Cicero: On Obligations. P.G. Walsh translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

 

Cicero writes to his son, Marcus, whom he sent to Athens to study with Cratippus, an Aristotelian Cicero calls “the outstanding philosopher of our day” (I.2). By philosophy Cicero means the study of both theoretical principles and practical precepts—Aristotle’s division of rational thought into theoria, the understanding of which is sophia and praxis, the understanding of which is phronēsis. As a guide to theory, one needs a teacher; as a guide to practice, one needs a city, a political community, a re publica or public thing. Each is the “supreme authority” in one area: the teacher for knowledge, the city for examples. Pay attention, then, not only to Cratippus but to Athens, which provides examples of the most eminent philosophers, beginning with Socrates. Of course, Cicero knows that philosophy cannot be authoritative in any straightforward sense; Socrates knows that he doesn’t know, or at least doesn’t know anything. But Marcus is a young man, not a philosopher, and the De officiis presents him with clear doctrines more than it engages him in dialectic.

The Latin officium translates the Greek kathekon, which (as Walsh explains in his introduction) means a service or friendly and helpful act. Cicero emphasizes service to the re publica, intent as always to turn his reader away from an exclusively private life, whether philosophic or not. He calls attention to the need to pay attention to translation, urging Marcus to study not only Greek but his native Latin and, by implication, not only Athens but his native Rome. To make progress in dicendum, learning, and judicandum, judiciousness, you need both languages. It is noteworthy that Cicero chooses judiciousness to denote practical wisdom or prudence; he will go on to speak of argumentation in law courts—a public forum for Roman citizens, and a place where one can indeed provide ‘good offices’ or friendly service to fellow citizens. And again to this purpose, he tells his son, you might read not only Aristotle but your own father’s books, while “exercis[ing] your own judgment on the content without pressure from me” while perfecting your mastery of your own language—a language for which his own writings serve as a model, Cicero rightly implies (I.2). While “I yield to many in knowledge and the practice of philosophy,” I really am a good orator (I.2), exhibiting propriety, clarity, and elegance of thought and expression. “While [my] orations exhibit a more forceful style, the equable and temperate style of my philosophic discussion is also worth imitating” (I.3). None of the major Greek philosophers and orators excelled in both genres.

Cicero’s own immediate good office or service to Marcus consists of his gift of this book. “I intend to begin with the subject most suited to both your years and my paternal authority,” the topic of officium itself. (I.4). This part of philosophy has the widest practical application, as “there is no aspect of life public or private, civic or domestic, which can be without its officium” (I.4). “Honorable conduct lies entirely in the performance of such obligations, base conduct in neglecting them” (I.5). Honestum not only contrasts with turpitudo but is also distinct from what is utile, useful. A substantial part of De Officiis consists of a defense of the claim that honorable conduct comports better with utility than base conduct does. And it is this point that Machiavelli will contest the moral ground with his great rival, centuries later. [1]

Cicero warns his son that some philosophic schools “undermine obligation in general by their theories of the supreme good and the supreme evil” (I.5). How a philosopher understands nature, what is theory of ‘the whole’ is, had considerable bearing upon his practical, ethical, teaching. For example, if a philosopher thinks that the summum bonum or supreme good “has no connection with virtue, and measures [that good] by his own interests rather than by what is honorable,” he “cannot cultivate friendship, justice, or liberality so long as he remains consistent in his views, and is not prevailed upon by his own better nature” (I.5). He will be a Cynic, an apologist for the base, one who sees no real possibility of honorable conduct in himself or in anyone else. Or a philosopher might be an Epicurean, holding pain to be “the greatest evil”; such a man “cannot possibly be brave, and he that accounts pleasure the summum bonum cannot be temperate” (I.5).

Thus, the underlying question is nature, human nature. These schools of philosophy can “say nothing about obligation,” as “no firm, stable precepts inherent in nature can be posited except by those who claim that honorable maxims are to be enacted solely or chiefly for their own sake” (I.6). The schools that do make that claim are the Stoics, Academics (Platonists), and Peripatetics (Aristotelians). Cicero tells Marcus that he shall “draw upon their wells as much as, and in whatever way, my judgment and inclination dictate” (I.6), although he shall “follow the Stoics chiefly,” perhaps in order to lean against any cynical and/or epicurean inclinations the young man might develop during his stay in Athens.

What is obligation—its end or aim—and what guidance does it give us in shaping our lives from day to day? Obligation can be either absolute—the right, simply—or measured, a matter of shaping means to an end. In considering a course of action, one should first think of whether that course is right, honorable, or whether it is reprehensible, base; second, one should think of whether it is useful, likely to enhance their wealth or power; one should also think of whether a useful course of action contradicts the right. And when choosing between courses of action, one must distinguish between an honorable course and one still more honorable, and between a useful course and one still more useful.

Cicero begins with the right, the honorable. What is right for any species of thing is the fulfillment of its nature. Man differs from beasts in his capacity to reason, which enables him to identify the causes of things and the likely consequences of the actions of things. “Without effort [Man] visualizes the course of his whole life and prepares the necessities to live it out” (I.11) In their families and cities, in which men share “a common language and life,” reason enables them to find the best way, to choose the right course of action. But “primary for man is the inquiry and investigation into the truth”; “what is true, simple, and genuine is what is most suited to man’s nature” (I.13). Bringing this desire for knowledge together with family and political life, men by nature consent to be governed only by those who issue “just and lawful commands for our benefit” (I.13). “From this attitude comes greatness of soul and contempt for merely human ways” (I.13). 

With such rational apprehension of natural right, “man alone of all animals” apprehends “the nature of order and propriety and due measure in deeds and words” (I.14). In so apprehending the natural order, Man “transfer[s] this by analogy” from “eyes to mind,” and plans his course of action as a similarly “harmonious structure” (I.14). He wants to do nothing “unsightly or degenerate,” or to contemplate anything irrational in thought or action (I.14). “These are the qualities that kindle and fashion honorable conduct,” whether or not that conduct wins praise (I.14).

The honorable has four sources: the perception and intelligent awareness of what is true (wisdom); safeguarding the community by assigning to each individual his due and by guaranteeing fidelity to contracts (justice); the greatness and strength of a loft and unconquered spirit (courage); and modestia and temperantia (moderation). Readers will recognize the four principal virtues enumerated by Plato’s Socrates in the Republic. Cicero devotes the remainder of Book I to discussing each of them.

Wisdom or “knowledge of the truth comes closest to the essentials of human nature, for” as Aristotle asserts at the beginning of the Metaphysics, “we are all impelled and attracted towards a desire for discovery and knowledge” (I.18). “In this natural and honorable activity there are two faults which we must avoid,” namely, to take unknown things as known, giving “rash credence to them,” and to waste energy and effort on “unnecessary” matters (I.18-19). On this latter point, Cicero warns against shirking one’s obligations by becoming “diverted from public service by enthusiasm for research” (I.19). Here, he has in mind some of the more recent Stoics, such as Sallust, satirized by the young man in Cicero’s De Republica who is preoccupied with trying to figure out an optical illusion caused by a meteorological phenomenon that makes it appear as if there are two suns in the sky. It is true that theoretical wisdom (sophia in Greek, sapientia in Latin) is “chief of all virtues,” differing from practical wisdom (phronēsis, prudentia), the “knowledge of things to be sought and things to be avoided” (I.153). But since theoretical wisdom “embraces the sense of community between gods and man, and the relationship between man and man,” it would be enfeebled and unfulfilled “if no practical action were to flow from it” (I.153). And how could practical action be sound if it were not informed knowledge of what human beings are and “concerned with the fellowship of the human race” (I.153)?

Justice, “the brightest adornment of virtue,” ensures, first “that no one harms his neighbor unless he has himself been unjustly attacked” and, second, “communal property should serve communal interests, and private property private interests” (I.20). Nature doesn’t endow private property; one comes by it either by longstanding occupancy of empty land, victory in war, law, bargain, contract, or lot. For another person or persons to seize property so acquired is to “transgress the law of the community” (I.21). Communal or public property is also legitimate, since “our country claims a share in our origin, and our friends likewise,” doing so by nature, human beings being social and political animals. Public property betokens these claims, “binding the community and its individuals closely together by our skills, our efforts, and our talents” (I.22). Justice rests on “good faith,” that is, “truthfully abiding by our words and agreements,” by our fides making our promises fiat (I.23). 

Injustice, by contrast, usually stems from fear, greed, and/or the desire for glory. Cicero cites “the shameless conduct of Gaius Caesar” as a recent illustration: “He undermined all laws, divine and human, in order to establish that dominance which his erroneous belief had targeted for himself” in his pursuit of power and glory (I.26). Most regrettably, such ambition “is usually nursed by men of the greatest and most outstanding talent” (I.26). They often possess the abilities needed to achieve their unjust ends.

Cicero takes care to distinguish between injustice committed under sudden impulse or stress from premeditated injustice. There is also a certain moral laziness that can set in, whereby men “allow persons whom they should protect to go without their support” (I.28). And injustice can occur through sheer distraction, as we concentrate on our “personal pursuits or activities” (I.28). Cicero singles out philosophers as especially prone to this last cause of injustice. In this, he disagrees with Plato’s remark in the Theaetetus to the effect that philosophers are just because they search for the truth, eschewing more ordinary ambition. They do indeed refrain from acts of justice committed out of fear, greed, or the desire for glory, Cicero concedes—they are not Caesars—but the very often neglect acts of justice because they are distracted by philosophizing itself. Still others commit injustice because they pursue family interests too ardently, in the manner of today’s soccer moms, or they harbor “some repugnance for the human race,” cloaking their misanthropy with the claim that “they are minding their own business” (I.29). Such persons are “deserters from the life of the community” (I.29).

Having defined the two types of injustice and identified their causes, and having shown the ways by which justice is maintained, “now we shall be able readily to assess what our obligation is at any particular juncture, unless our self-absorption becomes excessive” (I.29), letting no person suffer harm and remaining mindful of the public good. This settles the question of justice within the political community, but what about justice between and among political communities?

“Rights in warfare must be scrupulously observed” (I.34). Some military disputes are settled by negotiations, others by force. “Since the first is characteristic of human beings and the second of beasts, we must have recourse to the second only if we cannot exploit the first” (I.34-35). (Machiavelli famously subverts this formula in The Prince.) As in Aristotle, “wars should be undertaken for the one purpose of living peaceably without suffering injustice; and once victory is won, those who have not indulged in cruel monstrosities in the war should be spared” (I.35). We Romans have done just that, indeed conferring citizenship upon many former enemies even as we “utterly destroyed Carthage and Numantia,” whose armies committed such monstrous acts against Romans. Not just any peace should be accepted, only those which do not “contain the seeds of future treachery” (I.35). [2]

There is also the question of civil war, usually waged when two or more factions arise within a political community which do not agree upon what the community’s regime should be. To prevent this, we should observe justice even with respect “to the lowliest of society,” the slaves (I.41). “That we treat them as hired hands is reasonable enough: make them work, but give them what is their due” (I.41).

More generally, Cicero identifies “two ways of inflicting injustice, by force or by deceit. Deceit is the way of the humble fox, force that of the lion. Both are utterly alien to human beings, but deceit is the more odious; of all kinds of injustice none is more pernicious than that shown by people who pose as good men at the moment of greatest perfidy.” (I.41). Machiavelli’s adjuration to “use” both the fox and the lion is another instance of his subversion of classical morality as seen in one of its most admired Roman exponents. Although Machiavelli is usually understood to be an enemy of Christianity, this animosity is often supposed to be part of a defense of ‘the ancients.’ Not so: Machiavelli is out to ruin both moral codes and to substitute his own for them.

Related to justice with respect to the distribution of property are beneficence and liberality. Cicero recommends that these subsidiary virtues be ruled by reason in the form of practical wisdom. Assess the character of your potential beneficiary, his affection for you, the type of association you have with him, and any obligations he may have “undertaken in [your] interest” (I.45). At the same time, since “our lives…are spent not with men who are perfect and manifestly wise, but with people who at best embody some pale reflection of virtue,” liberality should extend to anyone “as long as some glimpse of virtue is perceptible in him” (I.46). This requires you to rank your fellow human beings in terms of your obligations to them. Whether good or not so good, one should extend liberality to those “endowed with the milder virtues of moderation, self-rule, and justice”; this is prudent, since those of less mild disposition, the high-spirited ones, often become perfervid,” more likely to abuse your open-handedness (I.46). 

You should also rank possible recipients of beneficence and liberality with respect to their relation to you. The most general relationship is our shared human nature, “the fellowship of the whole human race” (I.50). As mentioned earlier, what unites human beings is reason and speech, “which more than anything separates us from the nature of the beasts” and binds us “in a kind of natural alliance” (I.50). True, some animals may be said to have courage, but not justice, equity, or goodness in the sense of being fully cognizant of the rational order of nature. Within this bond, there is also “the common ownership of all things which nature has brought forth for men’s joint use”—air and water, for example (I.51). These “must be preserved” with the help of laws governing private and public property (I.51). Other levels of human relationship include nationality (including race and language), the political community, close friends, kin, and marriage. Following Aristotle, when it comes to friendship, no friendship “is more pre-eminent of enduring than the friendship forged between good men of like character” (I.55). 

How to rank these relationships? Here, Cicero provides a challenging contrast to the rank order ‘we moderns’ incline to make. “None of these affinities has more weight and induces more affection than the allegiance which we each have to the re publica” (I.57). True, “our parents are dear to us, and so are our children and relatives and friends; but our native land alone subsumes all the affections which we entertain” (I.57). But since we feel the competing attractions of all these relations, Cicero ranks country and parents first, since “the debts we owe to the benefits which they bestow are the greatest” (I.58). Next come children and the rest of the household, “for we are their sole resource, and they can have no other refuge”; following them come “those relatives whom we find congenial and with whom our future prospects also are often shared” (I.58). Nonetheless, in terms of our life within the re publica and outside of our families, all persons “flourish best in friendships; and the most satisfying friendship is that cemented by similarity of moral outlook” and character (I.58).

