Cicero: On the Republic. David Fott translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.
Written around 54 BC, De re publica (literally, ‘On the Public Thing’) presents readers with a dialogue set some seventy-five years earlier, in the aftermath of a factional struggle in Rome between the many who were poor and the few who were rich. In 134 BC, Tiberius Gracchus, tribune of the plebs, ignored the Senate’s role in lawmaking and redistributed land to the poor. When he sought reelection in order to avoid a charge of treason and the incumbent consul refused to stop him from doing so, some senators and their clients killed him. His brother, Gaius Gracchus, would be murdered also, thirteen years later, eight years after the time of Cicero’s dialogue. This consists of six books, two each for one day; no one now can offer a serious interpretation of it because it survives only in mutilated form. There are things to learn here, nonetheless, beginning with Cicero’s preface to Book I.
Tension between families and ‘the public thing’—polis, empire, modern state—occurs because the political community insists on its authority over families, restricting their liberty, while at the same time meeting the needs of families, not least of which is the need to regulate feuds among families. Cicero follows Aristotle in siding firmly with the political community: “Because the fatherland secures more benefits and is an older parent than he who begot, surely a greater gratitude is owed to it than to a parent” (I. fragment). But a more formidable challenge to the authority of the community arises from certain philosophers who turn their backs on public life. Cicero condemns them as “madmen” who could never help Rome in its wars, including its civil wars (I.1.). Why “madmen”? Because such men behave contra natura. “Nature has given to the human race such a necessity for virtue and such a love of defending the common safety that this force will overcome all allurements of pleasure and leisure,” unless one’s mind is deranged (I.1). That is, the ‘natural philosophers’ irrationally fail to understand human nature, and so do the apolitical moral philosophers—Epicureans and some Stoics. To understand human nature, nearer to us, more accessible to reasoning than the far reaches of the cosmos, one must think carefully about the political thing.
Against the apolitical moralists, Cicero remarks that “it is not enough to have virtue, as if it were some sort of art, unless you use it”; indeed, “virtue depends wholly upon its use” (I.1). The “greatest use” of virtue is “the governance of the city and the completion in fact, not in speech, of the same things as these men shout about in corners” (I.1.). Here, Cicero criticizes not only the apolitical moral philosophers but ‘theorizing’ political philosophers, first and foremost the author of the earlier dialogue titled The Republic. “Philosophers say nothing—at least of what may be said correctly and honorably—that was [not] accomplished and strengthened by those who have configured law [jus] for cities,” those who have established religion as the practice of piety and both the law of nations and the civil law (I.1-2). Without lawgivers, where would justice, fidelity, fairness, a sense of shame, self-control, avoidance of disgrace, desire for praise and for honorableness, courage, if not “from those men who gave form to those things by training and who strengthened some of them by customs and consecrated others by laws”? (I.2). “Therefore, that citizen who compels of all persons, by official command and by penalty of laws, what philosophers by speech can scarcely persuade a few persons [to do], should be given precedence even over the teachers themselves who debate those things,” inasmuch as the lawgivers have put virtue fully to use, making of it more than a topic for leisured speech (I.2).
Yet Cicero may not be so far from Plato as it seems. In the Republic, Socrates drew thoroughly ‘politicized’ men—Thrasymachus, Glaucon—away from action and into speech. The Athenians of that time were political without being especially thoughtful, lawgivers who had no clear idea of what justice is. Cicero sees a Rome in which philosophers tempt men away from politics altogether, off into Epicurean gardens and the groves of academe. If Socrates needs to save philosophy from politics, Cicero needs to save politics from philosophy. “Let us not listen to the horns sounding the retreat to call back even now those who have already gone ahead” (I.3). Both men aim at moderating if not resolving the old quarrel between politics and philosophy.
Cicero knows the objections to such a political philosophy, the kind of philosophy Plato and Aristotle insisted upon. It is laborious, some will say. And so it is. But this is “a trifling impediment to the vigilant and diligent man” (I.4). It is dangerous. Yes, that too: but such “dread of death” is “disgraceful,” as Socrates himself evidently thought. As for Cicero, even in exile he has “reaped greater joy from respectable men’s longing than grief from wicked men’s joy” (I.8). As Socrates argues in the Crito, “our fatherland has neither given us birth nor educated us according to law without expecting some nourishment, so to speak, from us” (I.8).
