Rhetoric of Sincerity.” 6. See also Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. C. D. Yonge (London: George Bell and Sons, 1875), 4.15. 7. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1.28. 8. Cicero, On Duties, 2.18, 1.101. See also Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 3.4; and Daniel J. Kapust, “Cicero on Decorum and the Morality of Rhetoric,” European Journal of Political Theory 10, no. 1 (2011): 104. 9. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 5.15. 10. Cicero, On Duties, 1.101. 11. Cicero, On Duties, 1.38. 12. See also Gary A. Remer, “Political Oratory and Conversation: Cicero versus Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory 27, no. 1 (1999): 48. 13. Cicero, On Duties, 1.88. 14. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.15. See also Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 2.1. 15. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.22. 16. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.22. 17. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.9, 4.15. Although Cicero uses this definition to describe anger generally, it specifically refers to the resentment of injury, for which there is no Latin term. Given that Cicero is describing the same phenomenon that Smith does later, I use the term “resentment” alongside anger to desribe the phenomenon Cicero has in mind here. 18. Cicero, On Duties, 1.24–26. 19. Cicero, On Duties, 1.33. 20. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.18. 21. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.36. 22. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.36. 23. Cicero, On Duties, 1.89. 24. In both On Duties and the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero describes duties for a select group of wise men, who are able to approach the Stoic ideal he often discusses, and



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for all other well-intentioned if imperfect people. Kapust (“Cicero on Decorum,” 101) notes that On Duties is concerned with not only the virtues for the wise but also the “middle” duties for ordinary individuals, which Cicero argues in Book III can confer a “kind of likeness to and appearance of wise men” (Cicero, On Duties, 3.16). In Book IV of the Tusculan Disputations—in which he provides his most extensive treatment of grief and anger—Cicero first discusses the virtues and behavior appropriate for a wise man (e.g., Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.25) but also for those who are not free from emotional disturbances, like his interlocutors (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.27). 25. Cicero, On Duties, 1.136–37. 26. Cicero, On Duties, 1.137. 27. Cicero, On Duties, 1.137, 1.88, emphasis added. 28. Cicero, On Duties, 1.88. 29. For example, Cicero, On Duties, 1.126. 30. Cicero, On Duties, 1.93. 31. Cicero, On Duties, 1.95. 32. Kapust and Schwarze, “The Rhetoric of Sincerity,” 10; compare Valentina Arena, “The Orator and His Audience: The Rhetorical Perspective in the Art of Deliberation,” in Community and Communication: Oratory and Politics in Republican Rome, ed. Catherine Steel and Henriette van der Blom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 195–210. 33. Cicero, On Duties, 1.23. 34. Cicero, On Duties, 1.28. 35. Cicero, On Duties, 1.88. 36. Cicero, On Duties, 1.88. 37. Cicero, On Duties, 1.88–89. 38. See P. A. Brunt, Studies in Stoicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 181–85; Kapust, “Cicero on Decorum,” 93–94, 101; Kapust and Schwarze, “The Rhetoric of Sincerity,” 20–22; Jonathan Powell, “Cicero’s Philosophical Works and Their Background,” in Cicero the Philosopher: Twelve Papers, ed. J. G. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 22, 23–26; and Remer, “Political Oratory,” 48. 39. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.20. 40. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.36. 41. For example, Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.29. 42. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.39. 43. See also Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.31, 4.37. 44. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.38. 45. For a more extensive treatment of the similarities between Ciceronian decorum and Smithean propriety, especially as it affects rhetorical ethos, see Griswold, Smith and the Virtues, 183; Kapust and Schwarze, “The Rhetoric of Sincerity”; and Stephen J. McKenna, Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). 46. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1976), I.i.1.5. 47. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.4.2. 48. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.1.1. 49. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.5.3, I.ii.3.7, I.ii.5.1.

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50. For example, Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.38. 51. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, IV.1.1; see also I.i.4.2–4; compare Cicero, On Duties, 1.93. 52. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.1.12. Elsewhere Smith makes similar claims about the harmony of scientific, linguistic, and economic systems (see Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce [Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982], 66, 223; and Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols., ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner [Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981], V.i.f.25) as well as the influence of our avoidance of anxiety. 53. Adam Smith, “History of Astronomy,” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. J. C. Bryce and William P. D. Wightman (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982), Intro., 6. 54. Smith, “History of Astronomy,” III.2; see also Alec Macfie, “The Invisible Hand of Jupiter,” Journal of the History of Ideas 32, no. 4 (1971): 595–99; and Craig Smith, Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy: The Invisible Hand and Spontaneous Order (London: Routledge, 2006), 16–19. 55. See Michelle Schwarze and John T. Scott, “Spontaneous Disorder in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments: Resentment, Injustice, and the Appeal to Providence,” Journal of Politics 77, no. 2 (2015): 463–76. 56. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.ii.3.7. 57. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.4.7–8. 58. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.ii.3.1. 59. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.5.3–4. 60. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.ii.3.4; see also VII.ii.1.18. 61. See especially D. D. Raphael, The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Fonna Forman-Barzilai, Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 62. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.ii.3.4. 63. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.iii. 64. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.iii.2.9. 65. For example, Smith, “History of Astronomy,” II.12; Cicero, On Duties, 1.98; and Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.27, 4.29. 66. See Lauren Brubaker, “Does the ‘Wisdom of Nature’ Need Help?,” in New Voices on Adam Smith, ed. Leonidas Montas and Eric Schliesser (New York: Routledge, 2006), 168–92; and Spencer J. Pack and Eric Schliesser, “Smith’s Humean Criticism of Hume’s Account of the Origin of Justice,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 44, no .1 (2006): 47–63. 67. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, II.i.1.2. 68. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, II.i.1.2. 69. Cicero, On Duties,1.23, 1.28–29. 70. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, II.i.2.5, II.i.4.4. 71. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, II.i.2.5. 72. See Griswold, Smith and the Virtues. 73. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, II.i.5.6.



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74. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, II.i.2.5; see also Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.1.13. 75. For example, Jonathan Powell and Jeremy Paterson, Cicero the Advocate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 50. 76. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Catilinarians, ed. Andrew R. Dyck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1.1. 77. Cicero, Catilinarians, 1.1. 78. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, VI.iii.9. 79. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, VI.iii.10. 80. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, VI.iii.9. 81. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, VI.iii.9. 82. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.iii.3. 83. See Schwarze and Scott, “Spontaneous Disorder.”

chapter 9

Burke, Cicero, and the Personalization of Imperial Injustice Daniel I. O’Neill

D

uring his lifetime, comparisons between the famous British statesman Edmund Burke (1729/30–97) and Cicero were made constantly.1 These comparisons were ultimately rooted in issues of empire and imperialism. In 70 BCE, Cicero led the prosecution of Gaius Verres, the former Roman proconsul for the imperial province of Sicily, for malfeasance in office. Similarly, from 1786 to 1794 Burke spearheaded a long and ultimately unsuccessful effort to impeach Warren Hastings, the former governor general of Bengal, for mismanagement of British imperial rule in India. In making a motion for papers in 1786 requesting evidence pursuant to Hastings’s conduct in India, Burke drew a direct comparison between his role as prosecutor and that of Cicero. Burke noted: The downfall of the greatest empire this world ever saw, has been, on all hands agreed upon to have originated in the mal-administration of its provinces. Rome never felt within herself the seeds of decline, till corruption from foreign misconduct impaired her vitals, and as an elegant commentator on the orations of Cicero—Midianus says, prevaricatione testimonii, (by prevarication of testimony) the inroads of corruption destroyed the political frame, then were all things at stake.—But even then, a man of the first families, and connections, and rank in the State, was brought to punishment. Verres the Governor of Sicily was accused by Cicero, for the maladministration of the province committed to his care.2 In short, India was like Sicily, Hastings was like Verres, and Burke was like Cicero—a figure whose prosecution of imperial injustice abroad would hopefully prevent the British Empire’s “downfall,” just as Cicero had prevented Rome’s. 178



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As Burke’s biographer F. P. Lock notes, “The trope of Burke as Cicero soon became a commonplace.” Indeed, John Boyne’s contemporaneous caricature, “Cicero against Verres,” depicts a barefoot Burke in a classical toga, striking a statuesque pose. Beneath the drawing is a long passage from Cicero’s Verrine Orations, in which Verres’s name and the specific circumstances of his case are replaced by Hastings’s name and Britain’s circumstances.3 Nearly a decade later, on the last day of his marathon nine-day speech closing the prosecution’s case against Hastings, Burke reaffirmed Cicero and the Verrine Orations as the model for his approach: We have all in our early education read the Verronean orations. We read them not merely to instruct us, as they ought to do, in the principles of eloquence, to instruct us in the manners, customs, and Laws of the ancient Romans, of which they are an abundant repository, but we read them for another motive for which the great Author published them, namely that he should leave to the world and the latest posterity a moment by which it should be shown what course a great public Accuser in a great cause ought to follow, and as connected with it, is what course Judges ought to pursue in such a cause. In these orations you see almost every instance of rapacity and peculation which we charge upon Mr. Hastings.4 This is a crucial passage. Certainly, it indicates that the tradition of seeing “Burke as Modern Cicero” has a long history.5 Burke saw himself as inheriting Cicero’s rhetorical approach not only stylistically but also substantively. Most important, he believed he ought to follow Cicero’s prosecutorial course because the actions of Verres and Hastings were virtually identical. Richard Bourke has recently argued that Burke’s repeated invocation of Cicero’s prosecution of Verres during the Hastings impeachment trial “served a number of related purposes.” First, it “conferred a kind of classical dignity and solemnity upon the undertaking.” Second, it allowed Burke to assume the pose of “pure patriotism: as with Cicero in his ‘impeachment’ of the malevolent Sicilian administrator, so Burke’s pursuit of the Governor General could be presented as an attempt to salvage the national reputation.” Third, and as suggested in the passage above with respect to how judges ought to behave in such a case, Burke saw the trial of Verres as a similar intervention in a constitutional crisis in which domestic political institutions were under threat.6 Specifically, according to Bourke, Cicero was wary that popular suspicion of senatorial domination of the courts was increasing after the election of Pompey and Crassus in 70 BCE, and this was leading to calls for the restoration of the tribunes’ powers, a move

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that would threaten to upend Cicero’s model of a balanced constitution. Thus, Burke believed that just as “the Roman Empire had been poisoned on account of a reluctance to punish provincial malversation,” in Britain “the corruption of popular opinion required a reassertion of senatorial wisdom.”7 This assessment of the purposes served by Burke’s Ciceronian approach to Hastings’s impeachment trial is characteristically insightful with respect to Burke’s domestic political concerns, as I will argue, in part, below. However, I also wish to stress a deeper theoretical similarity between Cicero’s approach to prosecuting Verres and Burke’s to punishing Hastings: The arguments of both these prosecutors had the effect of shifting the blame for imperial injustice away from treating it as a constitutive feature and structural consequence of empire to interpreting it as the result of the personal moral failings of particular individuals. This larger endeavor to place the blame for imperial injustice on individual administrators of empire (rather than either imperial Rome or imperial Britain) forges the tightest link between Cicero and Burke. For both thinkers, the problem was not that empire was an inherently unjust form of rule over subject peoples but rather that individuals such as Verres and Hastings were rogue administrators in what were otherwise glorious—and just—imperial enterprises. For Cicero and Burke, empires were wholly legitimate and mutually beneficial forms of political association, provided that they were run well by their administrators. Consequently, the injustices committed under the auspices of empire did not represent the moral failures of empires as such but instead only the moral failures of those individuals entrusted with governing them.8 Cicero on Sicily and Burke on India Cicero on Sicily The English word “empire” is derived from the Latin term imperium, meaning supreme power or command. The word connoted the rule of the highest Roman magistrates, the ability to apply Roman law, and of course a geographical entity composed of different political and cultural communities under Rome’s rule. While Rome retained sovereignty, it ruled over extremely diverse communities with widely varying political, cultural, and social practices, and its approach to imperial rule allowed for a great deal of differentiation in modes of governance according to context.9 For the Romans, empire was in general normatively unproblematic, a glorious extension of Rome’s power. The real issue was how to attune imperial rule such that it was sensitive to local circumstances on the ground, to avoid creating discontent among the communities subject to it. We see both of these dimensions of Roman imperial political thinking on display in Cicero’s Verrine Orations.



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With regard to imperial glory, in his second speech against Verres, Cicero declares that one of his ultimate goals, in addition to championing the Senate, is “to champion Sicily.” To do so, he first describes the conditions under which Sicily became a part of the Roman Empire: “Sicily was the first of all foreign nations to become the loyal friend of Rome. She was the first of all to receive the title of province, the first such jewel in our imperial crown. She was the first who made our forefathers perceive how splendid a thing foreign empire is. No other nation has equaled her in loyal goodwill towards us.”10 Historically, Sicily had become the first Roman province as a result of Rome’s direct military intervention on the island against its rival Carthage’s Sicilian allies, itself the basis for the first Punic War (264–241 BCE). Sicily’s provincial status was thus born of imperial rivalry and large-scale violence, and although it may have become Rome’s “loyal friend,” it was in fact incorporated into the empire as a distinctly subordinate entity as a result of this clash. Shortly thereafter the Romans imposed a grain tribute, or tax, that amounted to a tenth of the Sicilian harvest in Cicero’s time. On this point, Cicero celebrates Sicily’s status as a great agricultural producer by obliterating the distinction between Sicily’s crops and Rome’s resources: “Our relations with the province for all purposes were always such that we looked upon her various products not as growing on their soil, but as already added to our stores at home. When has she failed to pay us punctually her tribute of grain? When has she not spontaneously offered us what she believed that we wanted? When has she refused to supply what was ordered of her?”11 Here, Cicero stresses that the greatness of Sicily’s friendship lay in funneling its natural resources to Rome in order for the imperial metropole to flourish. Moreover, Cicero makes it clear that Sicily was not only the first jewel in the crown of the Roman Empire—as the British would later describe India’s importance for their empire—it was the linchpin for making greater and more glorious imperial conquests possible: “From this province therefore it was that our forefathers took that great step in their imperial career, the invasion of Africa; for the great power of Carthage would never have been crushed so readily had not Sicily been at our disposal, supplying us with corn and affording safe harborage to our fleets.”12 For Cicero, then, Sicily was a crucial component in Rome’s increasingly “global” imperial ambitions. Within the framework of glorious empire, Cicero also imagined the Sicilians appropriately having a strong degree of local autonomy. As long as the tithe was gathered and the necessary resources extracted, he believed that the Romans should maintain many of the pre-empire Sicilian institutional forms and customs. This was not least because adhering to such a mode of imperial

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rule would risk less resistance from the Sicilians. To this end, Cicero lauded the Roman approach of keeping as much of the essential structure of Sicilian selfgovernment as possible intact after the defeat of Hiero II of Syracuse in 263 BCE, which marked the advent of Rome’s imperial advance onto the island. Cicero praises this wise policy of the early Roman Empire at length and discusses how it came to an abrupt end with Verres. The early Roman imperial governors resolved that the Sicilians should manage their own affairs themselves, and should not be irritated either by new laws or even by the old laws under new names. And so they decided that the collection of tithe should always be sold as provided by the laws of Hiero, desiring to make the discharge of this duty less irksome to the Sicilians by preserving to them, under their new sovereigns, not only the institutions but the name of the most popular of their kings. They enjoyed these rights uninterruptedly, until Verres became praetor; he was the first man who dared to uproot and transform an order of things established everywhere, a usage inherited from their fathers, their constitutional privilege and right as the friends and allies of Rome.13 In short, Verres interrupted the smooth functioning of glorious empire by upending the long-established customs and traditions that were part of Sicily’s autonomy within the imperial framework—an autonomy Cicero respected as long as the necessary resources were consistently extracted, because Rome needed them for her domestic well-being and further imperial aggrandizement. This, essentially, proved to be Burke’s understanding of India as well. Like Cicero’s brief against Verres, Burke accused Hastings of personally upending an otherwise happy imperial arrangement through his own greed, corruption, and perfidy. Burke on India Like Cicero’s vision of Sicily and the Roman Empire writ large, Burke saw the imperial conquest of India as wholly unproblematic from a normative standpoint. Indeed, on his account, empire in India was no less a source of glory for Britain than empire in Sicily and North Africa was for Cicero.14 When Robert Clive and the forces of the British East India Company defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, it inaugurated the long, prosperous era of territorial empire in Asia by making northern India effectively a British province. In 1769 Burke praised Clive on the floor of the House of Commons after Clive



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had described the enormous potential wealth to be extracted from India. “He [Clive] has laid open such a world of commerce, he has laid open so valuable an Empire both from our present possessions and future operations, he has laid open such additional manufactures, and revenue. . . . Europe will envy, the East will envy. I hope we shall remain an envied people.”15 For Burke, then, the British Empire was always “an object, thank God, of envy to the rest of the world for its greatness and its power.”16 Burke’s invocation of God is important. He understood the British Empire as ultimately having divine origins; it was a precious providential gift that could never be fully understood but needed to be cherished and tended with care. Shortly before his death, Burke wrote fondly of “the dominion of the glorious Empire given by an incomprehensible dispensation of the Divine providence into our hands.”17 Raphael Woolf maintains that Cicero demonstrated a similar understanding of how providence was made manifest. Woolf argues that Cicero essentially claims that “the best evidence for a divine plan is the pre-eminence of the finest city on Earth—Rome!”18 In this sense, Burke and Cicero read the glorious gift of their respective empires as proof of otherwise inscrutable supernatural intentions beneficently at work in the material world. For Burke, the glorious calling of empire was not begun without violence. However, his conscience was untroubled by such originary violence because of his understanding of the doctrine of “prescription,” whereby “that which may be wrong in the beginning, is consecrated by time, and becomes lawful.”19 Speaking specifically of India, Burke noted that there (as elsewhere) one observed “conquest that is force convert[s] its own injustice, into a just title.” Conquest was in fact “a more immediate designation of the hand of God.”20 At the same time, Burke’s commitment to “prudence” meant that previous injustice on the subcontinent ought to be willfully occluded by drawing a “secret veil” over the origins of British rule in India, “a business in which otherwise the fortune, the genius, the talents and military virtue of this Nation never shown more conspicuously.”21 Burkean prescription and prejudice ensured that the injustice of Britain’s original imperial conquest in India in no way mitigated its status as a providential gift that contributed mightily to empire as a glorious national mission. In this sense, for Burke the conquest of India constituted a “state of exception,” wherein the ordinary rules of justice simply did not apply.22 Scholars have noted the similarities between Burke’s conception of the British Empire and the Roman Empire, both of which embraced wide variation in local rule within a framework of hierarchy and subordination where overarching sovereignty resided at the metropole.23 Of course, this was the strategy that