Aristotle identifies magnanimity or greatness of soul as the compendium of all the virtues, rightly ordered. It is especially associated with the spirited element of the soul, the part which takes risks, regrets that it has but one life to give for its country. If a spirited soul lacks any of the virtues it can become dangerous to itself and to others. Lacking justice, it will fight “not for the safety of all but for personal interests,” descending from civility to barbarism (I.62). True courage defends the right. Similarly, an intelligent and knowledgeable soul “divorced from justice [is] to be called cunning,” not wise (I.63). Spirited souls lacking one or more of the virtues become tyrannical. “Such men do not allow themselves to be overruled by argument”—reason”—or by any political or lawful sanction”—by civility (I.64). Demagogues who rely “on the false assumptions of the ignorant mob” cannot be classified among the men of magnanimity, either (I.65). “The loftier a man’s spirit, the more easily in his desire for fame he is drawn to unjust deeds; this is a slippery slope on which he is poised” (I.65). The desire for wealth is equally deleterious, “for we must consider it characteristic of the brave and noble spirit to think little of the things which most men reckon special and glorious, and to despise them with the steady and unflinching eye of reason”; “it is the mark of the mature spirit and the great resolution it shows to endure [the numerous and varied occasions which affect the human condition throughout life] in such a way as not to abandon either the life of nature or the dignity of the philosopher” (I.67).

The mention of philosophers spurs Cicero to relent a bit on his previous strictures regarding their inclination to the private life. Some of these are “austere and serious men unable to stomach the conduct of the people or its leaders”—Stoics, not Epicureans (I.69). Let us “perhaps allow abstention from public affairs both to individuals of outstanding talent who have devoted themselves to learning, and to men hindered by ill-health or some other cogent reason who have renounced politics and yielded to others the power and praise for administering the re publica” (I.71). But if a man’s only excuse is that he “despise[s] the military and civil offices which most men admire,” this is not to be condoned, given our obligations to the re publica as our protector (I.71). Men “whom nature has endowed with the resources for conducting public business should renounce all hesitation, seek entry to public office, and administer the re publica,” as “in no other way can it be governed, or greatness of soul be made manifest” (I.72). Both statesmen and philosophers should cultivate such greatness of soul, and philosophers will find this easier to do, as they are less vulnerable to reversals of fortune, need fewer material resources, and endure less humiliation in reversals of fortune than the public men do. 

The political man therefore needs a different kind of preparation than a philosopher does. He should consider not only the honor political work brings but whether he has the capacity to perform it. “Careful preparation must be made” (I.73). Many politically ambitious men take military achievement as crucial to such preparation. Cicero demurs. In truth, “there have been many civic issues of greater importance and renown than operations in war” (I.74). Let arms, then yield to the toga. Although war should not be avoided by inventing ‘rationalizations’ for evading it, “establishing the rationale for making war is more desirable than courage in battle” (I.80). A war should be undertaken for some purpose that justly serves the re publica, not as an opportunity to win glory.

In considering civil rule, a man should follow two precepts articulated in the Platonic dialogues: to “protect the interests of the citizens in such a way that all they do should be directed towards that end without thought of personal advantage” and that “the whole rei publicae be their concern, so that they do not protect one section at the expense of the rest” (I.85). Otherwise, he will only exacerbate factionalism, that is to say, contradiction or disharmony in the city, which is unreasonable and immoral, as seen in the political histories of both Athens and Rome. One should not engage in “scrambling for offices,” either—an “utterly wretched business” (I.86). Nor should we “lend an ear to those who will have it that we should show bitter anger towards adversaries”; rather, “nothing is more praiseworthy or more worthy of a noble an exemplary man than to be conciliatory and forgiving,” as “those of us who live with free peoples in communities where there is equality before the law should make a habit of affability and reserve,” not allowing ourselves to become irritated by demanding and annoying requests (I.88). At the same time, “such gentleness and magnanimity are praiseworthy only if we are stern when the state demands it, for otherwise the civitas cannot be well administered” (I.88). Be governed by the laws, “which when imposing punishment are guided by fairness and not by anger” (I.89). 

The virtue of moderation comports with the honorable because what is truly honorable precedes from what is well-measured, fitting. ‘Fittingness’ or decorum applies to all the virtues. In exercising practical wisdom, for example, one should fit words to the circumstances and “recognize and maintain the truth in all matters”—true statements being words that fit the nature of the matter considered (I.95). With courage, “what is performed in a manly and lofty spirit is seen to be worthy of a man and to be fitting, whereas the opposite is unfitting and because it is despicable” (I.95) In general, the fitting is whatever action is reasonable in a given circumstance; “the fitting is what is consistent with man’s excellence in the respect in which his nature differs from all other living creatures” (I.96). Nature is ‘what is’; decorum is consistent with nature, does not contradict it, and indeed burnishes it.

Many poets understand this, but apply it more broadly, showing us what is fitting in a villain as well as what is fitting in a hero. “But nature has endowed us with the role of constancy, moderation, self-government, and consideration of others” (I.98). Poets show us what is fitting to human nature and what is fitting to men who have ruined their nature. They know the difference, and so do we, since “just as physical beauty attracts the eye because of the apt harmony of the bodily parts, and our pleasure lies in the fact that all those parts are as one in sharing a native grace, so this notion of the fitting, of decorum, which shines in our lives, wins the applause of our contemporary through the order, moderation, and constancy reflected in every word and action” (I.98). “The obligation which stems from this advances first on the path which leads to harmony with nature and to the preservation of its law. If we take nature as our guide, we shall never go astray”; just as “we win approval by our physical movements which accord with nature,” so much more do we win it “with the movements of the soul which are likewise consonant with nature” (I.100).

By nature, the soul’s appetites should obey the commands of the soul’s reasoning capacity. “Nature has not fashioned us to behave as if we have been generated for play and jest” but for “more serious and important pursuits” (I.103). Play and jest should be treated as we treat sleep and relaxation generally, as restoratives after “we have done justice to serious and weighty business” (I.103). As for play itself, it can be “ill-bred, rude, scandalous, indecent” or “refine, urbane, clever, and witty,” as seen in the plays of Plautus and “the books of Socratic philosophy” (I.104). Cicero commends the second form, preferring that his son not turn into a frat boy.

Cicero understands that individuals have different natures within the overall framework of human nature. He does not, impossibly, expect everyone to be the same. “We should each of us hold resolutely to the characteristics peculiar to us as long as they are not flawed,” following “our natural bent insofar as it befits the law of nature” (I.110). Nothing is fitting if it flies in the face of Minerva, of reason, and that includes never aiming at “something we cannot achieve” (I.110). The boy puts aside his dreams of athletic ‘stardom’ when he learns that he can’t hit a curveball. Instead, “work hardest at the things for which we are best suited,” unless circumstances require otherwise (I.114). But above all, Marcus, “we must establish what kind of person we wish to be, and what way of life we wish to follow” (I.117). This is the hardest decision to make, and we make it when we are young, “at a time when our powers of deliberation are at their weakest,” when we are more likely to follow our desires than our reason (I.117). “The person who has harmonized his entire plan of life with the sort of nature which is free of faults should hold a steadfast course, for this is supremely fitting, unless perhaps he realizes that he has made a mistake in his choice of a way of life,” in which case he should never be so vain as to fail to change course (I.120). Many times, the example of a father is helpful in such deliberations, provided one doesn’t imitate his vices.

Decorum should be observed also in relation to one’s age—a young man should concentrate especially on developing habits of moderation, an old man on avoiding laziness and shameless luxury—and to one’s role in relation to the political community—a magistrate is not an ordinary citizen and neither is the same as a resident foreigner. Decorum also manifests itself in personal conduct: modesty regarding the body, never “fall[ing] into a habit of listless sauntering in our gait” or of “hurrying too fast” (I.131). Decorum of soul consists of “keeping our mental operations in harmony with nature,” never succumbing against perturbation or depression” (I.131). Our appetites should obey reason whether we are intent upon discovering the truth or in determining a course of action. Decorum of speech, whether in an oration or in ordinary conversation, requires a similar reasoned measure. 

“In all of life,” then, “the right precept is to avoid exhibitions of passion, that is, mental excitement that is excessive and untempered by reason” (I.136). Even in rebuking someone, “show clearly that event that very harshness which goes with our reproof is designed for the good of the person reproved” (I.137). 

Turning from speech to action, Cicero identifies three principles to be followed. “First, impulse should obey reason”; “second, we should assess the importance of a project we seek to achieve, to ensure that neither more nor less attention and labor is expended than the case justifies”; “third, we must take pains to safeguard all that pertains to the dignity and moderation of a gentleman” (I.141). The political community’s civil institutions will serve as guides for many actions, whatever criticisms may have been leveled against them by philosophers. With respect to foreigners, “in sum, not to go into details, we should respect, defend, and preserve the common bonds of union and fellowship subsisting between all humanity” (I.149).

A gentleman will select a fitting means of livelihood, excluding tax gathering, usury, manual labor, wholesale merchandizing, mechanical trades (“for no workshop can have anything liberal about it”), and all trades which “serve sensual pleasures,” such food preparation, and entertainment (I.150). Honorable trades require “more prudence” than these, and include medicine, architecture, and “teaching honorable things” (I.151). “But of all profit-making activities none is better, more fruitful, more delightful, more worthy of a free man than agriculture” (I.151). Such Virginia gentlemen as Washington, Jefferson, and Madison took due note.

Having established that “obligations derive from what is honorable, and from each type of virtue” (II.1), in Book II Cicero addresses the second main element of ethics, utility, which involves “the kinds of obligation which impinge upon our mode of living, and on the availability of the things which men put to use, their wealth and their resources” (II.1). However high-minded he may be, a gentleman still must attend to ‘low’ necessities.

There have been some who have charged Cicero with failing to observe this obvious point. He offers an apologia. “From time to time I fear that mention of philosophy is abhorrent to men of integrity, and that they are surprised that I devote so much time to it” (II.2). But he does so only because public life is no longer possible in Rome, now that Rome is “wholly in thrall to one man,” Julius Caesar (II.2). Had the re publica remained a mixed-regime republic, had its regime not changed, I no longer had any public role to maintain. Here, Cicero illustrates an earlier teaching: That moral conduct or obligation changes with circumstances. “Should anyone pour scorn on such study” as philosophy, “I cannot possibly imagine what such a person thinks worth praising” (II.5). 

Others criticize not his philosophizing but his way of philosophizing, charging that he contradicts himself when “I maintain that we can grasp nothing for certain” while “pursuing the rules for obligation” (II.7). But I have never claimed that there are some things certain, other things uncertain, only that “some things are probable and others improbable” (II.7). Ethical reasoning depends not upon certainty but upon convictions tested by logic, by dialectic, “the clash of arguments from the two sides” (II.8). Such rational testing, whereby one can identify and discard improbabilities, suffices for firm moral conduct. Cicero proceeds to do just that with respect to utility and possible conflicts between it and the honorable.

“Nothing more destructive can be imposed on human life” than the claim that “the honorable is detached from the useful” (II.9). And both the honorable and the useful should be related to justice. “Those who fail to see this are people who often venerate only tricksters and mistake perversity for wisdom” (I.10).

There are several kinds of useful things: inanimate (gold, silver), animate but non-rational (farm animals), and animate and rational (the gods, other men). Of the last group, “the gods are not thought to inflict harm” but men often do, presenting “the greatest stumbling-block to their fellow-men” (II.12). Inanimate and animate but non-rational things require human labor or at least rule to be useful. As for human beings, they can scarcely be useful to one another if they do not live in political communities, preferably ones with sound regimes. As a result of political life, “men developed a peaceable outlook and a sense of restraint; human life thus became more secure, and by giving and receiving, by interchange and application of talents we came to want for nothing” (II.15). Conversely, “there is likewise no plague so abominable that it is not visited by one man on another” (II.16). Cicero agrees with the opinion of Dicaearchus, who wrote that “many more men…have been wiped out by attacks of other men in wars or civil commotions than by all other disasters” (II.16).

Given this crucial dichotomy, “I regard it as the peculiar function of virtue to win over men’s minds, and to harness them to its purposes” (II.17). In this way, morality is supremely useful as well as good ‘in principle.’ All virtue centers on three things: “in detecting what is true and genuine in any instance, what is consistent with it, and what are its consequences, origins and causes”; in restraining “those mental disturbances which the Greeks call pathe (’emotions’)” and “subject[ing] impulses (the Greek for which is hormai) to the control of reason”; and, finally, in “treat[ing] our associates in a restrained and expert way, so that with their support we may have our natual needs supplied in full and abundant measure” while “wreak[ing] vengeance on those who have sought to harm us, and inflict[ing] such punishment as justice and decency allow” (II.18).

In diametric opposition to Machiavelli, Cicero argues that “of all these possibilities none is more calculated to secure and retain influence than winning affection, and none is more repugnant than being feared,” which leads to being hated (II.23). Tyrants like Julius Caesar are killed for this reason, as “no amount of influence”—meaning bribes—can “withstand the hatred of the many” (II.23). Even if the laws have been trashed by such a man, and “even if liberty has been intimidated,” eventually the laws will surface again, ready to prescribe just punishment (II.24). More, “liberty which has been suppressed has a fiercer bite than when it has been maintained” (II.24). Those who rule by fear often die in fear. The same goes for factitious men who foment civil wars. As a result of such men, “we have lost our republic” (II.29). “We have plunged into this disaster through choosing to be feared rather than to be cherished as the object of affection” (II.29).

Glory, which military commanders seek, works the same way, depending upon the affection and trust of the people and their opinion that a man is worthy of admiration and honor. These sentiments in turn depend upon the intent to serve the people and, better still, success in doing so, actions which manifest the virtues of “liberality, beneficence, justice, good faith, and all the virtues associated with civilized and affable manners” (II.32). It is human nature itself which induces us to “feel affection for those in whom we think these virtues reside” (II.32). Beyond affection, we also trust those whom we think have practical wisdom conjoined with justice, the ability to foresee events and to prepare for emergencies when they arise. Justice inspires trust still more because we place more trust in a just man with lesser prudence than a prudent man with little justice. “Justice without prudence will be able to do much; prudence without justice will have little effect at all” (II.34). In the philosophic sense, prudence with little or no justice is mere craftiness, not true prudence, but Cicero stipulates that he here describes the sentiments of ‘the many’ on these matters, not a precise moral teaching. 

Along with beneficence and the combination of prudence and justice, the man who wins glory enjoys the admiration and honor of his fellow-citizens. A man known for self-indulgence, unscrupulousness, backbiting, and baseness generally will be viewed with contempt, whereas the one who maintain their self-possession regardless of circumstances, good or bad, earn respect.

