Archives for November 2018

Marcus Tullius Cicero: On the Republic and On the Laws. David Fott translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.

Timothy W. Caspar: Recovering the Ancient View of Founding: A Commentary on Cicero’s De Legibus. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011.

 

Plato teaches that founding and preserving cities best tests manly virtue; Cicero teaches that founding and preserving “new political orders” approaches most closely the “will of the gods” (C 1). Cicero thus may be said to elevate political founding and political life generally, an esteem he extends to the philosophic status of political speech and thought. In so elevating and esteeming, “Cicero has laid down a challenge, not just for his own time, but for all times, and so to us: He challenges us to confront the teachings of the philosophers, to understand the ideas and truths within them that may be applicable to all times and places” (C 2). In issuing this challenge he risked his reputation among Romans, who inclined to displays of manly virtue but preferred to leave Plato and his ilk firmly to one side as Greek, all-too-Greek.

The old Romans are not alone. Modern scholarship also has mostly left Cicero aside, though not because it honors manliness. Our scholars deny coherence to Cicero’s political works, labeling him a would-be Stoic and then sniffing that the real Stoics scarcely esteemed politics at all, considering political life little more than unworthy playing to the crowd. But why indeed worry about Cicero’s philosophic incompetence, some scholars ask, since he was nothing more than a product of his times, more or less intellectually irrelevant ever since?

Timothy W. Caspar answers these charges and dismissals them the only way one can: by showing that Cicero’s De Legibus withstands close reading, that “seek[ing] to understand him as he understood himself” (C 13) by attending carefully to what he writes will uncover his originality and profundity as a thinker, one deeply engaged with the Platonic dialogues whose titles of his own political dialogues echo. Cicero maintained that the best possible Roman republic consisted of a ‘mixed’ regime, one featuring a balance between rich and poor, the few and the many. Can it be said that thinking about ancient political regimes and their ‘founding’ has no contemporary political interest? As Caspar remarks, “If government in Cicero’s day is characterized more and more by the rule of those who seek individual preeminence at the expense of the public good, then the constitution is no longer mixed, and a refounding, guided by political philosophy, is needed to restore it to proper balance” (C 3). Do we know how to recognize and address such problems better than he did?

Caspar establishes that the parallel between the titles of the Platonic and the Ciceronian dialogues point not only to similarities but to important contrasts between the two thinkers. Cicero’s De Legibus “seeks to legislate for the best regime outlined by the lead interlocutor of the De Re Publica, the legendary Roman statesman Scipio” (C 20), while Plato’s Laws does not aim at legislating for the best regime outlined in the Republic. Nowhere in Cicero do we find a proposal for communism of wives and property, as in Plato’s Republic. Even more tellingly, Marcus explicitly and repeatedly states that his intention differs from that of Plato. By titling his book not The Laws but Of the Laws, Cicero might mean laws in general, the laws of Rome, and/or the Laws of Plato. Caspar will show that all three meanings pertain. Further, and more like the Phaedrus than the Republic or the Laws, the arguments and actions of De Legibus occur outside any city; the characters are friends (the Greek is no ‘Stranger,’ as in the Laws, and indeed he isn’t the main character). The main character is also a poet. Could he be the philosophic poet Socrates wishes for in the Republic?

De Legibus consists of a dialogue with three Roman interlocutors: a Hellenophile, Titus Pomponius Atticus, and two brothers, Quintus Tullius Cicero and Marcus Tullius Cicero, himself the author of the dialogue. The first words, spoken by Titus, refer to the setting, a “sacred grove” in Arpinum, Cicero’s ancestral home—that is, outside the great city of Rome. (Caspar notes that these first words also contrast with the Laws, which begins not with a sanctified, humanly planted grove but with a direct invocation of a god.) The grove’s landmark oak tree has been memorialized in Marcus’ epic poem, the Marius. In answer to Titus’ question, brother Quintus replies that this oak does indeed still stand in the grove, adding with a touch of fraternal pride that the ‘oak’ in the poem will outlast the oak in the grove because it “has been planted by an intellect” (L I.1); “many other things in many places remain longer in remembrance than they could exist in nature” (L I.2). Life in nature is short, art is long, as another Roman poet wrote. The work of intellect lodges itself in the minds of others, many far removed in time and distance from the natural object the intellect “plants” in those other minds. To Titus’ perhaps friendly jibe that in so saying Quintus is “favoring [him]self by praising your brother” (L I.2), Quintus does not deny the charge but abstracts from any self-interest by saying that whether or not he has indulged in self-praise by family association, the longstanding character of poetic imagery, as against the shorter longevity of natural objects, may be seen in Titus’ native Greece as well, where it’s highly unlikely (for example) that a palm tree in Delos today is really the same one mentioned by Homer. “And many other things in many other places remain longer in remembrance than they could exist in nature” (L I.2).

Titus concedes the point, but turns to the poem’s author to ask if he really did “plant this oak tree” by intellect only, or did it (and the other actions in the poem) really exist (L I.3)? Like his brother, Marcus responds by pointing back to his questioner’s own beloved Greece, asking two rhetorical questions: Did Romulus really deify Proculus Iulius there, and did the North Wind really carry off Orithyia? Titus answers that these are ancient stories, but Marcus’ poem depicts recent events, not only within the memory but within the living memory of Marcus himself. Swearing by Hercules (and availing himself of the law-court imagery familiar to readers of Plato’s dialogues featuring Socrates), Marcus counter-charges any and all those who would accuse him of fabricating stories with ignorance of the difference between the kind of truth to be demanded of a poet and the kind required of a witness at trial. Brother Quintus understands this as a distinction between history and poetry, and Marcus concurs, saying that the measure of history (including the testimony of trial witnesses) is truth, while the measure of poetry is delight. What is more, historians themselves do not confine themselves to literal truth, as seen in the writings of that Greek, Herodotus.

Well, in that case, Titus returns, given the fact that “history is absent from our literature”—”as I very often hear from you”—will you not write such a history of Rome (L I.6)? Although Quintus chimes in with the proposal that this history encompass Rome’s beginnings, Titus prefers a memoir, something pertaining to events Marcus remembers firsthand—presumably to avoid mere speculation into events that now live on only in poems, delightful but not ‘literally’ truthful. Marcus resists the proposal in either form, pleading lack of the sustained leisure necessary to accomplish such a task. He awaits his old-age exemption from public service, when he can undertake “the pleasing, honorable task of a not lazy old age” (L I.10), a task some of us do indeed take up, if afforded the opportunity.

Caspar takes up this discussion of poetry, which resembles the critique of poets and poetry Socrates makes in the Republic. The poetic standard, delight or, as Caspar translates, pleasure, might imitate the good, “but is never the good itself”; indeed, it may imitate the good falsely, misleading its readers as it “shapes and forms and directs the evidence of the senses” (C 24). Founders of political regimes must attend carefully to poetry, reforming it and those who make it, lest they undermine citizens’ understanding of the good. (Even a cursory ‘remembrance’ of changes in popular American ‘poetry,’ including drama, shows how this undermining can occur.) Poetry broadly conceived to include political speech and even laws—human ‘making,’ generally—will prove both dangerous and indispensable to human, political, life. In contrast with poetry, and especially dangerous poetry, Marcus “attempt[s] to turn the student of Plato’s Laws away from contemplation of the heavens or the idea of the good to contemplation of nature”—”away from the heavens and towards the earth” (C 26). If so, Marcus wants his reader to perform a philosophic ‘turn’ somewhat related to the famous ‘turn’ of Plato’s Socrates. Initially, however, Marcus aims at a turn from the divine and heavenly toward earthly nature, whereas Socrates turned from the study of heavenly nature to human nature..

Caspar translates the Latin ingenio not as ‘intellect’ but as imagination or genius. He might regard Fott’s translation as too ‘rationalist’; in any event, he may be pointing us to an ambiguity in language that can lead to a confusion between reason and imagination, two related but distinct capacities of the human mind. By sharply distinguishing the real oak from the word-formed image-oak in the poem, Quintus wittingly or not severs the connection “between nature and the imagination or mind of man,” leaving poetry (and therefore poets or makers generally) “free to conquer nature,” free to persuade citizens “of almost anything”—rather in anticipation of Machiavelli, but in speech instead of deed, and so even more like the Greek and Roman rhetoricians and sophists (C 27). While acknowledging the power of poetry, Marcus (sometime poet and no mean orator, himself) wants nothing to do with severing truth and nature, or with holding the standard of delight or pleasure alone as dispositive when it comes to framing that higher ‘poetry’ of law. “Cicero means to anchor his future legislation in the nature that is the source of all justice,” “to remind his readers that politics cannot transcend nature,” that human nature sets limits to the realization of human imaginings (C 27). In this, Cicero presents in earnest what Plato may be said to present ironically. In both cases, these thinkers ask their readers to ask of poets not so much to present facts or ‘literal’ truths but to indicate “abiding truths,” truths about human nature that deserve to be lodged in the memories of citizens (C 29). In opening the discussion of history versus poetry, Titus “has done Marcus, and us, a favor: He provided the necessary opening for Marcus to demonstrate the importance of poetry to the laws and to the regime, as well as made it possible to indicate the insufficiency of poetry alone or unguided as the foundation of a just regime” (C 30). And that goes for the literary genre of history, too. What laws will govern both poetry and history? His interlocutors know what kind of poetry Marcus writes; they rightly want to know what kind of history he would write, even if he hasn’t the time actually to write it. This requires the interlocutors to make their own philosophic ‘turn,’ from poetry and history to law and politics, “and eventually to the laws that will make Scipio’s republic possible” (C 33).