The Epicureans, who cite trouble and danger as supposedly sound reasons for their “evasions” of politics, “so that they may more easily take great enjoyment in leisure, should be listened to certainly least of all” (I.9). They denigrate politicians as “worthless men,” futilely attempting to “restrain the raving, uncontrolled attacks of the crowd”; they claim that “the free man” will never stoop to “contending with vile, monstrous adversaries” who wield the weapons of slander and unjust force (I.9). They assure themselves, and their listeners, that they nevertheless stand ready to intervene if the republic faces some grand crisis. On the contrary, Cicero argues, those “who are good, courageous, and endowed with a great mind” should not evade public life, not allow worthless men “to tear the republic to pieces” (I.9). I myself have endured such hardship, he says, without fear of contradiction. And how can such men promise to engage in politics in times of supreme necessity when they shrink from politics in ordinary times? Have we any reason to suppose that they who have never proved themselves in the vicissitudes of everyday public life will—or, if willing, can—stand firm in amidst these storms?
If the later Greek philosophers shirk political responsibilities, Cicero notes that “almost all” of the ancient ‘seven wise men’ of Greece “were engaged at the center of public affairs” (I.12). (All but Thales, a ‘natural philosopher,’ the sort Plato’s Socrates criticized.) For “there is nothing in which human virtue more nearly approaches the majesty of the gods than either founding new cities or preserving ones that are already founded” (I.12).
Approaching the majesty of the gods is all very well, but what about approaching the truths the gods are said to know, including the truth about the gods? There is no necessary contradiction, here. “I achieved something memorable in managing the republic and a certain ability to expound the meaning [ratio] of political things,” having become “an authority through not only experience but also eagerness for learning and teaching” (I.12). Reasoning about politics, finding the meaning of political things, requires a certain “kind of reasoning that I must introduce” to Rome, even as Plato and Aristotle introduced it to Athens. This kind of reasoning “is neither new nor discovered nor invented by me.” I shall “recall to memory an argument among the most famous and wisest men in our city belonging to a single generation,” a memory given to Cicero and his brother by Publius Rufus Rutilius, who participated in that conversation (I.12). “I think that almost nothing of great importance pertaining to the consideration of political affairs was omitted from it” (I.13).
The principal discussant is Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus (“Africanus” in honor of his victorious leadership of Roman armies in Carthage and Numantia). He is at his suburban estate—neither fully in the city nor fully in the countryside, nature as conceived by the natural philosophers. He celebrates the “Latin holidays,” that is, the event marking the alliance between ancient Rome and the Latins, from whom the Roman men had seized women they needed for wives if Rome was to survive (I.14). The Romans quickly made peace with the justly aggrieved Latin rulers; this political marriage of necessity provided a new and stable foundation for Rome, preserving a city that had already been founded; godlike majesty entails godlike prudence or practical reasoning. This proved to be the indispensable alliance, enabling Rome to withstand attacks from rivals and eventually to defeat them and to establish their empire.
Scipio’s sister’s son has joined him. Unlike his eminent uncle, Quintus Tubero seems a bit lazy. Scipio tells the young man that even now, at leisure, on holiday, he works “in mind” if not in action (I.14). For emphasis, Scipio swears “By Hercules!”—that hero of labor (I.14). Very well, then, Uncle Scipio, if we want to exercise our minds, let’s work out the nature of “the other sun” that was reported recently to the senate (I.15). What is the reason for it? (We now know that when ice crystals reflect the light, the optical illusion of a second sun appears, but to Romans this was still an object of speculation.) As Tubero’s gracious host, Scipio wishes aloud that “we had with us our friend Panaetius, who inquires regularly and most eagerly about these celestial matters” (I.15). Yet to tell the truth, “I do not agree much with our close friend on this kind of thing”; as a Stoic, a philosopher concerned first of all with the ‘cosmopolis,’ the order of the universe, Panaetius “holds such firm conclusions on the sorts of matters we can scarcely guess about that it seems he notices them with his own eyes or handles them distinctly with his own hand. I am still inclined to judge Socrates wiser, who put aside all care of this kind and said either things sought about nature are greater than human reason can achieve or they hold no concern at all for human life” (I.15).