Above all, “justice fulfills all three prerequisites for gaining glory: benevolence, because it seeks to benefit the greatest number; trust for the same reason; and admiration because it despises those things which fire most men with greed, and possesses them” (II.38). A reputation for justice is necessary to gain the help of others, but “if people imagine that they can obtain glory by deceit and empty show and hypocrisy, in word and look”—the mere appearance of justice—they “very much mistaken” (II.43). Even thieves need to practice justice among themselves. Therefore, “justice must be cultivated and maintained by every means, both for its own sake (otherwise it would not be justice) and to enhance our honor and glory” (II.42). “We should be as we wish to be regarded” (II.43). To win this worthy reputation, one may conduct oneself well in war, exhibit modesty, devotion to parents and household, associate with men with the reputation for wisdom and justice, and demonstrate the ability to speak well, in friendly and affable conversation but also in public oratory, especially in courtrooms and especially as a defender of the accused, not their prosecutor. To defend the accused, especially those accused by government officers, can put a just limit on rule by fear even as it wins the esteem of the people, who are often the victims of such unjust intimidation. Cicero refers his son to an oration of this sort that he made when he was a young man. It is reasonable to consider the De Officiis not only as an example of a father’s advice to his son, not only as a model of advice fathers generally should give to their sons, but as his own version of Plato’s Apology of Socrates, that is, the speech of a man punished unjustly for living a just life—in his case, however, a life devoted mostly to civic activity, less to the more exclusively philosophic way of life defended by Socrates.

Beneficence or kindness—seen in what we now call charitable giving but even more charitable work—and liberality (the mean between the extremes of extravagance and miserliness) will earn you many friends. Direct your acts of beneficence toward men of integrity, lest your efforts be wasted; this keeps your efforts within the limits of justice. Some such acts should be directed to individuals, others to the re publica. Care must be taken to give moderately because gifts of money erode the wealth that makes such gifts possible; it can also corrupt the recipients. Cicero censure the practice of providing not so much bread as ‘circuses’—civic feasts, gladiatorial shows, public games, and “wild-beast chases” in the arenas (II.55). Liberality hits the middle between extravagance and miserliness. 

Beneficence is for men in their private capacity. As public officials, their “chief preoccupation…must be to ensure that the individual keeps what is his; there should be no public confiscation of the possessions of private persons” (II.73). Sulla began, and Julius Caesar expanded, the policy of proscribing their enemies and then giving their property to others; such largesse with others’ possessions is an instrument of tyranny. Similarly, Marcius Philippus’ “agrarian law,” whereby property would be transferred from the wealthy few to the many poor, aimed at “the equalization of property; what could be more baneful than that?” (II.73). “The chief motivation behind the establishment of res publicae civitatesque was to ensure the maintenance of private property; for although nature guided men to form communities, it was in the hope of guarding their possessions that they sought protection in cities” (II.73). Cicero singles out the property tax as particularly unjust for that reason; needed revenues may be supplied by tariffs. In all, “there is no vice more squalid than greed” (II.77), whether it is seen in private or public men, leading as it does to injustice and thus to factionalism. Rather, “the supreme demonstration of reason and wisdom as manifested by a good citizen, not dividing the interests of the citizens but uniting all on the basis of equity” (II.83).

At the same time, and as a corollary to property rights, rulers must take care that the many who are poor do not fall into debt. This only leads to resentment when the few who are rich attempt to collect what they’ve lent. To guard private property, prevent exploitation of the poor by the rich and rebellion by the poor against the rich; to “employ all possible means both in war and at home to enhance the power, territories, and revenues of the re publica while observing justice: “these are the tasks for great men,” tasks “regularly achieved in the days of our forebears” and still achievable today “for those who will carry them through,” thereby winning glory for themselves and proving useful to the re publica.

Book III continues the theme of usefulness, now with respect to describing and ranking the several kinds of useful things and actions. Cicero begins by contrasting his own enforced leisure, with the overthrow of the republican regime and the rule of Mark Antony, with that of Publius Scipio, whose intentionally extracted his moments of leisure from a life of military and political activity. Scipio said that “he was never less at leisure than in his leisure-time, and was never less lonely than when he was on his own,” thinking of public business or communing with himself (III.1). Leisure and solitude lend themselves to sloth in others; they stimulated the soul of Scipio. As for himself, Cicero wishes he could say the same, as “my leisure has been imposed on me from want of public business rather than through desire for rest” (III.2). But he can imitate Scipio as best he can, if imperfectly. Scipio’s leisure and solitude were superior to my own because he, like Socrates, wrote nothing while at leisure, concentrating his mind entirely upon political and philosophic meditations undiluted by the act of writing. Lacking “the strength of mind” that enabled Scipio to ignore his solitude, Cicero writes, an act of sociality—in this instance, one directed toward the care of his son. Cicero is ‘making himself useful,’ as our phrase puts it.

This returns Cicero’s thoughts to the relationship between the honorable and the useful. “Socrates used to pronounce a curse upon those who first separated these two things which are inseparable by nature” (III.11). In this, the Stoics concurred, arguing that nothing truly useful can be dishonorable and that the honorable is always useful—in sharp contrast to those who claim that what is honorable should serve the useful. Things said to be useful very often conflict with the useful.

Cicero cautions that for the Stoics the identity of the honorable and the useful can only coincide perfectly among the wise. Most of us are not wise. We esteem as honorable what is not truly honorable and esteem as useful what is not truly useful. We are human but imperfectly so; we strive to fulfill our true nature but have yet to do so. For us, what the Stoics call “the honorable at a secondary level” must suffice (III.16), cultivating and admiring the virtues as imperfectly understood—thinking of justice simply as repaying debts and refraining from lying or cheating, for example. Such virtue is not to be discouraged. It readily distinguishes between the honorable as conceived imperfectly from, for example, greed for financial gain. But it does lead to doubts in the moral realm, a realm where we typically seek certitude. For example, murder is rightly deemed evil, murdering a friend especially heinous. “But if a man murders a tyrant even if he is a friend, has he thereby implicated himself in a criminal act? the Roman people in fact do not think so, for they regard this as the most noble of illustrious deeds. So in this instance has the useful prevailed over the honorable? On the contrary, the honorable has allied with the useful.” (III.19). The criterion for judging these moral dilemmas we unwise folk must consider is human nature, which is social and political. Ordinarily, murder and theft and other acts of injustice undermine the natural sociability of human beings, although in the exception given such an act might affirm that sociality by killing an enemy of that very humanity. Thus, “though nature does not object to our opting to obtain for ourselves individually rather than for another what is need for life’s necessities, she does not permit us to increase our own resources, wealth, and possessions by plundering those of other people” (III.22). The “aim and purpose of laws [is] too keep intact the unifying bonds between citizens” (III.23). This goes not only for those who live as fellow-citizens but for nations as they deal with other nations.

As he had discussed in the Laws, nature as a whole holds together, consists of a unity of many forces and things, a harmony. There is a law of nature; nature isn’t chaotic. So too with the human soul, which is part of nature: “a lofty and noble spirit, and attitudes of courtesy, justice, and generosity, are much more in harmony with nature than are pleasure, mere life, and riches.” [3] “It is the mark of that noble and lofty spirit to despise these last, and to account them as nothing compared with the common good,” the good of the re publica (III.24). For ‘we unwise,’ we imperfect human beings, to emulate Hercules, who undertook “the greatest toils and privations so as to save or aid each and every nation, rather than to live apart from men, enjoying not only freedom from all troubles but also the greatest pleasures,” as Epicureans recommend (III.25). In engaging in military and especially political life, however, the one who “conforms with nature can inflict no harm on his fellow-man,” although he will unhesitatingly inflict harm on men who act as if they were beasts (III.25). “We do not share fellowship with tyrants” (III.32). In this sense “we must all adhere to the principle that what is useful to the individual is identical with what is useful to the community” (III.25). As Aristotle argues, we must attend to the circumstances, adjusting our conduct to them in order to achieve the honorable with the useful.

“What is good is certainly useful, and so whatever is honorable”—by definition good—is “useful” (III.35). The circumstances which “perplex our minds” occur because some things appear to be useful when they are not (III.40). So, for example, “the good man will never promote a friend’s interests to the detriment of the re publica or in defiance of his oath or pledged word, even if he is sitting in court over him, for he then quits the role of friends to undertake that of judge” (III.44). It might seem useful to promote your friends interests in expectation of some quid pro quo down the line, but this would injure the bonds of the re publica within which your friendship is framed. On the contrary, “the good man is one who benefits all those whom he can, and who harms none unless he has been the victim of injustice” (III.76). “Is it not shameful for philosophers to have doubts about this, when even plain country folk would have no doubts?” (III.77). Even if the prize is consulship, even if the intended end is, Caesar-like, lordship “of all the world,” it remains “a monstrous error” to perform what seem to be useful but unjust acts, to “lose the luster and repute of a good man” (III.83). “Nothing is more useless to the man who has gained that eminence unjustly,” as he “fears by day and night” for his own safety, knowing that the victims of his crimes seek just revenge, and will not stop until they have it (III.84).

In contrast to the likes of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, Cicero holds up the example of Marcus Atilius Regulus, a consul captured by during a war with Carthage. The Carthaginian monarch sent Regulus back to the Roman senate to ask for the return of some prisoners of war; Regulus swore an oath that if the senate refused to release them he would return to Carthage to face death by torture. Instead, Regulus recommended a supremely un-useful course for himself and his family, recommending to the senators that they not release the prisoners and then returning to Carthage to face execution. In doing so, Regulus “maintain[ed] the dignity of his consular standing,” exhibited “greatness of soul and courage,” serving the re publica instead of himself (III.99). How did this serve Rome? Regulus was old, “spent with age,” whereas the Carthaginian prisoners were young, brave officers; it was more useful to Rome for Regulus to sacrifice himself than to have such men released (III.100). Cicero’s title, De Officiis, suggests the intimate relation between the ‘good offices’ of the individual man and the political office he holds. Ciceronian ethics are political to the core, yet with no suggestion of modern ‘totalitarian’ servility towards ‘the state’ or ‘the party.’

“When men detach the useful from the honorable, they undermine the very foundations of nature” (III.101), which support the harmony of all elements not their contradiction and consequent destruction. “Nothing is useful which is not also honorable; and it is not honorable because it is useful, but useful because it is honorable” (III.110). That is, one must always ask, ‘Useful for what?’ To join pleasure with the honorable, for example, “is like mating an animal with a human” (III.118). It is Machiavelli who will commend the Centaur as a model for the prince.

 

 

 

Notes

1. As Walsh mildly puts it, “Machiavelli in his celebrated Il Principe (1513) diverges from the Ciceronian tradition.”
2. Walsh suggests that Cicero alludes to the Great Civil War of 49 BC, when Julius Caesar was allowed to retain the means by which he could violate the peace agreement he had reached with the Senate.
3. Hobbes and other materialists often put self-preservation, the maintenance of mere life on whatever terms, at the head of moral aims. Cicero is thinking more of such pleasure-seeking philosophers as the Epicureans, who argue “that all good lies in pleasure, and have maintained that virtue is praiseworthy merely because it is productive of pleasure” (III.116). This notion is “at war with the honorable,” contradicting the principal virtues of practical wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice—all now reduced to the status of instruments of pleasure (III.117).

 

Michael Platt: Mighty Opposites: Machiavelli and Shakespeare Match Wits. Privately published, 2021. First published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy (Volume 48, Number 2, Winter 2022).

 

What if playwrights Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) and William Shakespeare (1564-161) had met, corresponded, even conversed, thanks to the Florentine’s acquisition of the Makropulos Elixir, mixed by the court alchemist of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II—a potion imagined by still another playwright, Karel Capek (1890-1938), granting those who drink it a long-extended life? And what if Shakespeare wrote an unfinished dialogue based on the encounter, completed by his fellow player and trusted friend Nicholas Tooley? (After all, did not a promising young Plato scholar named Seth Benardete once muse, “Shakespeare could have written dialogues,” to the delight of his teacher, Leo Strauss?) Michael Platt has imagined it so, bringing together “the founder of modern political philosophy” with “the greatest modern poet” in a book animated by the question, can there be a Christian prince?”

The year is 1598. Machiavelli is secretary of state for the “Right, Re-Risen, Roman Republic,” having inspired the unification of northern Italy under a regime that has built itself into a naval power in the Mediterranean. He is on a diplomatic mission in England, perhaps to counter Spain, which still controls the Kingdom of Naples. Always looking to enlist “new captains in his unarmed army,” he also seeks an alliance with Shakespeare, whose writings surpass Machiavelli’s own works (Machiavelli admits to himself) in beauty. “In spiritual warfare nothing is more effectual,” and in his declared war on the regnant form of spirituality, Christianity, “the greatest calumny on life,” Machiavelli can use all the allies he can get. Having read Shakespeare’s Roman plays, he detects, or supposes he detects, a potential officer.

This is to say that Platt indicates the partial fulfillment of Machiavelli’s intention in a sort of afterlife made possible not by God but by medicine, an intention suggested in his books: in place of the risen Christ, the Galilean who defeated the Roman emperors, the Roman res publica will be resurrected, transfigured by the spirit of ‘the prince’—that is to say, the spirit of Machiavelli himself, who is no Cicero, no ‘ancient’ Roman.

Shakespeare replies to Machiavelli’s self-written letter of introduction, pleased with the Florentine’s flattering but true observation that Shakespeare writes both tragedy and comedy. He invites Machiavelli to attend performances of his Richard III and his three plays on Henry VI. He also recommends that Machiavelli read and reread them.

In due course, Machiavelli replies, observing that the English plays complement the Roman plays, with their shared themes of honor and calumny, the violence of political founding, and civil disorder. He is quick to spot a new source of controversy in modern England, “the new division of Christianity” between Catholics and Protestants. He criticizes monarchic regimes because they are dynastic: since “most families are awful to grow up in,” “why give rule of public things to a family,” which only “magnifies vices more than virtues”? It may be that he brings these themes together, with an eye on the ‘family’ seen in the Trinity. “I do see, howbeit faintly, the coming of a better regime,” as the English people exhibit the capacity to discern virtue in their rulers and demand justice when those rulers commit crimes. “Would that their common sense were instituted in a stronger Commons, and if a ruling circle sprang up in it.”

Shakespeare concurs with some of this. “How could I not study disorder? After all, there is so much of it. And it is always waiting to rush in. All it takes is one generation to lose the good times, and then slide on to worse,” although “in the worst of times, when all seems lost, a rebound occurs,” often beginning, as Machiavelli hopes, “with the people” As to Shakespeare’s downplaying of Parliament, he calls Machiavelli’s attention to the theater in which he puts on his plays. It “give[s] the audience the experience of an ideal Parliament in eternal session, in which all the important features of a political situation, together with their connection to everything above and below politics are brought into speech, so that deliberation about the nation, sometimes even about the world, goes on in the mind of the audience, as it should in Parliament, in the Privy Council, in the Monarch, and in the soul of every English man facing his public choices”—more than only a Parliament but a mixed regime, consisting of both aristocrats and commoners, “all drawn together in our Theatre, and by my theatre, all made into one audience, all laughing, weeping, trembling, cheering together, and accordingly understanding,” in what is now nearly a modern commercial ‘nation-state.’ He concludes by wondering if, even with a commercial way of life, men “can live together who do not worship together, as Jew and Christian do not, or at least look up to something beautiful and loft together?” Where Machiavelli envied the beauty of Shakespeare’s literary style, his art, Shakespeare himself considers beauty in nature, and perhaps in God.