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Cicero lauded in the Verrine Orations. As Burke put his own commitment to this principle with respect to the British Empire: “In the comprehensive dominion which the divine Providence has put into our hands . . . it was our duty, in all soberness, to conform our Government to the character and circumstances of the several people who compose this mighty and strangely diversified mass. I was never wild enough to conceive, that one method would serve for the whole; I could never conceive that the natives of Hindostan and those of Virginia could be ordered in the same manner.”24 In the case of India, Burke believed that the British had inherited the framework of rule developed under the Muslim Mughal Empire. As Robert Travers has shown, Burke interpreted Mughal rule through a Whiggish lens, comparing it to the British constitution with its limited monarchy, rule of law, and protection of private property, especially for the Hindu zamindars, the ruling aristocratic holders of large landed estates.25 Burke believed that after the British East India Company overthrew Shah Alam II in 1765, “Great Britain made a virtual act of union with that country, by which they bound themselves as securities for their subjects, to preserve the people in all rights, laws and liberties,” which they had enjoyed under the Mughal Empire and were duty bound to protect.26 He believed that Britain’s best approach to imperial governance in India was thus to preserve (and where necessary restore) the forms of authority, social hierarchy, and subordination that had obtained under Mughal rule and then proceed as much as possible with a policy of noninterference.27 In this sense, too, India for Burke was akin to Sicily for Cicero. The goal of the British Empire in India, like that of the Roman Empire in Sicily, was to extract massive riches with minimal violence and disruption to imperial subjects. In both cases, this was to be achieved by recourse to preexisting channels of authority and custom. For Cicero, this meant adhering to laws and practices that went back to the time of Hiero and even Carthaginian imperial influence on the island; for Burke, it meant hewing as far as possible to the imperial framework inherited from the Mughal Empire that the British had displaced, which had itself left earlier Hindu social structures intact. From a normative standpoint, empire was thus a glorious enterprise for both Cicero and Burke. However, to be maintained well, it had to be conducted wisely. This included affording the provinces a great deal of local autonomy and holding to long-established, preexisting, historical modes of internal self-governance that preceded imperial intervention. For both Cicero and Burke, however, the preferred mode of empire in Sicily and India would come spectacularly undone in the same fashion. Glorious empire was threatened because of the incomparable evil of one individual and



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his henchmen. In what follows, I wish to argue that it was ultimately Cicero’s depiction of Verres’s character and crimes that served as Burke’s model for prosecuting Hastings. Moreover, such a focus had a similar theoretical consequence— shifting the immorality associated with imperial injustice from the question of empire itself to that of the individuals involved in managing it. This approach of personalizing imperial injustice, more than anything else, allows Burke to rightfully lay claim to the title of “modern Cicero.” Cicero and the Personalization of Imperial Injustice It has been claimed that Cicero’s argument in On the Republic is likely “the first extant philosophical justification of Roman Empire, and he was certainly the first person to equate Roman justice with the order of the universe.”28 To make this case, James Zetzel argues that Cicero effectively reconstructed both sides of the Greek thinker Carneades the Academic’s speech to the Roman Senate in 155 BCE (in which Carneades eloquently praised justice in the first speech, then praised injustice with equal skill in the second) in On the Republic. In doing so, Zetzel suggests, a discussion of personal morality “has been transformed into a debate on political and imperial morality.” Cicero goes to great lengths to show “the application of the concept of justice to the Roman imperium” and demonstrate “that the concept of justice is as relevant to the foreign policy of Rome as it is to the behavior of individual human beings.”29 The philosophical conundrum that Cicero confronted, however, was that while an individual’s violations of natural law incurred its own automatic punishment through a loss of humanity, the same could not necessarily be said of violations of natural law by the state, which while potentially eternal also had no soul or transcendental life.30 In On the Republic, Cicero resolved this theoretical puzzle by arguing that when a state acts unjustly, it falls from the realm of the eternal; its punishment is thus to face the prospect of death and extinction in the world as a consequence of its unjust acts. On the one hand, Cicero’s position thereby justified Rome’s imperial conquest of other states, whose “injustice” was demonstrated by the fact that Rome destroyed them, concretely demonstrating their mortality. On the other hand, Cicero’s view also makes Rome’s own imperial actions subject to natural law and suggests a very high price for failure to adhere to it. If the Roman Empire acted unjustly on a large enough scale, its eternal status would be lost, with the consequence that Rome itself, if not the whole universe, would be threatened with extinction.31 This was not an isolated concern in Cicero’s thinking. In On Duties, for example, he writes:

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As long as the empire of the Roman people was maintained through acts of kind service and not through injustices . . . we could more truly have been titled a protectorate than an empire of the world. We had already begun gradually to erode this custom and practice; but after the victory of Sulla we rejected it entirely. . . . Our present sufferings are, therefore, just. For if we had not tolerated the crimes of many men going unpunished, such extreme license would never have come into the hands of one [i.e., Julius Caesar].32 This certainly raises the stakes of imperial conduct. At the very least, for Cicero imperial injustice might spell the end of Rome. More broadly, lingering in the background was the specter of what Carneades’s second speech meant for the morality of empire writ large. Put simply, were all empires inevitably unjust by definition? If so, all expressions of Roman imperialism, however cloaked in the language of natural law they might be, were unjust. In this way, Cicero effectively raises the larger question of the moral legitimacy of empire itself. How did Cicero respond to this conundrum? As C. E. W. Steel insightfully argues, Cicero’s approach to imperial questions depends on individual power holders, and “this in turn means that the problems which arise in the running of empire can be presented as the result of personal failings rather than endemic to the structures of government.”33 Steel maintains that Cicero’s speeches on empire (not just those on Verres, but also on Piso and Gabinus) depict individual magistrates “in a vacuum, autonomous, and morally corrupt.” Cicero consistently “sees Roman imperialism in terms of individual magistrates: what is at issue is what specific men have done or will do, and when things go wrong they go wrong because of individual misbehavior and immorality.”34 Such an analysis, Steel argues, is “a very convenient one, inasmuch as it presents a complex situation very simply and in a way that is unlikely to disturb the audience. If the only thing wrong with the empire is the misbehavior of individuals, then there is no need to feel concern about the system of imperial administration more generally.”35 For Steel, Cicero’s strategy of personalizing imperial injustice had the effect of avoiding thorny questions from Romans and their subjects about exploiting resources and the structure of imperial governance more broadly, including such issues as the relationship between the Senate and magistrates concerning the distribution of powers and the question of political pressure exerted on Rome by the provinces. To a very large extent, I agree with Steel’s thesis concerning Cicero’s understanding of the personalization of imperial injustice. In this chapter, I seek to show that a similar form of argumentation fundamentally animates Burke’s position.



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However, I also want to press Steel’s analysis further by suggesting that another of the principal effects of Cicero’s strategy of personalizing imperial injustice—and perhaps the most important one in the long run (certainly from the standpoint of Burke’s approach to empire, which is my chief concern)—was that it also provided an influential answer to the Carneadean moral conundrum sketched above. Cicero effectively maintained that any and all normative issues pursuant to empire were not a consequence of the injustice of the imperial enterprise as such but solely a function of a few deeply corrupt individual administrators running it. Once purged of these bad apples through zealous prosecution in a court of law, vouchsafed by the full weight of a conviction by members of the Senate acting as jury, Cicero believed that any moral qualms with imperialism would be resolved. Rome’s status as an eternal empire would remain safe as long as its violations of natural law were due wholly to specific individuals acting unjustly rather than Rome itself doing so as a corporate entity. Of course, the larger consequence of this approach was precisely to deflect Romans’ critical gaze from broader questions about the morality of their imperial enterprise as a whole. The Verrine Orations are conventionally broken into two parts. Only the first and much shorter of these was delivered as a speech in front of the praetor and jury of senators in court. Much of that speech focuses not on Verres’s alleged crimes. Instead, it represents Cicero’s strategic attempt to thwart the dilatory tactics used by Verres and his defense advocate, Hortensius, and his appeals to the senators in the jury to reject any attempt by Verres and Hortensius to corruptly buy them off. The broader importance of such appeals, however, is that they highlight an additional feature of Cicero’s argument: Verres’s trial would serve as a test of the legitimacy of Rome’s domestic political institutions. He tells his audience of senators and judicial functionaries that if conducted justly, Verres’s case could be a moment “that will help, more than anything else, to mitigate the unpopularity of your Order and the discredit attaching to these Courts of Law.” As Cicero describes him, Verres is the living embodiment of evil, a proverbial gift from the gods: “The character of the man I am prosecuting is such, that you may use him to restore the lost good name of these Courts, to regain favor at home, and to give satisfaction abroad.”36 Verres has not only “been quite open in amassing his stolen wealth”; he was “a robber and a criminal” who believed that he could buy his own trial date to create circumstances favorable to his acquittal, and then pay off senators in the jury to ensure it. For Cicero, Verres thereby clung to the widespread belief that the courts would never convict anyone with money.37

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Cicero also appeals to the praetor who served as judge in the trial, Manius Glabrio, to be a “champion of the Senate; that it may pass the test of this trial, and recover the esteem and favor of the Roman people.”38 Finally, Cicero— as a newly elected aedile—depicts his prosecution of Verres as undertaken solely “for the public welfare and the punishment of evil men.”39 In this way, Cicero casts himself as the potential savior of the domestic Roman order at the same time that his prosecution of Verres will have the consequence of exculpating Rome from charges of imperial injustice by placing them solely on Verres’s head. After the first speech, Verres went into voluntary exile to avoid what he saw as an inevitable guilty verdict. Nevertheless, Cicero published the massive welter of material that was to make up the substance of his brief against Verres in five lengthy speeches. The speeches charge Verres with several forms of misgovernment in Sicily. These include embezzling funds; extorting bribes from wealthy Sicilian landowners for the return of slaves wrongly accused of colluding with Spartacus’s revolt; judicial corruption; corrupt mismanagement of resources (corn) for personal gain by breaking old contracts and leveling new taxes; sacrilegious theft of religious art and statuary; military ineptness against marauding pirates (due in part to Verres’s laziness, repeated bouts of drunken revelry, and sexual debauchery); and judicial murder of Roman citizens abroad. Steel argues that Cicero’s rhetorical goal in pressing these accusations in the prosecution is to paint Verres as the quintessential “bad magistrate,” which is to say that “Verres both is bad, and does bad things.” However, “Cicero does not present Verres in relation to a general model of ‘how the empire should be run’: the whole characterization depends on the assumption that the key figure in imperial government is the individual magistrate, acting as an agent of the Roman people.” As Steel wisely notes, such “a very vague formulation” in fact “leaves open how exactly a magistrate should behave.”40 To aid this rhetorical strategy, Cicero places Verres’s actions in historical context by comparing them to those of previous imperial magistrates, arguing that Verres’s actions marked a massive shift in Roman behavior in Sicily since it first became an imperial province. Thus, by comparing Verres’s conduct with that of his exemplary predecessors, Cicero seeks to show that Verres was “a bad Roman.”41 The effect is thus to depict Verres as a tyrant lacking in all restraint and obliterating a carefully cultivated set of norms for Roman political behavior abroad. Simultaneously, “by using the model of a tyrant, Cicero can make it absolutely clear to his readers that Verres has overstepped the appropriate limits to his behavior while avoiding discussing what those limits actually are: a useful move, since it is far from clear that Verres had behaved illegally.”42



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In addition, because Verres was cast as the embodiment of evil, Cicero makes much of the fact that he subcontracted a range of administrative functions to an unfit cohort of similarly evil henchmen for whose acts he was ultimately responsible, chief among them Timarchides and Apronus. On this score, Cicero tries to damage Verres by arguing that Timarchides came from servile origins—he describes him as a runaway slave—which meant that he should never have been invested with meaningful power. At the same time, and despite this lowly background, Cicero contrasts Timarchides’s intelligence with Verres’s character, which is marked by overriding greed and dimwittedness. Thus, Cicero uses a wellknown trope of Roman comedy (the inversion of the appropriate relationship between master and slave) to further demonstrate Verres’s unfitness for office.43 Likewise, Cicero describes Apronus, Verres’s henchman in the corn fraud schemes, as a physically repulsive creature who serves as Verres’s characterological twin. Apronus is a sordid portrait of lecherous excess, yet Cicero insists that he and Verres shared a corrupt approach to governance and were close friends and maintained a profound level of physical intimacy: they used the same cups, Verres enjoyed Apronus’s scent (repulsive to others), and even allowed Apronus into his bedroom, which hinted at a deeper relationship. In addition to his other repulsive qualities, Cicero makes a point of insisting that Apronus danced shamelessly.44 In painting this picture, Cicero is keen to show that part of Verres’s lack of fitness to serve as magistrate is evident from the fact that he is controlled by right-hand men of low social origins and low character. These men hold important offices for which they are entirely unfit.45 Here, as elsewhere, we cannot know how Cicero’s rhetorical strategy might have played out before a jury, because Verres left Rome rather than seeing the trial through to completion. In the remainder of this chapter, however, I wish to argue that we see the longterm influence of such rhetorical strategies by considering how Burke’s approach to punishing imperial injustice was deeply indebted to them. Burke and the Personalization of Imperial Injustice The House of Commons ultimately sent four articles of impeachment against Hastings to the House of Lords for consideration. One was the “presents” charge (which concerned unsolicited bribes paid—given as “gifts” or “presents”—by Indians to British East India Company officials for preferential treatment). A second was the “contracts” charge, which dealt with the company’s fraudulent awarding of sweetheart deals on questionable terms, using them to inflate the salaries of their employees and create cushy new positions that were doled out

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to company favorites. A third charge was that Hastings had behaved despotically or tyrannically in governing northern India. A fourth article, referred to as the “begams” charge, had to do mainly with Hastings’s treatment of aristocratic Indian women known as the Begams of Oudh (Awadh). A cursory glance at these charges demonstrates a great deal of similarity with those leveled at Verres. Moreover, as Burke’s final speech in 1794 made clear, Cicero had shown “what course a great public Accuser in a great cause ought to follow” precisely because in his “orations you see almost every instance of rapacity and peculation which we charge upon Mr. Hastings.”46 In turn, the striking similarity between Burke’s and Cicero’s approaches, and between Hastings and Verres, can likewise be seen across all the charges. Foremost, Burke’s portrait of Hastings, like Cicero’s of Verres, stressed the accused’s greed. Burke makes this case at length in his long speech opening the impeachment in 1788, when he tells his audience: “I shall first show that Mr. Hastings’ crimes had root in that which is the root of all evil, I mean avarice; that avarice and rapacity were the groundwork and foundation of all his other vicious system[s].”47 This is a constant refrain in Burke’s description of Hastings, whose “demerits are all of the same nature. For though there is undoubtedly oppression, breach of faith, cruelty, perfidy, charged upon him, yet the great ruling principle of the whole, and that from which you can never have an act free, is money.” It is thus “the great principle of corruption which guided Mr. Hastings’s conduct.”48 Burke worried deeply that money pouring into the British Empire from Hastings and his minions in India would corrupt and upend the British constitutional balance, just as on Cicero’s account Verres’s imperially derived wealth endangered Rome’s domestic political institutions and courts of law. Burke saw India under Hastings as a “school of pride, insolence, corruption and tyranny,” run by a group of “criminals” and “Robbers” by which “every man in Great Britain will be corrupted and must be contaminated” if Hastings was not punished. These newly wealthy “nabobs” (from the term nawab, or provincial ruler under the Mughal Empire) thus threatened the fabric of British society and its political institutions. Burke therefore tells the House of Lords that “for the integrity and honor of the Commons of Great Britain, we have brought this man here before you.”49 Burke was thus interested, in part, in defending the Commons against charges of corruption in the face of imperial expansion and newly minted nabob wealth, no less than Cicero was concerned with reestablishing the integrity of the Senate in the face of charges of institutional rot. “I do assure you,” he tells the House of Lords, “never was a Cause of such magnitude submitted before any human Tribunal.”50



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Similar to Cicero’s accusations against Verres, Burke likewise excoriates Hastings for not only acting tyrannically but deputizing other morally reprehensible characters to engage in such behavior as his surrogates. For example, Burke accuses Hastings of farming out revenue extraction to such brutal figures as Devi Singh, who in turn subcontracted it to “such infernal villains” as Ganga Govind Singh, the scourge of Rangpur. Burke hastens to add that all fault ultimately lies with Hastings and his unrelenting greed for “approving, if not choosing, the worst m[e]n of the Country to exercise authority under him, proving how well they acted their part, and rendering it unnecessary for him to take any part in it.”51 Nor is this an isolated instance. Burke describes a series of such henchmen empowered by the corrupt and greedy Hastings to do his bidding that are every bit as memorable as Timarchides and Apronus. They also include Nathaniel Middleton, the British resident at Oudh, and Sir Elijah Impey, the chief justice of Bengal. In their correspondence describing how the British violently broke into the bedrooms of the begams of Oudh to ransack their treasures, Burke depicts these men as using terms so sweet, “You would imagine they were making love.”52 Most memorable of the group is Munni Begum, who functions in Burke’s narrative like Timarchides and Apronus combined. Burke repeatedly describes Munni Begum, whom Hastings had made the guardian and regent of her underage stepson, the nawab of Bengal as a “Common prostitute,” a “slave,” and a “fantastic dancing girl.” As in Cicero’s account of Apronus, this latter charge of shameless dancing was not meant as a compliment. Indeed, Burke told the House of Lords, “Your Lordships are to suppose the lowest degree of infamy in occupation and situation when I tell you that Munny Begum was a slave and a dancing girl.” Like Cicero’s description of Apronus, yet more boldly, Burke also hints at a deeper level of intimacy that led to Munni Begum’s ascent to power: “It is possible Mr. Hastings might be in love with Munny Begum. . . . Many great men have played the fool for Prostitutes from Mark Anthony’s days downwards”; hence he refers to “the lover, Warren Hastings Esqr., and the object of his passion and flame, Munny Begum, to which he sacrifices as much as Anthony ever did to Cleopatra.”53 All of this brings us to Burke’s version of Cicero’s Carneadean debate about justice. There is a long tradition in Burke scholarship of lauding his supposed reliance on natural law to reject Hastings’s invocation of the tradition of “Oriental Despotism” as a legitimate mode of governing India.54 Hastings basically argued in his trial that Eastern states had always been governed despotically, so he was simply adopting local custom in doing the same. Burke famously rejected such Montesquieuan arguments about Islamic and Hindu societies not being governed by the rule of law, arguments Hastings had relied on. Instead, he