Titus knows that Marcus has already studied the law. Given his reluctance to undertake a historical investigation, would he converse about that? Even as “your dear, famous Plato did” (L I.13)? Why, yes, Marcus replies, perhaps having been waiting for just this opportunity. We will need to understand five things in order to discover “the source of laws and right” (L I.16): What nature has granted to a human being; how many of the best things the human mind can encompass; what service we have been born for and brought into light to perform and accomplish; what the connection is among human beings; and what natural fellowship there is among human beings. That is: human nature, the limits of the human mind; the purposes human beings have by nature; what human beings have in common; what human friendship is. As Titus immediately sees, Marcus isn’t interested primarily in the conventional laws of Rome but in drawing the discipline of law from “within the profoundest philosophy,” which Marcus then defines as an investigation of “universal right and laws,” which derive from “human nature” (L I.17). “Ignorance of the law” in this sense” conduces to “more lawsuits than knowledge of it” (L I.18); sharp lawyers may chase ambulances, but ignorant citizens violate underlying right and laws themselves. “The beginning of right should be drawn from law,” a “force of nature” inherent in “the mind and reason of the prudent man” (L I.19). Inasmuch as not all men are prudent, “it will be necessary to speak popularly and to call that a law which, when written, consecrates what it wants by either ordering [or forbidding] as the crowd calls it.” But let us three friends “take the beginning of establishing right from the highest law”; “all laws should be tailored” to fit “the form of republic that Scipio taught to be the best,” namely, the mixed regime (L I.19-20). Marcus thus explicitly links De Legibus to De Re Publica, and shows that he regards human nature as political, in need of a regime or political order consistent with the uniquely human characteristic as the only animate being which “has a share in reason and reflection,” a capacity which, when “grown up and fully developed… is rightly named wisdom” (L I.22-23).

As Caspar remarks, “Marcus’s law will represent the intersection of philosophy and politics on the highest level” (C 34). Not Socratic philosopher-kings ruling boys ten years and younger but mature men will rule in his preferred regime. In establishing his independence from Plato’s dialogue, “he encourages us to think for ourselves, just as he does” (C 36). In thinking about justice and true law as “connected to man through nature, through human nature,” Marcus reveals why he “had resisted Quintus’s earlier attempt to sever nature from poetry” (C 37). Poetry comes from poets; poets are human; humans have a nature. If that nature provides the standard of justice and true law, then “poetry will be judged by true law in terms of how closely it adheres to this nature,” and not by how much pleasure it gives us (C 37). In rejecting Titus’ Epicurean standard for poetry, Marcus will not run to the opposite, Stoic standard, which defines human nature as if men had no bodies (as Socrates does, albeit ironically). It is true that Marcus initially proposes a definition of natural law that approaches the Stoic level of abstraction in order, Caspar suggests “to woo his interlocutors” (C 37), one of whom is indeed an Epicurean and the other a Roman gentleman-aristocrat with the Epicurean leanings aristocrats too often come to display. But he will soon bring them down to earth without losing them to conventionalism or to sophistry. “Atticus and Quintus must be led to see the importance of politics for philosophy—and philosophy for politics” (C 40).

“Human law in a just republic necessarily struggles to align itself with natural law, all the time” (C 39), and for this struggle to proceed with success one must not sever one from the other any more than one must sever poetry from nature. His interlocutors are so inclined. Therefore, Marcus’ “entire speech in the first book [of De Legibus] could be understood as an artful attempt at promoting what is to come in the two later books” (C 40). He starts with philosophic teachings propounded by Plato and Aristotle: To define a thing, to say what it is, one must begin with its beginning because its beginning “has within it” its end or purpose, just as (we now know) DNA has within it the body it can become. “If we understand the principia, we can understand the natura, and ultimately the telos” (C 41). He then initially proposes a high-toned definition of law as the highest reason, taking care to attribute this definition to previous thinkers. Initially defining law as the “highest reason,” he quickly identifies this not as theoretical reason but as practical, prudential reason, the kind of reason that guides an already virtuous soul to the good ends it seeks (C 41). But what are those ends? Two kinds of justice, he offers, again following Aristotle: equity or distributive justice, “giving each his own” in proportion to his desert (C 42); and the justice of choosing or commutative justice, providing accurate restitution for goods received or for actions taken, whether good or bad. Justice needs codification, writtenness, a sort of ’embodiment,’ so that all citizens can learn it, not only ‘the few.’ In this mindfulness of the needs of all citizens, Marcus nods to the requirements of Scipio’s mixed regime, with its element of popular participation and consent. “Law that will be useful to actual regimes must take account of the fact that no republic is composed entirely of philosophers or Stoic sages or prudent human beings” (these may be three different types of men); this understanding links the three books of De Legibus together in a manner overlooked by those scholars who charge the dialogue with incoherence (C 44). Very roughly speaking, Book I is to Books II and III what the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the United States Constitution are to the Constitution itself, although one should hasten to add that Book I is more thoroughly a work of philosophy than the Preamble and more comprehensively so than the Declaration.

Very well, then. Who is the prudent man? How will we know him when we see him? How much authority should be consent to give him? How shall philosophy and political life relate to one another?

Caspar will return to these questions, with Cicero, but first he remarks a difference between the treatment of reason in the two dialogues. In De Re Publica law is “right reason congruent with nature”; in De Legibus law is “highest reason” “rooted in nature” (C 45-46). One natural law, two definitions: How so? Because the discussants differ. De Re Publica features a long discussion among “preeminent Roman political gentlemen”; De Legibus features a much shorter discussion among “three good friends, two of them brothers,” one of them a Greek not a Roman, “about the best laws for that republic” (C 46). In one sense, the intimacy of the latter discussion would incline it to be more philosophic, and it is in one way. Because the men legislate for a whole people, the leader of the discussion, Marcus, must bring his philosophically-inclined friends to philosophize politically, to take account of all kinds of human beings, not only ‘the few.’ The “right reason” of De Re Publica can indeed guide “gentlemen who may not necessarily need the formal sanctions of the law,” but “highest reason” in De Legibus “guides a republic that includes gentlemen and non-gentlemen”—a down-to-earth mixed-regime republic that can also appeal to philosophers and non-philosophers, whether or not they are gentlemen, by giving all men a standard to ‘look up to’ (C 46). “All segments of the republic may share in reverence for a law that is highest and also right” (46), and as firmly rooted in nature as the noblest oak in the sacred grove. To speak in ‘modern’ terms, “right reason” in the wrong minds might lead to Kantianism or, to speak in ‘ancient’ terms, to a Platonism without Socratic/Platonic irony. In either case, the danger of apolitical idealism or worse, political idealism, must be confronted and faced down. “Instead of attempting to lay down the best laws simply, for a republic that is ultimately guided by philosophers,” the interlocutors of De Legibus “will seek to legislate for the best republic that is ruled by prudent gentlemen or statesmen who adhere to the natural law” (C 48). “Nature and natural law replace the ideas, above all the idea of the good, as the political standard which this republican regime will look” (C 48). Marcus does this both to bring philosophers and would-be philosophers down to earth, for both political and philosophic reasons, and to give ‘the many’ a standard inherent in the immediately visible order of the nature they see, hear, feel, smell, and taste all around them. “Morals must be firmly planted in the minds of citizens, and the legislator must not rely on the sanction of written laws alone” (C 48), indispensable though they are.

This will require the right kind of civil religion. Marcus challenges Titus’ Epicurean assumption that “the gods are indifferent to human beings” (C 49). Addressing him not by his patrimonial name, “Pomponius,” perhaps as a reminder of fatherly authority, he induces him “to concede that nature is ruled by force, nature, reason, power, mind, or command of the immortal gods” (C49). This Titus consents to do, adding good-naturedly that he does so because the noise of the rushing river and chirping birds will prevent his Epicurean colleagues from hearing his admission. Marcus thereby reveals his political-philosophic strategy: “lay[ing] down laws for a republic that includes various schools of philosophy” (C 49). To do so, he needs “some common moral ground [as] a bedrock principle for political happiness” (C 49). Whereas Plato’s Athenian Stranger needed no such consent, finally pointing back to the rule of philosopher-kings, with its rule of reason founded on the doctrine of ideas ‘abstracted’ from concrete nature, unimpeded by the political influence of philosophic factions, Cicero’s Rome did feature such factions. The philosophic factions of Athens impeded philosophy by attempting to understand nature by gazing directly at the cosmos, ignoring human opinions. The philosophic factions of Rome impeded not only philosophy but politics itself, by attempting to justify withdrawal from politics not only on intellectual but on moral grounds. “Marcus softens Atticus and convinces him that his project is an attempted recreation of the Platonic enterprise,” an enterprise Titus reveres as a Greek as well as a philosopher or would-be philosopher, even as his philosophic school has deviated from that enterprise (C 52). “Natural law is the solution for gentlemen under siege by bad”—that is, “apolitical and dogmatic”—”philosophy, and it serves as a common ground upon which they might agree politically” even as they remain in disputation philosophically (C 52).

In civil-religious terms, while the Athenian Stranger posits an active, providential god who punishes those who violate his laws, Cicero can speak of what the American Founders called the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Instead of the Stranger’s “rule of intelligence in the form of law,” leading to “the rule of philosopher-kings,” natural law “finds its home first and foremost in the ‘mind and reason of the prudent man,'” that is, in real human beings mindful of their themselves and their fellow human beings as naturally embodied beings (C 54). “Cicero praises and defends the political over the philosophical life, in a book devoted to guiding prudent gentlemen and teaching them about the best republic, of which De Legibus is the sequel” (C 56). He divides the remainder of Book I into three main parts whose topics are the origins of justice, a defense of natural as opposed to conventional justice, and “an encomium to philosophy” (C 56).