In their next exchange of letters, Machiavelli begins by condemning the conspicuously Christian Henry VI, who “wishes to be loved not feared” and is rewarded only with contempt. Indeed, on further consideration, Machiavelli concludes that Henry wants to be loved only by God, remaining indifferent to the love, the hate, and even the contempt of his fellow men, a ruler who “puts himself above politics” even to the extent of restoring titles and estates to his dynastic enemy, Richard Plantagenet. Unfitted for war, Henry never played sports, practiced with weapons, or learned horsemanship; for Machiavelli, ‘horse’ means warfare and, given Richard’s famous battlefield cry, “My kingdom for a horse!”—a line that will reappear for further discussion later—Machiavelli is rehearsing his theme from The Prince that princes of war must replace princes of peace. With “reviling relish,” Machiavelli lists Henry’s many “sins of political omission,” from his failure to defend his (few) political friends (especially his failure to protect his Lord Protector, Duke Humphrey) to his failure as a royal husband to punish his foreign-born queen for her infidelity. “All these omissions add up to omitting to rule,” to leaving rule of human things to the wisdom and power of God and His providence.

Shakespeare largely concurs with this analysis, while cautioning against taking it too far. “I have qualified our contempt” for Henry. He may not know horses, “but surprise, he knows hawking,” a sport that figures in his comedy the Taming of the Shrew, in which “my hawker Petruchio gentles a mature wild female, named Kate, and with the same means” a falconer would use, “deprivation of sleep and meat.” Moreover, Henry “never had the benefit of a father,” only “the image of his great father,” Henry V—in “everyone’s mind for comparison”—and a “nefarious uncle,” the Duke of Bedford, as his tutor. The “ever-widening span” between young Henry’s “sight and his might makes him something like a Fool in court,” seeing and saying things impermissible to others but unable to act, “or even to take care of himself.” Rulers do need toughness, since “not all the anointment in Christendom can change a soul never born to rule.” But Henry does have compassion for his people, and this is what leads to his “one political success,” his quelling of a popular rebellion “through clemency and through the recollection of his father.” Shakespeare adds, tellingly, “No wonder you missed it; clemency is not a trick of the fox.” More, we see that while Machiavelli blames Henry’s incapacity on Christianity, Shakespeare attributes that incapacity to the king’s nature. This allows Shakespeare to judge him with clemency, as Machiavelli does not and will not.

That last rapier thrust induces Machiavelli to pull back, offering a qualification of his own. “Not that too much vice is virtuous,” he cautions, criticizing Henry’s queen, Margaret, for her excessive “spirit of revenge.” After all, “murder must have a purpose,” a political purpose; “she is all fury, no cunning.” But here, too, Shakespeare points to a certain subtlety Machiavelli overlooks. Margaret is “not all revenge.” When Henry banishes her lover, “we see some tenderness in her, however adulterous,” and when her son is stabbed in front of her, “we feel as she feels,” never having “expected to suffer with her.” “Often that happens in my works. Suddenly someone who could have hardened into a profile, even a cartoon, shows another side or feature, or a downright about-face. As you get to know human beings that happens. As you get to know yourself, that happens.” Platt follows Shakespeare’s lead here, even as he has Shakespeare deliver that lesson; just when it seemed that the exchange between the two men might turn into a simple battle of wits, he has Shakespeare offer the childless older man some fatherly advice.

There is a larger moral and political problem that Machiavelli also does not see. If Duke Humphrey attempted to overthrow Henry, “as his wife and you urge,” he would no longer be himself, no longer “the man we rightly…think most fit of all the magnates to be a king.” That is, “he would lose his eligibility in our eyes, and as important, his worthiness in his own eyes.” As Plato’s Socrates argues, “the same virtue that makes a man best for an office excludes him”; the one “most worthy to rule, the philosopher, is least interested in doing so.” A ruler by the apparently natural but actually conventional right of heredity may therefore be preferable to the ruler by the natural right of virtue. After all, so many persons suppose themselves naturally fitter to rule than whoever it is that wears the crown. To make partly invisible, counterfeitable virtue the criterion for ruling in practice would be to invite endless civil disorder. Better that the wise man advise the king, serve as Lord Protector, guarding him against such enemies as Humphrey’s ambitious wife and the ever-conniving Cardinal Winchester. “It is ambition within bound and in service of the good that is to be lauded, not the over-reaching acquisitiveness you urge in recommending Humphrey seize the Crown, or the infinity you desire. That way madness in the soul lies, and chaos in the state.”

After Richard Plantagenet’s son Edward kills Henry’s capable son, also named Edward, on the battlefield, and his ally Gloucester murders Henry (by then Edward’s prisoner in the Tower of London), England is left with a king whose sexual desires lead him into an injudicious marriage. Machiavelli sniffs, “The lust of Edward IV unfitted him to be a prince.” More politic choices had been available. Upon reading this, Shakespeare thinks, “Though in your Prince you warn not to touch the women, in your plays you teach every man to ‘touch’ all he can.” For you, Machiavelli, “neither fortune nor woman can resist man,” but in the world you envision there can be no stable families to uphold the city. “Families start with sight, not touch, with the ardent looks of the young, of Romeo and Juliet.” “Machiavelli in love, impossible.” And so Machiavelli makes the first genuinely political relationship, the reciprocal rule of husband and wife, also impossible. If Machiavelli were ever to watch Romeo and Juliet, “I’m afraid he’d set himself to teach one lover to murder the other, and thus effectually prove that love does no, cannot exist, just as he would prove ideal republics are no guides to better states, and even no measure of extant ones.”

Shakespeare keeps most of these thoughts to himself. In his answering letter, he contents himself with making a different remark, one aimed at moderating his correspondent’s claims. “One consequence of the free will my characters manage to exercise…is that others cannot predict it; even the sagacity of the sage is limited by that reality; that’s a hard fact those who are proud of penetrating hard things do not like to acknowledge.” The news of his Lord Protector’s death first makes King Henry faint. But then his realization of his unintentional responsibility for that death “fills him, for once, with spirit,” a possibility neither his enemies nor the play’s audience anticipate. “My characters are always doing something a bit ‘out of character,’ very much like the men and women I know, like myself.” His point to Machiavelli: conscience does not invariably make cowards of us all. Sometimes it makes some of us courageous. “A sense of guilt is not always a disadvantage, and its absence not always an advantage.” Equally, the attempt to conquer fate, Fortuna, to satisfy an unlimited desire to acquire by somehow getting ‘behind’ one’s character, manipulating it, ‘using’ one’s virtues and vices, makes too much of freedom. Machiavelli, how well do you know yourself? How well do you know other men, whom you are so sure you see right through? And how well do you know Fortuna, whom you expect to master?

Shakespeare thus agrees that Henry and Edward are no fit kings, although for different reasons. What of the tyrant who succeeds them, Edward’s younger brother, Richard III? Machiavelli applauds. “In these Histories so far, I most esteem this man most,” he exclaims, with redundant emphasis. “I positively exult in Richard’s polite employment of Christian scripture and sentiments,” seen in his seduction of Lady Anne, widow of Edward’s son, “right beside her husband’s coffin,” no less. Machiavelli delights in Richard’s “witty expression” of his prideful contempt for his inferiors, phrases Shakespeare turns that are even better than his own clever formulations in The Prince.  Still, he faults Richard for being a bit too open in his blasphemies, a mistake symptomatic of an overall lack of prudence. What is more, “other than gaining the crown, he has no purpose, no plan.” In this, his anti-Christian stance apes the Christian’s inclination to gaze at the lilies of the field, which neither toil nor spin because the joys of the day suffice to him who expects still greater, permanent joys in eternity, needing no plan for that future time, already prepared for him by his Savior. By contrast, Machiavelli does have a plan. While hoping to rid the world of the ‘moderns’ or Christians while radically revising the teachings of the ‘ancients,’ Machiavelli himself would take care to salvage pieces of ancient wisdom, including prudential wisdom, even as he directs them to purposes the ancients did not understand.

Shakespeare takes up the theme of the ancients—specifically, the Romans. “Between us, I do not see Rome, either republic or empire, as wholly superior to our modern Christendom.” Because “the deepest desire of a Roman is to become a statue of himself,” Rome undertook the monumental task of world conquest. Having achieved this, Julius Caesar did indeed “achieve a statuesque immortality.” But “in becoming a god” he lost his humanity. (As Christians would add, a statue-god is an idol, no real god.) To “despise human life” leads to a reduction of the man to a slab of marble or, if still living, a beast. Caesar’s idolatrous divinity contrasts with Christ’s everlasting life, whereby God became human, died, but continued to live and even to rule. Why is this not the superior ideal?

Ideal it may be, but is it true? Machiavelli replies that the reasoning behind the Earl of Warwick’s autopsy of Duke Humphrey, proving that the Lord Protector was murdered (2 Henry VI 3.2.168ff.) should be extended to consideration of claims based on “the body of Christ allegedly crucified and allegedly risen from the dead.” Christians point to miraculous stigmata on their hands, where painters depict nails driven into Christ’s hands, attaching Him to the Cross. But “only nails through the wrists will hold a body to a cross—unless you believe in miracles. So much for all later stigmata! I and Leonardo know if anatomy were queen of the sciences there would be no theology.” Morally, too, Christianity hangs on dubious assumptions. “What a terrible idea, of a God who would punish whole innocent generations for the deeds of their grandfathers, but this God does not exist.” Fortuna, on the other hand, “hard but not interested in retribution,” shows that men “need princes not saviors,” as “men punish themselves” with their crimes of ignorance and the mental weakness induced by false religion. Shakespeare, Machiavelli confidently or perhaps wishfully asserts, rightly teaches the English to “abhor infamy, dare to reason, and be a man.”

“You say things that other men do not say, only do,” Shakespeare observes. Yet what you say is only “part of knowledge.” “Sometimes, even in politics, men do good things, and sometimes, if rarely, they aspire, even in political life, to the lofty good above them, and thus deserve to be remembered, as Good Duke Humphrey, a statesman though he failed, should be.” Your Prince amounts to “the unintended exhibition of your noble soul,” inasmuch as “you aspire to lasting glory, but you do not know yourself”; “I see all your desires in strife, the desire to know the truth, the desire to effect something, and the desire to win immortal fame, all there struggling in you.” Reread your own book and if by that “you come to understand yourself, you would soon be able to order yourself.”

As for the way you would order the world, into large, centralized states, this too will lead to self-contradiction. Before Henry VIII and his successful instantiation of your kind of state in England, a rich man gave to a poor man out of charity, a poor man felt gratitude in return. Now, “those taxed to provide will always feel it is too much, and the poor receiving it will feel it is too little”; with such “resentment in both and humiliation of the receiving poor,” will not your strong state weaken?

When Machiavelli pointedly ignores this “challenge to self-examination,” Shakespeare indignantly writes that the teacher of evil lives on, all right, but in the malign effects of his teachings. Scoundrels “will cite your authority for their low crimes, their base betrayals, and even their savage atrocities.” Exercising his own virtue of prudence, however, he decides not to send this letter and rather to wait for a better opportunity to engage Machiavelli at his core, so to speak, “perhaps face to fact, on a visit to Stratford.”

He instead more cautiously writes to “suggest that much escapes you.” In “grasping for the effectual,” you blind yourself to “noble failures, and complain of fortune, yours and Cesare Borgia’s and you do not know who to marry”—a theme of the Odyssey—”and I doubt you know how to die”—a theme of the Iliad. That is, although Machiavelli writes comedies, tragedies and epics remain beyond his reach. And even his most famous comedy, Mandragola, is “devoid of merriment,” more smutty than funny.

One of the things Machiavelli admits has escaped him is the reason why crafty Richard III lost his crown so soon after he took it. Shakespeare explains. Having murdered the two young princes in the Tower, Richard seeks an heir; hence his intention to marry Edward’s widow. He can conceive only of a father who will guard his heir, perpetuate his family on the throne, not one who might risk his son for the good of his country. But this is what his enemy, Lord Stanley, does, “risking [his] own son for the greater good of England,” as “one of those Romans you admire” would do. Richard dies in the battle that ensues.

More profoundly, Richard fails as a man. “Feared not loved you say. Well, the truth is Richard like every man wishes to be loved.” But “he finds he cannot love himself, only fear himself.” He grew up “with everyone around him, including his mother, interpreting his shape”—his hunchback—as “a mark of God and expecting evil of him, until he does too.” Despite his ridicule of Christianity, he “swears by St. Paul five or six times,” a sign of misery beneath the mockery. He “thinks himself unloved by God, brought into existence to do evil, to be God’s scourge and minister, and yet notwithstanding, damned for being so, damned from birth exactly as some Protestants hold omniscient God to providentially rule this world, electing few, damning the many.” You, Machiavelli, “share his hatred of God, but not how it began in him. He thought God hated him. He hated God for that” and came to “hate himself.” In his last battle “he was seeking death, as an end to his wretched life.” Is your life any less miserable, Machiavelli?

But to send such a letter would be to go too far, too soon. Shakespeare “sends only a trim draft of the letter he’s rushed into.”

In his reply, Machiavelli denies that he recognizes no noble failures. “I recognized Cesare Borgia.” “His failure to unite Italy, at least Northern Italy and Rome, and drive out the barbarians, was the noblest failure of modern times.” It is this failure that I now seek to expunge, as secretary of state of the Right, Re-Risen Roman Republic. As for the devotees of the Risen God, “No fools are more senseless than those who burn with Christian piety; they make no distinction between friend and foe, allow themselves to be deceived, and ignore injuries; they shudder at pleasure, actually find it in fasts, vigils, penances, scourges, and ordeals; in short, they shrink form life, and prefer death. This is insane.” I admire your works, Will, because I find “no good Christians in them,” except for Henry VI, “an utter disaster.” “He who would not hurt a fly, destroys a kingdom.” As for Richard, his pangs of conscience do indeed bring him down, and that is precisely the problem. If he hates himself, who is responsible for that other than his God? Or rather himself, for believing in that God. “Christianity is the cause of  a tyranny as never before on earth,” of tyrants who “must hate every well-formed human being and even hate human life itself. No previous tyrants, wicked as their deeds were, ever did so.” The ancients knew nature; the Christians deny it and in that denial ruin everything they touch.