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invoked something like the principles of natural law based on right reason, as expressed in Cicero’s On the Republic, principles Burke believed were expressed in all great civilized religions, to reject Hastings’s recourse to “Geographical morality.”55 However, two points need to be made regarding such lines of argument. The first is that Burke never invoked natural law principles to argue against the legitimacy of imperial conquest, as such, either in India or anywhere else subject to British imperialism in the eighteenth century. Indeed, for the reasons suggested above, Burke did exactly the opposite, and thereby placed the question of initial imperial conquest beyond the pale of natural law arguments entirely.56 This brings me to the second point: Like Cicero with respect to Verres, when Burke invokes natural law to criticize the implementation of empire, he does so for the sole purpose of punishing Hastings as an individual, not Britain as an empire. For Burke, Hastings acted in a morally reprehensible fashion in his administrative capacity, but this did not reflect poorly on the moral status of the British Empire. As such, Hastings could be guilty on a personal level as a corrupt and greedy imperial administrator, but this guilt did not extend to Britain or the Empire as such. In this fashion, Burke’s solution closely mirrored Cicero’s response to the Carneadean debate played out in On the Republic: by personalizing imperial injustice and cleansing Britain of Hastings as Cicero had cleansed Rome of Verres, Burke hoped—like his rhetorical model—to make empire both eternal and morally unproblematic. Conclusion The goals of Cicero’s prosecution of Verres were grand. Through a demonstration of Verres’s guilt, he hoped to go beyond championing the cause of Sicily as a province whose people were unjustly treated. As he put it, “I promised to champion Sicily; it is the province of Sicily that involved me in my present undertaking. And yet, though this is the burden I shouldered, though I did indeed promise to champion Sicily, my thoughts came to embrace a somewhat wider purpose. The fact is that I promised to champion the whole Senatorial order, nay, to champion Rome itself.”57 Cicero’s description of his goals might serve equally well as a description of Burke’s own in prosecuting Hastings for his behavior in India. But in Burke’s case, if not Cicero’s, there is surely an irony worth noting concerning his aim of championing Britain. Although I am not qualified to judge Verres’s conduct against the Roman examples Cicero adduces in his speeches, Burke’s juxtaposition of



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Hastings’s approach to India with that of Robert Clive is illustrative of the broader issue I wish to conclude on. As I have argued at length elsewhere,58 and as is suggested above by my mention of the “state of exception,” Burke’s full-throated embrace of the conqueror of northern India morally exculpated Clive, whom he praised repeatedly as a genius who had brought glory, wealth, and honor to Britain. All of that notwithstanding, and despite Burke’s vehement opposition, in 1772–73 the House of Commons investigated Clive on charges of corruption and despotism conducted on a scale that most historians think dwarfed anything subsequently done by Hastings. Indeed, Clive put in place policies that helped exacerbate a famine in northern India in 1769–70, one in which an estimated ten million people died. At the time that famine was occurring, as well as twenty years later when the catastrophe was a well-known fact in Britain, Burke lauded Clive, whose conquests he believed had ushered in the grand era of British imperial glory in Asia. For Burke, imperial injustice did not apply to Britain as a state, nor to those individuals whose violent conquests founded and expanded that empire. Rather, imperial blame affixed itself only to Warren Hastings as an individual, along with the henchman he had deputized, and it only occurred after Hastings took power in the early 1770s, not in the preceding decade plus. In this regard, and paradoxically, Burke’s appropriation of Cicero also points to how the trial of Warren Hastings was a great success, regardless of the fact that the House of Lords ultimately acquitted him. As Nicholas Dirks argues, Burke’s approach would “rescue the imperial mission” and “ennoble the idea of empire” by transforming empire into a patriotic enterprise and a weighty responsibility. In India and elsewhere, this meant that control of the empire was transferred fully from the East India Company to the British state and ultimately the British nation. In this sense, Dirks notes: “The trial not only put paid to the scandals of empire; it also raised empire above the possibility of scandal. The only scandal that remained, of course, was one that neither Burke, nor for that matter subsequent historians of empire, would conceive as such: the scandal of empire itself.”59 Against this backdrop, perhaps the greatest Ciceronian legacy for Burke lay not in his invocation of “natural law” to prosecute Hastings (a concept that, after all, did not prevent either thinker from defending imperial conquest as morally proper). Rather, it can be found in Cicero’s creation of a blueprint for how to “ennoble” empire by transforming its manifest moral failings from matters of collective to personal injustice punishable only by the empire itself, an entity that for both thinkers thereby remained wholly outside the parameters of justice.

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Notes 1. There is debate regarding Burke’s date of birth. The traditional year of 1729 has been seriously challenged by Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 29. Bourke puts Burke’s birthdate at 1730, and many scholars have now accepted this, although Bourke admits that a case can still be made for 1729, so I have included both dates here. 2. Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 6, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981–2015), 63. Marshall, the editor of all three volumes concerning Burke and India (vols. 5–7), notes that the reference to “Midianus” in this passage seems to have been an error made by the reporter of the speech. A different version appearing in the Morning Herald, February 21, 1786, mentions the commentator as “Ascanius,” and the problem of failure of punishment being exacerbated by prevaricatione accusatorum in the face of incomplete information. This comports with the manuscript of Burke’s speech among his papers at Sheffield, which mentions both Ascanius and the phrase attributed to him. As Marshall points out, eighteenth-century editions of Cicero’s Verrine Orations “were frequently provided with a commentary attributed to Asconius Pedianus [9 BC–A. 76]” (6:63, n.1). 3. See F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, vol. 2, 1784–1797 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 91. The quotation beneath the caricature is from the opening paragraph of Cicero’s first speech against Verres. On Burke “comparing himself to Cicero prosecuting Verres for his notoriously corrupt and oppressive administration of Sicily,” see Lock, Edmund Burke, 2:75. 4. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 7:662–63. The importance of this passage was stressed more than a century ago by H. V. Canter, “The Impeachment of Verres and Hastings: Cicero and Burke,” Classical Journal 9, no. 5 (1914): 199–211. Canter insists, “All doubt that Burke realized he was following Cicero as a prosecutor, and that he regarded him as a model, is put aside when we come to his remarks on the Verrines” (“The Impeachment of Verres and Hastings,” 200). 5. See Geoffrey Carnall, “Burke as Modern Cicero,” in The Impeachment of Warren Hastings, ed. Geoffrey Carnall and Colin Nicholson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), 76–90. 6. Bourke, Empire and Revolution, 631. 7. Bourke, Empire and Revolution, 631–32. 8. In chapter 4 of this volume, Michelle T. Clarke rightly points out that in On Duties, Cicero “insists that Roman expansion was typically motivated by considerations of justice and pursued fairly.” I do not see this point as in any way antithetical to the thesis I am advancing here. Cicero did indeed believe (like Burke) that there was nothing inherently immoral about empire per se; indeed, as Clarke argues specifically with respect to Cicero, the contrary is true. Likewise, she notes that Cicero believed “corrupt leaders like Sulla have since normalized the self-serving and unjust expropriation of Roman enemies and allies alike.” Here, too, she points to the phenomenon of individual corruption as the problem to be addressed, and not the moral status of empire itself. Of course, simply because Cicero and Burke believed that empires properly run were mutually



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beneficial and morally desirable forms of political association does not compel us to agree with them. 9. For the etymology and meaning of the term and the importance of Roman notions of empire for later European understandings of the phenomenon, see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 10. Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Verrine Orations, 2 vols., trans. L. H. G. Greenwood (New York: Putnam’s, 1928), 2.2.1–2. 11. Cicero, Verrine Orations, 2.2.5. 12. Cicero, Verrine Orations, 2.2.3. 13. Cicero, Verrine Orations, 2.3.14–15. 14. My argument in this section and the one below on Burke draws on Daniel I. O’Neill, Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), chaps. 1 and 3. 15. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 2:220. 16. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 6:277. 17. See Edmund Burke to French Laurence, July 28, 1796, in Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958–78), 9:62. 18. See Raphael Woolf, Cicero: The Philosophy of a Roman Sceptic (New York: Routledge, 2015), 77. I am grateful to Dan Kapust for making me aware of Woolf ’s argument. 19. Burke to Captain Thomas Mercer, February 26, 1790, in Burke, Correspondence, 6:95. 20. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 6:462, 6:351. For a similar gloss on these passages, see P. J. Marshall’s editorial introduction to this volume (Burke, Writings and Speeches, 6:26). 21. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 6:316–17. Again, Marshall rightly recognizes the importance of this passage for understanding Burke. 22. See O’Neill, Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire, 37. As I also note there, Bourke would seem to concur with this assessment. Bourke writes that for Burke, “a veil of silence should be drawn over the original assertion of might, with each bloody manifestation of force assigned to oblivion” (Empire and Revolution, 366). My own argument about the “state of exception” for Burke in India follows Nicholas Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), concerning which more below. 23. See Iain Hampsher-Monk, “Edmund Burke and Empire,” in Lineages of Empire: The Historical Roots of British Imperial Thought, ed. Duncan Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 117–36; Richard Bourke, “Liberty, Authority, and Trust in Burke’s Idea of Empire,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61, no. 3 (2000): 453–71; and P. J. Marshall, “Burke and Empire,” in Hanoverian Britain and Empire: Essays in Memory of Philip Lawson, ed. Stephen Taylor, Richard Connors, and Clyve Jones (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1998), 288–98. 24. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 3:316.

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25. See Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 26. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 6:281–82. 27. On this point, see especially Robert Travers, “Contested Despotism: Problems of Liberty in British India,” in Exclusionary Empire: English Liberties Overseas, 1600–1900, ed. Jack P. Greene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 191–219; P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 181; and P. J. Marshall, “Burke and India,” in The Enduring Edmund Burke, ed. Ian Crowe (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1997), 39–47. 28. James E. G. Zetzel, “Natural Law and Poetic Justice: A Carneadean Debate in Cicero and Virgil,” Classical Philology 91 (1996): 298. 29. Zetzel, “Natural Law and Poetic Justice,” 308. 30. Zetzel, “Natural Law and Poetic Justice,” 315. 31. Zetzel, “Natural Law and Poetic Justice,” 316–18. 32. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), II.26–28. I am grateful to Dan Kapust for directing me to this passage. 33. See C. E. W. Steel, Cicero, Rhetoric, and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4. 34. Steel, Cicero, Rhetoric, and Empire, 73, 190. 35. Steel, Cicero, Rhetoric, and Empire, 73. 36. Cicero, Verrine Orations, 1.1–2. 37. Cicero, Verrine Orations, 1.5, 1.7, 1.8–10. 38. Cicero, Verrine Orations, 1.51. 39. Cicero, Verrine Orations, 1.36. 40. Steel, Cicero, Rhetoric, and Empire, 29. 41. Steel, Cicero, Rhetoric, and Empire, 35. 42. Steel, Cicero, Rhetoric, and Empire, 31. 43. Steel, Cicero, Rhetoric, and Empire, 36–38. 44. Steel, Cicero, Rhetoric, and Empire, 39–40. 45. Steel, Cicero, Rhetoric, and Empire, 41–42. 46. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 7:662–63. 47. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 6:371. 48. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 6:377, 382. 49. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 7:261. On this theme, see Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 50. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 7:692. 51. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 6:421, 6:425. 52. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 7:465. 53. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 7:52–54, 7:613, 7:592. 54. This runs across the ideological spectrum. For representative examples, see Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France



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(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Peter Stanlis, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958). 55. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 6:346. 56. For an expansion of this argument, see O’Neill, Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire. 57. Cicero, Verrine Orations, 2.2.1. 58. See O’Neill, Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire. 59. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire, 125, 296; see also 314–25.

chapter 10

Cicero’s Legacy in Contemporary Political Thought Dean Hammer

I

n On the Orator, Cicero has the character Antonius observe, “History [which is] truly a witness of the passing ages, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of past ages,” then ask, “by what other voice than the orator’s is [history] entrusted to immortality?” (Historia vero testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis, qua voce alia, nisi oratoris, immortalitati commendatur?).1 The words speak to Cicero’s ongoing efforts to give endurance to a fleeting existence that would continue to resonate with his growing sense of loss, whether of Tullia, the res publica, or his own fame. As aware as he was of the vicissitudes of history, he could not have anticipated the trajectory of his legacy. It did not come as he had hoped. In 55 BCE, he had asked Roman historian Lucceius to write about the period from his consulship to his return from exile so that his achievements could be “memorialized” and his name given renown.2 Plato did that for Socrates; Xenophon did it for Cyrus. But Cicero left too much behind. To that wealth of material, subsequent political theorists have returned, less interested in securing Cicero’s legacy than in the perspective offered to new problems. My interest is to examine five interpretive strands that have guided contemporary understandings of Cicero. Each approach views Cicero through the lens of particular concerns that are seen as central to how we think about politics: the creation of constitutional structures, the operation of social power, the striving for transcendent truths, the recognition of human embeddedness, and the quest for a vision of an ideal. I explore how scholarship since about 2000, guided by a new pragmatism, has revised each of these strands in revitalizing Cicero.3 198



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Constitutionalism and the Future of Western Democracy So much of the foundation for our understanding of Rome was laid by a constitutional and legal tradition of scholarship that arguably dates to the discovery of a manuscript of Justinian’s Digest in the eleventh century. Theodor Mommsen, following Wilhelm Drumann, sets the stage for Cicero’s reception in the twentieth century. In his introduction to Römische Geschichte, Mommsen describes the relationship of ancient and modern history: What is called modern history is in reality the formation of a new cycle of culture [that] too is destined to experience in full measure the vicissitudes of national weal and woe, the periods of growth, of maturity, and of age, the blessedness of creative effort in religion, polity, and art, the comfort of enjoying the material and intellectual acquisitions which it has won, perhaps also, some day, the decay of productive power in the satiety of contentment with the goal attained. And yet this goal will only be temporary: the grandest system of civilization has its orbit, and may complete its course but not so the human race, to which, just when it seems to have reached its goal, the old task is ever set anew with a wider range and with a deeper meaning.4 Mommsen describes these forces of decay and rejuvenation not just as a jurist but also as an outspoken politician supporting the German liberal national movement. History of Rome, written in the wake of the 1848 revolutions (in support of which Mommsen lost his position at Leipzig), reflected the questions liberals were asking at the time: what is the legitimacy of revolutions (in response to the right), what are the limits of popular participation (in response to the left), and what is the nature of the state and law? James F. McGlew notes that Mommsen understood constitutional development “as the sphere of human innovation and the sole means, in a civilized state, whereby dilemmas caused by social and economic conditions could find their solutions, and were, therefore, for Mommsen, as for all liberals of his time, the historian’s principal concern.”5 One sees in history the struggle between conservative and progressive forces where revolution is necessary when the constitution no longer functions. The German drama plays out in Mommsen’s analysis of the unwritten constitutional arrangements of Roman politics: of the development of the res publica by way of a well-organized political body and in turn its inability to address fundamental issues of economic misery, landlessness, and administrative

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incompetence with the growth of its empire until it ceased to be legitimate.6 For Mommsen, Caesar appears not as Bismarck, eager to centralize and concentrate his power, but as a statesman desiring the regeneration of his nation.7 Caesar sought to take “the moral revolt of the good and the distress of the many” to forge a revolution against the landed aristocracy (Rome’s version of the Junkers) and the only mechanism to articulate the will of people.8 Read against the concern with how states regenerate themselves and his elevation of Caesar as a leader seeking to address the deficiencies of the Roman constitution, Mommsen provides a devastating evaluation of Cicero: the exaggerated interest in rhetoric as a sign of the degeneration of the times; a “statesman without insight, opinion, or purpose”; “valiant in opposition to sham attacks”; able to “[knock] down any ways of pasteboard with a loud din”; so much a “dabbler, that it was pretty much a matter of indifference to what words he applied his hand”; his works in exile “stale and empty”; a man who had “no conviction and no passion”; “the absolute want of political discernment in the orations on constitutional questions”; the “dreadful barrenness of thought”; his On the Commonwealth as a “singular mongrel compound of history and philosophy” that is “as unphilosophical as unhistorical”; and his philosophical works a “rude imitation” of Aristotle.9 It is not that Mommsen created these characterizations from scratch; part of their persuasive appeal is that these judgments had hounded Cicero since his own lifetime. Fed by Mommsen’s magisterial and powerfully written works, and driven by some of the same concerns about constitutional development, an array of scholars—whether Basil Gildersleeve in classics, William Dunning in establishing a new academic discipline of political science, or Sir Frederick Pollock in jurisprudence—understood the Romans politically for their contributions to law and administration.10 Mommsen’s evaluation of Cicero stuck. Cicero suffers the same fate in R. W. Carlyle and A. J. Carlyle’s six-volume History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West as with Mommsen: he was a person of interest because he “summed up the commonplaces of the political theory of his time,” but a thinker who does not possess “any great originality or mind, or any great power of political analysis.”11 Decades later, Moses I. Finley echoes Mommsen’s evaluation of Cicero as being as “unphilosophical as unhistorical,” suggesting that nothing in the decades of intervening scholarship justifies changing this view. There is in Cicero, as Finley notes, “only rhetoric.”12 In a cruel irony, given Cicero’s praise of the orator as the voice of history, his rhetoric is what dooms him as shallow and unprincipled. The Russian revolution, collapse of Weimar Germany, and rise of totalitarianism further heightened anxieties about the future of constitutional democracy,



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leading a new generation of scholars to mine the Roman past for its potential contributions to Western constitutionalism. In the inaugural volume of the Journal of Politics, George H. Sabine suggests that the “greatest political theories” are important because of their “analysis of a present situation and in suggestiveness for other situations.”13 Sabine (like Charles H. McIlwain in his influential contributions to constitutional thinking) reads the Romans, and Cicero specifically, as contributing to a modern, Western notion of law and jurisprudence.14 In an essay on Cicero, which appears in his translation (with Stanley B. Smith) of On the Commonwealth in 1929, Sabine and Smith begin by observing that Cicero “is not to be numbered among the greatest writers of politics,” hardly the introduction one craves.15 His importance lies in his work as a “repository” of Greek thought.16 They end by noting that Cicero’s work “denotes an advance in political thinking” because of the “noble insistence that it is the duty of all men to serve their country,” the “inculcation of the principles of justice and fairdealing,” and the “recognition of the universal society, founded upon reason and including all rational beings within its ambit.”17 In his widely used History of Political Theory, first published in 1937 and continuing as the primary political theory text into the 1960s, Sabine is less charitable, suggesting that Cicero’s call to duty was anachronistic and a complete failure and his theory of the mixed state a “forlorn hope.”18 Moreover, Sabine repeats the now-familiar view that Cicero’s importance lies not in his “originality” but in the ideas embedded in his work that were preserved and read by future generations.19 Sabine is referring to the development of “legalism,” or “the presumption that the state is a creature of law and is to be discussed not in terms of sociological fact or ethical good but in terms of legal competence and rights.”20 As for Cicero’s project in On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, Sabine comments bitingly that the notion of an ideal state being “developed in the course of history” could have been an important idea “if only he had possessed the philosophical capacity to carry it out.”21 Sabine is more sympathetic in his assessment of the importance of Cicero’s formulation of the Stoic doctrine of natural law, not because of any originality by Cicero but because it becomes the most transmitted version of the doctrine. He notes several features: a universal law transcending specific human institutions that binds all people, the ethical requirement of dignity and respect due all people, a statement that no state can endure without recognizing the “rights that bind its citizens together,” and a view of the state as a “common property of the people” that derives its authority from “the collective power of the people.”22 Out of these features, three general principles emerge that were accepted for centuries: “that authority proceeds from the people, should be exercised only by the warrant