But why, then, uncle, did Plato himself study not only with Socrates but with the Pythagoreans? In his dialogues, Plato has Socrates speak “in such a way that even when he is debating morals [mos], virtues, and even the republic, he is nonetheless eager to combine numbers, geometry, and harmony in the manner [mos] of Pythagoras”? (I.16). (1) Scipio has his answer ready: Plato “wove together the Socratic wit and subtlety of conversation with Pythagoras’s obscurity and weight in many arts” (I.16). That is, in his own artfully constructed dialogues, Plato combined nature, but more specifically human nature, distinguished by its power of logos, of speech and reason, with mathematically symmetrical art. He thus combined two forms of knowledge in an unmatched portrayal of the philosophic quest and of those who undertake it.
Romans, take note. Do not hesitate to combine Romanness with Latinity in a more refined, but still political way. Several of them now arrive, ready to enjoy the Latin holiday. Publius Rufus Rutilius, “our authorial source for this conversation” (I.17), appears first, followed by Lucius Furius Philus, who proves to be a man of both moral and intellectual virtue, then Gaius Laelius, a former consul and close friend of Scipio, Spurius Mummius, a favorite of Laelius and fellow Stoic, Gaius Fannius and Quintus Scaevola, both educated young men in their late twenties, thus old enough to be quaestors. A mixture of experienced statesmen steeped in philosophy and young men eager for learning: Scipio invites them to move their conversation to a sunny meadow, closer to nature, placing Laelius in the center of group. Because Laelius is the elder of the two men, in Rome, in the city, Scipio treats him as if he were a father; outside Rome, Laelius treats Scipio “as a god,” in honor of his “glory in war” (I.18). Here, neither in the city at peace nor outside the city in war but just outside the city but now outside the household, they will continue the conversation begun indoors. They are joined at last by the oldest man of them all, Manius Manilius, a “prudent man” under whom Scipio served in Carthage in the 140s and who returned to Rome to serve as consul immediately after that. Scipio seats him next to Laelius.
So, “what conversation did we interrupt?” Laelius wants to know (I.19). Upon being told about the two suns, Laelius wonders if we should not first explore “matters relevant to our homes and the republic” (I.19). Not necessarily, convinced Stoic Philus replies, since our real home is the universe itself, the “domicile” and “fatherland” the gods gave us “in common” (I.19). “Everyone eager for wisdom” should investigate and consider the natural things, which are the true public things, he avers, swearing by Hercules as Laelius had done, presumably ready for such heroic labors (I.19). Laelius relents, “since we are on holiday” (I.20).
Philus proceeds not to discuss the heavens themselves but a model of them, originally designed by Archimedes. In some respects, the artfulness of Archimedes impresses him more than the universe his model depicted: “I judged that there was more talent in that Sicilian than it seemed human nature could provide” (I.22); to Philus, the natural philosopher is as nearly divine as the lawgiver is to Scipio. In both cases, however, it is human nature that is the real wonder. This perhaps inadvertent pointing back to human nature gives Scipio a dialectical opening. He recounts how the owner of the model, who had seized it as war booty, used it to show his soldiers that a solar eclipse was not an evil open concerning the coming battle but a natural event, explicable in human terms by the artifact. The practical use of science “banished the empty superstition and fear from the disturbed men, fear that would sabotage the soldierly courage needed for victory, doing so by reason (I.24-25). Well used, art can serve as an intermediary between reasoning and unreasoning men, for good military and perhaps political purposes. Why else write those artifacts, dialogues?