Shakespeare continues to find Machiavelli’s interpretation of his plays too narrow. It is as if Machiavelli were a latter-day Xenophon, but one who never wrote Socratic dialogues. “Xenophon knew Socrates, Xenophon looked up to Socrates. You’re no Xenophon.” If you were, you would see that Richard’s restless night before his last battle, when he is visited in his dreams by the ghosts of all those he’s murdered, amounts to “a Socratic self-examination.” Machiavelli does not imagine “how a poet might oppose tyranny, working from within, getting the tyrant to confess his misery,” as I hope to do “in a play about the Scottish usurper Macbeth.” Steeling himself to murder the king, Macbeth will tell himself, “To do this deed, I must not know myself.” Do you, Machiavelli, in your intention to murder God, really know yourself? “In hating God you are in some danger of hating the good.” If you have concluded from reading Richard III that I therein prove the lethality of Christian belief, wait until you have read my second English history tetralogy, the one in which I portray Henry IV, Henry V, and Falstaff. I send you the manuscripts and I also invite you to “resume our conversation, but face to face, in Stratford.”

Upon receiving the manuscript, Machiavelli is only the more convinced that he needs to enlist “this vivacious English captain to my cause.” Had Henry V “lived only ten years more,” he writes, “his reputation would have been glorified by additional conquests, his realm enlarged, his hold on it firmer, his son better educated, and the prospect of his son’s rule fairer.” Henry’s very statements against my teachings and my disciples merely indicate his adherence to those teachings and his status among my disciples, since “those who declare themselves Machiavels have not understood the first thing about my teaching.” He is very happy to accept Shakespeare’s invitation to dine.

In their dialogue over dinner, speaking of the second Henriad, Machiavelli continues his complaints about Christianity. When Shakespeare observes that Richard II is the only king in his Histories to compare himself to Christ, Machiavelli repeats his criticism of Henry VI: that that is exactly the problem with him. He chose the wrong model. “Christ was no ruler. All he teaches is how to lose and then be pitiful, passionate, and poetical about it.” This is true of Richard, Shakespeare agrees, “but the question who should rule is not as deep or as deeply engaging as how should we die and dying, live”—the question addressed by Jesus in His crucifixion and resurrection. In his attempt to come to terms with that issue, Richard wins and deserves the audience’s sympathy. Having effectively dismissed both Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection as myths, and so passionately that he never notices that the question of death remains real even if Jesus is not, Machiavelli ignores Shakespeare’s argument and continues to speak about ruling. In ruling, “only effectual truths yield benefits,” not poetic images. Richard’s belated Christian maunderings leave the English no choice but to side with Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, who replaces the Plantagenet line with his own.

He does it by what Shakespeare calls “the deliberately accidental murder of Richard,” an act “inseparable from the justice of the monarchy,” even as Elizabeth I’s beheading of Mary Queen of Scots was inseparable from the justice of her monarchy. Although Richard himself posed no threat to the new dynasty, his adherents did. There are “two goods” which must “be held together, justice and peace,” and “two principles that all rulers must keep together, and all monarchs must keep together, namely, inheritance and virtue.” Shakespeare disagrees with Machiavelli in denying that legitimacy and the authority it lends too power serve merely as covering for power, a fraud that veils force. “Some will remember the piteous and yet desirable passing of the Crown” from Richard to Henry “as an impeachment and removal, some will remember it as an abdication that left the throne unoccupied, and others will remember it as a simple gift from one cousin to another but all will remember that Richard did participate in it. And that makes it somewhat legitimate and will somewhat obstruct any later claims of wrongful usurpation. Ceremonies matter. One might even call them effectual.” As for Richard’s murder, whereas Machiavelli considers Henry responsible for it (the new king complained about the former king in front of a courtier who took the complaint as a command issued in the form of a hint), Shakespeare reminds him that Henry does not “admire himself” for his cousin’s death, “as you do him.”

This brings them to the next, great, Henry. They agree that while spirited Hotspur is a lion, sly Falstaff a fox, Prince Hal is both. By (as Shakespeare puts it, in Machiavelli’s phrase) using the lion and the fox, Hal proves himself the true prince. Yet Shakespeare sees virtues rather than virtù in this: “prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice.” That “smells of Socrates,” Machiavelli sneers, the man whose imagining of republics disabled him from founding a real one. “I hope you don’t carry hemlock with you” to our dinner, Shakespeare replies, in mock alarm. Machiavelli zeroes in: Your Henry is not “quite enough of a lion and a fox, he was not cruel enough.” Had he allowed his father to be killed on the battlefield instead of rescuing him, Prince Hal could have been king five years earlier, “started for France five years earlier,” and then, having conquered and absorbed it, set out for Italy, uniting Europe and ruining the papacy for good.

No, Shakespeare says, “I can hear” Henry V replying to such a suggestion: “What, are we turned Turk, that for our advantage we would see our fathers murdered by our committing omission?” Indeed we should, Machiavelli insists (never the one to overlook a cross-cultural borrowing), “for greatness.” No, again, Shakespeare’s Henry answers: “We doubt that greatness comes without some goodness We know that it does not come from such evil.” Seeing his father in deadly peril, he defends him without hesitation, rightly winning his father’s confidence in his loyalty, at least in the aftermath of the moment. Then and subsequently, Prince Hal proves he can “wait to become king,” although his father begins to doubt it. “Son Hal knows his father better than father Henry IV knows him, his own son.” But this makes your second Henry IV play a bit boring, Machiavelli complains. Shakespeare concedes that this is so. The play is about tired old age, undramatic but natural, a condition sons must eventually deal with, as they consider their fathers. Price Hal will not force nature.

Machiavelli (and his true English captain, Francis Bacon) would. They look for physical means of prolonging physical life—Bacon with his experiments involving the refrigeration of chickens, Machiavelli with his Makropulos potion. Machiavelli tempts Shakespeare by offering him a dose, which Shakespeare declines, saying, “Life would not better without death. Truly, it would no longer be life.” Perpetual life is what would be tiresome. Machiavelli seems not to appreciate the implications of his own atheism; he denies the God Who offers eternal life while still yearning for such a life. To Machiavelli’s temptation, Shakespeare effectively offers a counter-temptation: Have the courage of your own conviction, if those really are your convictions.

The dialogue ends with a consideration of Henry V, a man who overcame temptations. Shakespeare cites Henry’s first soliloquy, which begins with the claim, “I know you all”—Falstaff, Poins, and the rest of his drinking buddies (1 Henry IV, I.2.188-209). This is “plain truth not juvenile excuses.” Henry has “learn[ed] nothing from Falstaff”; he spent time with him because he was biding his own time, waiting to enter the public realm with éclat. Indeed, the Marshall of France and Welsh Fluellen “have some inkling of what henry of England is up to.” And Henry knows something even they, even Machiavelli himself, do not: that “the spirit of the men” wins wars, a spirit animated “not so much by their fear of the prince, but their love of him.” To be sure, like founding, war means blood; there will be winners and losers, and that is not simply a matter of power but of the good in the real world, wherein “seeking some good always sacrifices some other.” If “the beautiful, the true and the good seldom coincide,” then Machiavelli’s attempted use of Shakespeare as a means of lending beauty to his ugly (half) truth amounts to a highly unlikely project, even if, perhaps especially if, Shakespeare were to play along with it.

“Yes,” Machiavelli remarks, “we need to talk of good war, not just war.” Henry, Shakespeare explains, wants to retake France not as a means of reuniting the shards of the Roman Empire but to avoid the evil of civil war in England by redirecting the thoughts and actions of England’s restive aristocrats overseas and to render his foot soldiers obedient. Machiavelli claims that, too, is Machiavellian, but Shakespeare rejoins that civil war is an evil greatly to be avoided, and that steadying troops “in the fact of a fearful adversary”—a danger he faces with them—hardly qualifies as cynicism. Neither “poetic and deluded like Richard II,” nor “malicious and deluded like Richard III,” nor “provoked by injustice like his father, nor by love of fame like Hotspur” (nor, one might add, love of sack like Falstaff), and above all not by acquisition, like you, Machiavelli, Henry’s only possible motivation is duty.

In that case, Machiavelli says, “I don’t understand him.” “Not even Socrates might,” Shakespeare suggests, because Socrates associates political life with convention, mere opinion, which potential philosophers ought to put their strength into overcoming in rational ascent from those borrowed lights. “According to Socrates there is no reason for a philosopher to rule,” and no obligation, either. “To become who you are, you had to fight all opinions.” But Henry is no ‘ancient,’ any more than he is a ‘modern’ or Machiavellian. “He is the inheritor of a potent model of nobility, one unknown to the ancients, princes and philosophers, of the highest serving the low, of an immortal who not only seeks the good of mortals, like Prometheus, but who suffers for them, even unto joining them in death.”

Machiavelli does not like the sound of that. It sounds like Christ to him, and Shakespeare readily admits it—with a proto-Nietzschean turn, at that. “Though Christ refused to rule, and even seemed to leave ruling to the Caesars, still he provided a pattern for rulers. Let them be Caesars, but Caesars with something of the soul of suffering Christ.” Ready to sacrifice themselves for the good of their people. Henry is “the greatest man of deeds I can imagine”; “though I love others more, I admire none more than him”—a “great prince, which we are not, and what is more, he was a greater man” superior to me not in writing, in wit, or in thinking but in the “single-minded active pursuit of the good.”

Shakespeare thus denies Machiavelli’s central claim about Christianity, that it unfits men for rule. Shakespeare claims instead that Christianity can make politics better and politicians more effective. Against this, Machiavelli has one last temptation up his antitheological sleeve. “Shakespeare, you are a great prince, but of shadows. You could be one of nations, peoples, and states, indeed of the world.” “No, it is not for me,” Shakespeare quickly answers. It is not my nature. Unlike Henry VI, Shakespeare can choose what to do with his lie. No royal inheritance burdens him. He bears only a natural inheritance, to which he intends to give full scope. He chosen a life of inquiry undertaken through observing men and women and writing plays about them. Many of those persons say not only rue and false things but true things at odds with one another. In this, his plays resemble the Gospel: “Everyone who arrives sure of something will find something to keep him sure,” as Machiavelli has done, but “only by being alert to contrary truths, might you ever later make your way to unity” by “wrest[ling] like Jacob with the angel.” In the Gospel, “Christ himself is responsible for his bounty and the difficulty arising from it,” with some aphorisms saying one thing—it is “harder for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle” to get into heaven—and others saying the opposite—become like a trusting child, and you will be on the way there. Jesus leaves it to His listeners to bring such things together. Jesus poses His own version of the Socratic challenge to undertake philosophizing. To pose such difficulties to his audience is Shakespeare’s vocation, his imitatio Christi.

Shakespeare has withheld something from the manuscript of Henry V he gave Machiavelli to read. It is Henry’s prayer on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, where he prays first to “the God of Battles” to “steel my soldiers’ hearts,” but then to the Lord, asking forgiveness for his father’s part in Richard II’s death (“I have built / Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests / Sing still for Richard’s soul” (Henry V, 4.1.285-301). Reading this, Machiavelli storms out, “losing forever the chance not only to enjoy lofty things, but from that coign of vantage, come to know all the low things, which he thought he already knew.” 

 

Cicero: On the Republic. David Fott translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.

 

Written around 54 BC, De re publica (literally, ‘On the Public Thing’) presents readers with a dialogue set some seventy-five years earlier, in the aftermath of a factional struggle in Rome between the many who were poor and the few who were rich. In 134 BC, Tiberius Gracchus, tribune of the plebs, ignored the Senate’s role in lawmaking and redistributed land to the poor. When he sought reelection in order to avoid a charge of treason and the incumbent consul refused to stop him from doing so, some senators and their clients killed him. His brother, Gaius Gracchus, would be murdered also, thirteen years later, eight years after the time of Cicero’s dialogue. This consists of six books, two each for one day; no one now can offer a serious interpretation of it because it survives only in mutilated form. There are things to learn here, nonetheless, beginning with Cicero’s preface to Book I.

Tension between families and ‘the public thing’—polis, empire, modern state—occurs because the political community insists on its authority over families, restricting their liberty, while at the same time meeting the needs of families, not least of which is the need to regulate feuds among families. Cicero follows Aristotle in siding firmly with the political community: “Because the fatherland secures more benefits and is an older parent than he who begot, surely a greater gratitude is owed to it than to a parent” (I. fragment). But a more formidable challenge to the authority of the community arises from certain philosophers who turn their backs on public life. Cicero condemns them as “madmen” who could never help Rome in its wars, including its civil wars (I.1.). Why “madmen”? Because such men behave contra natura. “Nature has given to the human race such a necessity for virtue and such a love of defending the common safety that this force will overcome all allurements of pleasure and leisure,” unless one’s mind is deranged (I.1). That is, the ‘natural philosophers’ irrationally fail to understand human nature, and so do the apolitical moral philosophers—Epicureans and some Stoics. To understand human nature, nearer to us, more accessible to reasoning than the far reaches of the cosmos, one must think carefully about the political thing.

Against the apolitical moralists, Cicero remarks that “it is not enough to have virtue, as if it were some sort of art, unless you use it”; indeed, “virtue depends wholly upon its use” (I.1). The “greatest use” of virtue is “the governance of the city and the completion in fact, not in speech, of the same things as these men shout about in corners” (I.1.). Here, Cicero criticizes not only the apolitical moral philosophers but ‘theorizing’ political philosophers, first and foremost the author of the earlier dialogue titled The Republic. “Philosophers say nothing—at least of what may be said correctly and honorably—that was [not] accomplished and strengthened by those who have configured law [jus] for cities,” those who have established religion as the practice of piety and both the law of nations and the civil law (I.1-2). Without lawgivers, where would justice, fidelity, fairness, a sense of shame, self-control, avoidance of disgrace, desire for praise and for honorableness, courage, if not “from those men who gave form to those things by training and who strengthened some of them by customs and consecrated others by laws”? (I.2). “Therefore, that citizen who compels of all persons, by official command and by penalty of laws, what philosophers by speech can scarcely persuade a few persons [to do], should be given precedence even over the teachers themselves who debate those things,” inasmuch as the lawgivers have put virtue fully to use, making of it more than a topic for leisured speech (I.2). 