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of law, and is justified only on moral grounds.”23 For Sabine Cicero’s argument is not specifically democratic and is vague about the recourse of the people, but what is implicit in Sabine’s discussion is his concern with the radical break from these principles taken by totalitarianism. Cicero becomes important in recalling and restoring the thread of this constitutional tradition to the contemporary world. The Crisis of Democracy and the Realities of Power These acclamations of Roman contributions to constitutionalism grew out of an earlier juristic tradition, and another strand emerged that put less faith in constitutional and legal structures and looked to the Romans, instead, because they revealed the operation of the “realities of power.”24 Scholars thus began to explore the extralegal and extra-institutional relations or transactions that were organized by social power: the ability to influence (through wealth, patronage, and position) and the ability to coerce (through fear). That framework, which has its roots in the work of Anton von Premerstein, resonated with similar debates in political science and sociology between the pluralist school (reflected in the work of Arthur Bentley, David Truman, and Robert Dahl) on the one hand, and elite power approaches (in the pioneering work of Helen Merrell Lynd and Robert Lynd in the 1920s and 1930s and articulated theoretically by Gaetano Mosco, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels) on the other. How one appraised group influence, whether oligarchic or democratic, depended largely on the evaluation of the extent to which informal relations are seen as open, fluid, competitive, or transparent. Probably most influential was Ronald Syme’s study of the transformation of the Roman state and society to an oligarchy, a change that was as much about the rise of totalitarianism in Europe as it was about the hidden ways political freedom was abolished in Rome. Syme’s work goes beyond what he sees as past studies of rhetoric and literature, using these ancient sources to puncture political ideologies and propaganda. For Syme, Cicero sought through his political theory to advance a particular agenda that included redeeming his own leadership in defense of the res publica, endorsing the ancestral constitution in On the Commonwealth, creating a “liberal oligarchy” in On the Laws, and envisioning the ideal statesman as a civilian rather than a military man in On Duties.25 Whereas for Mommsen Cicero stood in the way of Caesar’s valiant efforts to save the res publica, for Syme Cicero was “a humane and cultivated man” who perished as “a victim of violence and despotism.”26 Cicero failed because he succumbed to his own “ambition and vanity,” which deluded him about the duplicity of his



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opponents.27 It is not that Cicero is derivative; it is that he is a dupe who did not understand that in the ruthless competition for power he was in over his head. It turns out that this was Cicero’s high point among those studying the informal operation of power. As the specter of totalitarianism waned, new democratic and even revolutionary aspirations exposed deep inequalities and class tensions, highlighting a view of politics as run by an elite oligarchy ruling in its own interests. Cicero was cast as the Catilinarian executioner and the defender of entrenched inequalities. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix provides the most systematic and sustained example of this approach, using Cicero against himself to reveal the class conflict that was endemic to the Roman system.28 For de Ste. Croix, Cicero’s political theory and constitutional system are veiled in a moralism and hypocrisy that gives political power to the wealthy.29 In the only book dedicated to Cicero’s political thought at the time (which took until 1988), Neal Wood depicts Cicero as “the first important social and political thinker to affirm unequivocally that the basic purpose of the state is the protection of private property.”30 For Wood, Cicero “justifies a way of life that more and more emphasized private property, business investment, and the accumulation of riches, although he takes to task the excesses to which many of his peers were prone.”31 Cicero’s legacy is that he anticipates “the conservative mentality.”32 The characteristics of this mentality include veneration of tradition, incrementalism, priority of liberty over equality (with liberty meaning that one does what is in accord with one’s station), rule by a propertied minority who act within a constitutional framework (meant to limit conflict and protect property), and limited social reform. Cicero’s thought reflects his awareness of the changes in the ruling class as it fragmented into a competition for wealth and influence. Among his shortcomings as a political thinker was that he imagined as a solution a romanticized view of the ancestral constitution without accounting for some of the underlying structural problems created by imperial expansion and the failure to address fundamental social issues of poverty and landlessness. As Wood concludes, “while taking exception to the divisive individualism of the ruling class and its excesses, he possibly contributed to their war of all against all by presenting them with a rationalization for social, political, and moral individualism. His cure, in fact, was symptomatic of the disease.”33 Cicero’s reputation does not get better when questions of justice are situated in the context of global power relations. Martha C. Nussbaum contends “that not only our insights into the ‘duties of justice’ but also our primitive thinking about the duties of material aid can be laid at the door of Cicero.”34 The reason for this is because of the “pernicious influence” of distinctions that Cicero draws between two types of duties: duties of justice that cut across national lines, and

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duties of material aid that “give us a lot of room to prefer the near and dear.”35 From the perspective of informal relations of power, whether in the state or a global context, Cicero emerges as a regressive force, justifying radical inequalities in wealth and opportunity. The Crisis of Modernity and the Search for a Spiritual and Natural Order Totalitarianism was not just a threat to constitutionalism and democracy but was seen by many as a symptom of a deeper crisis of modernity, leading scholars to look to the ancients as a counterpoint. The diagnosis of that crisis differed, though. For some scholars, the crisis of modernity was ultimately a crisis of belief in a larger and more enduring order of the cosmos. For example, Eric Voegelin contends that the ideologies that emerge in the twentieth century were the result of a loss of belief in a spiritual order and a growing certainty in the human ability (deriving from scientism and positivism) to craft a new order. In The Ecumenic Age, Voegelin argues that the Stoics initiate this turn from philosophy (and wonderment) to science, transforming the tension between God and humanity into a material form. The result is “the deformation of symbols into doctrine,” which Voegelin sees as played out in “the exploration of structures in reality through science.”36 The “genius” of Cicero, a word we rarely see associated with him, is that he recognized these “forces of disintegration” and sought to “protect the truth” through a “‘word’ that incarnates the truth of divine presence in reality.”37 He transforms “the older Latin term religio into the symbol that comprehends protectively both the truth of existence and its expression through cultic observance and doctrine.”38 But Cicero ultimately puts “his seal” on the Stoic “deformation of philosophy into doctrine.”39 He fails because he makes the mistake of fusing the Roman state with the myth of an ideal order so that he never inquires into “the material or spiritual conditions of the existence of a political community.”40 For Voegelin, Cicero “not only is not an original thinker, but he expressly refuses to be one.”41 His mixed attitude of respect and “amused contempt” for Greek philosophy “indicates that the truth of theory, while sensed as an enlargement of the intellectual and moral horizon, could have no existential meaning for a Roman.”42 For Voegelin, Cicero did not wonder. He was too at home in Rome. Cicero was a symptom of a turn in ancient thought that would lay the foundation for the spiritual crisis of modernity.43 Concerned with upending classical virtue through modern science’s rejection of final causes and ends in favor of a materialist and mechanistic universe, Leo Strauss looked to the ancients to decode a hidden conversation—hidden because philosophy is antithetical to and endangered by the city—that provided



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glimpses of natural right, reason, and revelation.44 Political philosophy, understood here as mediating between philosophy and politics, provided guidance and education about “the nature of political things and the right, or the good political order.”45 Strauss reads Cicero first as a philosopher, who, like Plato, conceals the subversiveness of philosophy and whose political actions “on behalf of philosophy” have nothing in common with his career.46 As one author notes, Cicero discovered the “secret core of Platonism” but kept it secret, guarding it.47 Cicero wends his way through Strauss’s works primarily in footnotes to illustrate or clarify some aspect of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, or the Epicureans.48 The continuities and commonalities of Cicero with the Greeks are emphasized to highlight the distinction Strauss makes between the ancients and the moderns generally and the tension between philosophy (and, in the case of Cicero, natural law) and civil society.49 Although Strauss does not write exclusively on Cicero at any point, he does appear in a chapter by James Holton in Strauss and Joseph Cropsey’s History of Political Philosophy. Seeking to counter the view of Cicero as an uninspired “dilettante” who lacked “depth of understanding,” Holton suggests that Cicero only appeared uninspired to “satisfy the demands of the practical Roman mind.”50 Cicero’s real objective was to “introduce philosophy into Rome.”51 It is philosophy, not politics, as Strauss writes, that is both natural and of a higher order for humans.52 What emerges from this analysis are two lessons that echo throughout Strauss’s writings. First, the best regime is one that favors the aristocratic “element of wisdom or counsel” because it best protects the philosopher.53 Second, the practitioner of politics must be aware of the “limitations intrinsic to political life. Both reason and justice must somehow be diluted to meet the needs of the practical or political life.”54 Cicero feigns unoriginality. But in elevating his philosophic contributions, Holton, like Strauss, denies the very nobility that Cicero saw as integral to the practice of a political life. The Crisis of Modernity and the Summoning of a Civic Republican Tradition Whereas Voegelin and Strauss attributed the crisis of modernity to a loss of a connection to a higher truth, a second response by civic republicans saw the crisis as a loss of a connection to ourselves as political beings. Its twentieth-century incarnation emerges out of a critique of liberalism, which is seen as reducing politics to the protection of interest-seeking individuals. Hannah Arendt gives us a sense of republican concerns (although her writings go well beyond the scope of civic republicanism) when she characterizes modernity as fostering a

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worldlessness in which any claims of the past are lost—the obsolescence of old products, the inefficiency of old production methods, the irrelevance of tradition, and the loss of common standards of value and their replacement with individual measures of immediate gratification—so that it is as though we are “living and struggling with a Protean universe where everything at any moment can become almost anything else.”55 Although difficult to define precisely,“worldlessness” can be understood generally as Arendt’s diagnosis that the “human artifice,” which makes up our home in the world, is no longer seen as shared, secure, familiar, or enduring.56 Arendt locates in Cicero two different paths of philosophical thought. She suggests in The Life of the Mind that “philosophy had found a kind of foster home in Rome during the last century before Christ, and in that thoroughly political society it had first of all to prove that it was good for something.”57 One such path of usefulness, written against a sense of a disintegrating public realm, was that philosophy could “teach men how to cure their despairing minds by escaping from the world through thinking.”58 Philosophy becomes the animi medicina, the art of healing the soul, as Cicero writes in the Tusculan Disputations.59 Philosophy, as articulated by Cicero and in turn adopted by such a thinker as Hegel, appears not as a response to “reason’s need” but “has an existential root in unhappiness.”60 The “disintegration of reality” and the corresponding “disunity of man and the world” create a “need for another world, more harmonious and more meaningful.”61 Arendt argues that Cicero would discover “the thoughttrains by which one could take one’s way out of the world.”62 The second path that Arendt identifies in Cicero is how philosophy, as cultura animi—a cultivation of the soul—may also return us to the world. For Arendt, Cicero’s extension of the metaphor of cultivating nature to “matters of spirit and mind” provides a way of responding to this worldlessness.63 “Culture,” which as a “word and concept, is Roman in origin,” comes from colere—“to cultivate, to dwell, to take care, to tend and preserve”—and refers at least initially to the “intercourse of man with nature in the sense of cultivating and tending nature until it becomes fit for habitation.”64 Culture, because it derives from cultivation, suggests a disposition of care for the things of the world that humans have made: monuments, buildings, works of art, political institutions, and laws. Culture indicates a public attitude of sensitivity and care for the traces of human action that allows for the enduring greatness of human action and the survival of politics. Arendt was not alone in recalling the Romans. In response to what had been a near-consensus view of a liberal tradition in Western democracies, scholars began to trace a transatlantic republican inheritance that went through or was



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seen as beginning with Cicero. In The Classical Republicans, written in 1945, Zera Fink provides an early statement of this view, arguing for an English republican tradition that included such figures as James Harrington, John Milton, and Algernon Sydney. Cicero is important in two ways. First, he (among others) articulates a view of mixed government that would be important in arguments limiting the power of the English king.65 Second, by tracing how the Roman constitution develops over time, Cicero advanced the idea that “men were free to set up whatever government they pleased.”66 The claim is a far cry from earlier views of Cicero’s constitutionalism as romantic at best and reactionary at worst. Other scholars followed and traced different aspects of this republican tradition, although in these accounts Cicero is usually either ignored or represented as part of a composite republican tradition.67 One influential genealogical interpretation that treats the Roman past seriously comes by way of Quentin Skinner. The beginning point of Skinner’s argument rests on a contrast between the modern state that has a new type of sovereign authority and the Roman res publica as its antithesis: a community of citizens gathered in “a state of civic independence” in which one can live “a free way of life, unconstrained by any unjust dependence or servitude.”68 Skinner derives from the Romans a third notion of liberty, one of nondomination, which from a communitarian form of liberty, in which one realizes liberty through participation in self-directed communities, or its liberal form, in which one seeks protection from arbitrary interference. In Foundations, Skinner traces how two aspects of this liberty—political independence (freedom from external coercion) and self-government—are used against monarchical authority by what he refers to as the neo-Romans during the Renaissance.69 In these neoRoman interpretations, there is less emphasis on specific institutions and more on a proper spirit among “the rulers, the people and the laws.”70 The genealogical argument invariably shaded over into a normative claim. Philip Pettit most notably uses this ideal of liberty as nondomination to develop a social ideal that is anticollectivist, anti-atomistic, and antimajoritarian.71 Civic republican interpretations were important in at least giving Cicero some place in contemporary political theory. But they came at a price. If for Mommsen the nuance of Cicero’s political thought disappears into his caricature of the person, for the civic republicans the nuance was often lost in service to a tradition. It is not that these neo-Roman notions are incorrect; it is that they are incomplete because they define Roman political thought along such a narrow spectrum, by way of a particular, historically situated transmission of a Roman notion of liberty. In Skinner’s Liberty before Liberalism, for example, Cicero is largely indistinguishable from Sallust, Livy, Seneca, and the Digest.

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While referencing a Roman republican tradition associated with Cicero, Pettit distances his account from its historical accuracy.72 Perhaps it is indicative of the status of Cicero in political thought that when Arendt explores some of these subtleties, their importance for shaping her thought were largely ignored.73 The Rejection of Formalism and the Search for a Vision of the Ideal Perhaps we can account for this limited attention to Cicero and the Romans: they largely dropped out of graduate curricula in political theory in the 1970s and 1980s as political theory took different directions. With the elevation of more formal aspects of theory, the cumulative nature of Roman thinking was emptied of conceptual substance. As William Ebenstein notes, “there is not much formal political theory in the Roman heritage that compares with the brilliant masterpieces of Greek philosophers. The only Roman political writer who has had an enduring influence throughout the ages is Cicero.”74 That contribution was reducible to “law and administration.”75 In Ebenstein’s Political Thought in Perspective, Plato received forty-nine pages of treatment and Aristotle received thirty-six. Cicero could muster only six pages—less attention than allotted to Dante, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Jean Bodin, Thomas Jefferson, or Robert Owen. In his Introduction to Political Thinkers, Cicero is absent. Reacting to the new formalism in political thought, Sheldon Wolin provided an influential argument about a different direction of political thought: “Political theory is not so much interested in political practices, or how they operate, but in their meaning.”76 Imagination, more than methodology, is the means by which theorists strive to “transcend history” and present the “totality of political phenomena.”77 Wolin celebrated political thought that was “architectonic” in the sense that “the political imagination attempts to mould the totality of political phenomena to accord with some vision of the Good that lies outside the political world.”78 The difficulty that confronted the Romans, Wolin suggested, was that the spatial dimension of politics had changed from the city-state to an expansive empire. Yet the Romans were unable to modify their categories of thought to rediscover the meaning of the political in this new institutional setting. In a sense, Wolin takes Mommsen’s critique of Cicero and generalizes it to the Romans, arguing that “the student of political ideas must deal with a period notoriously lacking in great political thinkers.”79 The “little there was in the way of systematic theory proves on closer analysis to be more often Greek than Roman in origin.”80 What was different—and Wolin is speaking about Cicero here—was a



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recognition “of the role of institutions in defining and ordering an important segment of the community.”81 But these institutions offered little in the way of vision, “level[ing] individual greatness” and making political action indirect through “the distorting medium of institutions.”82 For Wolin, Cicero defined a set of Roman principles that diminished politics to “nothing but the pursuit of interests.”83 For Cicero, “friendship was converted into an instrument of political strategy,” justice was treated as “a useful type of knowledge for eliciting the cooperation of others in supplying our own wants,” virtue was place in service to political administration, and proper administration was oriented to protecting property.84 In the end, Cicero’s response to the crisis of the republic could not help but fail because “the long schooling in interest-politics had conditioned the Romans to distrust their own political vocabulary.”85 Wolin concluded his characterization of the Roman period by suggesting that political philosophy had “exchanged its political element for a vapid moralism.”86 In this focus on political thought as the recovery of meaning, the Romans had neither the vision nor the conceptual power to address the ontological questions of political being. To students who later encountered and were influenced by Wolin’s book, he provided a reason (several, in fact) to ignore Cicero. There is a discernible gap in the ensuing decades in engagement by political theorists with Cicero and the Romans. With the explosion of articles in the early 1970s debating the nature of political theory, the Romans never entered the debate.87 In the two decades after the journal Political Theory was founded in 1973, it published only two articles on Cicero. From 1980 to 1990, the journal History of Political Thought published only four articles that dealt with ancient Rome, and none were on Cicero. More surprising, only five articles on ancient Rome were even submitted to the journal.88 From 1960 to 1990, no articles on Cicero were published in History and Theory. A similar paucity of discussions or even mentions of Cicero occurs in Polity and the Review of Politics. Classics of Moral and Political Theory has selections from Epicurus and Epictetus, but not Cicero. George Klosko subsumes Roman political thought under Hellenistic political theory.89 Leslie Paul Thiele’s Thinking Politics, which aims to “integrate the insights of ancient, modern, and postmodern political thought,” has two references to the Romans: one brief quotation by Cicero and the term res publica.90 Cicero’s works appear in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought as a “revival of the intellectual activity in the Greek world under Roman rule, on a vast scale, if not of great originality.”91 What had become most noteworthy about Cicero is his failure to offer a vision of the political.

