A Written Republic: Cicero's Philosophical Politics (original) (raw)
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Cicero: Crises of Humanism and Republicanism
Past and Future, 2024
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) was a Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher who lived in the turbulent days of the Late Republic. As a 'new man' in Rome, he made his fame through major law cases and thereafter as a 'saviour of the republic' by stopping Cataline's attempted coup d'etat of 63-62 BCE. Beyond this, however, Cicero was a transmitter and transformer of a vast body of Greek philosophy into Latin via his numerous texts on philosophy, ethics, and rhetoric. Works such as his De Re Republica (the Republic) and De Officiis (On Moral Duties) sought to set forth a practical approach to government via a mixed constitution (including elements of kingship, aristocracy and democracy) and the idea of a concord of different orders, relying on a consensus of common goods shared within an educated community. He made important contributions to humanism and republicanism that would be taken up again in later ages. However, as a politician, he was unable to put this idea of a balanced and stable republic into practice. As the power of proconsular armies increased, this led to the rise of leaders such as Pompey, Crassus, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and then the young Octavian (later on the emperor Augustus), often working extra-constitutionally. Cicero was unable to retain the friendship and clemency of Julius Caesar, and thereafter earned the hatred of Mark Antony, whom he had fiercely criticized in his speeches, The Philippics. In 43 BCE the agents of Antony hunted Cicero down, cut his throat, and brought his head and hands back to be nailed on the rostra in Roman forum. If, politically, Cicero was unable to protect his vision of a mixed and balanced Roman constitution, he was nonetheless a man who tried to stand up for great philosophical and political ideals. He was doomed not so much by his own limitations as by the nature of the age, a period when personal ambition and civil wars were tearing Rome apart. His successes and failures were not trivial, and had much more impact and long-term value than the trivial successes of the minor writers and selfserving politicians who surrounded him.
Introduction to Cicero as Philosopher
Cicero as Philosopher. New Perspectives on His Philosophy and Its Legacy, 2024
We sayt his with the caveat that as harp distinctionb etween Cicero's 'public' writings and 'private' letters is untenable. Cicero wasi ns everal respects engagingi np ublic or quasi-public acts when writinghis letters. Furthermore, the myriad letters he wrote vary with respectt ot heir privacya nd design. 2 On Cicero'ss elf-fashioning, see Bishop 2019 and Dugan2 005. 3 See Reinhardt 2022bfor adetailed summary of this scholarlydebate. See Allen 2022 for arecent accountofCicero'sradicalism that incorporates manyofthe features scholars have come to associatew ith mitigated skepticism.
SYLLABUS Defending the Republic: Roman Constitutionalism from Cicero to the American Revolution, 2024
The assassination of Pompey the Great in September of 48 BCE sealed the fate of the Roman republic. Pompey's military leadership had been the republicans' last hope of preserving Rome's constitutional order in the face of the dictatorial ambitions of Julius Caesar, who had in effect declared war on his own country in 49 BCE when he brought his army across the Rubicon river into Italy from Gaul. Some Romans—including the statesman, orator, and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero—resisted Caesar with the pen, not the sword. In works such as On the Republic, Cicero articulated and urged upon his fellow citizens the merits of republican government, its basis in popular sovereignty, and the moral and political virtues of the rule of laws not men. A group of republican conspirators seeking to restore the old order assassinated Caesar in 44 BCE. They were in turn destroyed by Caesar’s would-be heirs. Cicero himself was assassinated by the Caesarian faction for his political speech and activism. Cicero's writings and their influence survived his assassination and have inspired opponents of tyranny and proponents of self-government for over 2000 years. In this course, we engage the legacy of Roman republicanism, and its historically unprecedented regime of rights, laws, and constitutional norms. We read foundational texts by Cicero, the Roman historian Livy, and others. We also read later authors who drew inspiration from them, such as Joseph Addison, whose 1713 play Cato George Washington staged for his troops in 1778 at Valley Forge, abolitionist writers like William Wells Brown, James Bell, and Frances Ellen Watkins, the feminist writer Abigail Adams, who argued against patriarchy in her letters to her husband John Adams, and John Adams himself (the “American Cicero”), whose 1787 work A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America drew on Cicero, Polybius, and other classical authors, and finally the Constitution itself—the oldest still-operating constitution in the world, and one that many perceive as now under threat.
Cicero’s Rhetoric of Philosophical Political Engagement in the Preface of De Re Publica
Pietas, 2023
Recent discussion of Ciceronian constitutionalism has focused on Cicero’s efforts to revive the governing structure of the mixed regime as a solution to the crisis of the late Republic, neglecting the moral and philosophical aspect of his envisioned reform of Rome’s ruling class and his rhetorical strategies for advancing it. In De Re Publica, Cicero endorses the traditional republican regime, but in the preface of Book 5 he laments its disappearance due to the loss of the men who formerly defended it: since these men were themselves formed by a constitution now lost, how can such men, and the constitution, be restored? Limiting myself to the preface of the first book, I argue that Cicero strives to bring back the right kind of men in three ways: he disproves Epicurean quietism as self-defeating, shames decent men into embracing the risks of engaging in politics on behalf of the traditional regime by casting them as Epicureans, and encourages the ambitious to engage in politics from motives drawn from philosophy with the aim of moderating the potentially destructive passion for glory. In importing these novel motives from Greek philosophy, Cicero makes use of a brilliant rhetorical strategy of ethos, initially casting himself as contemptuous of philosophy; he also disguises their philosophical provenance by attributing them to Roman tradition. The cumulative effect of these arguments is the establishment of the secret rule of wisdom and a new role for republican rhetoric in the context of the philosophic dialogue