Yet Cicero may not be so far from Plato as it seems. In the Republic, Socrates drew thoroughly ‘politicized’ men—Thrasymachus, Glaucon—away from action and into speech. The Athenians of that time were political without being especially thoughtful, lawgivers who had no clear idea of what justice is. Cicero sees a Rome in which philosophers tempt men away from politics altogether, off into Epicurean gardens and the groves of academe. If Socrates needs to save philosophy from politics, Cicero needs to save politics from philosophy. “Let us not listen to the horns sounding the retreat to call back even now those who have already gone ahead” (I.3). Both men aim at moderating if not resolving the old quarrel between politics and philosophy.

Cicero knows the objections to such a political philosophy, the kind of philosophy Plato and Aristotle insisted upon. It is laborious, some will say. And so it is. But this is “a trifling impediment to the vigilant and diligent man” (I.4). It is dangerous. Yes, that too: but such “dread of death” is “disgraceful,” as Socrates himself evidently thought. As for Cicero, even in exile he has “reaped greater joy from respectable men’s longing than grief from wicked men’s joy” (I.8). As Socrates argues in the Crito, “our fatherland has neither given us birth nor educated us according to law without expecting some nourishment, so to speak, from us” (I.8).

The Epicureans, who cite trouble and danger as supposedly sound reasons for their “evasions” of politics, “so that they may more easily take great enjoyment in leisure, should be listened to certainly least of all” (I.9). They denigrate politicians as “worthless men,” futilely attempting to “restrain the raving, uncontrolled attacks of the crowd”; they claim that “the free man” will never stoop to “contending with vile, monstrous adversaries” who wield the weapons of slander and unjust force (I.9). They assure themselves, and their listeners, that they nevertheless stand ready to intervene if the republic faces some grand crisis. On the contrary, Cicero argues, those “who are good, courageous, and endowed with a great mind” should not evade public life, not allow worthless men “to tear the republic to pieces” (I.9). I myself have endured such hardship, he says, without fear of contradiction. And how can such men promise to engage in politics in times of supreme necessity when they shrink from politics in ordinary times? Have we any reason to suppose that they who have never proved themselves in the vicissitudes of everyday public life will—or, if willing, can—stand firm in amidst these storms?

If the later Greek philosophers shirk political responsibilities, Cicero notes that “almost all” of the ancient ‘seven wise men’ of Greece “were engaged at the center of public affairs” (I.12). (All but Thales, a ‘natural philosopher,’ the sort Plato’s Socrates criticized.) For “there is nothing in which human virtue more nearly approaches the majesty of the gods than either founding new cities or preserving ones that are already founded” (I.12). 

Approaching the majesty of the gods is all very well, but what about approaching the truths the gods are said to know, including the truth about the gods? There is no necessary contradiction, here. “I achieved something memorable in managing the republic and a certain ability to expound the meaning [ratio] of political things,” having become “an authority through not only experience but also eagerness for learning and teaching” (I.12). Reasoning about politics, finding the meaning of political things, requires a certain “kind of reasoning that I must introduce” to Rome, even as Plato and Aristotle introduced it to Athens. This kind of reasoning “is neither new nor discovered nor invented by me.” I shall “recall to memory an argument among the most famous and wisest men in our city belonging to a single generation,” a memory given to Cicero and his brother by Publius Rufus Rutilius, who participated in that conversation (I.12). “I think that almost nothing of great importance pertaining to the consideration of political affairs was omitted from it” (I.13).

The principal discussant is Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus (“Africanus” in honor of his victorious leadership of Roman armies in Carthage and Numantia). He is at his suburban estate—neither fully in the city nor fully in the countryside, nature as conceived by the natural philosophers. He celebrates the “Latin holidays,” that is, the event marking the alliance between ancient Rome and the Latins, from whom the Roman men had seized women they needed for wives if Rome was to survive (I.14). The Romans quickly made peace with the justly aggrieved Latin rulers; this political marriage of necessity provided a new and stable foundation for Rome, preserving a city that had already been founded; godlike majesty entails godlike prudence or practical reasoning. This proved to be the indispensable alliance, enabling Rome to withstand attacks from rivals and eventually to defeat them and to establish their empire. 

Scipio’s sister’s son has joined him. Unlike his eminent uncle, Quintus Tubero seems a bit lazy. Scipio tells the young man that even now, at leisure, on holiday, he works “in mind” if not in action (I.14). For emphasis, Scipio swears “By Hercules!”—that hero of labor (I.14). Very well, then, Uncle Scipio, if we want to exercise our minds, let’s work out the nature of “the other sun” that was reported recently to the senate (I.15). What is the reason for it? (We now know that when ice crystals reflect the light, the optical illusion of a second sun appears, but to Romans this was still an object of speculation.) As Tubero’s gracious host, Scipio wishes aloud that “we had with us our friend Panaetius, who inquires regularly and most eagerly about these celestial matters” (I.15). Yet to tell the truth, “I do not agree much with our close friend on this kind of thing”; as a Stoic, a philosopher concerned first of all with the ‘cosmopolis,’ the order of the universe, Panaetius “holds such firm conclusions on the sorts of matters we can scarcely guess about that it seems he notices them with his own eyes or handles them distinctly with his own hand. I am still inclined to judge Socrates wiser, who put aside all care of this kind and said either things sought about nature are greater than human reason can achieve or they hold no concern at all for human life” (I.15). 

But why, then, uncle, did Plato himself study not only with Socrates but with the Pythagoreans? In his dialogues, Plato has Socrates speak “in such a way that even when he is debating morals [mos], virtues, and even the republic, he is nonetheless eager to combine numbers, geometry, and harmony in the manner [mos] of Pythagoras”? (I.16). (1) Scipio has his answer ready: Plato “wove together the Socratic wit and subtlety of conversation with Pythagoras’s obscurity and weight in many arts” (I.16). That is, in his own artfully constructed dialogues, Plato combined nature, but more specifically human nature, distinguished by its power of logos, of speech and reason, with mathematically symmetrical art. He thus combined two forms of knowledge in an unmatched portrayal of the philosophic quest and of those who undertake it. 

Romans, take note. Do not hesitate to combine Romanness with Latinity in a more refined, but still political way. Several of them now arrive, ready to enjoy the Latin holiday. Publius Rufus Rutilius, “our authorial source for this conversation” (I.17), appears first, followed by Lucius Furius Philus, who proves to be a man of both moral and intellectual virtue, then Gaius Laelius, a former consul and close friend of Scipio, Spurius Mummius, a favorite of Laelius and fellow Stoic, Gaius Fannius and Quintus Scaevola, both educated young men in their late twenties, thus old enough to be quaestors. A mixture of experienced statesmen steeped in philosophy and young men eager for learning: Scipio invites them to move their conversation to a sunny meadow, closer to nature, placing Laelius in the center of group. Because Laelius is the elder of the two men, in Rome, in the city, Scipio treats him as if he were a father; outside Rome, Laelius treats Scipio “as a god,” in honor of his “glory in war” (I.18). Here, neither in the city at peace nor outside the city in war but just outside the city but now outside the household, they will continue the conversation begun indoors. They are joined at last by the oldest man of them all, Manius Manilius, a “prudent man” under whom Scipio served in Carthage in the 140s and who returned to Rome to serve as consul immediately after that. Scipio seats him next to Laelius.

So, “what conversation did we interrupt?” Laelius wants to know (I.19). Upon being told about the two suns, Laelius wonders if we should not first explore “matters relevant to our homes and the republic” (I.19). Not necessarily, convinced Stoic Philus replies, since our real home is the universe itself, the “domicile” and “fatherland” the gods gave us “in common” (I.19). “Everyone eager for wisdom” should investigate and consider the natural things, which are the true public things, he avers, swearing by Hercules as Laelius had done, presumably ready for such heroic labors (I.19). Laelius relents, “since we are on holiday” (I.20).

Philus proceeds not to discuss the heavens themselves but a model of them, originally designed by Archimedes. In some respects, the artfulness of Archimedes impresses him more than the universe his model depicted: “I judged that there was more talent in that Sicilian than it seemed human nature could provide” (I.22); to Philus, the natural philosopher is as nearly divine as the lawgiver is to Scipio. In both cases, however, it is human nature that is the real wonder. This perhaps inadvertent pointing back to human nature gives Scipio a dialectical opening. He recounts how the owner of the model, who had seized it as war booty, used it to show his soldiers that a solar eclipse was not an evil open concerning the coming battle but a natural event, explicable in human terms by the artifact. The practical use of science “banished the empty superstition and fear from the disturbed men, fear that would sabotage the soldierly courage needed for victory, doing so by reason (I.24-25). Well used, art can serve as an intermediary between reasoning and unreasoning men, for good military and perhaps political purposes. Why else write those artifacts, dialogues?

As it happens, it wasn’t Archimedes but Thales of Miletus, a natural philosopher, who first understood the lunar eclipse. The natural philosopher learned something about the cosmos, our natural home and republic; the artist-philosopher Archimedes built a model of it; the military commander Gallus then put it to moral use against the immoral effect of superstition. Perhaps, then, Scipio in fact sees that the philosophers’ discoveries come before those of lawgivers, but they require artist-philosophers and military statesmen (Gallus also served as a consul) to bring out the nature that matters most to human beings—their own nature. Scipio does not fail to see the implication of philosophic investigation when it comes to the founding of Rome itself. “Although in fact nature snatched away Romulus” during a solar eclipse, “it is said that his virtue carried him off to heaven” (I.25). 

Not that this should make human beings preen themselves on mere glory. “What should someone who has examined these kingdoms of the gods consider splendid in human affairs? Or what is long lasting to someone who knows what is eternal,” one who sees “how small the earth is,” how small the Roman Empire is on the small earth? (I.26). It is not human opinion or even the civil law, but “the common law of nature” which “forbids that anything belongs to anyone except to him who knows how to handle and use it” (I.27). Artifacts modeling the universe, the universe itself insofar as it is within our reach, rightly belong, rightly are the property of, the prudent, the men of practical wisdom. Positions of command and consulships are “necessary things, not things to be desired,” not for profit or glory but for right use (I.27).

In this, “those who, when no one is watching, either speak with themselves or act as if they were present in an assembly of highly educated men, delighting themselves with their discoveries and writings” excel those who speak “in the forum and in a mob” (I.27). “Who can think that anyone is richer than he who lacks nothing that nature requires, or more powerful than he who attains everything he desires, or happier than he who has been free from all disturbance of mind, or of steadier fortune than he who possesses things that (as they say) he can carry away with himself from a shipwreck?” (I.27). The ability to reason is the true sign of human nature.

Laelius deems Scipio to have gone too far in his concessions to natural philosophy. Astronomers gaze at the heavens but don’t watch what’s in front of their feet, stumbling like the philosopher the slave girl laughed at. By Hercules, “I think that the things appearing before our eyes should be inquired about more” (I.31). Ask not why there are two suns, Tubero; ask why there are two senates and (alluding to the restive Gracchi and their followers) “almost two peoples in our republic” (I.31). At the head of the many who are poor, the Gracchi undermined the Rome unified when the Latins were conciliated. Consider that. “Young man, if you will listen to me, do not fear another sun” (I.31). Even if we could understand the cosmos, “we cannot be better or happier because of this knowledge” but we can be better and happier if we have one Rome (I. 32). We should therefore learn “the arts useful the city,” devoting this holiday “above all to conversations most advantageous to the republic” (I. 33). “Let us ask Scipio to explain what he thinks is the best form of the city”—which is none other than Plato’s theme, Socrates’ inquiry in the Republic (33).

Following Aristotle, Scipio calls “the management and administration of a republic” the “greatest art” (I.41). By ‘republic,’ he means a political community, “an assemblage of a multitude” a “‘thing’ of the people,” under a regime of one kind or another—either “one man or certain select men” or “the multitude” (I.42), the many who are poor, called in Rome the “proletarians,” the “child-givers,” men and women who have nothing to give the city but children (II.42). Whether a king, a set of aristocrats, or the people, the ruler or rulers must rule “by a kind of deliberation so that [the city] may be long lasting” (I.41). This deliberation “should always be measured by the cause that gave birth to the city,” the purpose intended by those who founded it, “the bond that first bound human beings among themselves in the fellowship of a republic,” which is what keeps the political union together (I.42). Any of the three regime types might maintain that bond; the one that does, “though it is not perfect,” is nonetheless “tolerable” (I.42). 

Problems will arise because none of the three regimes readily maintains the bond. Even if “no unfairness or greed” corrupts the regime, “in kingdoms the others”—the aristocratic few and the many ‘commoners’—have “too small a part in common justice [ius] and deliberation,” which is what Cicero means by liberty (I.43). In aristocracies, the many are excluded. “And when the people manages all things, although it may be just and moderate, the equality [aequabilitas] itself is unfair [iniquus] because it recognizes no degrees of rank” (I.43). By this, Scipio evidently means that wealth should not be equalized, as democrats incline to attempt; the attempt threatens the aristocrats or oligarchs with demotion in rank, turning them into enemies of the democratic regime. And the attempt to equalize wealth must fail, since “the natural abilities of all person cannot be equal” (I.49)—including, obviously, the natural ability to acquire wealth. Each regime thus tends to exclude or injure some elements of the community and thereby to undermine it, to generate enemies of the regime. This is why there are “cycles” or “revolutions” of regimes in republics. “While it is for the wise man to know them”—a philosopher like Aristotle—it is “for some great citizen and almost divine man, while governing the republic, to foresee those that threaten and to direct its course and keep it in his power” (I.46). That is, the theoretical or philosophic man cannot do what the supremely prudent man can do: not only understand political typology but to use it, rather as Gallus used the philosopher’s knowledge of the cosmos, to defend a real, flawed, but good regime from its weaknesses. To truly preserve a republic, however, it is best not to institute any of the three simple regimes but instead to mix them in such a way as to moderate each element, restraining each from exaggerating its characteristic flaw.

This mixed regime sounds like the one Aristotle describes as the best practicable regime, except that Aristotle doesn’t expect the mixture to consist of good elements. He recommends that two bad regimes, oligarchy and democracy, be combined in such a way so that the few who are rich and the many who are poor can do nothing without cooperating with one another. At this point, however, Laelius cuts short any discussion of exactly what Scipio has in mind with his own idea of a mixed regime by saying that he wants to know which of the three simple regimes Scipio “judge[s] best” (I.46). We don’t know why Laelius insists on this point, as the next two pages of the book have been lost. It might be that he wants to know which element of the three, if any, should be preeminent in the mixed regime; in Rome, the example he has before his eyes, the senate, the institution representing the few, usually enjoyed such preeminence. 