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Politics without Illusion This appraisal of Cicero has changed. The years since about 2000 have witnessed a revival of interest in Cicero and fresh new assessments of his contributions. J. G. F. Powell’s edited volume, Cicero the Philosopher, which appeared in 1995, provided an early and important examination of Cicero’s philosophic contributions that, as Powell writes in his introduction, “would have been hard to conceive” twenty or thirty years before.92 There have followed new contributions that specifically address Cicero’s contributions to political thought by Joy Connolly, Bryan Garsten, Daniel Kapust, Walter Nicgorski, Jed W. Atkins, Benjamin Straumann, Gary Remer, and Dean Hammer.93 These works are informed by the different interpretive traditions I have discussed already. But they are also responding to these traditions, navigating between utopian illusion and totalitarian despair. This greater appreciation of Cicero partly arises from a deeper engagement with the historical context of his thought—not with an orientation toward historicism but with a sense of how the contours of Cicero’s thought are shaped by and give expression to the concrete experience of politics. The breadth of Cicero’s contributions has widened and been given new currency to include original contributions to debates about deliberative democracy, constitutionalism, legitimacy, political leadership, and citizenship. I want to highlight how these approaches have altered the particular traditions of Ciceronian interpretation and what they suggest about the direction of political thought. Constitutionalism Debates about the Roman constitutional system remained vigorous, particularly in German scholarship, driven by two questions. First, to what extent can one talk meaningfully about a Roman constitution? Second, given the complexity of authority relations, who had power?94 Building on these constitutional strands but modifying them in important ways, Straumann characterizes his argument as a “rediscovery of the constitutional thought of the late Republic.”95 Although he is referring to the recovery of a much older tradition of interpretation, in several striking ways Straumann’s argument rediscovers some of the political and legal thought of the Carlyles, McIlwain, and Sabine that largely dropped out of the debate in the ensuing decades. They collectively challenge the dichotomy of ancient and modern, viewing Roman legal thought as more modern than Greek in the concepts that are formulated and in their influence on subsequent discussions of constitutionalism.96 They note how Roman legal thought articulates a higher law that is universal, precedes any given state, serves as the foundation for rights and justice, and provides limits on legislation.97 To



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recall Sabine’s formulation, the Romans conceive of the state as a product of law. In addition, they share a view of the Romans as providing a conception of a prepolitical state of nature in which people join together for protection, an understanding of the role of constitutions in establishing procedures for the protection of property, and the association of liberty with a share in power.98 But a point of emphasis in Straumann’s discussion is a different take on Cicero’s relationship to these constitutional discussions. Where Cicero usually figures as a source expressing the cultural practices of the time and rarely as a constitutional thinker, Straumann sees “Cicero’s theoretical writings as well as his forensic and deliberative oratory” as a “constitutional argument” in its own right.99 Cicero is no longer a reactionary and unimaginative force symptomatic of Rome’s decline; rather, his constitutional arguments reflect an attempt to address the practical issues facing the republic by establishing “precise boundaries between constitutional and extra-constitutional violence and authority.”100 Cicero does that by recognizing “contingency and a sense of the limits of reason” and by making reference “to a foundation of natural-law norms that govern a supposed prepolitical realm.”101 We see a shift in the categories by which we view the Romans: from a subsumption of Roman politics into other ancient forms to a view of Roman constitutionalism as displaying distinctively modern features, from a view of Cicero’s constitutional arguments as largely embedded in Roman practices to a view of Cicero as making advances in constitutional thought, and from traditional questions of republican virtue to debates about the scope of power.102 Informal Power Discussions of the informal operation of power have changed as well. Although the oligarchic aspects of Roman power remain an ever-present and not incorrect subject of scholarship, the importance of these norms has taken new directions, giving insight into the operation of Roman politics and the role of norms in political systems. We can credit Syme’s student Fergus Millar with turning these oligarchic assumptions on their heads, seeing instead “a very striking example of a political system in which rival conceptions of state and society, and rival policies as regards both internal structures and external relations, were openly debated before the crowd in the Forum.”103 By way of his oratory, Cicero becomes a critical source for Millar’s interpretation of the vitality of the Roman public forum in which orators represented previous political issues in terms of conflict between officeholders and demonstrated a concern with public opinion.104 Although Millar still talks in terms of political structures, such as the equal voting of all citizens in the comitia tributa, he explores the “social realities of participation” and “the exercise of power, persuasion, and force between those

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individuals and groups who did participate.”105 Subsequent scholars have pursued these social dimensions of power, continuing to revise earlier views of Rome as a closed, clientele system (though not necessarily agreeing with Millar) by exploring the complicated dynamics of “clout,” patterns of participation, public opinion, electioneering, and the role of rhetoric in entrenching hierarchies, unsettling hierarchies, and forming identities.106 Beyond reevaluations of the operation of power relations in the Roman political system, scholars began to draw out new conceptual insights about the role of informal norms and passions in politics that are seen as critical to binding a community together as much as they are to dividing it. If at one point the response to totalitarianism, nationalism, and factionalism was to exorcise these passions with reasoned discourse, recent scholarship has begun to appreciate the invisible, extra-institutional, affective ways by which individuals relate to each, including notions of decorum, love, care, and trust.107 Cicero’s res publica is not an abstraction derived by reason; it is a living concept oriented by the memories of ancestors who are loved and admired, made familiar by the visual artifacts that grasp and move them, and given form through continual acts of renovation and renewal. These insights take on particular salience for contemporary political theorists, as they did for Cicero, because of the looming sense that these invisible bonds are disintegrating. Higher Truths Cicero’s writings always pointed in two ways: toward the human longing for the eternal and the temporal, a trajectory traced in Scipio’s ascent and return. Scholars have begun to explore these connections anew, providing fresh appraisals of Cicero’s philosophic legacy while noting aspects of contingency and doubt in his thought. As Powell speculates, Cicero’s skepticism may appear more attractive to modern readers, who, “living as they do in an age which has largely abandoned the belief in an attainable absolute truth, may well now regard Cicero’s Academic probabilism as a more realistic strategy than the rational certainties of the Stoic or the materialist certainties of the Epicurean.”108 Margaret Graver has treated seriously Cicero’s Stoicism in her discussion of emotions in the Tusculan Disputations.109 Atkins has sought to place Cicero’s On the Commonwealth and On the Laws in a tradition of political philosophy, arguing that these works can be read as “products of the appropriation, transformation, and transcendence of Greek thought.”110 Atkins positions his argument between what he describes as idealist and realist approaches, introducing the need for grounding philosophical and political discussions in an account of nature while remaining skeptical about the possibility of perfection.111



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Some Straussians have also returned to Cicero, taking more seriously his Academic skepticism and own political priorities. Noteworthy is Nicgorski, who was almost alone for decades in blazing a Straussian trail to Cicero. Nicgorski sounds the Straussian concern with a modern world “when clear and certain knowledge” that comes from “assured premises have been ever more undermined.”112 Nicgorski follows Strauss in the claim that “Cicero knew and accepted the classical teaching that philosophy for its own sake—search and contemplation—was the highest human activity.”113 In terms of the practical dimensions of human life, Nicgorski again develops a Straussian theme in suggesting that Cicero “understands human society and, thus, political life itself to be formed out of need, not merely in the sense of security or ‘necessities of life’ but in terms of the full requisites of human nature, the chief of which is virtue itself.”114 That serves as the basis for Nicgorski’s argument that Cicero’s notion of utility is grounded in the needs of human nature.115 There is a final point of Straussian emphasis in distinguishing between the best regime and the “best practicable regime.”116 Through a series of works with such titles as Cicero’s Practical Philosophy and Cicero’s Skepticism and His Recovery of Political Philosophy, one can discern an interest and engagement in Cicero’s politics.117 Most significantly, Nicgorski views Cicero’s “life and writings as one fabric,” suggesting that Cicero “would not have welcomed praise based on a distinction of his philosophical writings from his political efforts or, for that matter, on a separation of his style from his substance.”118 Recalling Strauss’s observation that perhaps the defense of philosophy from ordinary politics has been too good in that it has given rise to philosophy and science that is unrelated to political action, Nicgorski suggests that perhaps this is why “Cicero’s distinctively practical philosophy” is largely ignored in modern philosophic discussions.119 Cicero still labors in Plato’s shadow.120 But in bringing together Cicero’s philosophic writings with his political actions, Nicgorski argues that Cicero changes the emphasis in his “loving quarrel” with Plato from an ideal city to the model statesman.121 As Nicgorski suggests, “The model statesman with his characteristic prudence comes to be prior to any specific articulation of a best regime, for not only must the standard for the wider society be a practicable one (that is, it must itself pass the judgment of prudence) if it is to be good and worthy of pursuit but whatever the specifics of the best regime at a given time, it is the statesman who represents the primary means of attaining this regime.”122 Cicero’s interests in the “best practicable regime” and the model statesman were influenced by his and the Roman experience that seeks to avoid “the kind of controversies that arose from the very beginning around the specific institutions

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and customs of Plato’s city in speech.”123 Furthermore, his political activities can be seen less as a distraction and more as providing “an advantaged perspective.”124 It is a recognition of the imperfection of politics and the attainability of a leader who is “marked by a genuine appreciation for inquiry as well as its limits, and yet embracing the responsibilities of leadership in the public realm.”125 Civic Republicanism Much of the pioneering work on the Romans grows out of a civic republican tradition. In contrast to some earlier scholarship that focused on tracing a transatlantic, republican tradition, these newer interpretations present us with a more historically contextualized, more nuanced, and more normatively important Cicero. In particular, one sees a recovery of the practice of political rhetoric that had fallen out of favor because it was implicated in the imperfections of politics that political theory sought to escape: its manipulativeness, deceptiveness, and hierarchical aspects.126 The connection between rhetoric and republicanism should not surprise us. Rhetoric is not a discourse of abstracted people but begins with how, as Garsten writes, “we find them—opinionated, self-interested, sentimental, partial in their friends and family, and often unreasonable.”127 Rhetoric is not just a mirror of prejudice, though; in these new formulations, it is seen as playing a role in deliberation and judgment, whether as it is informed by philosophy, as it contains within it a “pragmatic political morality” that recognizes the “actual practice of politics,” or as it constructs us as political entities who, by way of discourse, speak within particular historical traditions and communicate and reflect on these traditions.128 These republican approaches share a recognition of the incompleteness or messiness of politics. By this I do not mean simply a nodding recognition that an ideal cannot be achieved or, as with the Straussians, the begrudged descent of the philosopher from the best life into political life, if only to make the community safe for the philosopher. Instead, Cicero reorients how one thinks about the relationship between political thought and action. This messiness arises from Cicero’s grappling with the tensions lived in the final decades of the republic: tensions between selfishness and sociability, reason and emotion, knowledge and its limits, and the importance of institutions and their frailty. Rhetoric does not stand apart from these tensions but, as Connolly suggests, evokes “the looming awareness that the living web of communal virtue is always, somewhere, being torn apart by human vice and mortality; that the basis for legitimacy is slowly eroding; that the citizen and the state must die together.”129 That is, political thought is now immersed in these tensions.



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Recasting Vision Evaluated by their production of an imagined political world, the Romans could not help but pale in comparison to the Greeks. Cicero and Virgil both admit that. But through that lens we are bound to misunderstand how the Romans actually thought about their political world. One immediately encounters in Cicero (as with any Roman text) an array of names, events, and practices that appear more practical than conceptual, more concrete than abstract, more culturally and historically embedded then universal, and more backward than forward looking. But new approaches and reassessments have offered fresh insight into Cicero’s contributions by recasting our vision from an imagined, totalizing ideal to a more vivid sense of the tangibility of political life, often accompanied by a renewed appreciation of thinking from history. Important in guiding these conceptual insights is what is referred to as the rhetorical turn in political theory. This turn is certainly related to the revival of rhetoric in the practice of politics that we saw earlier, but it also provides a methodological grounding for the study of concepts. For Skinner, who was influential in developing this approach, “political life itself sets the main problems for the political theorist.”130 That leads Skinner to examine the “nature and limits of the normative vocabulary at the time,” which becomes important in identifying the types of questions that get asked.131 Rejecting some of the abstractness by which the history of political ideas has been discussed, Skinner argues instead that “the understanding of concepts” is always, in part, “a matter of understanding what can be done with them in argument”: the assumptions and vocabulary of traditions against which the speaker is reacting; the moves in an argument; and the changes that are introduced into the debate.132 One of the implications of this approach is to broaden the types of texts important for studying political thought, from a privileging of the theoretical to an examination of the language, including that of rhetoric, by which people make sense of the world. This rhetorical turn has been complemented by a variety of other methodological approaches, including cultural studies, new historicism, poststructuralism, and feminist theory that analyze how social and political tensions play out in texts, not just as a mirror of these tensions but as efforts to navigate them in turn. These approaches have reappraised Cicero’s conceptual contributions by seeing how concepts are formulated in his explicitly philosophic works and by way of his visual language and rhetoric.133 Moreover, the conceptual range of Cicero’s works have expanded to include an early and original formulation of legitimacy, conflicting discourses of liberty, conceptualizations of the state as a type of societas or partnership, the connection of self-fashioning to citizenship,

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the sociopolitical foundations of jurisprudence, and the role of disciplinary practices in organizing the logic of the state.134 Rather than being a failure of vision, Cicero’s thought is seen as evoking the experience of the tangible world.135 The vision that drives Cicero’s thought does not transcend history. Rather, the vision proceeds from recognition of a community’s embeddedness in history, asking not how we create anew but where we go from here: how we reconcile ourselves to loss, how we care for what we have created, and how we give a future to our past.136 Conclusion I want to step back and quickly summarize the challenges these interpretations make to our reception of Cicero. Against the view of Cicero’s thought as largely derivative of the Greeks, there are new suggestions of the originality and distinctiveness of Cicero’s contributions in constitutional thought, natural law, and leadership. Against views that Cicero is simply doing the bidding of the landed aristocracy, we have new evaluations of his contributions to ethics, democratic deliberation, and the invisible bonds that organize community life. Against the claim that Cicero provides no vision, we have a more complex understanding of what this vision entails; not necessarily an escape from but a recognition of the tensions and incompleteness of politics. The past few decades have largely rewritten Mommsen’s assessment of Cicero, not just in identifying greater originality but also in elevating aspects of Cicero’s arguments that count in ways that were dismissed earlier. What we encounter is the lived experience of political life that exists between past and future, memory and forgetfulness, structure and belief, permanence and temporality, justice and injustice, freedom and discipline, and hope and loss. It may be the case that Cicero has renewed interest for political theorists because he speaks to some of the same tensions that haunt contemporary politics. Notes My thanks to Kerry Whiteside for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 1. Cicero, De Oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 2.9.36, translation mine. 2. Cicero, Letters to Friends, trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) 5.12.1, translation mine. 3. See Dean Hammer, “What Is Politics in the Ancient World?,” in A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Ryan K. Balot (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 20–36, for a review of methodological approaches to the study of ancient politics; and Dean Hammer, Roman Political Thought and the Modern Theoretical Imagination



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(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 13–37, for a discussion of the history of the reception of Roman political thought in the twentieth century. 4. Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome, trans. William P. Dickson (London: Richard Bently, 1862), 1.1 (2). 5. James F. McGlew, “Revolution and Freedom in Theodor Mommsen’s Römische Geschichte,” Phoenix 40 (1986): 432. 6. Mommsen, History of Rome, 5.2 (86), 5.10 (443–44). 7. Mommsen, History of Rome, 5.11 (448). 8. Mommsen, History of Rome, 5.2 (86). 9. Mommsen, History of Rome, 5.12 (602–7). 10. The number of books on the Romans devoted to law is stunning. In addition to Mommsen’s works there are William H. Buckler, The Origin and History of Contract in Roman Law down to the End of the Republican Period (London: Clay and Sons, 1895); Max Zöller, Römische Staats- und Rechtsaltertümer: Ein Kompendium für das Stadium und die Praxis (Breslau: Marcus, 1895); Ernst Herzog, Geschichte und System der Römischen Staatsverfassung (Leipzig: Teuber, 1884); Wilhelm Liebenam, Forschungen zur Verwaltungsgeschichte des Römischen Kaiserreichs (Leipzig: Teuber, 1888); Wilhelm Liebenam, Zur Geschichte und Organisation des Römischen Vereinswesen (Leipzig: Teuber, 1890); Antonin Deloume, Les Manieurs d’Argent à Rome (Paris: Thorin, 1892); W. T. Arnold, The Roman System of Provincial Administration (Oxford: Blackwell, 1879); T. E. Scrutton, The Influence of the Roman Law on the Law of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1885); T. M. Taylor, A Constitutional and Political History of Rome (London: Methuen, 1899); H. J. Roby, Roman Private Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902); R. W. Carlyle and A. J. Carlyle, A History of Mediæval Political Theory in the West, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1903); E. C. Clark, History of Roman Private Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906); Fernand Bernard, The First Year of Roman Law, trans. Charles P. Sherman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1906); and P. F. Girard, A Short History of Roman Law, trans. A. H. F. Lefroy and J. H. Cameron (Toronto: Canada Law, 1906). 11. Carlyle and Carlyle, History, 1.3; see also Carlyle and Carlyle, History, 1.12: “certain incoherence in his philosophical conceptions.” 12. Moses I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 128. 13. George H. Sabine, “What Is a Political Theory?,” Journal of Politics 1 (1939): 4. 14. See Charles H. McIlwain, The Growth of Political Thought in the West, from the Greeks to the End of the Middle Ages (New York: Macmillan, 1932); and Charles H. McIlwain, Constitutionalism, Ancient and Modern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1940), 45. 15. George H. Sabine and Stanley B. Smith, “Introduction,” in Cicero, On the Commonwealth, ed. G. H. Sabine and S. B. Smith (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1929), 40. 16. Sabine and Smith, “Introduction,” 40. 17. Sabine and Smith, “Introduction,” 99. 18. George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (New York: Holt, 1937), 162, 155.