Marcus can now meld philosophy and civil religion: “The primary fellowship of human beings with god involves reason,” including “right reason,” which is law; hence “we should consider human beings to be united with gods by law” and right (L I.23). “The whole universe should be thought to be one in common between gods and human beings,” and it has been so since the origin of the human species (L I.23). Although he had refused the task of undertaking a historical account of Rome, and especially of its origins, Marcus does not hesitate to go much farther back in time here, past the origin of Rome to the origin of the human species itself—a clear indication that he offers his friends another poem or mythos. “In the perpetual celestial courses [and] revolution there emerged a sort of ripeness for planting the human race,” whose original members had their souls “implanted by god” (L I.24). This gave humans “a blood relation or a family or a lineage between us and the heavenly beings,” accounting for the fact that “out of so many species there is no animal besides the human being that has any notion of god” (L I.24). Man “recognizes god because he, so to speak, recollects whence he arose” (L I.25). Recollection or remembrance is the province of poetry, readers will recall, and the image of planting in the new poem ‘recalls’ the image of the Marian oak in Marcus’ earlier poem. Ciceronian theology blurs the distinction between the divine and the human by making both natural, evidently originating in nature. The arts also have a natural origin, as “countless arts have been discovered through the teaching of nature, which reason imitated in order to attain skillfully the things necessary for life” (L I.26). The human mind, senses, and body all fit together, and because they do human beings can perfect their ‘given’ capacities, developing speech (“the greatest matchmaker of human fellowship”) and reason (L I.26-27). Cicero develops his account of oratory or rhetoric elsewhere, but, as Caspar remarks, “This whole work is an exercise in the rhetoric of the natural law statesman in action” (C 60).

By making human beings one species, nature has made us fundamentally equal; Marcus goes so far as to claim that all human beings enjoy the same capacity to learn. This has moral and political implications: “There is no one of any nation who cannot arrive at virtue when he has found a leader” (L I.30). As in virtue, so in vice: “In depravities there is [also] a remarkable similarity in the human race,” lured as we are by “pleasure, which, although it is an enticement to disgrace, has a sort of similarity to a natural good” (L. I.31). Fundamentally, however, “we have been made by nature to participate in right, one with another, and to share it among all persons”; right “is by nature,” having “been given to all persons” because “reason has been given to all persons” (L I.33). Law is “right reason in ordering and forbidding” (L I.33). Morally, this entails not self-sacrifice (Marcus warns against separating advantage from right) but cherishing oneself “no more than he does the other person,” in light of the natural equality of all members of the human species (L I.34).

Caspar distinguishes between “Cicero’s supreme god” and the “creator God of Genesis” (C 58).  “Cicero’s supreme god seems to be bound by reason and nature,” whereas the Biblical God, “by contrast, is mysterious, all-powerful, and fundamentally unapproachable,” and, as Creator, precedes the “heavens and the earth” as well as man (C 58). One might quibble that God isn’t entirely mysterious (He reveals Himself in His Bible) or fundamentally unapproachable (properly addressed, He answers prayers and may even change His mind when a prophet disputes with Him). But as Creator, indeed, he is not merely “Nature’s God.” Cicero’s civil-religious poetry enables him, as Caspar writes, quietly to depart from thoughts about the gods in “turn[ing] to mankind’s common nature as the basis for justice” and “mov[ing] away from the community of men and gods to the community of human beings” in his warning against the lure of pleasure, including the pleasure of wrongly-intended poetry (C 61). Many of Rome’s philosophic schools may thrive in the mixed-regime republic, but Epicureans, who make pleasure and pain their standard of justice instead of the natural law, are invited to remain in their private gardens until such time as they return to their Socratic/Platonic origin. Still, as Caspar observes, the Ciceronian republic will make no attempt to suppress the schools, as “there is something about [them] that reflects human nature itself” (C 66), something in us that (like apolitical Epicureans) would rather stay out of the assembly hall and the council chamber, walk away from the disputations of political life. Pleasure may not register what’s distinctively human in human nature, but it is natural, and “the regime will not concern itself with stamping out every bad opinion,” instead allowing such an opinion “to survive so long as it does not interfere with the day to day operations of politics, or cause too many people to abandon their loyalty to the regime” (C 66). When asked by Titus to adjudicate a dispute between the Academic school of philosophy, who taught that virtue is honorable, and the school of Zeno, who taught that nothing is good except what is honorable, Marcus dismisses the dispute as ‘academic’ in our sense—merely verbal. As Caspar suggests, he doesn’t want to agitate dogmatic quarrels but to diminish them for the sake of the mixed regime. Another way to say this is that Marcus sees the mixed regime indeed as a mixture of somewhat contradictory elements—the few and the many, Platonists and Stoics, but these elements must find some foundational principle or principles on which they concur. Those who reject the moral foundation of the regime will be excluded or at least (as we would say) ‘marginalized,’ precisely because they reject the natural law.

Marcus now singles out classical conventionalism (the doctrine “that everything is just that has been approved in the institutions or laws of peoples” [L I.42]) for an extended critique. “Right is uniform; human fellowship has been bound by it, and one law has established it,” namely the law of right reason in commanding and prohibiting, which readily understandable by all men, not only philosophers (L I.42). Nature inclines us “to cherish human beings,” and fear therefore need not be the motive for respecting the law. (This distinguishes Ciceronian natural law not only from classical conventionalism but from Biblical law, which teaches that fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.) Human law cannot “make right out of wrong” (L I.43). Even when we misuse the term “virtue” to describe a tree or a horse (true virtue is “fully developed reason” [L I.43]), we still understand that this goodness inheres in their nature, not in opinion. Further, we consent to honor virtuous persons and dishonor the vicious; not only reason but spiritedness, the ‘aristocratic’ characteristic par excellence, if guided by reason, recognizes natural law. Good character remains steadfast precisely because logical consistency guides such a soul, lending itself to resolution. Bad character, governed by changeable passions, often proves unreliable, unsteady. There can be constancy in bad character too, if the soul chooses selfish advantage or pleasure as its guiding star; a narrowly utilitarian soul might be rational ‘in the retail,’ if not ‘in the wholesale.’ The difference is that the genuinely rational soul finds rational means to the rational end of fully-developed humanness, whereas the utilitarian soul finds rational means to the satisfaction of the appetites.

Quintus evidently has learned something. He no longer denigrates nature in order to exalt human artfulness. “The matter is such that the highest good is to live from nature,” he summarizes, “that is, to take great enjoyment [from] virtue in a moderate, suitable life—or to follow nature and to live by its law, so to speak—that is, to omit no act (however great it may be in itself) that may attain the things that nature demands—because this is likewise worthwhile, to live in accordance with virtue as if it were a law” (L I.56). Marcus immediately reinforces this speech with a Socratic lesson: The god Apollo teaches us that “we should know ourselves” (L I.58). “He who knows himself will think first that he has something divine and that his own intellect within himself is like a sort of consecrated image”; he will have “wisdom as [his] leader,” “discern[ing] that he is a good man and that for this very reason he is going to be happy,” having “entered the fellowship of affection with his own,” including the gods and his fellow virtuous and prudent men and citizens (L I.59-60). Knowing now that “he has been born for political fellowship,” he will prove ready to make “precise argument” and more, he “may rule peoples, stabilize laws, chastise the wicked, protect the good,” and generally conduct himself not as a philosopher-king but as prudent citizen whose “parent and educator” is no longer merely his father but practical wisdom (L I.60).

Caspar deepens the reader’s understanding of these passages by emphasizing the way in which Marcus has moved his gentlemanly aspirants to philosophy away from their apolitical, Epicurean tendency to detach themselves from politics. By bringing in the virtue of honorableness, which the equally apolitical Stoics esteem as a merely moral virtue, he shows them “that to be honorable means to be political” (C 84). Whether Epicurean or Stoic, “the friendship of the wise, though perhaps possible, aims too high and is therefore insufficient as a general organizing principle for politics in a natural law regime” (C 67). And is therefore not really wise. Justice “must be useful to the republic, to cities, and to the people, and therefore rooted in a nature all human beings share” (C 67). He “set[s] up a political standard that does not require perfected wisdom to achieve” (C 68), one perceived by conscience, a “concept Marcus mentions for the first time” here (C 67), an ‘internalized’ form of the aristocrat’s honor. While appealing to the high-toned principle of divine reason, indeed to Socratic self-knowledge, Marcus also praises constancy, honorableness and moderation, more common but nonetheless indispensable virtues which one need not be a philosopher to achieve. Not the sapientes or wise man but the viri boni or good man embodies the standard of “a community of wisdom” that remains within the reach of a real city (C 71). “Marcus seeks to cultivate a genuine attachment in the hearts and minds of the nobility of this republic to what is just, and indeed to all the virtues, because they are good and honorable in and of themselves” (C 71); this combination of self-respecting but not selfless virtue with the love of one’s own regime in one’s own city depends on “the ideal of virtue [becoming] a standard to which the wise and the non-wise can both aspire” (C 72).

Philosophers seek souls capable of someday philosophizing. Cicero would also turn philosophers to the task of teaching those will never philosophize, but who can reason well about practical matters before his political community, who knows enough about nature to follow its guidance and to situate his own community within the natural world. Caspar finds it “most striking” that Cicero would “return, philosophically and politically, to Socrates” (C 76), initially by conversing with his friends Socratically, bringing them in to the enterprise of founding a regime in which thoughtful men will avoid dogmatic, ‘ideological’ thinking and remain mindful of the virtues needed for a more nearly just community that will be more than a ‘city in speech.’ The laws proposed in De Legibus will “stand as legislation for the best regime outlined in De Re Publica” (C 80). “He seeks to revitalize or perhaps even re-found republican government in Rome, or, if that is not possible, to provide a model for future founders of natural law republics” by “first bring[ing] about the re-birth of a politically relevant and healthy philosophy to guide the return to republicanism, and then keep that republican train on its tracks after the founding is complete” (C 84).