As it happens, it wasn’t Archimedes but Thales of Miletus, a natural philosopher, who first understood the lunar eclipse. The natural philosopher learned something about the cosmos, our natural home and republic; the artist-philosopher Archimedes built a model of it; the military commander Gallus then put it to moral use against the immoral effect of superstition. Perhaps, then, Scipio in fact sees that the philosophers’ discoveries come before those of lawgivers, but they require artist-philosophers and military statesmen (Gallus also served as a consul) to bring out the nature that matters most to human beings—their own nature. Scipio does not fail to see the implication of philosophic investigation when it comes to the founding of Rome itself. “Although in fact nature snatched away Romulus” during a solar eclipse, “it is said that his virtue carried him off to heaven” (I.25).
Not that this should make human beings preen themselves on mere glory. “What should someone who has examined these kingdoms of the gods consider splendid in human affairs? Or what is long lasting to someone who knows what is eternal,” one who sees “how small the earth is,” how small the Roman Empire is on the small earth? (I.26). It is not human opinion or even the civil law, but “the common law of nature” which “forbids that anything belongs to anyone except to him who knows how to handle and use it” (I.27). Artifacts modeling the universe, the universe itself insofar as it is within our reach, rightly belong, rightly are the property of, the prudent, the men of practical wisdom. Positions of command and consulships are “necessary things, not things to be desired,” not for profit or glory but for right use (I.27).
In this, “those who, when no one is watching, either speak with themselves or act as if they were present in an assembly of highly educated men, delighting themselves with their discoveries and writings” excel those who speak “in the forum and in a mob” (I.27). “Who can think that anyone is richer than he who lacks nothing that nature requires, or more powerful than he who attains everything he desires, or happier than he who has been free from all disturbance of mind, or of steadier fortune than he who possesses things that (as they say) he can carry away with himself from a shipwreck?” (I.27). The ability to reason is the true sign of human nature.
Laelius deems Scipio to have gone too far in his concessions to natural philosophy. Astronomers gaze at the heavens but don’t watch what’s in front of their feet, stumbling like the philosopher the slave girl laughed at. By Hercules, “I think that the things appearing before our eyes should be inquired about more” (I.31). Ask not why there are two suns, Tubero; ask why there are two senates and (alluding to the restive Gracchi and their followers) “almost two peoples in our republic” (I.31). At the head of the many who are poor, the Gracchi undermined the Rome unified when the Latins were conciliated. Consider that. “Young man, if you will listen to me, do not fear another sun” (I.31). Even if we could understand the cosmos, “we cannot be better or happier because of this knowledge” but we can be better and happier if we have one Rome (I. 32). We should therefore learn “the arts useful the city,” devoting this holiday “above all to conversations most advantageous to the republic” (I. 33). “Let us ask Scipio to explain what he thinks is the best form of the city”—which is none other than Plato’s theme, Socrates’ inquiry in the Republic (33).
Following Aristotle, Scipio calls “the management and administration of a republic” the “greatest art” (I.41). By ‘republic,’ he means a political community, “an assemblage of a multitude” a “‘thing’ of the people,” under a regime of one kind or another—either “one man or certain select men” or “the multitude” (I.42), the many who are poor, called in Rome the “proletarians,” the “child-givers,” men and women who have nothing to give the city but children (II.42). Whether a king, a set of aristocrats, or the people, the ruler or rulers must rule “by a kind of deliberation so that [the city] may be long lasting” (I.41). This deliberation “should always be measured by the cause that gave birth to the city,” the purpose intended by those who founded it, “the bond that first bound human beings among themselves in the fellowship of a republic,” which is what keeps the political union together (I.42). Any of the three regime types might maintain that bond; the one that does, “though it is not perfect,” is nonetheless “tolerable” (I.42).