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19. Sabine, History, 161. 20. Sabine, History, 160; see also Sabine and Smith,“Introduction,” 39–40; and McIlwain, Constitutionalism, 46–47. 21. Sabine, History, 162. 22. Sabine, History, 164–67; see also Sabine and Smith, “Introduction,” 7. 23. Sabine, History, 166. 24. Ramsay MacMullen, Corruption and the Decline of Rome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 116; see also Hans J. Morgenthau and Kenneth W. Thompson, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (1948; repr., New York: McGrawHill, 1993), 227. 25. Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (1939; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 144–46. 26. Syme, Roman Revolution, 4. 27. Syme, Roman Revolution, 11, 122. 28. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (London: Duckworth, 1981), 312. 29. De Ste. Croix, Class Struggle, 414, 331, also 344, 355. 30. Neal Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 132; see also 129. 31. Wood, Cicero’s, 210. 32. Wood, Cicero’s, 210. 33. Wood, Cicero’s, 213. 34. Martha C. Nussbaum, “Duties of Justice, Duties of Material Aid: Cicero’s Problematic Legacy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (2000): 178. 35. Nussbaum, “Duties,” 178, 180. 36. Eric Voegelin, Order and History: The Ecumenic Age (1974; repr., Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 4:91. 37. Voegelin, Order and History, 4:91. 38. Voegelin, Order and History, 4:92. 39. Voegelin, Order and History, 4:101. 40. Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, ed. Ellis Sandoz (1956; repr., Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 1:136. 41. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, 1:131. 42. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (1952; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 91. 43. See also Willmoore Kendall and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, Cicero and the Politics of the Public Orthodoxy (Pamplona: Universidad de Navarra, 1965), for a Voegelinian reading that is more sympathetic to Cicero as a philosopher, while noting its incompatibility with Cicero as politician. 44. Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959); on science and natural right, see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950). 45. Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, 12. 46. Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, 126–27.



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47. William H. F. Altman, The Revival of Platonism in Cicero’s Late Philosophy: Platonis aemulus and the Invention of Cicero (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 29. 48. See, for example, references in Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964); and Strauss, Natural Right. 49. See Strauss, Natural Right, 154–56, 163. 50. James E. Holton, “Marcus Tullius Cicero,” in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), 130. 51. Holton, “Marcus Tullius Cicero,” 131. 52. Strauss, The City and Man, 13–14. 53. Holton, “Marcus Tullius Cicero,” 139. 54. Holton, “Marcus Tullius Cicero,” 149. 55. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 95. 56. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 173. 57. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 1:158. 58. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:152. 59. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 3.3.6. 60. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:153. 61. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:153. 62. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:157. 63. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 212; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 2.4.13. 64. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 211–12. 65. Zera Silver Fink, The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth Century England (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1945), 5–6. 66. Fink, Classical Republicans, 26. 67. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, NC: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1969); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2006). 68. Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 2, Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 17; see also Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 297. 69. Skinner, Foundations, 6–7. 70. Skinner, Foundations, 45.

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71. Pettit, Republicanism, vii, 129. 72. Pettit, Republicanism, 5, 10. 73. The few studies that pursued these Ciceronian strands in Arendt’s thought include Kirstie McClure, “The Odor of Judgment: Exemplarity, Propriety, and Politics in the Company of Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig J. Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Dean Hammer, “Hannah Arendt and Roman Political Thought: The Practice of Theory,” Political Theory 30 (2002): 124–49; and Hammer, Roman Political Thought and the Modern Theoretical Imagination, 38–77. 74. William Ebenstein, Political Thought in Perspective (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 87. 75. Ebenstein, Political Thought, 87. 76. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (1960; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 7. 77. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 19. 78. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 19. 79. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 65. 80. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 65. 81. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 76. 82. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 76. 83. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 81. 84. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 78–79. 85. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 81. 86. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 85. 87. Giovanni Sartori, “What Is ‘Politics’?,” Political Theory 1 (1973): 8, for example, writes that the Romans substitute the “juridical” for the “political.” 88. Iain Hampsher-Monk, “Ten Year Report on Article Submissions to History of Political Thought,” History of Political Thought 11, no. 4, supplement (1990): 773–76. 89. George Klosko, History of Political Theory: An Introduction, 2 vols. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1993). 90. Leslie Paul Thiele, Thinking Politics: Perspectives in Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern Political Theory (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1997), xi. 91. David Miller, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 451. 92. J. G. F. Powell,“Introduction: Cicero’s Philosophical Works and Their Background,” in Cicero the Philosopher: Twelve Papers, ed. J. G. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 1. 93. Joy Connolly, The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Joy Connolly, The Life of Roman Republicanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Daniel J. Kapust, Republicanism, Rhetoric, and Roman Political Thought: Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Walter Nicgorski, ed., Cicero’s Practical Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012); Walter Nicgorski, Cicero’s Skepticism and His Recovery of Political Philosophy (New York:



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Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Jed W. Atkins, Cicero on Politics and the Limits of Reason: The Republic and Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Benjamin Straumann, Crisis and Constitutionalism: Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Gary A. Remer, Ethics and the Orator: The Ciceronian Tradition of Political Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Hammer, “Hannah Arendt”; Hammer, Roman Political Thought and the Modern Theoretical Imagination; and Dean Hammer, Roman Political Thought: From Cicero to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 94. See discussions by Fergus Millar,“The Political Character of the Classical Roman Republic, 200–151 B.C.,” Journal of Roman Studies 74 (1984): 18; Fergus Millar, The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 3–4; Christian Meier, Res publica amissa: eine Studie zu Verfassung und Geschichte der späten römischen Republik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 56–57, 116–18; Franz Wieacker, Römische Rechtsgeschichte, Erster Abschnitt: Einleitung, Quellenkunde, Frühzeit und Republik (Munich: Beck, 1988); P. A. Brunt, The Fall of the Roman Republic and Related Essays (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 345; A. W. Lintott, The Constitution of the Roman Republic (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 39; J. A. North, “The Constitution of the Roman Republic,” in A Companion to the Roman Republic, ed. Nathan Stewart Rosenstein and Robert MorsteinMarx (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 256; Martin Jehne, “Methods, Models, and Historiography,” in A Companion to the Roman Republic, ed. Nathan Stewart Rosenstein and Robert Morstein-Marx (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 21; Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp, Reconstructing the Roman Republic: An Ancient Political Culture and Modern Research, trans. Henry Heitmann-Gordon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 18; and Straumann, Crisis and Constitutionalism, 36. 95. Straumann, Crisis and Constitutionalism, 341. 96. Carlyle and Carlyle, History, 2, 9; McIlwain, Constitutionalism, 28–29, 40, 45, 60; Straumann, Crisis and Constitutionalism, 191–237. 97. Carlyle and Carlyle, History, 6–8, 17; McIlwain, Constitutionalism, 48, 59; Straumann, Crisis and Constitutionalism, 6, 11, 13, 118–45; also Sabine, History, 164–66. 98. On prepolitical state of nature, see Carlyle and Carlyle, History, 13, 17; and Straumann, Crisis and Constitutionalism, 161–68. On the procedures for protecting property, see McIlwain, Constitutionalism, 52–54; and Straumann, Crisis and Constitutionalism, 168–90. For associating liberty with a share in power, see Carlyle and Carlyle, History, 15; McIlwain, Constitutionalism, 28–29, 39–40, 45–47, 50; and Straumann, Crisis and Constitutionalism, 6; see also Sabine, History, 167. 99. Straumann, Crisis and Constitutionalism, 2. 100. Straumann, Crisis and Constitutionalism, 2. 101. Straumann, Crisis and Constitutionalism, 150. 102. Straumann, Crisis and Constitutionalism, 2. 103. Millar, Crowd in Rome, 7. 104. Millar, Crowd in Rome, 59. 105. Millar, Crowd in Rome, 208. 106. On clout, see W. Jeffrey Tatum, “The Practice of Politics and the Unpredictable Dynamics of Clout in the Roman Republic,” in A Companion to Greek Democracy and

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the Roman Republic, ed. Dean Hammer (Oxford: John Wiley and Sons, 2015). On patterns of participation, see Robert Morstein-Marx, Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 122–23; Martin Jehne, “Who Attended Roman Assemblies? Some Remarks on Political Participation in the Roman Republic,” in Repúblicas y ciudadannos: Modeles de participación cívica en el mundo antiguo, ed. Francisco Marco Simón, Francisco Pina Polo, and José Remesal Rodriguez (Barcelona: Publicacións i edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2006); Henrik Mouritsen, Plebs and Politics in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Henrik Mouritsen, “The Incongruence of Power: The Roman Constitution in Theory and Practice,” in A Companion to Greek Democracy and the Roman Republic, ed. Dean Hammer (Oxford: John Wiley and Sons, 2015). On public opinion, see Cristina Rosillo López, Public Opinion and Politics in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). On electioneering, see Alexander Yakobson, Elections and Electioneering in Rome: A Study in the Political System of the Late Republic (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999). On rhetoric in entrenching hierarchies, see Morstein-Marx, Mass Oratory. On unsettling hierarchies, see Connolly, Life of Roman Republicanism, 23–64; and Yakobson, Elections and Electioneering. On forming identities, see Connolly, State of Speech, 38–76; and Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 107. On decorum, see Daniel J. Kapust, “Cicero on Decorum and the Morality of Rhetoric,” European Journal of Political Theory 10 (2011): 92–112; and Connolly, State of Speech, 169–85, On love, see Connolly, State of Speech, 163–97. On care, see Hammer, Roman Political Thought and the Modern Theoretical Imagination, 38–77. On trust, see J. Jackson Barlow, “Cicero on Property and the State,” in Cicero’s Practical Philosophy, ed. Walter Nicgorski (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 212–41; Hammer, Roman Political Thought: From Cicero to Augustine, 62–67; and Dean Hammer, “Foucault, Sovereignty, and Governmentality in the Roman Republic,” Foucault Studies 22 (2017): 49–71. 108. Powell, “Introduction,” 23; see also Jonathan Zarecki, Cicero’s Ideal Statesman in Theory and Practice (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), on the rector; Raphael Woolf, Cicero: The Philosophy of a Roman Sceptic (London: Routledge, 2015). 109. Margaret Graver, Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 110. Atkins, Cicero on Politics, 8, 12; see also Yelena Baraz, A Written Republic: Cicero’s Philosophical Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 111. Atkins, Cicero on Politics, 230. 112. Nicgorski, Cicero’s Skepticism, 7; see also Nicgorski, Cicero’s Practical Philosophy, 9; and Nicgorski, Cicero’s Skepticism, 1. 113. Walter Nicgorski, “Cicero’s Paradoxes and His Idea of Utility,” Political Theory 12 (1984): 566. 114. Nicgorski, Cicero’s Skepticism, 115. 115. Nicgorski, Cicero’s Skepticism, 6. 116. Walter Nicgorski, “Cicero’s Focus: From the Best Regime to the Model Statesman,” Political Theory 19 (1991): 245.



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117. See also David S. Fott, “The Politico-Philosophical Character of Cicero’s Verdict in De Natura Deorum,” in Cicero’s Practical Philosophy, ed. Walter Nicgorski (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012); and David S. Fott, “Skepticism about Natural Right in Cicero’s De Republica,” Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics 16 (2014): 152–80. 118. Nicgorski, Cicero’s Practical Philosophy, 2. 119. Nicgorski, Cicero’s Practical Philosophy, 6. 120. For example, see most Altman, Revival of Platonism. 121. Nicgorski, “Cicero’s Focus,” 234; see also Nicgorski, Cicero’s Skepticism, 158. 122. Nicgorski, “Cicero’s Focus,” 243; see also Nicgorski, Cicero’s Skepticism, 167. 123. Nicgorski, “Cicero’s Focus,” 245, 241. 124. Nicgorski, Cicero’s Practical Philosophy, 9. 125. Nicgorski, Cicero’s Skepticism, 5. 126. Remer, Ethics and the Orator, 176. 127. Garsten, Saving Persuasion, 4–5. 128. Garsten, Saving Persuasion, 159; Remer, Ethics and the Orator, 4, 169; Connolly, State of Speech, 262. 129. Connolly, State of Speech, 14. 130. Skinner, Foundations, xi. 131. Skinner, Foundations, xi. 132. Quentin Skinner, “Retrospect: Studying Rhetoric and Conceptual Change,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 176; Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7–8. 133. On visual language, see Vasaly, Representations; and Elaine Fantham, The Roman World of Cicero’s De oratore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). On rhetoric, see Ingo Gildenhard, Creative Eloquence: The Construction of Reality in Cicero’s Speeches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Connolly, State of Speech. 134. On legitimacy, see Malcolm Schofield,“Cicero’s Definition of Res Publica,” in Cicero the Philosopher, ed. J. G. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). On discourses of liberty, see Valentina Arena, Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). On self-fashioning and citizenship, see John Dugan, Making a New Man: Ciceronian Self-Fashioning in the Rhetorical Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). On sociopolitical foundations of jurisprudence, see Jill Harries, Cicero and the Jurists: From Citizen’s Law to the Lawful State (London: Duckworth, 2006). On disciplinary practices and the logic of the state, see Hammer, “Foucault,” 49–71. 135. Hammer, Roman Political Thought and the Modern Theoretical Imagination, 38–77; Hammer, Roman Political Thought: From Cicero to Augustine, 76–87; see also Connolly, Life of Roman Republicanism, 207. 136. See Hammer, Roman Political Thought: From Cicero to Augustine, 26–92.

Contributors

Michelle T. C l arke is an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College. The author of Machiavelli’s Florentine Republic (2018), she has also written several articles on Machiavelli, Roman political thought, and republicanism. She is currently working on a book about the concept of political order in Cicero and Machiavelli. D ean Ham m er is the John W. Wetzel Professor of Classics and Professor of Government at Franklin and Marshall College. He is the author of The Puritan Tradition (1998), The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought (2002), Roman Political Thought and the Modern Theoretical Imagination, Roman Political Thought: From Cicero to Augustine (2008), and an edited volume, A Companion to Greek Democracy and the Roman Republic (2015). Daniel J. K apust is a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he also directs the Political Economy, Philosophy, and Politics Program and is the director of the Center for Early Modern Studies. He is the author of Republicanism, Rhetoric, and Roman Political Thought: Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus (2011) and Flattery and the History of Political Thought: That Glib and Oily Art (2018). He has published widely on topics including republicanism, rhetoric, classical reception, and democratic theory, and on figures including Lucretius, Cicero, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Adam Smith. E ric M acP hail is a professor of French at Indiana University and the editor of the scholarly journal Erasmus Studies, published under the auspices of the Erasmus of Rotterdam Society. He is the author, most recently, of Atheist’s Progress: Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment (2020). 225

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E mily Nac ol is an assistant professor of political theory at the University of Toronto. She is the author of An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain (2016). Her research interests include the history of eighteenthcentury political thought and political economy, the politics of risk, discourses of labor and work, and plague writing as a genre of political thinking. C ary J. Nederman is a professor of political science at Texas A&M University. His research concentrates on the history of Western political thought, with a specialization in early European political theories from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, especially the reception of ancient Greek and Roman ideas. He is the author or editor of more than twenty volumes and has published in excess of one hundred journal articles and book chapters. His latest books are The Bonds of Humanity: Cicero’s Legacies in European Social and Political Thought, ca. 1100–ca. 1550 (2020) and Thomas Becket: An Intimate Portrait (with Karen Bollermann, 2020). Daniel I. O’Neill is a professor of political science at the University of Florida, where he works principally on the history of modern political thought. He is the author of The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy (2007) and Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire (2016), and the coauthor or coeditor of three other books. His scholarship has also appeared in such journals as Political Theory, History of Political Thought, Journal of the History of Ideas, Review of Politics, and Polity, as well as a number of edited volumes. Gary R em er is a professor of political science at Tulane University. He is the author of Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (1996) and Ethics and the Orator: The Ciceronian Tradition of Political Morality (2017), and the coeditor of Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (2004). The focus of his research has been on Cicero, Renaissance political theory, political morality, and the rhetorical perspective in political theory. His current research is on the northern humanist and Christian Kabbalist Johannes Reuchlin’s conception of scholarly friendship between Christian and Jewish Kabbalists. Michelle S ch warze is the Jack Miller Center Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research centers on moral psychology and the history of political economy, especially in eighteenthcentury political thought and the works of Adam Smith. Her first book, Recognizing Resentment (forthcoming), argues that spectatorial resentment enables



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justice in liberal societies through the recognition of equal moral and political right. Her work has also been published or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, American Political Thought, and Polity. Brand on Turner is an associate professor of political science at Clemson University. His work has appeared in Political Theory, Polity, Review of Politics, and elsewhere. His research interests are primarily in the history of political thought, particularly modern Anglophonic thought and theories of liberalism and conservatism.