Accordingly, Marcus must bring his friends to consider the laws of religion and of magistracy. Caspar introduces the subsequent two books of De Legibus by showing how they both relate to and differ from the first. While the thoroughly prudent political philosopher might rule with no need for written law, virtuous gentlemen will need a ‘framework’ provided by “a handbook on natural law” (C 95). The laws that follow “are not positive laws for an actual regime in the here and now, but laws dictated by nature” (C 95), itself more ancient, more ‘time-honored,’ than the oldest families of Rome. “Cicero intend[s] his law code to serve as a standard and refuge to which all human founders of regimes might repair, but which they might never actually achieve” (C 97). By writing an (as it were) popular book instead of a philosophic treatise on natural law, he sets out perform the task Plato attempted in his Laws, but in a much briefer, thus more serviceable form. In addition, codifying the natural law, writing it down, putting some meat on its bones, brings Marcus and his friends firmly down to earth, after the sometimes rarified discussion of Book I. Marcus goes so far as to lead the discussants physically to an island in the Fibrenus, where “nature dominates” (L II.2)—in Caspar’s words, “his favorite spot in his beloved place of birth” (C 98). The idea of home, both as a specific place that is preeminently ‘your own’ and also a place within the natural order, should conduce to a move to the concrete, the specific, the familiar and the familial; Caspar suggests that Marcus thereby “compels his interlocutors to think, among other things, of the Greek myth of autochthony, which teaches that the people of a particular city or country are literally born from the very earth in which they live” (C 104). Such a thought does indeed bring one down to earth, although Marcus’ “new and improved definition of citizenship” (C 104) won’t go quite that far down. Nor will he go so far ‘up’ as Plato’s Athenian Stranger does. Unlike Plato’s Laws, which begins with the word theos, god, “Cicero does not begin with the god simply, but with god as manifested in nature, in a natural spot, in a wooded grove dedicated to his ancestors or the gods of the family, in which we presume could be found the tombs of those ancestors who have become gods” (C 100). Not the god, now, but a god, one “connected to him personally, to his family, and to all those members of his family who have come before him” will animate one pole of the subsequent conversation (C 100). The intimate connection between the divine and the natural remains, but in ever more practical form. A solid bond between man and the gods, man and nature, must be specific to that man, and to his city; only such a bond can “support and maintain the notion of natural justice” in the real world (C 101). Caspar observes, “Man’s relationship with the gods is important, but necessarily secondary or supportive in nature… not from the point of view of the eternal concerns of religion, but from the point of view of politics, the concerns of this entire dialogue” (C 101). Further contrasting De Legibus with Plato’s Laws, Caspar finds that Plato’s interlocutors walk not along a river but “uphill to the cave of Zeus”; the only river that appears in Plato’s dialogue is imaginary, a river in speech, representing “swift-flowing and swirling philosophical arguments about theology, the gods, and the priority of soul to body” (C 102). But Marcus continues to avoid the cold, fast-flowing river of philosophic dispute, as they’ve already agreed to return to the Socratic roots of political philosophy. Accordingly, the tranquil island in the river represents an oasis in which the legislators can view political society from outside, impartially, and indeed naturally, not from the sanctuary of the supreme god.

All city-dwellers have two fatherlands: their place of birth and the place where they were received, after leaving home to come to the city, “one by nature the other by citizenship” (L II.5). This second citizenship leaves the pleasures of one’s birthplace behind, based as it is “on the reason of man,” not on sentiment. At home, the natural law may mix too easily with powerful emotions. As Caspar puts it, “Rome—Scipio’s best (and mixed)regime—must replace the place of birth as the primary object of reverence and affection for its citizens” (C 106). Marcus makes clear that that this is not a simple distinction between nature and convention, however, recalling that “law was not thought out be human intellects; it is not some resolution of peoples, but something eternal that rules the whole universe through the wisdom of commanding and prohibiting,” the “mind of god compelling or forbidding all things by reason” (L II.8). This “concern with the eternal or the unlimited,” Caspar writes, “serves to place politics within certain boundaries that it may never cross” (C 106). “The human nature that grounds the best republic is both universal and particular” (C 107).

At the urging of Quintus, Marcus has thus returned to the topic of “the force and nature of law” (L II.8). “The divine mind is the highest law, so too when it is in man, it has been fully developed in the mind of the wise man” (L II.11). As Caspar remarks, the prudent man of Book I, associated with philosophy, retreats and the wise man, associated with religion, now appears. “Cicero seeks popular sanction for his republic and laws,” even as he continues “what is in effect a steady and inexorable rationalization of Roman religion” (C 112). Philosophers and even gentlemen will not need such strong stuff as religious laws, and they may live with the understanding that one never fully reaches the wisdom one loves while depending on their strength of soul to provide moral reinforcement to the natural law, but ‘the many’ demand firmer things that, standards more ‘exterior’ to their souls, including “lawgiver Jupiter, a belief popularized and reinforced by the poets,” as well as “conventional human punishment” (C 113). “This is, after all, the mixed regime of Scipio; it is not the rule of the wise over the wise” (C 117). Marcus “gradually” and carefully “confuses the distinction between nature and god” (C 115), making “a subtle but perceptible shift from the god as supreme toward the equality of god and the natural force that sanctions all laws as just or unjust” (C 116). The coming-back-to-earth of Book II requires both the acknowledgement of the need for piety in a mixed-regime republic and a retained measure of the natural law.

To respect philosophers, gentlemen, and the many in one regime requires rhetoric, persuasion, not compulsion by force and threats. A sound legal code needs a preface or preamble, invoking the divine origin of the laws along with the teaching that the gods “behave very well toward the human race” (L II.15). “For what is truer,” Marcus offers, “than that no one may properly be so foolishly arrogant as to think that reason and a mind are in himself but not in the heaven and the universe?” (L II.16) Who does not perceive “the order of the stars, the alternations of day and night, the balance of the seasons, the things produced for our enjoyment”? (L II.16). Another way to put this would be to say that the principle of reason, the principle of non-contradiction, inheres not only in human logos but in the orderliness of the cosmos where, just as in the human mind, there can be no round squares. As Caspar writes, “even the best kind of law requires persuasion to be effective” (C 117) and the human refusal to acknowledge even the self-evident truths of natural law—a refusal made by tyrants great and petty, singular and numerous, alike—ranges from the philosophic schools to the corner tavern. True, failure to acknowledge natural law will lead to punishment, eventually, but the eventual may take a long time. “True opinions [are] more readily accepted by citizens in a regime that believes in active and involved gods” (C 120), prudently invoked in the preamble to the body of the laws.

The body of the laws itself should be succinct. Marcus doesn’t propose a full code of law for a particular city, but offers “natural law legislation,” which “cannot be fixed to any particular time in human history,’ in any particular place, for any particular people (C 122). “Though the laws for the best regime have always existed, because laws dictated by nature are eternal and unchanging, they must be constantly adapted to the fluctuating affairs of human life” (C 122), to that ever-flowing, Heraclitean river of circumstances which the river on which the island stands may also invoke. “The laws of De Legibus are valid as actual laws only for the naturally best regime of De Re Publica, a reformed Roman republic that never truly existed” (C 122). Those natural laws offer a standard for those laying down “actual laws” (C 122), but they will not be actual laws for actual regimes that are not the naturally best one—that is, for every other regime. And indeed these future legislators themselves will need their founding law codes to be succinct, as “no founding legislator could ever know every particular need or situation that might arise, nor should he be expected to” (C 123).

Marcus’ religious laws reinforce the natural law and the natural law regime. The gods shall be approached with purity, piety, and with no attempts at material sacrifice, lest wealthy citizens imagine that they are not equal before the gods with all other citizens. What is more, human beings will not avenge violations of this law: “If anyone does otherwise, the god himself will be the avenger” (L II.19). Marcus immediately removes any suggestion of public religious indifference, however, by stipulating that “No one shall have gods separately, neither new nor foreign, unless those gods have been publicly adopted” (L II.19); in the real Rome, it would be centuries before Christianity received full official sanction. Worship of the ancestral family gods shall remain undisturbed, as shall such deified heroes as Hercules and Aesculapius. Also, personified virtues (Mind, Virtue, Piety, Trust) shall be worshipped as “those things on account of which ascent to heaven is given to a human being” (L II.19). Whether in the households or in the public square, Marcus aims at valorizing those human capacities that conduce to a steadfast citizenry. Linking families to the city, Marcus adjures households to “learn from public priests,” especially with respect to restraint or moderation in performing religious rites. The priestly class itself shall consist of two kinds, one in charge of the public rites and ceremonies, the other “interpret[ing] the strange announcements of prophets and seers whom the senate and the people approve” (L II.21). Such practices as augury and divination shall be carefully ruled, inasmuch as they can cause the souls of citizens to be pervaded with hope or fear. In Caspar’s words, describing this central and “by far the longest” section of the religious laws (C 124), “only  a standard of reason, or of what is in conformity with nature, could limit the types and therefore the number of gods permissible at Rome, and only if it becomes the standard to which all good priests should repair” (C 125). No “nocturnal sacrifices by women” (L II.21)—that is Bacchanalian rites—shall be allowed, but (Marcus being no killjoy) the laws shall “direct the joy of the people” with public games combined with ceremonies honoring the gods (LII. 22). Violations of the public laws of religion shall indeed be enforced by human beings, although the emphasis remains on example, not punishment. Public religious observance governed by the priests “holds together the republic”—reinforcing the social and political bonds necessary in any regime—”for the people always to be in need of the judgment and authority of the aristocrats” (L II.30); the mixed regime will have a strong aristocratic element, one that rules by as it were reaching into the souls of the many, moderating and steadying them for republican citizenship. “The augurs,” Caspar observes, “ostensibly religious functionaries, in fact hold the greatest political power in the republic, greatest in the sense that no political action may be carried out without their approval” (C 128). Justice, the aim or telos of the regime remains paramount, but the augurs are among the indispensable means to this end.