The dialogue as we have it resumes with Scipio remarking that “every republic is such as either the nature or the will of him who rules it” (I.48). It’s a good thing that this portion of the text survives because it states the reason why regimes are crucial to understanding a ‘republic’ or political community. Initially, Scipio considers the democratic republic the best of the simple regimes. It alone provides liberty to the most people, and nothing “can be sweeter than liberty” (I.48). Why so? Because liberty means political rule, ruling and being ruled, and serves as a spur to deliberation. Deliberation exercises the distinctively human characteristic, reason; genuinely political rule or liberty thus brings out human nature to the fullest. In deliberating together, the people frame laws. “Law is a bond of political fellowship”—a shared purpose is indispensable, but it needs reinforcement—and “justice is equality under law”; equality under law in turns enhances the “fellowship of citizens,” making them more likely to deliberate amicably, keeping the political union together (I.49). Since there will never be equality of wealth or of natural abilities, equality in a republic can only be based on legal rights, what the United States Constitution calls equal protection under the laws. “For what is a city if not a fellowship in justice”? (I.49).

When it comes to day-to-day ruling, whatever the regime, “nature has provided not only that the highest men in virtue and mind should”—should—be “in charge of the weaker, but also that the latter should be willing to obey the highest men” (I.51). That is, in exercising their political liberty the people should freely entrust themselves to the men of moral and practical-intellectual virtue. Unfortunately, “the crowd” confuses wealth with virtue while the rich “cling to the title of ‘the best men,'” although “they lack the substance” of true aristocrats, being “full of dishonor and insolent haughtiness” (I.51). Indeed, “there is no more deformed species of a city than that in which the most prosperous men are considered the best” (I.51). This popular error, which may come about because the many who are poor wish they were rich, means that equality under the law, “which free peoples cling to, cannot be preserved” (I.53).

By contrast, “what can be more splendid than virtue governing a republic? Then he who commands others is a slave to no desire; then he has embraced all the things in which he instructs his fellow citizens and to which he summons them; and he does not impose laws on the people that he does not obey himself, but he puts forward his own life as a law for his own citizens” (I.51). If any of the the three simple regimes could find such a ruler or rulers, it would be the best. But they can’t, at least not for long. Which of the simple regimes does Scipio then prefer? Upon reflection, “none of them in itself separately,” as he has said before (I.53). Each has its means of winning consent: “Kings captivate us by affection” (the fascination of today’s Americans with the English monarchy being a case in point); aristocrats captivate us by “judgment” (as Tocqueville much later sees, an aristocracy is a prudent man who never dies); democracies captivate us by “liberty” (I.55). Kings win our hearts; aristocrats win our heads, our ‘better judgment’; democracies should win our heads, too, but democrats seldom keep them, descending instead to following their desires.

Specifically, kings win our hearts through the sentiment of piety. Many nations favor kingship, Scipio observes, “because they think that all gods are ruled by the majesty of one royal [god],” which a human king resembles more than the few or the many (I.56). But if, thanks to the natural philosophy the conversation began by considering, some of us reject the belief that Jupiter rules as “the error of the ignorant,” a matter of hearsay, we should consider the teachings of those who learn by seeing—Thales, Archimedes—who say that “this entire universe [is ruled] by a mind” (I.56). If so, the rightly ordered human soul resembles the rightly ordered cosmos; human nature resembles cosmic nature. Scipio affirms the opinion of “the famous Archytas of Tarentum,” who “rightly regarded anger as a certain sedition of the mind—that is, in opposition to reason” (I.59-60). If the cosmic regime is a kingship, if the rightly ordered soul is, too, and so is the rightly ordered household, then why not the city? Democracy suffices for survival when the republic is “in peace and leisure” (“you may be lascivious while you fear nothing”). But just “as both he who sails when the sea suddenly begins to grow rough and he who is ill with a worsening sickness implore the assistance of one man,” so our people readily obey those same magistrates as if they were royals, when war erupts. In Rome, under such circumstances, the people even consent to the rule of the dictator, safety being “worth more than lust” (I.63). 

What if the dictator prefers not to relinquish his ruler, once the crisis has passed? And even when there is no crisis, “from this uncontrolled or rather monstrous people someone is usually chosen as leader against those leading men,” the aristocrats, “who have already been struck and driven from their place” by the licentious many. The popular leader is typically “someone daring, vile, often impudently hunting those who have deserved well of the republic, someone making presents to the people of both others’ things and its own.” Such men “emerge as tyrants over the same men who brought them forth” (I.68). This is how the liberty of the democratic republic, having declined into licentiousness, leads to tyranny “born from this excessive licentiousness” (I.68). And this kind of thing is true of all the simple regimes; although each has its characteristic excess, “all excesses” in one regime cause it to change into its opposite (I.68). “The form of the republic, as if it were a ball, is seized from kings by tyrants, then from them by leading men or peoples, then from them by either factions or tyrants. The same mode of republic is never maintained very long.” (I.69). 

Although he began by claiming that the democratic republic is best, Scipio finally answers Laelius’ question about the best of the simple regimes the way Aristotle answers it, although not exactly on Aristotelian grounds. “The kingly one excels the others by far” because, as a product of human art, and indeed of the master art, the architectonic art, politics, it rules the same way as the cosmos, the soul, and the family are rightly ruled (I.69). But, as Aristotle maintains, the mixed regime “exel[s] the kingly one itself” (I.69). “It seems good for there to be something preeminent and regal in the republic, for something else to be shared with and assigned to the authority of leading men, for certain things to be saved for the judgment and will of the multitude” (I.69). The mixed regime features the civil equality or liberty “which free men can scarcely be without for very long,” along with “a firmness” that none of the simple types can achieve (I.69). “For there is no cause for a revolution where each man has been firmly placed in his own station and there is nothing beneath him into which he may plunge and sink” (I.70).

By the end of Book I, it is clear why Scipio placed Laelius physically in the center of his dialogic circle. As a prudent, that is to say far-seeing, man, Scipio knew he could depend upon his old friend to keep the discussion down to earth, giving Scipio the chance to show what Socrates showed Plato’s readers—that philosophers must know that, and what, they do not know, and that they do not know as much as they would like to know about the cosmos, although they can know some things. What they can know better, and must know better, given their physical location in a political community or ‘republic,’ is how to use the reason that only takes them so far in their investigations into cosmic nature to better understand what they can come to know a lot about—human nature, its social and political character, and the way in which various regimes deflect and distort the reasoning power of the human mind, the preeminent or ruling power of the philosopher’s mind. If Socrates introduced political philosophy to Athens, Cicero assumes the role of Plato, with Scipio as his Socrates, in Rome, against the Epicureans and Stoics who either retreat to their gardens or imagine themselves swept up even beyond those (Aristophanic) clouds and into the stars. And by demanding, later on, that Scipio reveal which of the simple regimes he prefers, perhaps hoping that Scipio will argue in favor the aristocratic regime that both he and Scipio represent, Laelius gives his friend the opportunity to tie the argument into a knot that only Scipio can unweave, then re-weave into the mixed regime.

Aristotle claims that the mixed regime is the best practicable regime. The proof that it’s practicable is nearby: it is Rome itself. In Book II, the account of the second half of the conversation’s first day, Scipio turns to Rome—specifically, its political history. Whereas Socrates’ city in speech has one man as its real founder, a philosopher who extracts the best regime from his younger interlocutors, Scipio’s practicable regime in an existing, earthly city took much longer to perfect and was the work of many minds over time. This is why it is not only more practicable than the city in speech but superior to other mixed regimes in practice, regimes which had such lone founders as Minos of Crete and Lycurgus of Sparta. Prudent Cato the Elder told Scipio that “there had never been anyone at any time whose intellect had been so excellent that nothing escaped it, and that all the intellects at one time, brought together as one, could not foresee enough to comprehend everything without experience in things and the passage of time” (II.2). It’s as if Cato had read Edmund Burke.

When Romulus founded Rome, he exercised prudence in selecting its location. He avoided the seacoast, which would have made the city vulnerable to quick attacks, vulnerable to the corruption and destabilizing change of customs which a people engaged in maritime trade incline, importing new customs along with merchandise. Too, such citizens wander in search of goods—often luxury goods, the desire for which corrupts them. Scipio cites the example of the Greek islands, which “almost float [in the sea] along with the institutions and customs of [their] citizens” (II.8). True, such places enjoy “great convenience” in the transport of goods, compared with landlocked cities, which suffer from much higher carrying costs (II.9). Romulus’ solution was the same as Aristotle’s (Politics VII.6). He located Rome on a river with access to the sea, where access to it by marauders and traders alike could be controlled. 

Having solved his geopolitical problem, he then addressed his population problem. There were too few Romans, so he invited Sabine “maidens” to a festival, had his young men seize them for wives, then made peace with the understandably indignant Sabine king by sharing rule of their joint territories with him (II.12). (The Sabine king later died, leaving Romulus, who had prudently not provided for joint Roman-Sabine rule into the future, in firm control of the expanded monarchic republic.) To accommodate the few, he founded the senate, adding the authority of “each excellent man” to his own (II.15). He also founded a civil religion with regular use of the auspices, giving prudent rulers a way of (as it were) sanctifying their foresight. In his penal system he used fines, not force, avoiding the sharper forms of resentment toward his policies. “Do you see,” Scipio asks, “that by means of the judgment of one man, not only did a new people arise, but it was already adult and almost of ripe age—not like one left crying in a cradle,” or under a fig tree as, the story goes, Romulus himself had been left (II.21). As a foundling as well as a founder, Romulus was free of the family ties that might have made him suspect to most of the families who joined together to found the ‘republic.’ His death enhanced his legend as much as his birth. Scipio notes that Romulus was deified in an age in which people were no longer as superstitious, no longer as unlearned, as in earlier times. This claim registered a sense that the mind of a great founder participates in the divine mind, the mind that organizes and rules the regime of the cosmos. The founder’s reason is in a sense divine, that is, part of the larger nature, the nature of the natural philosophers, while at the same time practical, reasoning about public things occurring on a real river leading out to a real sea.

Laelius sees what Scipio is doing. “You have begun a new plan of arguing, which is nowhere in the books of the Greeks” (II.21). “That leading man [Plato], to whom no one was superior in writing, took a piece of ground for himself on which he built up a city according to his own choice—admittedly splendid, perhaps, but inappropriate for human life and customs,” a city fit for speech only, a regime in theory never to be brought into practice (II.21). The other political philosophers, if not Aristotle then his followers, the Peripatetics, “have discussed the types and principles of cities without any certain pattern and shape of republic” (II. 22). “You seem about to do both,” crediting the great founders and lawgivers “with what you find instead of fabricating as Socrates does in Plato’s work” while nonetheless “ascrib[ing] to reason those things concerning the site of the city that Romulus established by chance or necessity” (II.22). And unlike the Peripatetics, “you argue not in a roaming speech but about one fixed republic,” Rome (II.22). This is Cicero’s distinct contribution to political philosophy, an examination of one best regime but one that exists in practice. This is why he pretends from the beginning of his discourse that philosophers merely ‘follow’ lawgivers.

Continuing this way of interpreting Roman political history as if it were a collaboration of great minds over the centuries, Scipio announces that “this new people saw what had escaped the Spartan Lycurgus,” who had made the Spartan monarchy hereditary (II.24). “Those rustics of ours”—they are ‘our own,’ and so the republic they advanced deserves the attachment the natural love of one’s own brings to it—saw that “regal virtue and wisdom, not family, ought to be sought,” saw also that the true title to rule is the natural rule of reason, not the natural rule of bodies as points along a ‘royal line’ (II.24-25). The Roman aristocrats even took their next king from the Sabines, not from themselves; they did not love their own in a foolish way. Numa Pomilius saw that Romans “were kindled with eagerness for war because of Romulus’ instruction”—not the least of which was his scheme to seize by force the Sabine maidens (II.25). “He thought they should be turned back from that habit to a slight extent,” moderated (II.25). 

Numa began by dividing among the citizens the lands Romulus had seized in war, teaching them “that by cultivating the fields they could abound in all conveniences without pillaging and booty” (II.26)—the same policies American commercial republicans would attempt, albeit with mixed success, with the warlike Amerindian nations and tribes. He thus gave them the economic foundation for “a love of leisure and peace, through which justice and trust most easily grow strong, and under the protection of which the cultivation of fields and the reaping of their fruits are maximally defended” (II.26). He established new and more elaborate religious rites befitting a people so relieved of warlike temperament and further “softened through religious ceremonies the spirits that were burning with the habit of, and the desire for, making war” (II.26). He designed marketplaces, games, and celebration—peaceful occasions for bringing the people together, away from the brotherhood of military camps. In sum, Numa “restored to humanity and tameness human spirits, which were then monstrous and wild with eagerness for making war,” reigning for thirty-nine years “in utmost peace and concord” (II.27). 

Scipio refutes the legend that Numa was a Pythagorean. As Manilius understands, this betokens the fact that we Romans “are accomplished not in arts that have been imported from overseas but in native, domestic virtues” (II.29), a claim Scipio the philosopher-statesman says nothing to discourage. Indeed, he adds that “many things taken from somewhere else have been done much better by us,” likely including political philosophy (II.30). Prudence, practical wisdom, prevails here, as “the Roman people has been strengthened not by chance but by deliberation and training, yet not when fortune opposes” (II.30). As with the natural cycle of regimes, so with the course of events; prudential deliberation and habituation can meet what fortune dishes out, prevent a bad circumstance from worsening and sometimes reverse things. Scipio is neither a fatalist, like a Greek tragedian, nor a Florentine playwright, like Machiavelli, who supposes he can conquer Fortuna, beat her into submission.

The next king, Tullus Hostilius, excelled at war but also set down a law requiring all wars to be declared and condemning undeclared wars “unjust and impious” (II.31). Declaration of war were to be made by the people, showing “how wisely our kings even then saw that certain things should be granted to the people” (II.31). Scipio emphasizes how Roman political history is as Cato said it was, “not the work of one time or of one man,” but a succession of additions of “good and advantageous things…made with each successive king” (II.37). But he immediately presents a massive qualification to this lesson, already suggested by his earlier warnings about the weakness of kings, their propensity to tyrannize. The last three kings were the Tarquins, each worse than the next, ending with Tarquinius “Superbus”—superb indeed in his murderous tyrannizing. “No animal more horrid, foul, or hated by gods and human beings can be thought of” than a tyrant (II.48).