Index

Academic School, 36 Adam, 127–28 Adams, John, 8 Aeneas, 6 Alypius, 19 Ambrose, 22 anger: resentment and, 12, 46, 160–73, 174n4, 174n17, 226–27; retributive justice and, 160–68, 172–73, 174n17, 174n24; Stoics and, 160–63, 165–66, 172–73 Annales (Ennius), 26 Answer to Skeptics (Augustine), 32n25 Antony, Saint, 18 Apophthegmata (Plutarch), 115 Apronus, 189, 191 Apuleius, 18 Archbishop of Canterbury, 45–47 Arendt, Hannah, 205–6, 220n73 aristocracy, 4, 66, 200, 216 Aristotle, 4; contemporary political thought and, 200, 205, 208; Hobbes and, 125, 135; John of Salisbury and, 35; More and, 59, 64; Nicomachean Ethics and, 35, 135; Smith and, 160, 165; societas and, 89; theoretical wisdom and, 89; translation of, 7 Atkins, E. M., 134, 212 Atkins, Jed W., 210 Atticus, Titus Pomponius, 4, 7, 111, 113–16, 118n38

Augustine: Ambrose and, 22; Answer to Skeptics and, 32n25; The Care to Be Taken for the Dead and, 19; Christians and, 9, 18, 20–22, 25–26, 30, 32n31, 33n48; Cicero’s influence upon, 17–30; City of God and, 21–23, 25–26, 28–29, 31n24, 32n26, 34n59; Confessions and, 17–18, 20, 30n4; Dioscorus and, 19–21; Epicureans and, 20; faith and, 22–23, 27, 29; friendship and, 20–21, 32n25; Hortensius and, 9, 17–19, 31n4; justice and, 10, 25–30, 34n59; Nectarius and, 23–25, 28; On Christian Doctrine and, 21; On the Trinity and, 18; oratory and, 19–22, 32n27, 32n31; Paul and, 22; Plato and, 20, 24, 27; reason and, 26–28; religion and, 21, 29; sexual modesty and, 33n40; Stoics and, 20; truth and, 18–22, 25, 28, 30; vanity and, 17, 19; virtue and, 24–25, 27, 29–30; wisdom and, 17–18, 20, 27 Aveyron, 133 Babel, 128, 137n40 Barlow, J. Jackson, 98n8, 145, 154n5, 154n8, 156n33 Battle of Plassey, 182 Becket, Thomas, 45–47, 53n56 Begum, Munni, 191 Bellum Catilinae (Sallust), 25

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230

Index

Bentley, Arthur, 202 Bible, 18, 40, 128, 140 Bodin, Jean, vii, 111–12, 208 Bollerman, Karen, 51n3, 52n12, 53n40, 53n46, 226 Borgias, 95, 170 Bourke, Richard, 179, 194n1, 195n22, 195n23 Boyne, John, 179 British East India Company, 182, 184, 189, 193 Brutus (Cicero), 4, 72–73 Burke, Edmund: Bourke and, 179, 194n1, 195n22, 195n23; Cicero and, 178–93; Clive and, 182–83, 193; constitution and, 179–80, 182, 184; corruption and, 178, 180, 182, 186–93, 194n3, 194n8; doctrine of prescription and, 183; faith and, 190; Hastings and, 12, 178–80, 182, 185, 189–93, 194n4; India and, 182–85, 190; justice and, 12, 178–93; Lock and, 179; On Duties and, 185, 194n8; property and, 184; reason and, 192; religion and, 192; tyranny and, 190–91; virtue and, 183; wisdom and, 180 Caesar, 3, 11, 103–4, 114, 116n4, 119n61, 134–35, 186, 200–202 Calama, 23, 25 Calvin, John, 208 Care to Be Taken for the Dead, The (Augustine), 19 Carlyle, A. J., 200, 210 Carlyle, R. W., 200, 210 Carneades, 106–7, 185–86 Cato, 89–90, 100n33 Charles IX, 119 Chillingworth, William, vii Christians/Christianity, 226; Augustine and, 9, 18, 20–22, 25–26, 30, 32n31, 33n48; Bible and, 18, 40, 128, 140; John of Salisbury and, 37, 45; Locke and, 140–41; monotheism of, 6; Montaigne and, 108; More and, 67, 74;

On Christian Teaching and, 22, 32n31; pagan philosophy and, 6–7, 35 Chrysippus, 106–7 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: Augustine and, 17–30; Brutus and, 4, 72–73; Burke and, 178–93; contemporary political thought and, 198–216; dialogues of, 19; dissertations on, vii; Epicureans and, 65, 82n92; Epistulae ad Atticum and, 111, 113; For Murena and, 89–90, 100n33; For Sestius and, 121, 123; For Sextus Roscius and, 93–94; Hortensius and, 9, 17–19, 30n4, 187; imperial injustice and, 185–89; John of Salisbury and, 35–51; Letters to Atticus and, 7, 113, 115; Locke and, 140–53; Machiavelli and, 86–97; Montaigne and, 103–16; More and, 55–78; normativity of societas and, 87–91; On Divination and, 21, 127, 134; On Duties and, 4 (see also On Duties (Cicero)); On Friendship and, 21, 32n25, 43, 47–50, 124; On Invention and, 7, 21, 37, 121, 123–26; On Obligations and, 99n20, 99n25, 100n29, 100n30, 100n36, 101n57, 102n74; On the Commonwealth and, 4–5, 9, 121, 125, 127, 132, 150, 200–2, 212; On the Ends of Good and Evil, 65–67, 82n92, 83n93, 105, 108, 117n20; On the Laws and, 9, 41, 136n20, 201–2, 212; On the Nature of the Gods and, 7, 20, 70, 83n93, 108–9; On the Orator and, 4–5, 7, 21, 32n31, 75, 98n8, 198, 226; On the Republic and, 23, 25–28, 33n55, 34n58, 185, 192; Orator and, 4, 21–22, 32n31, 45, 63; origins of society and, 37–39; political naturalism and, 39–42; Pro Quinctio and, 92; receptions of, 6–9; renewed interest in, 3–6; Sicily and, 180–82, 184; Smith and, 160–73; as Tully, 8, 19–21, 140–41; Tusculan Disputations and, 12, 35, 65–67, 108, 132–33, 160, 162–66, 206, 212; tyranny and, 10, 37, 42–47, 76, 100n36, 111, 158n51; Verres and, 12, 178–82,



Index

185–92, 194n3; Verrine Orations and, 179–81, 184, 187, 194n2; web searches on, 16n48 City of God (Augustine), 21–23, 25–26, 28–29, 31n24, 32n26, 34n59 civic republicanism, 205–8, 214 Clarke, Michelle T., 7, 10–11, 86–102, 194n8, 225 Clive, Robert, 182–83, 193 Cole, Nicholas, 8 Colet, John, 59 Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (Macrobius), 24, 33n45 Confessions (Augustine), 17–18, 20, 30n4 Connolly, Joy, 4, 210, 214 consensus, 7, 55, 59, 69, 72, 77, 92, 100n33, 101n45, 129–31 constitution/constitutionalism: Burke and, 179–80, 182, 184; contemporary political thought and, 12–13, 198–204, 207, 210–11, 216; future of Western democracy and, 199–202; Hobbes and, 125, 133; mixed, 4, 158n51; More and, 57; On the Commonwealth and, 4; Verres and, 12, 178–82, 185–92, 194n3 contemporary political thought: Aristotle and, 200, 205, 208; Cicero’s legacy in, 198–216; civic republican tradition and, 205–8, 214; constitution and, 12–13, 198–204, 207, 210–11, 216; crisis of modernity and, 204–5; culture and, 199, 206; decorum and, 212; democracy and, 199–204, 220; Epicureans and, 205, 209, 212; ethics and, 216; faith and, 202; friendship and, 209; illusion and, 210–16; informal power and, 211–12; justice and, 201, 203–5, 209–10, 216; knowledge and, 209, 213–14; legitimacy and, 199, 210, 214–15, 223n134; modernity and, 204–8; On Duties and, 202; On the Commonwealth and, 200–202, 212; oratory and, 198, 200, 211; Plato and, 198, 205, 208, 213–14; property and,

231

201, 203, 209, 211, 221n98; realities of power and, 202–4; reason and, 201, 205–6, 211–12, 214; recasting vision and, 215–16; rejection of formalism and, 208–10; religion and, 199, 204; Renaissance and, 207; search for ideal and, 208–10; sociability and, 214; societas and, 215; spiritual/natural order and, 204–5; Stoics and, 201, 204– 5, 212; totalitarianism and, 200–202; truth and, 198, 204–5, 212–14; virtue and, 204, 209, 211, 213–14; wisdom and, 205; Wood and, 203 convention, 27, 129–31, 143–46, 154n10 corruption: Burke and, 178, 180, 182, 186–93, 194n3, 194n8; justice and, 12, 77, 97, 101n57, 145, 162, 178, 180, 182, 186–93, 194n3, 194n8 Crassus, 123, 179 Cropsey, Joseph, 8, 205 cruelty, 86, 190 culture, 58–59, 67, 121–22, 126, 199, 206 Cyrus, 198 Dahl, Robert, 202 Dante, 208 Dawson, Hannah, 127–28, 130 De Cive (Hobbes), 129, 131–32 decorum: contemporary political thought and, 212; flattery and, 99n20; John of Salisbury and, 45; justice and, 12, 88, 100n29, 161, 164–65, 167, 174n5, 174n24, 175n45; Smith and, 12, 161, 164–65, 167, 174n5, 174n24, 175n45; social custom and, 88; statesmen and, 96; Utopia and, 10, 55–57, 59, 63–78; virtue and, 100n29, 164, 174n24 De Homine (Hobbes), 128 democracy, 4, 102n74, 199–204, 210, 225–26 de Ste. Croix, G. E. M., 203 dialogues of Cicero, 19 Diderot, Denis, 8 Digest (Justinian), 199, 207

232

Index

Diogenes, 106–7 Dioscorus, 19–21 Dirks, Nicholas, 193 Dodaro, Robert, 34n59 Domitius Marsus, 115 Drumann, Wilhelm, 199 Dunning, William, 200 Dyck, Andrew 99n10 Ebenstein, William, 208 Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, The (Hobbes), 129, 131–32 elitism, 65–66, 97, 125, 202–3 Ennius, 26 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, An (Hume), 7 Epaminondas, 112 Epictetus, 209 Epicureans: Augustine and, 20; Cicero and, 65, 82n92; contemporary political thought and, 205, 209, 212; Hobbes and, 124; John of Salisbury and, 44–45, 53n46; Montaigne and, 105–9; Stoics and, 105; Torquatus and, 105; tyranny and, 45; Velleius and, 83n93, 109 Epicurus, 209 Epistulae ad Atticum (Cicero), 111, 113 Erasmus, 10; humanism and, vii, 57, 59, 64; Montaigne and, 111, 114–15; More and, 56–57, 59, 63–64, 70, 79n19; neutrality and, 111, 114; Praise of Folly and, 59 Erasmus of Rotterdam Society, 225 Essais (Montaigne), 103–4, 108, 113, 116n1, 119n55, 119n64 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke), 141 ethics, 8, 65; Aristotle and, 35, 135; contemporary political thought and, 216; of expediency, 98n8; Locke and, 140–42, 152; Machiavelli and, 90, 97, 98n8; Montaigne and, 108–10; More and, 65; On Duties and, 5, 90, 97, 135,

152, 161; Smith and, 161; Stoics and, 100n26 eudoxia, 105–6 Exemplaire de Bordeaux, 108–9, 111, 116n1 faith: Augustine and, 22–23, 27, 29; Bodin and, 112; Burke and, 190; contemporary political thought and, 202; John of Salisbury and, 39, 41, 43, 46, 48, 50; Machiavelli and, 92–94; More and, 57, 64; truth and, 21–22, 48, 57, 122; wisdom and, 122 fidelity, 48, 101n57 Fink, Zera, 207 Finley, Moses I., 200 flattery, 24, 43–44, 47–51, 99n20, 225 foreign policy, 94, 185 For Murena (Cicero), 89–90, 100n33 For Sestius (Cicero), 121, 123 For Sextus Roscius (Cicero), 93–94 founding, 121–27, 132 freedom, 21, 36, 162–63, 202, 207, 216 free will, 32n26, 70 Friedrich, Hugo, 119n53 friendship, 181; Augustine and, 20–21, 32n25; contemporary political thought and, 209; flattery and, 47–51; Hobbes and, 124; John of Salisbury and, 10, 37, 39, 43, 47–51, 54n85; Montaigne and, 104, 108; More and, 65–67 Garsten, Bryan, 121, 136n4, 210, 214 Gavinus, 186 Genesis, Bible book of, 128 Geneva Manuscript of Rousseau’s Social Contract, 138n58 Gildersleeve, Basil, 200 Giles, Peter, 59–61, 63, 65–69 Gowing, Alain, 6 Graver, Margaret, 212 Gray, Hannah H., 58 greed, 76, 94, 182, 189–92 Green, R. P. H., 22



Index

Griffin, M. T., 134 Griswold, Charles, 160 Grocyn, William, 59 Habermas, Jürgen, 66 Hagendahl, Harald, 18, 31n24 Hamilton, Alexander, 8 Hammer, Dean, 12–13, 198–223, 225 Harrington, James, 207 Hastings, Warren: Burke and, 12, 178–80, 182, 185, 189–93, 194n4; tyranny and, 190–91 Henry II, 45–46 Henry VIII, 56, 59–60 Hermarchus, 107 Hesiod, 24 Hiero, 184 Histories (Thucydides), 130 Hobbes, Thomas, 11; Aristotle and, 125, 135; Cicero and, 120–35; De Cive and, 129, 131–32; consensus and, 129–31; De Homine and, 128; constitution and, 125, 133; convention and, 129–31; The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic and, 129, 131–32; Epicureans and, 124; friendship and, 124; humanism and, 121, 135n3; Hume and, 120–21, 135; justice and, 122–23, 125, 133; knowledge and, 126–28; language and, 125–31, 133, 137n40; Leviathan and, 121, 126, 128–33, 137n37; On Duties and, 121, 124, 133–35; On the Commonwealth and, 121, 125, 127, 132; oratory and, 121, 123, 128–29; reason and, 121–25, 130–32; religion and, 126–28, 133; Shaftesbury and, 120–21, 135; Smith and, 120–22, 135, 136n9; sociability and, 120, 130, 132–33; societas and, 136n5; truth and, 122, 131; vanity and, 131; virtue and, 120–23, 132–35; wisdom and, 122–23 Holton, James E., 8–9, 205 Holy League, 114 honestum, 11, 86–90, 98n8, 109–12, 114 Horace, 105, 117n14

233

Hortensius (Cicero), 9, 17–19, 30n4, 187 Huguenots, 114 humanism: Bodin and, vii, 111–12, 208; Erasmus and, vii, 57, 59, 64; Hobbes and, 121, 135n3; Jacobus Acontius and, vii; Machiavelli and, 97n1; Montaigne and, 103–4; More and, 55, 57–60, 64, 66, 78n8, 79n10, 79n16, 83n109; Renaissance and, 7, 55, 58–59, 79n10, 79n16, 97n1, 226 Hume, David, 7, 120–21, 135 Hutten, Ulrich von, 64 immorality, 90–91, 185–86, 194n8 immortality of the soul, 18 imperialism, 4, 94, 178, 186–87, 192 Impey, Elijah, 191 individualism, 149, 153, 154n4, 158n52, 203 In Praise of Folly (Erasmus), 59 Institutio Oratoria (Quintilian), 6 Jefferson, Thomas, 208 Jesus Christ, 20, 153n2, 206 John of Salisbury, 7; Aristotle and, 35; background of, 35; Becket and, 45–47, 53n56; Christians and, 37, 45; Cicero and, 35–51; decorum and, 45; Epicureans and, 44–45, 53n46; faith and, 39, 41, 43, 46, 48, 50; flattery and, 43–44, 47–51; friendship and, 10, 37, 39, 43, 47–51, 54n85; Henry II and, 45–46; justice and, 37–49; knowledge and, 36, 38, 48, 50; Metalogicon and, 35–40, 47, 52n14; On Duties and, 35, 40–43; oratory and, 45, 51; origins of society and, 37–39; Plato and, 40; Policraticus and, 35–37, 39–44, 47, 49–50, 51n7, 53n40, 53n46; political naturalism and, 39–42; reason and, 37–40, 43–44, 46; religion and, 36, 46; resentment and, 46; sociability and, 38; truth and, 36, 47–49; tyranny and, 10, 37, 42–47; vanity and, 45; virtue and, 42–43, 46–48, 50, 78n1; wisdom and, 38

234

Index

Julius II, 95 justice, 227; anger and, 160–68, 172–73, 174n17, 174n24; Augustine and, 10, 25–30, 34n59; body politic and, 39–42; Burke and, 12, 178–93; contemporary political thought and, 201, 203–5, 209–10, 216; corruption and, 12, 77, 97, 101n57, 145, 162, 178, 180, 182, 186–93, 194n3, 194n8; decorum and, 12, 88, 100n29, 161, 164–65, 167, 174n5, 174n24, 175n45; Hastings and, 12, 178–80, 182, 185, 189–93, 194n4; Hobbes and, 122–23, 125, 133; human relationships and, 154n8; John of Salisbury and, 37–49; Locke and, 142–45, 151; Machiavelli and, 86, 88–89, 93–94; Montaigne and, 108; moral spectatorship and, 12, 161, 167, 170; More and, 68; personalization of imperial, 178–93; reason and, 9, 26, 28, 30, 43–44, 46, 93, 122, 125, 167, 201, 203–5; resentment and, 160–63, 174n4, 174n17; retributive, 160–73; Roman Senate and, 171–72, 185–90; Smith and, 12, 160–73; social harmony and, 142; virtue and, 5, 27, 29, 42–43, 46, 89, 93–94, 100n29, 144, 160–61, 166, 172, 183, 209; wisdom and, 27, 89, 100n29, 122–23, 205 Justinian, 199 Kantianism, 166 Kapust, Daniel J., vii–viii, 3–16, 120–39, 210, 225 Kelly, Duncan, 150 Kinney, Arthur, 61 Klosko, George, 209 knowledge, 124; contemporary political thought and, 209, 213–14; founding and, 121; Hobbes and, 126–28; intellectual possession of, 5; John of Salisbury and, 36, 38, 48, 50; Locke and, 140–48, 152, 154n10; Montaigne and, 103, 107, 117n23; More and, 61, 65, 69; Stoics and, 89; truth and, 5, 20, 22, 30,

36, 48, 65, 69, 74; virtue and, 5, 48, 50, 89, 140, 143, 149, 209, 213–14 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 7, 58–59, 61 labor: individualism and, 149, 153; Locke and, 11–12, 141–42, 146–53, 156n36, 157n42, 157n45, 157n48, 158n50, 158n59, 159n63; property and, 141–53, 156n36, 157n48 Lactantius, 7 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Smith), 8 Letters to Atticus (Cicero), 7, 113, 115 Leviathan (Hobbes), 121, 126, 128–33, 137n37 liberty, 48, 101n57, 121, 129, 184, 203, 207, 211, 215, 221n98, 223n134 Life and History of Thucydides, The (Hobbes), 121 Life of Cicero (Middleton), 8 Life of Cicero (Trollope), 8 Linacre, Thomas, 59 Livy, vii, 40, 207, 225 Lock, F. P., 179 Locke, John: Christianity and, 140–41; Cicero and, 140–53; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and, 141; ethics and, 140–42, 152; individualism and, 149, 153, 154n4, 158n52; justice and, 142–45, 151; knowledge and, 140–48, 152, 154n10; labor and, 11–12, 141–42, 146–53, 156n36, 157n42, 157n45, 157n48, 158n50, 158n59, 159n63; On Duties and, 140–46, 150, 152, 153n2; On the Commonwealth and, 150; political economy and, 141, 149–53; population growth and, 157n42; property and, 140–53, 154n4, 154n5, 154n8, 154n10, 155n13, 155n15, 155n18, 156n31, 156n33, 156n36, 156n37, 157n48, 158n53; reason and, 141, 145, 147–49, 152, 154n10; Second Treatise of Government and, 146–48, 151–53, 156n32, 156n37, 158n50; sociability and, 11–12, 140, 144–46;



Index

Some Thoughts Concerning Education and, 140–41, 157n41; Stoics and, 156n33; vanity and, 152; virtue and, 140, 143–44, 148–49; Wood and, 143, 149, 153, 154n4, 154n5, 154n8, 155n13, 155n15, 155n18, 155n27, 156n32, 157n42, 158n51, 158n52, 158n53 Logan, George, 61 Lucceius, 198 Lucretius, 122, 127 Lupset, Thomas, 59, 83n109 Luther, Martin, 208 Lynd, Helen Merrell, 202 Lynd, Robert, 202 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 7; Cicero and, 86–97; civic body and, 93; comparative analysis of Cicero and, 86; ethics and, 90, 97, 98n8; faith and, 92–94; honestum and, 86–90, 98n8; humanism and, 97n1; justice and, 86, 88–89, 93–94; On Duties and, 10–11, 86–93, 96–97; Plato and, 96; The Prince and, 10–11, 86, 91–93, 97; reason and, 93–94, 97; sociability and, 87–88, 90–91; societas and, 10–11, 87–97, 99n10, 100n29, 100n42; Stoics and, 86–90, 98n7, 99n25, 100n26, 100n30; truth and, 91; utile and, 86–90, 98n8; virtue and, 87–89, 93–94; wisdom and, 88–89, 100n26, 100n29 MacPhail, Eric, 7, 11, 103–19, 225 Macpherson, C. B., 158n52 Macrobius, 24, 33n45, 115 Manius Glabrio, 188 Mark Antony, 135 Marshall, P. J., 194n2 McCutcheon, Elizabeth, 64 McGlew, James F., 199 McIlwain, Charles H., 201, 210 Metalogicon (John of Salisbury), 35–40, 47, 52n14 Michels, Robert, 202 Middleton, Conyers, 8 Middleton, Nathaniel, 191