Caspar rightly points to the way Marcus ‘naturalizes’ the republic’s civil religion. Marcus preserves respect for “the rites of families and fathers” because “antiquity most nearly approaches the gods,” and religion must always be treated “as if it were handed down by the gods” (L II.27). And citizens worship the deified virtues in temples “so that those who have those things (and all good men have them) may think that the gods themselves have been placed in their souls” (L II.28), a thought that anticipates the Christian teaching on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. For Cicero, nature is the oldest thing of all; as Caspar puts it, “the best thing will now become the oldest thing,” not only in fact but in the minds of the citizens, “as other ancestral, though irrational, practices are gradually forgotten” (C 126). This rationally guided forgetfulness “recognizes the necessity of accounting for man’s concern with the eternal” (C 130). In terms of the struggles among the philosophic schools, Cicero “seeks to reclaim religion and divination from the Stoics,” whose understanding of both remains stubbornly and worrisomely apolitical (C 131). And what goes for the rites in the republican regime also goes for music, a theme familiar to readers of Plato. “Children must learn a moderate music, sanctioned by gods, that supports the laws”; “if the gods cease to care about the music of the regime, the regime cannot control what it is or will become,” and the poets who make music use it as yet another form of their rhetoric (C 135). Marcus wants a moderate and just republicanism, not what he calls “theatocracy” with its “lawless and shameless freedom” (C 136). And even as those who appeal to the ‘low’ in human nature deserve restraint, in another way so do those who appeal to the ‘high.’ While “it is the duty of every gentleman in the natural law regime” to defend “the goddess of wisdom, or wisdom itself,” too often such gentlemen hold themselves to be morally superior magnanimous men and/or wise men; with an orientation toward the gods, unimpeachably superior even to gentlemen in both morals and intellect, gentlemanly pride will be “tamed by this truly mixed regime,” with its firm religious practices (C 137). At the same time, “religion is to be the domain of authority (auctoritate) alone, an authority that affirms and supports this mixed, natural law regime” (C 141). For example, Marcus limits gravesites to lands than cannot take cultivation, to places where “the nature of the field can produce so much that it may receive the bodies of the dead without damage to the living” (L II.67). The earth belongs to the living.

“Book II begins and ends in death or with a concern for death, and thus a concern for the eternal soul” (C 143). Cicero thus acknowledges “the ultimate concerns of [the citizens of the justice regime] and regulate[s] the line between life and death,” connecting “the good of the republic with the concern its citizens have for immortality and for their souls” (C 143). The influential gentlemen desire both immortal glory and justice, and the regime aims at inducing them to rule justly “for the sake of the very best kind of immortality: a deathless eternity accompanied by a lasting reputation of justice among the living,” a civic deification of the very best souls (C 143). These gentlemen will not forget the warlike virtues of Romulus, but neither will they neglect the lessons of lawgiver Numa, who established the virtues of peace, virtues “that make the long life for the republic possible: religion and mildness or mercy (clementia). Without virtues of peace, warlike aristocrats will defeat their foreign enemies but then turn on one another in civil wars. In all this, nature “remains the highest standard of this regime, and religion serves that end.” (C 145) Religion is nonetheless central to the dialogue because in a natural-law republic care for the souls of all citizens, not only philosophers, takes precedent, prepares for, right reception of the natural law and of magistrates guided by it. “What is left unsaid”—that a Rome “founded first on the laws of religion or the priority of the soul” might not “have had to resort to war and conquest at its founding”—comes closer to nature than did the historical practice of the actual Rome, which put the political regime first in time  (C 164).

In Book III Marcus addresses the matter of magistracies or political offices. Plato of course treats them extensively, and the Greek Titus avers that “You may never praise him either too strongly or too often” (L III.1). While complimenting his (decreasingly) Epicurean friend (who has “attained that very difficult alliance of seriousness with humaneness” [L III.1]), Marcus will continue to adhere to Scipio’s natural-law, mixed-regime republic as distinguished from the rule of philosopher-kings guided by the idea of the good. Still, Marcus must be quietly pleased that his friend shows signs, as Caspar puts it, of consenting to just that regime, a regime in which the rare and politically unrealistic motive of the quest for wisdom and the good will be replaced by the more common but politically realistic motive of the love of praise or honor. “Praise is needed in this kind of regime, a regime that has as its citizens those who are not necessarily philosophers and who may not be able to see the idea of the good, but who are still good men” (C 163). It turns out that some Epicureans are not immune to such salutary rhetorical blandishments. Those who are not can “keep to their gardens” (C 163).

Magistrates rule, being ruled by the laws: “It can truly be said that a magistrate is a speaking law, and a law is a silent magistrate” (L III.2). To give voice to the silent natural law, the magistrate must acknowledge the rule of the earth by the universe in which it is situated, and the rule of the universe by “the god” (L III.2). Having turned from the religious institutions to the magisterial institutions, Marcus leaves Jupiter and the other gods behind, now mentioning only “the god” (along with that “divine man,” Plato, who, it will be recalled, provides the rhetorical reference point for Marcus’ intended political reconciliation of the philosophic schools). The kingly rule of “the god” over the universe initially found its human imitators in the ancient monarchic regimes, but this proved politically unrealistic in Rome. (It might be noted that ancient Israel presents us with the opposite picture: a personal, kingly God who founded a republic for His people, who eventually came to prefer a monarchic regime. As in Israel, the power of the magistrate is a part of the divine power, but unlike Moses, Marcus does not conceive of “the god” as personal, or as a Creator.) What is more, Marcus prefers mixed-regime republicanism to monarchy, on Aristotelian grounds: “It is proper both for him who obeys to hope that he will command at some time, and for him who commands to think that in a brief time he will have to obey” (L III.5)—a restatement of Aristotle’s definition of the political life appropriate for the political animal, man, a life consisting of ruling and being ruled in turn. As Caspar notes, if a regime can balance ruling and being-ruled it will achieve “political moderation,” the virtue “that Cicero sets up as the standard for virtue in individuals” (C 167).  “The regime is held together by the magistracies and those who are in charge, and from their arrangements”—that is, the formal or institutional dimension of the regime—”the type of each regime may be understood” (L III.12).

Accordingly, the first of the laws pertaining to the magistracy requires justice of the laws themselves and moderation of the citizens who obey them, including the magistrates, who are subject to the peoples’ “right to appeal” their decisions (L III.6). There will be no right to appeal military decisions in wartime, however, although the regime’s military arm will be constrained in other ways, as Marcus will outline in due course; what we would call civilian control of the military shall prevail. Indeed, the most authoritative institution of the regime will be the senate, charged with “keep[ing] these magistrates just and guid[ing] the whole republic” (C 173). The somewhat ‘privileged’ character of wartime military authority obtains because “the highest law” is “the safety of the people” (L III.8). By “highest” Marcus cannot mean noblest or even most just but rather supremely necessary; in this as elsewhere, Marcus brings his interlocutors down to earth. As Caspar puts it, “when the very safety of the republic is at stake, there is no higher law”; “if the republic is destroyed, no other laws, no matter how lofty, will matter” (C 174).

Of all the magisterial offices Marcus proposes, the most controversial one by far proves to be the tribunate, whose members served as a check on the necessary but dangerous kingly powers of the consuls. Aristocratic Quintus denounces the Tribunate as an instrument of popular misrule, among whose offenses being its attacks on Marcus (L III. 19-22). Marcus naturally agrees that “the power of the tribunes of the plebeians is too great,” but immediately points to the worse alternative: “The violence of the people, however, is much more ferocious, much more ardent” (L III.23). This is why the Tribunate was founded in the first place. Cicero reminds Quintus (and not incidentally appeals to patriarchal authority while doing so), “When the Fathers conceded this power to the plebeians, the weapons fell, the sedition was extinguished, a compromise was found so that the less important men thought that they were equalized to the leading men” and as a result “make no struggles concerning their own right,” anymore (L III.24). At the same time, aristocratic control of the auspices has “often repressed an unjust urge of the people” (L III.27), so the influence flows both ways. Similarly, although senators are elected by popular vote, once elected these men, eminent in virtue no matter what social class they come from, moderate aristocrats and plebeians alike. Indeed, the senate will be “the linchpin of this whole system of government” (C 184). It is therefore utterly indispensable that “the highest men of the city” be educated to virtue, as the example of their way of life sets “the customs of cities” even more powerfully than “changes in musicians’ songs” (L III.32). In this he departs from “our dear Plato”; having established Plato as the common ground among the philosophic schools, and between the schools and the aristocrats, he can now adroitly bring both to listen to distinctively Ciceronian thoughts—politically speaking, the mixed regime (C 178-179). In such a regime, “those who are not in the ruling class will not be willing slaves to that ruling class,” but will “have a say in rule” (C 186).

Caspar remarks that whereas many philosophers tend toward apolitical theorizing at the expense of the city and, ultimately, themselves, Quintus the aristocrat inclines toward a political purism, wishfully thinking that those ‘born to rule’ could do so without any polluting interference from the lower orders. He supposes that “political strife itself is unnatural and somehow a perfect kind of politics is possible here on earth,” a “perfectly polished world of aristocratic rule” (C 182). Marcus would bring him to understand that “just government includes both the necessary and the good”; “the choice in politics is never between two perfect options, or even between one perfect and one imperfect option, but rather between two less than perfect options” (C 183). And when Titus bestirs himself to side with Quintus, he inadvertently “reveals a capacity for anger or indignation, a political trait that shows us why he is the kind of Epicurean who can be brought into Marcus’s best republic” (C 184). Tellingly, both men “urge Marcus to finish his laws,” revealing that “they are learning how to accept a political regime that is less than perfect” (C 184).

This provides Marcus with an opportunity to discuss the popular election of the senators, an obvious pressure point in the argument with his two friends. In the United States, open voting—the practice of compelling voters to announce their choices verbally at the polls instead of filling out a secret ballot—would prove an instrument first of gentry influence over their neighbors and then of political bosses’ influence over party members. The Romans knew that, too, and Quintus argues for open voting. Secret ballots take away aristocrats’ authority; “a hiding place should not have been given to the people in a ballot which could conceal a vicious vote while respectable men were ignorant of what each man felt” (L III.34). Titus concurs: “The best regime” will be found “in the power of the best men” (L. III.37). Marcus proposes a compromise: secret ballots for plebeians coupled with the aristocrats’ right to inspect the ballots, so that they can’t be blind-sided. Marcus additionally observes, quite sensibly, that most plebeians side with the aristocrats, anyway, out of respect; a secret ballot will enable them to do so, without ‘peer pressure’ from demagogues of class solidarity. Appealing rhetorically to his high-toned friends, he announces that “my law gives the appearance of freedom; the authority of respectable men is retained; a cause of contention is eliminated” (L III.39).