“At this point,” Scipio teaches, the cycle of regimes “will now come round—the natural motion and revolution of which you must learn to recognize from the beginning” (II.45). “The source of political prudence, with which this entire speech of ours deals, is to see the paths and bends of republics so that when you first know how each thing inclines, you can hold it back or run to meet it first” (II.45). Cicero never endorses anything like modern ‘historicism’ or ‘historical determinism.’ He speaks of natural cycles, not events determined by alleged historical laws, and while these cycles cannot be mastered, they can be foreseen and sometimes redirected by statesmen. And because “the fortune of the people is fragile when it depends on the will or habits of one man,” a sound regime will last longer if more men share rule (II.50). The succession of good kings in Rome amounts to such a regime when it is considered over time as the rule not of one but of several kings.

It was a consul, Publius Valerius, not a king, who prudently fortified the regime of the few that replaced the monarchic republic by giving “moderate liberty to the people” (II.55). Publius was the one who removed the axes symbolizing absolute rule over the people from the rods of the fasces. (A later Roman, Benito Mussolini, took care to replace them.) “Therefore, in those times the senate maintained the republic in this form, so that while the people was free few things were managed by the people, more things were managed through the authority of the senate by plan and by custom, and the consuls held only annual power that was royal in its very type and in its right” (II.56). No vote of the popular assembly could become law or policy unless the senators approved it. Rome had become an aristocratic republic, but one enjoying popular consent. It is true that in “the nature of things” the people began to take “to itself a somewhat greater measure of rights”; “reason was perhaps lacking in this, but the nature of republics itself often overcomes reason” (II.57). At best, a prudent ruler or rulers may direct the people as you and I, Laelius, saw in Africa, when a man would sit on an elephant, “a monstrous, immense beast,” ruling it “by a gentle command or touch” (II.68). It is with elephants and the people as it is in the passions of the soul. “The part of the spirit that is called the mind, bridles and tames not merely one beast or one easy to subdue,” but the many fierce passions (II.68). The prudent man has “almost only one” duty: to “never cease instructing and contemplating himself, that he call others to the emulation of himself, that he show himself to his fellow citizens as a mirror through the brilliance of his spirit and life” (II.69). In this, he can help to harmonize the city “in the agreement of very dissimilar persons through reason moderated by the intermingling of the highest, lowest, and middle orders,” as with the notes in a harmonious song (II.69). This well-ordered mixed regime is “the closest and best bond of safety in every republic,” impossible to sustain without justice, the thing Socrates and his interlocutors searched for in Plato’s Republic (II.69).

Book III apparently contained a conversation on justice conducted at the outset of the second day. Unfortunately, at this point, and for most of the remainder of the six books of Cicero’s On the Republic, the text becomes too fragmentary to understand, except if approached as a series of aphorisms. (Many of the fragments were preserved precisely because subsequent writers who did have the full text in front of them extracted lines that served as concise statements of points they wanted to make in their own books.) 

Philus challenges the natural law theory of justice in two ways. He first cites the variety of “law, institutions, customs, and habits” not only across the nations but “in one city, even in this very one” (III.10). Does this undeniable phenomenon not suggest that justice is merely arbitrary and conventional? “Why shouldn’t a woman have property? why should she be heir to a Vestal Virgin but not to her own mother?” (III.10). He or another critic of natural law then deploys the argument made by Glaucon in Plato’s Republic: If a good man were falsely vilified as a criminal and a vicious man held to be a paragon, and if the good man were tortured and exiled while the bad man honored and heaped with wealth, “who in the world will be so mad as to doubt which man he would prefer to be?” (III.13). More, “what goes for individuals also goes for peoples: no city is so foolish that it does not prefer unjustly commanding to serving justly” (III.13). The analogy is inexact, inasmuch as the good man with the false bad reputation wasn’t merely serving his city but being abused by it; the right way to make the argument would be to say that it is better to command unjustly than to serve unjustly, to be subject to the injustices of an unjust commander. That is, the tortured and exiled man wasn’t serving the city justly, as his fellow citizens didn’t deserve his services. Plato’s Socrates stands firm, saying that a truly just man prefers bodily torture to the ruin of his soul, given the soul’s unquestioned superiority to the body. Aristotle in effect replies to Glaucon’s argument by citing the mitigating force of circumstances. A Christian would agree; Jesus’ torture and death on the Cross were not just but the supreme act of grace.

Scipio apparently prefers a different counterargument. A city ruled unjustly no longer deserves the name, ‘city.’ “Who would call that ‘a “thing” of a people” (that is, a republic) “at the moment when all together were oppressed by cruelty of one man, and there was neither the single bond of right nor the agreement and fellowship of an assemblage, which is a people?” (III.35). For example, Syracuse, “the greatest of the Greeks’ cities and the most beautiful of all” was no genuine republic when Dionysius ruled it (III.35). “Where there is a tyrant, there is not a defective republic…but, as reason now compels, it must be said that there is no republic at all” (III.35). This is true not only of place ruled by a tyrant but one ruled by any faction. It is no longer a political community, a public thing at all, but a thing ruled for the private interests of the one, the few, or the many. It has abandoned its status as a civitas. It no longer features ruling and being ruled, reciprocally; it is no longer a political thing.

In the second half of the dialogue’s second day, Scipio appears to be holding the conventions Philus had cited to the bar of the natural law as it concerns cities. He criticizes several Greek customs: the gymnastic training of youth encourages homosexual behavior; in Sparta, the custom of thievery is wrong and so is the custom of putting prefects in charge of women instead of husbands. Even Plato deserves censure, as he “orders everything to be in common, so that no citizen can say of anything that is special to him or his own” (IV.18). That is, yes, customs do vary from city to city and even in the same city, over time, but the natural law provides the standard for judging them because the natural law begins with a definition of human nature and, by logical deduction, the republics consistent with that nature. Like Socrates, Scipio doesn’t hesitate to censure “wicked, popular men in the republic who were seditious”—demagogues—along with scurrilous poets who defame decent citizens (IV.20b). “We ought to have life set up by the judgments of magistrates and legal rulings, not by the talents of poets, nor ought we listen to a reproach except from a law that one is allowed to respond to and to defend oneself against in a court of law” (IV.20c).

Like Socrates, Cicero would not ban all poets from the city. He prefaces Book V with a quote from the poet Ennius: “The Roman Republic stands upon ancient customs and men” (V.1). There is reason, and thus natural law, in this. “Neither men, unless the city had been so accustomed, nor customs, unless such men had been in charge, could have either founded or held for so long such a commanding republic and one so widely extended” (V.1). The problem with “our generation” of Romans is that, having “received the republic just like an extraordinary picture, but one already fading in the passage of time, not only did we neglect to renew it in the same colors in which it had existed, but we did not even take care of it so as to preserve at least its shape and, so to speak, its outlines” (V.1). Today, the customs are unknown, having “perished for lack of men” (V.1). This has nothing to do with chance, everything to do with “our own vices” (V.1). In the dialogue, now in its third and final day, Scipio reaffirms the natural justice of a city-sustaining custom of ancient Greece, brought to Rome by Numa: “no private man was an umpire or arbitrator of a lawsuit, but everything was accomplished by royal judgments” in the king’s court (V.3). “The long-lasting peace of Numa was the mother of law [ius] and religion in this city,” and peace could last because Numa had written such laws (V.3). Cicero has Scipio recur to his teaching about the priority of lawgivers to philosophers who explicate and statesmen who carry out conventional laws founded upon the natural law, laws shown to be natural by their endurance over time.

This passage provides a gateway to the second half of the dialogue’s last day. The lawgiver is the “guide” of the city, a man of “complete prudence,” the virtue animated by foresight (VI.1). The duty of the citizen is to follow the founding laws, “prepar[ing] himself so that he is always armed against things that upset the form of the city,” that is, its regime (VI.2). By contrast, sedition breaks the citizens apart, spoiling that form. Sedition acts in the city as lusts act in the soul. “Lusts are grave mistresses over thoughts,” “compel[ling] and command[ing] innumerable things” without limit and therefore without form (VI.5). Because lusts “cannot in any way be satisfied or satiated, they impel to every crime those whom they have kindled with their enticements” (VI.5). They render souls, and seditions render cities, formless—one no longer human, the other no longer public things. Nature sets down those limits or laws; lusts and seditions violate nature, ruining human beings and their republics.

Lawgivers or guides who are themselves guided by the natural law desire and deserve “not statues anchored in lead or triumphs with withering laurel leaves, but some more stable and more robust kinds of rewards” (VI.12). This impels Scipio to end this conversation in the same way as Plato’s Socrates did in his Republic, with a story upholding the immortality of the soul. In Socrates’ story, a man named Er dies in battle but returns to life with a report of the afterlife, in which just and unjust souls alike find their proper rewards, choosing their next life in accordance with the way they lived their most recent one. Scipio puts a similar lesson in terms of his own prophetic dream he experienced while in Africa, a dialogue within the dialogue in which he conversed with Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, victor over Hannibal at Zama in the Second Punic War. This first Scipio Africanus served as a priest of Mars and was renowned for his ability to foresee, which some take to be prophetic, others a matter of natural foresight or prudence—a ‘divine’ capacity in one or another sense of the word.

The first Africanus predicts the victory of the second: “you will finish a very great war” (VI.15). You will also return to a Roman republic in turmoil, threatened by exactly the sort of factional misrule that would end Rome as a true republic, the threatened rule of Africanus’ grandson, the populist Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. “Here, Africanus [as that will be the younger man’s title, by then], it will be proper for you to show to your fatherland the light of your mind, talent, and judgment” (VI.16). This you will do, as “the one man with whom the safety of the city rests,” the man who can rightly serve as dictator “to set the republic on firm footing” (VI.16). But only “if you escape the impious hands of your relatives,” the brothers Gracchi (VI.16). Your age, 56, consists of the number eight multiplied by the number seven. In Pythagorean terms, each of those numbers “is held to be complete for different reasons” (VI.16): eight is an auspicious number, seven a number denoting completion, an end. You may reach an auspicious end if you “recognize this: For all those who have preserved, assisted, increased their homeland, there is a certain place marked out in heaven where happy persons enjoy everlasting life. That is to say, nothing that happens on Earth is more welcome to the leading god, who rules the whole universe, than the assemblies and assemblages of human beings united in right, which are called cities.” (VI.17). That is, God loves ‘the political.’ 

“At this point,” Scipio tells his listeners, “I was thoroughly frightened not so much by fear of death as by fear of a plot by my own relatives” (VI.18); sedition within his family, sedition that threatened the Roman republic, concerned him more than his own demise. The death of a person ends the life of an individual, but the destruction of a family or of a republic ends a thing of lasting honor. What of my natural family, my father? Is he here with you, Africanus?

Yes, your relatives, including your father, still live, having “sprung out of the chains of their bodies as if out of prison. What is called life among you is truly death. Don’t you observe your father Paullus coming toward you?” (VI.18). After their tearful reunion, Scipio Aemilianus asks Paullus, if death is the portal to such a blessed life, why continue to live on earth, with its murderous betrayals and ruinous factions? 

Paullus replies, “Until the god, whose sacred zone is everything you have sight of, frees you from the wardens of your body, the entrance to this place cannot be open to you” (VI.19). Under this law, which is the law of nature, the task of human beings is to “protect the globe you see in the middle of this sacred zone, which is called Earth” (VI.19). Given this “human task,” you must remain within your body to protect your family and, even more important, “your fatherland” (VI.20). Therefore, “you must not depart from human life without the order of him by whom your soul has been given to you, so that you will not seem to flee” that god-given, nature-given task (VI.19). Only if you take up that task, “cultivat[ing] justice and piety,” will you walk the “way to heaven and to this assemblage of those who have already lived” (VI.20). Yes, the majesty of the cosmic regime far surpasses that of the Roman Empire, but your duty is to fulfill your task as a father and as a citizen, first.

Scipio not only sees the eight cosmic spheres, the ever-circling domains of the stars and planets, above the immobile ninth sphere, Earth, but he also hears the music of the eight mobile spheres, which consists of seven sounds, as two of them emit he same sound. Eight and seven, again: the cosmic harmony parallels Scipio’s age at this moment. 

The lesson taken from this cosmic view is simple to state, hard to enact. Earth is small, compared to the cosmos as a whole, but it is part of that cosmos. Human ambitions, even in the great Roman Empire, are also small. “What renown can you attain from the conversation of human beings, or what glory can you attain that should be desired?” (VI.24). Fame on Earth is limited in both in both its territorial and temporal extent. “Therefore, if you wish to look on high and consider attentively this seat and eternal home, if you will not give yourself to the conversations of the crowd nor put hope in human rewards for your deeds, virtue itself may properly draw you to true honor through its own enticements” (VI.29). To put human esteem in its rightful place is not to denigrate politics but to understand political life not as a field of vaunting ambition but as a just duty, here and now. Natural philosophers, along with Epicurean and Stoic moralizers, attempt to jump up to Heaven too soon, failing to recognize the place of Earth’s regimes within the cosmic regime, and failing to recognize the place of the regime of Earth within the cosmic regime. Neither ambition nor suicide can be just, given the natural law.

Scipio takes the lesson. “Truly, Africanus, if a lane, so to speak, opens an entrance to the heaven for those who have deserved well of their fatherland, although I have walked in your tracks and those of my father from boyhood and have not lacked your glory, nevertheless, ow that such a reward has been explained, I will exert myself much more vigilantly” (VI.30). Political virtue yields heavenly reward, being consonant with the regime of the cosmos.

Africanus approves. “The mind of each person is each person” (VI.30). In that sense, “you are a god,” inasmuch as the supreme god moves the cosmos even as your mind moves the other parts of your soul and, through them, your body (VI.30). The supreme god is the unmoved mover whose existence Aristotle deduced. Let your mind, your reason, be your unmoved mover. “This is the special nature of the soul” (VI.32). “You should employ it in the best matters! And the best cares are for the safety of the fatherland” (VI.33).

Cicero defends politics by putting it in its place, between the unthinking ambition of tyrants and demagogues, those who believe that ‘everything is political’ on earth, and the unthinking ‘intellectualism’ of many philosophers, who believe that what happens on earth, including politics, is trivial, no concern of an intelligent person. There is a larger, indeed comprehensive order or regime, the regime of nature and its law. In that regime, human politics has its rightful, lawfully delimited place. 

 

Notes

1. The translator helpfully indicates that the Latin mos denotes both manners and morals, rather in the way, more familiar to ‘we moderns’ and readers of Montesquieu and Tocqueville, of the French moeurs.
2. ‘Our’ Scipio is Scipio Aemilianus Africanus, who crushed Carthage once and for all in the Third Punic War. His father was Aemilianus Paullus, but his adopted father was Cornelius Scipio, son of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus; he thus converses with his grandfather-by-adoption as a fellow-victor in a war against Carthage.