235

Millar, Fergus, 211–12 Milton, John, 127–28, 207 modernity, 204–8 Mommsen, Theodor, 3, 8, 199–200, 202, 207–8, 216, 217n10 monarchy, 4, 111, 113, 184 Montaigne, Michel de, 7, 11; ancient Romans and, 104; Apologie de Raymond Sebond and, 109; Christianity and, 108; Cicero and, 103–16; civil war and, 104, 111–16; Epicureans and, 105–9; Erasmus and, 111, 114–15; Essais and, 103–4, 108, 113, 116n1, 119n55, 119n64; ethics and, 108–10; Exemplaire de Bordeaux and, 108–9, 111, 116n1; friendship and, 104, 108; glory and, 104–10; honestum and, 109–12, 114; Horace and, 105, 117n14; humanism and, 103–4; justice and, 108; knowledge and, 103, 107, 117n23; On Duties and, 105, 108, 110–12; On the Ends of Good and Evil and, 105, 108, 117n20; On the Nature of the Gods and, 108–9; oratory and, 115–16; Plato and, 103, 109; reason and, 111; Renaissance and, 110, 114; Senate and, 111–12; Stoics and, 105–10; truth and, 111; Tusculan Disputations and, 108; utile and, 110–12; vanity and, 104–5, 113–16; Villey and, 108; virtue and, 105, 109 moral spectatorship, 12, 161, 167, 170 More, Thomas, 7; accomplishments of, 58–59; Aristotle and, 59, 64; Christians and, 67, 74; Cicero and, 55–78; Ciceronianus and, 57; constitution and, 57; decorum and, 10, 55–57, 59, 63–78; Erasmus and, 56– 57, 59, 63–64, 70, 79n19; ethics and, 65; faith and, 57, 64; friendship and, 65–67; Giles and, 59–61, 63, 65–69; Henry VIII and, 56, 59–60; humanism and, 55, 57–60, 64, 66, 78n8, 79n10, 79n16, 83n109; Hythloday and, 10, 56–77; justice and, 68; knowledge and, 61, 65, 69; Morton and, 59–61, 66, 68, 78,

236

Index

More, Thomas (continued) 82n79; On Duties and, 59, 64, 66, 73; oratory and, 55, 59, 61, 63–65, 67, 72–73, 75–77, 79n16, 79n19, 81n52, 84n130; Plato and, 56, 59, 61, 63, 65, 68, 70–71, 74, 76; property and, 56–57, 61, 69, 74–75, 77; reason and, 56, 66, 74, 76; religion and, 57–58, 65, 83n109; Renaissance and, 55, 58–59, 79n16; Senate and, 64, 72, 76–77; Stoics and, 65, 71; truth and, 55–57, 63–75, 81n64, 82n69, 83n93; tyranny and, 76; Utopia and, 55–57, 59–71, 75–78, 82n79, 82n92, 83n96, 83n109; wisdom and, 60, 63 Morton, Cardinal, 59–61, 66, 68, 78, 82n79 Mosco, Gaetano, 202 Moses, 126 Mughal Empire, 184, 190 Nacol, Emily C., 11–12, 140–59, 226 Nakam, Gérealde, 119n53 Nectarius, 23–25, 28 Nederman, Cary J., 7, 10, 35–54, 226 New Academy, 36 Nicgorski, Walter, 125, 133, 210, 213 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 35, 135 Nussbaum, Martha C., 203–4 Nyquist, Mary, 122 Of the Social Contract (Rousseau), 76, 132, 138n58 oligarchy, 202–3, 211 On Christian Doctrine (Augustine), 21 On Christian Teaching (Augustine), 22, 32n31 On Divination (Cicero), 21, 127, 134 On Duties (Cicero), 4; Burke and, 185, 194n8; contemporary political thought and, 202; ethics and, 5, 90, 97, 135, 152, 161; Hobbes and, 121, 124, 133–35; John of Salisbury and, 35, 40–43; Locke and, 140–46, 150, 152, 153n2; Machiavelli and, 10–11, 86–93, 96–97; Montaigne and, 105, 108, 110–12; More and, 59, 64, 66, 73;

oratory and, 81n52; Smith and, 12, 160–63, 172; sociability and, 90; societas and, 87–93, 96–97 O’Neill, Daniel I., 12, 178–97, 226 On Friendship (Cicero), 21, 32n25, 43, 47–50, 124 On Invention (Cicero), 7, 21, 37, 121, 123–26 On Obligations (Cicero), 99n20, 99n25, 100n29, 100n30, 100n36, 101n57, 102n74 On the Commonwealth (Cicero): constitution and, 4; contemporary political thought and, 200–202, 212; Hobbes and, 121, 125, 127, 132; importance of politics and, 5, 9; Locke and, 150; Plato’s influence on, 4 On the Ends Of Good and Evil (Cicero), 65–67, 82n92, 83n93, 105, 108, 117n20 On the Laws (Cicero), 9, 41, 136n20, 201–2, 212 On the Nature of the Gods (Cicero), 7, 20, 70, 83n93, 108–9 On the Orator (Cicero), 4–5, 7, 21, 32n31, 59, 72, 75, 98n8, 121, 123, 198, 226 On the Republic (Cicero), 23, 25–28, 33n58, 185, 192 On the Trinity (Augustine), 18 Orator (Cicero), 4, 21–22, 32n31, 45, 63 oratory: Augustine and, 19–22, 32n27, 32n31; contemporary political thought and, 198, 200, 211; epideictic, 64, 72, 81n52, 84n130; Hobbes and, 121, 123, 128–29; John of Salisbury and, 45, 51; Montaigne and, 115–16; More and, 55, 59, 61, 63–65, 67, 72–73, 75–77, 79n16, 79n19, 81n52, 84n130; Senate and, 64, 72; Smith and, 165; statesmanship and, 6, 11; truth and, 18 Owen, Robert, 208 Paradise Lost (Milton), 127–28 Pareto, Vilfredo, 202 Paul, 22, 141



Index

Petrarch, 7 Pettit, Philip, 207–8 Phaedrus (Plato), 81n64 Philus, 27 Piso, 186 Plato: Augustine and, 20, 24, 27; contemporary political thought and, 198, 205, 208, 213–14; Diogenes on, 80n40; Holton’s tradition and, 9; John of Salisbury and, 40; Machiavelli and, 96; Montaigne and, 103, 109; More and, 56, 59, 61, 63, 65, 68, 70–71, 74, 76; On the Commonwealth and, 4; Phaedrus and, 81n64; philosopher ruler of, 5; The Republic and, 4, 63, 65, 70, 76, 109, 162; Smith and, 160, 162; Socrates and, 198; theoretical wisdom and, 89; web searches on, 16n48 Plotinus, 24 Plutarch, 40, 113, 115 Policraticus (John of Salisbury), 35–37, 39–44, 47, 49–50, 51n7, 53n40, 53n46 political economy, 12, 141, 149–53, 225–26 Pollock Frederick, 200 Polybius, 124 Pompey, 11, 104, 114–15, 119n61, 179 Ponticianus, 18 Powell, J. G. F., 124, 210, 212 Premerstein, Anton von, 202 pride, 29, 45–46, 59, 190 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 10–11, 86, 91–93, 97 property: Burke and, 184; claim to, 146–49; communal, 57; contemporary political thought and, 201, 203, 209, 211, 221n98; labor and, 141–53, 156n36, 157n48; Locke and, 140–53, 154n4, 154n5, 154n8, 154n10, 155n13, 155n15, 155n18, 156n31, 156n33, 156n36, 156n37, 157n48, 158n53; population growth and, 157n42; private, 56, 61, 74–75, 141–50, 153, 154n8, 154n10, 155n15, 184, 203; problem of, 141–46 Pro Quinctio (Cicero), 92

237

Pro Roscio Amerino (Cicero), 92 Punic Wars, 181 Quintilian, 6, 59, 79n19, 115 Quintus, 4, 152 Rape of the Sabine Women, 25 reason: Augustine and, 26–28; Burke and, 192; contemporary political thought and, 201, 205–6, 211–12, 214; Hobbes and, 121–25, 130–32; John of Salisbury and, 37–40, 43–44, 46; justice and, 9, 26, 28, 30, 43–44, 46, 93, 122, 125, 167, 201, 203–5; Locke and, 141, 145, 147–49, 152, 154n10; Machiavelli and, 93–94, 97; Montaigne and, 111; More and, 56, 66, 74, 76; Smith and, 162–67 reciprocity, 38, 41, 48 Regulus, 112 religion: Augustine and, 21, 29; Burke and, 192; Christian monotheism and, 6; contemporary political thought and, 199, 204; divine truth and, 28, 30; French Wars of Religion and, 110; Hobbes and, 126–28, 133; human dissociation and, 122; John of Salisbury and, 36, 46; More and, 57–58, 65, 83n109; pagan, 6–7; popes and, 95; Smith and, 168; tolerance and, vii, 225; truth and, 6, 21, 28, 30, 65, 204; Verres and, 188. See also Christians/ Christianity Remer, Gary, vii–viii, 3–16, 55–85, 210, 226 Renaissance, vii; contemporary political thought and, 207; honestum and, 110; humanism and, 7, 55, 58–59, 79n10, 79n16, 97n1, 226; Montaigne and, 110, 114; More and, 55, 58–59, 79n16; Petrarch and, 7; utile and, 110 Republic (Plato), 4, 63, 65, 70, 76, 109, 162 resentment, 226–27; cannibalism and, 163; Cicero and, 161–66; John of Salisbury and, 46; justice and, 160–63, 174n4,

238

Index

resentment (continued) 174n17; Smith and, 12, 160, 166–73, 174n4, 174n17 Rome Saved, or Catiline (Voltaire), 8 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 76, 99n20, 132, 138n58 Sabine, George H., 8, 201–2, 210–11 Sallust, vii, 6, 25, 207, 225 Schwarze, Michelle A., 12, 160–77, 226–27 Scipio, 4, 24–28, 34n58, 34n59, 90, 125, 132, 154n10, 162, 212 Second Treatise of Government (Locke), 146–48, 151–53, 156n32, 156n37, 158n50 selfishness, 39, 76, 97, 163, 168, 214 Senate, 4; justice and, 171–72, 185–90; Montaigne and, 111–12; More and, 64, 72, 76–77; oratory and, 64, 72; Smith and, 171–72 Seneca, 6, 40, 71, 113, 119n55, 207 Sextus Peducaeus, 108 Shackleton Bailey, D. R., 115 Shaftesbury, 120–21, 135 Shah Alam II, 184 Shanks, Torrey, 121 Singh, Ganga Govind, 191 Siraj-ud-Daulah, 182 Six livres de la République (Bodin), 112 Skinner, Quentin, 7, 121, 131–32, 207–8, 215 Smith, Adam, 11; anger and, 160–68, 172– 73, 174n17, 174n24; Aristotle and, 160, 165; Cicero and, 160–73; decorum and, 12, 161, 164–65, 167, 174n5, 174n24, 175n45; ethics and, 161; Hobbes and, 120–22, 135, 136n9; justice and, 12, 160–73; Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres and, 8; moral spectatorship and, 12, 161, 167, 170; On Duties and, 12, 160– 63, 172; oratory and, 165; Plato and, 160, 162; reason and, 162–67; religion and, 168; resentment and, 12, 160, 166–73, 174n4, 174n17; retributive justice and, 160–73; Senate and, 171–72; Stoics and, 12, 160–62, 165–66, 169–73, 174n24;

Theory of Moral Sentiments and, 8, 135, 160–61, 166–69, 172–73, 176n52; virtue and, 160–66, 172; wisdom and, 166 Smith, Stanley B., 201 sociability: anger and, 160–68, 172–73, 174n17, 174n24; Cicero’s emphasis on, 87–88, 121–25, 124–25; contemporary political thought and, 214; Hobbes and, 120, 130, 132–33; John of Salisbury and, 38; Locke and, 11–12, 140, 144–46; Machiavelli and, 87–88, 90–91; On Duties and, 90; virtue and, 88, 120–21, 132, 140, 214 societas: Aristotle and, 89; civic body and, 93; concord and, 92; contemporary political thought and, 215; Hobbes and, 136n5; Machiavelli and, 10–11, 87–97, 99n10, 100n29, 100n42; normativity of, 87–91; On Duties and, 87–93, 96–97; Pro Roscio Amerino and, 92; rejection of, 91–97; Stoics and, 89–90 Socrates, 63, 70, 109, 198 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke), 140–41, 157n41 St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, 119 Steel, C. E. W., 186–88 Stoics: anger and, 160–66, 172–73; Augustine and, 20; Chrysippus and, 106–7; contemporary political thought and, 201, 204–5, 212; Diogenes and, 106–7; Epicureans and, 105; ethics and, 100n26; eudoxia and, 105–6; knowledge and, 89; Locke and, 156n33; Machiavelli and, 86–90, 98n7, 99n25, 100n26, 100n30; middle duties and, 5, 100; Montaigne and, 105–10; More and, 65, 71; natural law and, 8; science and, 204; Smith and, 12, 160–62, 165–66, 169–73, 174n24; societas and, 89–90; wisdom and, 89, 100n26, 166 Straumann, Benjamin, 134, 210–11 Strauss, Leo, 8, 204–5, 213 Stuart-Buttle, Tim, 154n3 Sydney, Algernon, 207



Index

Syme, Ronald, 202–3 sympathy, 167–73 Tacitus, vii, 6, 225 Testard, Maurice, 18 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 8, 135, 160–61, 166–69, 172–73, 176n52 Thiele, Leslie Paul, 209 Thucydides, 121, 130 Timarchides, 189, 191 Timoleon, 111–12 Tiro, 115 Torquatus, L. Manlius, 105 totalitarianism, 200–202 Trajan, 40 Travers, Robert, 184 Trollope, Anthony, 8 Truman, David, 202 truth: Augustine and, 18–22, 25, 28, 30; Christianity and, 6, 22; contemplation and, 5; contemporary political thought and, 198, 204–5, 212–14; divine, 28, 30; faith and, 21–22, 48, 57, 122; higher, 212–14; Hobbes and, 122, 131; John of Salisbury and, 36, 47–49; knowledge and, 5, 20, 22, 30, 36, 48, 65, 69, 74; Machiavelli and, 91; Montaigne and, 111; More and, 55–57, 63–75, 81n64, 82n69, 83n93; oratory and, 18; religion and, 6, 21, 28, 30, 65, 204; as worthy pursuit, 13 Turner, Brandon, 9–10, 17–34, 227 Tusculan Disputations (Cicero), 12, 35, 65–67, 108, 132–33, 160, 162–66, 206, 212 tyranny: Burke and, 190–91; Epicureans and, 45; Hastings and, 190–91; John of Salisbury on, 10, 37, 42–47; moderation and, 44–47; More and, 76; tyrannicide and, 42–44, 100n36, 111, 158n51 utile, 11, 86–90, 98n8, 110–12 Utopia (More), 82n92, 83n96; decorum and, 10, 55–57, 59, 63–78; “The Dialogue

239 of Counsel” and, 60, 73; Giles and, 59–61, 63, 65–69; humanism and, 55, 57–60, 64, 66, 83n109; Hythloday and, 10, 56–77; impact of, 55; in utramque partem and, 10, 55, 61, 69–70, 75; Morton and, 59–61, 66, 68, 78, 82n79; speaker format of, 55–56

vanity: ambition and, 202; Augustine and, 17, 19; Hobbes and, 131; John of Salisbury and, 45; Locke and, 152; Montaigne and, 104–5, 113–16; pride and, 29, 45–46, 59, 190 Velleius, 83n93, 109 Verres, Gaius, 12, 178–82, 185–92, 194n3 Verrine Orations (Cicero), 179–81, 184, 187, 194n2 Villey, Pierre, 108 Virgil, 6, 18, 24, 33n48, 215 virtue: Augustine and, 24–25, 27, 29–30; Burke and, 183; civic, 4, 25, 29; contemporary political thought and, 204, 209, 211, 213–14; decorum and, 100n29, 164, 174n24; Hobbes and, 120–23, 132–35; John of Salisbury and, 42–43, 46–48, 50, 78n1; justice and, 5, 27, 29, 42–43, 46, 89, 93–94, 100n29, 144, 160–61, 166, 172, 183, 209; knowledge and, 5, 48, 50, 89, 140, 143, 149, 209, 213–14; Locke and, 140, 143–44, 148–49; Machiavelli and, 87–89, 93–94; Macrobius and, 24; military, 183; money and, 155n21; Montaigne and, 105, 109; Smith and, 160–66, 172; sociability and, 88, 120–21, 132, 140, 214; virtue and, 140, 143–44, 148–49 vita activa, 4, 6, 56, 98n8 Vivenza, Gloria, 160 Voegelin, Eric, 204, 218n43 Voltaire, 8 Volusianus, 33n46 Ward, John O., 7 War with Catiline (Sallust), 6

240

Index

Wegemer, Gerard, 67, 77 wisdom: Augustine and, 17–18, 20, 27; Burke and, 180; contemporary political thought and, 205; faith and, 122; Hobbes and, 122–23; immortal, 17; John of Salisbury and, 38; justice and, 27, 89, 100n29, 122–23, 205; Machiavelli and, 88–89, 100n26, 100n29; More and, 60, 63; Smith and, 166; Stoics and, 89, 100n26, 166 Wolin, Sheldon, 208–9 Wood, Neal: Cicero’s Social and Political Thought and, 9, 154n5; conservative

mentality and, 203; contemporary political thought and, 203; diminished status of Cicero and, 3; Locke and, 143, 149, 153, 154n4, 154n5, 154n8, 155n13, 155n15, 155n18, 155n27, 156n32, 157n42, 158n51, 158n52, 158n53 Woolf, Raphael, 183 Xenophon, 198 Zeno, 90 Zetzel, James E. G., 65, 100n42, 154n10, 185