Caspar summarizes: “A republic in which the senate holds the authority (auctoritas) and the people have the power (potestas) will be moderate and harmonious” (C 185). Such a natural-law republic is possible but unlikely, inasmuch as find men of sufficient virtue to command the respect of the people “will be very difficult and will require a ‘certain education and training'”—”an education in the natural law” which will provide “knowledge of nature and its laws, which are at the heart of this most just and mixed regime” (C 185). This will be easier to do than establishing a regime of philosopher-kings, but not by much. “This entire oration is in some sense directed at these best men. Marcus attempts to educate these potential leaders de re publica and de legibus, because all depends on them.” (C 186). In this, Cicero does follow Plato’s example. Inasmuch as Plato’s Laws quietly directs readers back to the Republic, so too does the education seen as necessary in De Legibus “seems to require a return to De Re Publica, to a study of the great statesmen therein described” (C 187)—to De Re Publica, which “sits in the center of Cicero’s catalogue of works that he gives us in the De Divinatione” (C 187).

Each senator shall attend sessions faithfully, speak in turn, and speak “with measure, that is, not endlessly” (L III.40). And he ought to know what he’s talking about, “know the republic”—how many and what kind of soldiers it has, its financial resources, its allies and tributaries, its laws and treaties, its legal procedures, and “the ancestors’ precedents” (L III.41). As for the people, the principal duty is to refrain from violence, given their representation in the Tribunate and their power to elect the senators. As for the lawmaking powers themselves, there shall be no laws against “private men,” i. e. individuals, as the laws should afford equal protection to all (L III.42); any judgment imposing exile on an individual should only be rendered by “the greatest assembly of the people” (L III.44). The dialogue ends with a requested (by Titus) and promised (by Marcus) the need for officials who guard the official records of the laws. Without such a safeguard, the magistrates “are as wise as their clerks want them to be” (L III. 48). Truer words were never spoken.

Caspar emphasizes that Cicero, in so instituting this aristocratic senate within his natural-law republic, “keeps it truly political,” balancing aristocratic and popular rule (C 189). “He refuses to allow the solution of the problem of just government to fall prey to noble pride, and in so doing he keeps a window open for political philosophy to advise this regime” (C 189). Marcus’s “standard is one of knowledge, not wealth, birth, or social standing” (C 189). However, this standard will apply most immediately to the gentlemen who rule; unlike Plato’s regime, Cicero’s regime will be ruled by “good men” who “seek to know the natural law and who fear the highest kind of punishment such a law might inflict: the knowledge of wrongdoing that torments the best kind of conscience in the best kind of soul” (C 195). In the end, what seems to be a more ‘realistic’ regime than Plato’s may be even harder to found in fact; “there is no rarer thing to find or discover among men than a perfected orator” of the sort Cicero envisions as the founder of his regime (C 204). Indeed: Are great statesmen any more numerous than great philosophers?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ronna Burger: The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

 

Like Dorter, Ronna Burger follows in the line of those who interpret the Platonic dialogue as “a unified whole, whose philosophic content cannot be separated from its dramatic form.” The dialogue form itself distances its author from any one argument or doctrine advanced in the dialogue by one or more of the characters portrayed. If written, ‘dialogue’ implies two or more interlocutors not only within the text but between the author of the text and its readers. And all of these layers of meaning exemplify Socrates’ “second sailing”—his abandonment of the attempt to intuit the nature of things directly and his turn toward approaching them indirectly, through the logoi. Accordingly, Burger doubts Dorter’s extraction of “a meaningful sense of immortality” to be found in the doctrine of “the ‘world-soul’ of which all individual souls are portions”—a doctrine that does indeed sound suspiciously proto-Hegelian.

Duality or doubleness of meaning famously involves Socrates’ irony. Here, Socrates “appeals to the ordinary understanding of ‘death’ or ‘immortality,’ while deriving from reflection on the unrecognized presuppositions and implications of that ordinary understanding, his own philosophic reconstruction of it.” Philosophizing via speech advances thought by identifying contradictions within that ordinary understanding, those stated opinions of un-philosophic persons. Those persons may dislike the process of so identifying their errors, even to the extent of killing the one who performs the operation. By attacking the body of the philosopher, however, they concentrate his mind still further on the way in which “thought or awareness can be affected by the cessation of certain mechanistic processes in the body lead us to an understanding of psychē that affirms its independence from the body, precisely because we are compelled to confront just the opposite.” In this the practice of dying and being dead becomes a kind of purification.

Purification in the form of separation of the psychē from the body recalls the doctrines of the Pythagorean philosophers. Phaedo narrates Socrates’ death to an audience of Pythagoreans. Insofar as one might infer Plato’s teaching from his labyrinthine dialogue, he disagrees with the Pythagoreans in identifying first principles with the “ideas” not numbers. He also disagrees with them concerning their doctrine of reincarnation, a process requiring the separability of psychē from body. Plato’s Socrates “attempt[s] to reinterpret the meaning of ‘separation,’ and in so doing to reverse the Pythagorean position”; Burger says that “one might say” this is “the fundamental intention of the Phaedo.”

There is a moral and political dimension to purification. The delay between Socrates’ trial and his execution occurs because it permits the Athenian citizens to purify themselves ritually from exacting the death penalty. But Socrates too “acknowledg[es] the need to purify himself before dying because “he may be guilty of having neglected” to “make himself understood by the nonphilosophers who have convicted him.” The dialogue does that in a more permanent or ‘immortal’ way by having him make appealing but unsound arguments about death and immortality. The sounder and underlying implication of these arguments is that for Socrates dying is “a separation of logos from just that attachment to the self that the hope for immortality brings.” The “center of the dialogue” features Socrates’ redefinition of the greatest fear from fear of death to fear of “misology” or hatred of speech and reason. The latter fear occurs when philosophers misunderstand wisdom as the (impossible) “direct contact of the pure psychē with the ‘beings themselves,'” as the Pythagoreans attempt to do. The center of the dialogue thus splits this dialogue about duality into two halves, “exhibit[ing] the tension between concern with the self and concern with the argument for its own sake, between the fear of death together with the hope for immortality and the fear of misology together with a technē of logos.” The dialogue moves away from concern with the ‘self’ or psychē and toward concern with logos, with argument and a corresponding unconcern for the ‘fate of the self.’ The social and political problem may be described as the philosophic desire for the release from the body in the form of the pursuit of sound arguments and the non-philosophers’ desire to valorize their desire for self-preservation through worship of the gods. Mythos threatens logos. It is not for nothing that Burger divides her book into thirteen chapters. To purify oneself from the mythologically valorized quest for self-preservation, the Platonic dialogue serves as a therapeutic medication—ironically symbolized in the action of the dialogue by the poison Socrates takes as the means of liberating his psychē from his body.

In the dialogue’s Prologue, we learn that Phaedo’s first words to his Pythagorean audience refer to the ‘self,’ to himself, as present at Socrates’ death. “The dialogue, traditionally understood as the Platonic account of the separability of the psychē from the body, begins by referring to the self as an inseparable unity of psychē and body.” The narrative form itself transforms deed into speech; Burger remarks that “the narrative form is the exemplification of what Socrates will present as the crucial turn in his own philosophic development” from direct noetic experience of the beings to examination of the logoi about the beings. The Apology isn’t the only dialogue featuring a defense of Socrates by Socrates. Accused by his companions of effectively committing suicide by refusing to escape when given the opportunity, Socrates must begin his final conversation with a defense of what seems to be an act of running away from life.” Far from running away from life, Socrates maintains, by staying on to ‘face the music’ he continues steadfastly in the best way of life. “Socrates identifies the city, the domain of political authority and opinion, as the prison in which the philosopher is interned and from which he longs to escape; in attempting to demonstrate the immortality of the psychē, he identifies the prison no longer with the city, but with the body.” After all, the philosopher must live somewhere in order to philosophize, and in any city other than his own he likely would be regarded as not merely a foreigner but a likely enemy, affirming “the reputation of philosophy as a destroyer of the laws, hence of thoughtless young men.” “But” (and this an important “But”), “if the historical Socrates could not make this journey, the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues, in the days following his condemnation, shows how philosophy can be exported safely outside Athens” by means of the written ‘dialogue’ itself, purveyors of the philosophic way of life.

Logos and mythos interact in the passage 60b1-60c7, beginning as it does (after weeping wife Xanthippe is escorted out) with an Aesopian story claiming that pain derives from the imprisonment of the psychē in the body, whereas death releases the psychē from that imprisonment, bringing it to a condition of pleasure in the ‘afterlife.’ Socrates responds by asking what pain and pleasure are. Such a ‘What is?’ question aims at the assumption of the maker of the mythos that pain and pleasure are self-evident; such questioning distinguishes the ‘givenness’ of mythos from the interrogation of logos. Further, if life is painful, then does this not mean that the divine prohibition of suicide works opposes the good of human beings? But human beings cannot make that judgment, having no experience of death. Then again, Socrates says that to philosophize is to practice dying, to anticipate the experience of death. In so saying, he redefines death away from the bodily, leaving behind the common definition of it as a physiological phenomenon. The action of dialoguing or conversing “has in fact a double function: if, in its physiological effect, it chains the psychē to the body, it is at the same time the means of separating the logos from the psychē united with the body.” As I converse, I employ my body to form logoi; simultaneously, the logoi or arguments my body forms take on ‘a life of their own.’ They are apprehended (or not) by others, passed on, perhaps written down for others to read.

This is what “the practice of dying” entails (63c8-64c-9). If that practice, that philosophizing, is so good, why does the philosopher not long to prolong his life, even as ‘the many’ do (if for different reasons)? Simmias laughs at Socrates for this: Where is your duality of ‘the few’ and ‘the many’ now? To this sally Socrates brings his signature irony, introducing the way of life of men he calls the “true” or “genuine” philosophers, who in fact resemble ‘the many’ more than Socrates does. “Just as [the true] philosophers seek the separation of the pure psychē from the body, the many—who want to ‘die of pleasure’—seek the separation of pure body from psychē.” Hedonism and asceticism add up to two sides of the same coin. The supposedly “true” philosophers are Platonists as Platonists are popular conceived, neglectful of their bodies, wishing their heads could float up to the clouds, like balloons. In the actual practice of Plato’s Socrates, however, philosophy requires staying in the city and conversing with real people, few of whom philosophize. “Reducing every obstacle to a corporeal one”—a matter of overcoming the bodily—the “true philosophers” “absolve themselves of all responsibility for their inability to obtain the phronēsis”—the practical wisdom—”they desire,” finally “maintain[ing] a false standard of absolute wisdom, while refusing to acknowledge one’s own deficiency,” thereby gestating “resentment against logos through which one deprives oneself of the very possibility of seeking truth and knowledge of the beings.” “The genuine philosophers misunderstand the nature of philosophy”: whereas their “longing for death is based on a resentment of life that is unconditional, it is Socrates awareness of his particular—political—circumstances that allows him to construe as a benefit his imminent release from the city, from the body, from life itself.” Practical wisdom or prudence is like money: It isn’t an end in itself but a medium of exchange, and not of exchanging one pleasure for another, one pain for another, one fear for another, without any reference to the virtues of justice, moderation, and courage, all of which rein in pleasures, pains and fears. Prudence rightly supports the virtues, not the passions. ‘The many’ suppose otherwise, and, by accepting the popular notion of the sharp bifurcation of psychē and body, the putatively true or genuine philosophers end up as mirror-images of ‘the many.’ In insisting, rhetorically, on the immortality of the individual psychē, Socrates responds to “interlocutors who are moved by their own fear of death, together with pity at the imprudence and anger at the injustice”—as they suppose—”of Socrates’ acceptance of his own death.”

Thinking about this claim of the immortality of the psychē, Cebes asks, how do we know the soul survives the death of the body? He neglects to ask what the psychē is. Nor does Socrates broach the subject. Instead, he makes a speech about “the logic of becoming,” of genesis. The argument is sophistical. Claiming that ‘the greater’ must originate in ‘the smaller,’ and vice versa, he induces Cebes to agree that ‘therefore’ the living must come from the dead, and that ‘therefore’ a dead body will generate a soul that lives on. As Burger remarks, unlike ‘greater’ and ‘smaller,’ “living and dead” are “not contradictory but contrary opposites,” since “something may be neither dead nor alive.” Further, Cebes ignores the obvious fact of organic genesis: that the living originate from the living. “Cebes has become blind to the most evident facts of experience,” taking on the illusion of the ‘genuine’ philosophers, with their “disdain for the body.” Socrates’ sophistry and Cebes’ folly notwithstanding, the argument will turn out to be true in one sense. If one follows Socrates in turning “from investigation of the beings to investigation through logoi,” then the logos in which a philosopher dies will bring him back to life in the mind of the reader. Written by a mortal man and featuring mortal men, the logos by and about men now dead revives them in speech if not in being.

This leads to the topic of anamnesis or ‘not-forgetting,’ of being mindful. Socrates offers Cebes another dubious argument: If knowledge is anamnesis, then our soul must have been somewhere before birth. Simmias too buys into this claim. Why is it so attractive? The answer lies in souls pervaded with the egalitarianism valorized in a democratic regime. “If learning were in fact nothing but recovery of knowledge that is one’s own, every man should be capable of this self-actualization.” Once again, there is “a nonmythological core” to this, namely, that “learning is intelligible only as the actualization of a potential that belongs to man as such.” The “recollection thesis” lends mythological persuasiveness to a real insight into nature.

So far, Socrates has presented two (specious) arguments for the immortality of the soul, the hope for which so strongly animates his interlocutors that they incline to believe them. One argument describes the soul as the animating principle of the body, as the source of its life; the other describes the soul as a “medium of cognition.” Burger criticizes Dorter for overlooking the disjunction between life and cognition. This distinction comes out in Socrates’ third argument, the argument from ‘likeness.’ Here, Socrates (already having pretended to establish the doctrine of reincarnation) presents a sort of Aesopian fable, saying (in Burger’s paraphrase) that “each psychē becomes in another life what it is like in this life, given its habits, its hopes, and its fears.” He does this in answer to Cebes’ fear that the soul might survive release from the body only to be dissipated, like smoke. Not so, Socrates replies. If the psyche can be dragged down and confused by the body and its senses, so too, after escaping the body, will it attach itself to “the pure and lasting and deathless” ideas or forms. In this argument, “The psychē seems to have no nature of its own but only to assimilate itself to its object.” But of course “to grant the likeness of the psychē to the invisible and unchanging does not… satisfy the challenge for a demonstration of its immortality and indestructibility.”  For the psyche or soul to be truly immortal it would need to be or to become like the forms themselves—a whole without parts, “incomposite.” Socrates “has not established” that. What Socrates does argue seriously is a ‘likeness’ of the argument about likeness: Most souls entrap themselves in bodily desires (including the desire for self-preservation, reified in the yearning for the immortality of one’s soul). “Only philosophy… sees what is most terrible about the situation—namely, that comes about through desire, so that the prisoner himself is responsible for his own incarceration,” whether in the polis with its idols or in the body. The soul isn’t reincarnated after the body’s death but self-‘carnated’ during life, taking on the characteristics of the objects of its desires. “What is apparently meant to explain the physiological origin of the living being is in fact the description of a mode of conduct in life.” Since the soul is necessarily entrapped in the body and a polis, only the arguments it makes might be separated from the body and the polis, becoming immortal. “Socrates ends this third argument… by determining not what kind of being is naturally subject to dispersion, but what kind of psyche is naturally inclined to fear dispersion. His condemnation of the foolishness of this fear entirely independent of any proof of the immortality of the psyche.”

The seventh, central chapter of Burger’s thirteen chapters focuses not on the centerpiece of the dialogue—the critique of misology—but the preparation for that critique. Although she has emphasized the turn from concern for the soul’s survival after the body’s death to concern for argument, for logos, one must also notice that the term ‘psychē’ recurs frequently in her book. And indeed without the soul there would be no arguments. She titles this chapter “Images of the Psychē,” raising a question Socrates has avoided so far: What is the soul? And how can we know it, given the elusiveness of direct noetic apprehension of being? Here Socrates introduces the image of the swan, and the swan song. The swan is said to sing before dying, having no fear of death. Socrates describes himself as a fellow-servant, with the swans, of Apollo; he “departs from life no more sorrowful than the swans, blessed with the gift of prophecy from the same master.” It a gift governed by the same irony Socrates exhibits on other occasions, however, inasmuch at “Socrates sanctions his claim to knowledge of what awaits him after death—that ultimate limit of human knowledge—by appealing to the god who proclaimed him the wisest of men only because he had knowledge of his own ignorance.” As for Cebes and Simmias, they continue to identify the soul with the mind, hoping for its immortality, even as Socrates conceives of immortality as logos, and indeed a logos or set of arguments that can only endure if a philosophic mind manages to bring other minds to understand one or more of the arguments it generates. Socrates can be satisfied that this fragile immortality will at least survive him, if dimly, because his interlocutors have understood that his arguments for the immortality of the soul in the more conventional sense do not withstand logical scrutiny. “But neither entertains the possibility that this is the fulfillment, rather than the failure of his intention,” Socrates having “spoken nowhere of the imperishability of the psychē.” One story tells of Plato’s dream, just before his own death, of “a swan darting from tree to tree, unable to be caught by the fowlers”; Simmias the Socratic interpreted this to mean “that all men would try to grasp Plato’s meaning but none would succeed, and each would understand him according to his own views.”

That too would be a sort of immortality—to be forever sought, never captured, only glimpsed. Is being itself like that? This might lead to considerable frustration, however, and to abandonment of the hunt, even to the all-too-human reaction that what we can’t have isn’t really worth having, anyway. Now Burger turns to the center of the Phaedo, which she has placed just off-center in her book. The danger of misology, hatred of logos, hatred of argumentation, arises as we wander through the labyrinth of logoi, compounded of the many, and contradictory, arguments we hear about just about everything. And since human beings are the argumentative animals, misology leads readily to misanthropy, quite apart from our opinions about Apollo and the other ‘gods.’ One needs the equivalent of Ariadne’s thread, a “technē of logos,” to oppose this incipient confusion and despair. Socrates logical art (he is the first to enunciate the principle of non-contradiction) offers a modest guide. Whereas disputatious souls, described ironically as the “genuine” philosophers, “discover the untrustworthy character of all logoi, as well as of pragmata [perception of material objects], Socrates discovers only knowledge of his own ignorance.” This “knowledge of human nature”—knowledge of the limitedness of its own ability to know—”save[s] him at the same time from misology, for only be recognizing his own deficiency can he escape from blaming his ignorance on logos itself.” “Avoidance of misology depends precisely upon abandoning the desire for knowledge of the beings themselves, in order to preserve trust in the possibility of discovering ‘the truth of the beings’ through logoi.” By contrast, the “genuine” philosophers attempt the impossible and end up resenting “the body as the obstacle to the attainment of phronēsis, construed as direct contact of the pure psychē with the pure beings.” That is, they begin to despair of both argumentation and life itself. The art of logos at least ‘weeds out’ those logoi that are self-contradictory, bringing the logician-philosopher nearer to elusive being, affording him clearer glimpses of it in flight, possibly even the hope of discerning its flight-patterns. The immortality or at least the endurance of this effort will depend upon its transmission to other souls, however, and here is where Socrates (who evidently glimpses souls via logoi, with some success) brings Phaedo in. “Phaedo is to cut off his hair in mourning not for the death of Socrates, but only for the death of the logos”; he will indeed transmit the story to the Pythagoreans, and (at least according to the surmise Plato invites) to Plato, author of the dialogue named for him. As for Simmias and Cebes, they “must separate from all self-interest their examination of the logos: only through this separation can they participate with Socrates in the practice of dying.” Their concern with psychic immortality betrays that self-interest; their halting attempts to follow Socrates’ arguments and indeed to refute them promises a chance at letting go of it, and concentrating the minds they wish immortal on the arguments themselves, which may prove perennial.

“The one argument that both Simmias and Cebes wholeheartedly endorse,” the recollection argument, suggests to Socrates a turn to the question of harmony. Simmias had compared the soul to a harmony: the lyre represents the body, the strings the elements composing the body; Socrates implied that the harmony produced by the strings of the lyre represents the soul and its affects. “While the coming into being and perishing of the psychē is thus dependent on the instrument of the body, the harmonic order imposed on the psychē is not necessarily dependent on the body.” The soul’s “capacity to give a logos” provides a way to knowledge surer than “the understanding of the beings as the object of a passive vision by the pure psychē,” whose stubborn impurity so frustrates the “genuine” philosophers. For his part, Simmias fails to understand that “the nature of logos as a composite whole… has qualities other than those of its component parts”; he commits what later logicians would call the reductionist fallacy. His reductionism leads him to a mistaken egalitarianism, a supposition that all souls are equal because they are all equally souls. Socrates observes that because souls comprise several elements, those elements may be better or worse harmonized with one another; in this sense, all souls are not equal. For example, as he now leads Simmias to see, the soul can choose to rule the appetites of the body, denying food to the stomach’s hunger. Further, to say that the soul can choose to do this suggests that the soul’s real struggle is not so much with the body but ‘with itself,’ more precisely within itself, as reason and affects struggle for rule. Indeed, it is the spirited or thumotic element of the soul which constructs “the ideal of the pure psychē separate from the body and compelled to tyrannize it”; the “pure beings” originate not in nature but in “willfulness and moral indignation.” Thus “the common ground of harmonization, understood as the well-ordered state of the parts of the psychē—in relation to the whole, and harmony, understood as consistency of logoi, must be the law of noncontradiction.”

Turning next to Cebes, whose physiological account of the soul mirrored Simmias’ ‘idealistic’ but in fact thumotic account, Socrates says more about that very art of logos, that law of noncontradiction, and, crucially, the way of life you might have if you organized your life around that art, that law. Cebes’ discomfort at Socrates’ “confidence in dying” implies discomfort at Socrates’ confidence in his way of life. Burger devotes the longest chapter of her book to Socrates’ unfolding of how he came to understand and further the philosophic way of life, with its “trust in logos.”

If Socrates was simply blinded by his attempt “to look directly at things and grasp them through the senses,” in the way of materialist naturalism, how then could he have arrived at his way of life, his reorientation of the philosophic enterprise? As mentioned earlier, the beginning of this turn was ‘meta-mathematical’: If ‘two’ in math can occur by adding one and one or by splitting one into two, how does ‘one’ come to be? Opposite causes can produce ‘two’; opposite causes can also produce ‘one.’ These perplexities returned when he considered other dualities, including those of pleasure and pain, body and soul. Materialist naturalism cannot answer such questions. But neither can immaterialist teleology, the claim that the mind arranges all things. Moreover, teleology subtly tempts us, “project[ing] onto the whole the operation of the human mind, without necessarily acknowledging that projection.” This turns out to have implications for the immediately preceding topic of harmony: Is the good of the whole, the posited telos, identical with the good of each particular within the whole? (In theology, this becomes a serious question indeed—the problem of evil.) One might redeem teleology by distinguishing the good from the necessary, the end from the means; evil particulars might serve the good of the whole, and/or evils done to some particulars might do so. If so, however, one still needs an argument showing what the good of the while is, and why it is good. “A comprehensive teleology would require a defense of the superiority of life, or of death, not merely for one individual but for that individual as a single part of a cosmic whole.” The composite character of the soul, pulled as it is in different directions, calls teleology into question. What is the standard?

If both materialist naturalism and teleology do not suffice, what if they are combined? “Socrates brings to light the inseparability of mechanism and teleology, and with that of body and psychē.” Mechanism fails to search “for the power that causes things to be placed as best” in soul and body, and in the cosmos itself. “Those who will be psychically blinded by their unwillingness to rely on reflections… mistake the pragmata grasped through the senses for the beings themselves.” But that is not the fault of the senses, the body, but of the “needs and desires, and hopes and fears of the psychē.” Socrates ‘turn’ to the logoi thus did not turn him away from consideration of things and of actions. Far from it. “Socrates deed of remaining in prison”—itself a physically restricting thing which restricts another thing, the body—”provides in the Phaedo the proper context for the speeches on immortality.” “To pursue the Socratic second sailing is to replace investigation of the beings themselves with investigation of their truth,” meaning that “the truth must be the bond between the mind and the noetic object”; “investigation of the truth of the beings is investigation of what makes knowledge possible,” as light “serves as a bond between the eye and the visible object.” The principle of non-contradiction applies because “each pragma [thing] is an inseparable unity of a subject and a quality ascribed to it, and when the opposite pragma is ascribed to that subject, that inseparable unity constitutes the opposite pragma,” thus contradicting the prior ascription. One must learn to investigate one’s noetic visions, testing them for logical inconsistencies, treating them as hypotheses and not as unquestionable beings-in-themselves. And this goes for the ‘Platonic’ ‘vision’ of the ‘ideas’ as causative entities. Plato isn’t necessarily a ‘Platonist,’ much less a Neo-Platonist. Cebes has been too much the noetic visionary in his very materialism. In “introduc[ing] the technē of logos in an attempt to turn attention away from all self-interest,” Socrates does not present the full picture of the philosophic life but rather prepares Cebes for it by quieting his inordinate fear of death, which may plunge him into misology. Recognize your starting point not as a self-evident truth but as a hypothesis, and you will uncover “the deeper levels of assumption concealed in the initial hypothesis.” “Every Platonic dialogue” proceeds this way. That “the security of Socrates’ technē of logos” may itself be questioned, treated as a hypothesis, isn’t an inquiry that this dialogue addresses.

Instead, the conversation turns back to immortality. “The identification of the self with the soul, as a self-identical substrate regardless of its properties… is precisely the target of Plato’s critique here,” a reprise of the point he made against Simmias’ egalitarian assumption that because all souls are equally souls they are therefore equal in all respects. Socrates never speaks of an idea of soul, and this matters because the principle of non-contradiction governs the ideas primarily; things often do feature contradictory elements within them. (The soul does, as its emotions conflict with or ‘contradict’ one another, and reason.) The more nuanced or refined ones definition of the cause of a thing or an action becomes, the less irrefutable it will be—as modern political pollsters have learned, to their embarrassment. To use Socrates’ example, the argument “that fire can be the cause of heat only and not of cold… did not and could not have established that fire is the only cause of heat.” Although Cebes believes that soul is the only cause of life in the body, Socrates knows that body might be the cause, just as easily. At best, a philosopher can test a hypothesis and certify it as free of self-contradiction, but it might yet turn out to be “empirically wrong.” Whether soul is the cause of life, and whether it is immortal, might be so certified, and for “demotic” or rhetorical purposes this can reconcile the “music” played to ‘the many’ with the “music” heard by ‘the few’ philosophers, but for those philosophers those claims will remain hypotheses, not certainties, pending further investigation. With respect to the soul, Socrates distinguishes between perishing and destruction. “To perish, Socrates seems to suggest, is simply to cease to exist altogether, whereas to be destroyed is to turn into something else because of losing an essential attribute.” Whereas a number could perish if another number were added to or subtracted from it—add ‘two’ to ‘three’ and each is altogether changed—add fire to snow and you get water, which retains the same chemical composition as snow but has changed it structure. Similarly, the soul (a compound) may be imperishable but nonetheless destructible, as Socrates the person dies even as his arguments, and indeed himself as a human ‘type,’ the philosopher, live on. As he puts it, “When death approaches the man, the mortal, as it seems, of him dies, while the immortal departs, going away safe and incorruptible, withdrawing from death.” This doesn’t mean that the soul itself is immortal, although most men will hastily assume that it does. Socrates advises the philosophic few: Let them.

Meanwhile, live as if your soul were immortal, worth caring for. “The evil from which [the soul] must escape is not life itself… but the opposite of being good and prudent.” The contrary of Socrates is the Athenian dēmos which condemned him to death, “believing it to be the greatest evil.” The mythos or story which Socrates reserves for his last long speech treats the cosmos as an image of the body writ large. In the Republic, the polis was the body writ large, the regime its soul. “Now the walls of the polis within which we are chained prisoners are replaced by the boundaries of the known world, the shadows cast on the wall by artificial objects reflected in the light of man-made fire replaced by the natural phenomena of our environment systematically misperceived through our murky depths.” Only care for the soul will prevent these misperceptions caused by the mind-darkening emotions. Earlier, he had commended the virtues of moderation, justice, courage, and phronēsis as one considers ones “hope for the beautiful reward of a particular fate after death”; now, he commends the virtues of moderation, justice, courage, and freedom and truth in considering the philosopher’s confidence about life and death. This suggests that the reward of the previous set of virtues and born fruit.

The poison Socrates must now drink, in accordance with the verdict of the Athenian jury, he describes as a pharmakon, that is, a medicine. “The pharmakon that Socrates drinks is simultaneously a poison that brings his life to an end and a remedy that cures a disease” or, the use a previous metaphor releases him from prison, “from the self-imposed chains of attachment to pleasure and pain.” Burger contends that the real pharmakon that “fulfills the practice of dying, as a separation of logos from the living self,” is the Platonic dialogue. When Phaedo closes his account of this day, he calls Socrates as “the best and most prudent and most just” man of his time, a “judgment of exoneration” of Socrates from the verdict of the jury handed down by a man who knew him better than the Athenian assembly did.