Problems will arise because none of the three regimes readily maintains the bond. Even if “no unfairness or greed” corrupts the regime, “in kingdoms the others”—the aristocratic few and the many ‘commoners’—have “too small a part in common justice [ius] and deliberation,” which is what Cicero means by liberty (I.43). In aristocracies, the many are excluded. “And when the people manages all things, although it may be just and moderate, the equality [aequabilitas] itself is unfair [iniquus] because it recognizes no degrees of rank” (I.43). By this, Scipio evidently means that wealth should not be equalized, as democrats incline to attempt; the attempt threatens the aristocrats or oligarchs with demotion in rank, turning them into enemies of the democratic regime. And the attempt to equalize wealth must fail, since “the natural abilities of all person cannot be equal” (I.49)—including, obviously, the natural ability to acquire wealth. Each regime thus tends to exclude or injure some elements of the community and thereby to undermine it, to generate enemies of the regime. This is why there are “cycles” or “revolutions” of regimes in republics. “While it is for the wise man to know them”—a philosopher like Aristotle—it is “for some great citizen and almost divine man, while governing the republic, to foresee those that threaten and to direct its course and keep it in his power” (I.46). That is, the theoretical or philosophic man cannot do what the supremely prudent man can do: not only understand political typology but to use it, rather as Gallus used the philosopher’s knowledge of the cosmos, to defend a real, flawed, but good regime from its weaknesses. To truly preserve a republic, however, it is best not to institute any of the three simple regimes but instead to mix them in such a way as to moderate each element, restraining each from exaggerating its characteristic flaw.
This mixed regime sounds like the one Aristotle describes as the best practicable regime, except that Aristotle doesn’t expect the mixture to consist of good elements. He recommends that two bad regimes, oligarchy and democracy, be combined in such a way so that the few who are rich and the many who are poor can do nothing without cooperating with one another. At this point, however, Laelius cuts short any discussion of exactly what Scipio has in mind with his own idea of a mixed regime by saying that he wants to know which of the three simple regimes Scipio “judge[s] best” (I.46). We don’t know why Laelius insists on this point, as the next two pages of the book have been lost. It might be that he wants to know which element of the three, if any, should be preeminent in the mixed regime; in Rome, the example he has before his eyes, the senate, the institution representing the few, usually enjoyed such preeminence.
The dialogue as we have it resumes with Scipio remarking that “every republic is such as either the nature or the will of him who rules it” (I.48). It’s a good thing that this portion of the text survives because it states the reason why regimes are crucial to understanding a ‘republic’ or political community. Initially, Scipio considers the democratic republic the best of the simple regimes. It alone provides liberty to the most people, and nothing “can be sweeter than liberty” (I.48). Why so? Because liberty means political rule, ruling and being ruled, and serves as a spur to deliberation. Deliberation exercises the distinctively human characteristic, reason; genuinely political rule or liberty thus brings out human nature to the fullest. In deliberating together, the people frame laws. “Law is a bond of political fellowship”—a shared purpose is indispensable, but it needs reinforcement—and “justice is equality under law”; equality under law in turns enhances the “fellowship of citizens,” making them more likely to deliberate amicably, keeping the political union together (I.49). Since there will never be equality of wealth or of natural abilities, equality in a republic can only be based on legal rights, what the United States Constitution calls equal protection under the laws. “For what is a city if not a fellowship in justice”? (I.49).
When it comes to day-to-day ruling, whatever the regime, “nature has provided not only that the highest men in virtue and mind should”—should—be “in charge of the weaker, but also that the latter should be willing to obey the highest men” (I.51). That is, in exercising their political liberty the people should freely entrust themselves to the men of moral and practical-intellectual virtue. Unfortunately, “the crowd” confuses wealth with virtue while the rich “cling to the title of ‘the best men,'” although “they lack the substance” of true aristocrats, being “full of dishonor and insolent haughtiness” (I.51). Indeed, “there is no more deformed species of a city than that in which the most prosperous men are considered the best” (I.51). This popular error, which may come about because the many who are poor wish they were rich, means that equality under the law, “which free peoples cling to, cannot be preserved” (I.53).
By contrast, “what can be more splendid than virtue governing a republic? Then he who commands others is a slave to no desire; then he has embraced all the things in which he instructs his fellow citizens and to which he summons them; and he does not impose laws on the people that he does not obey himself, but he puts forward his own life as a law for his own citizens” (I.51). If any of the the three simple regimes could find such a ruler or rulers, it would be the best. But they can’t, at least not for long. Which of the simple regimes does Scipio then prefer? Upon reflection, “none of them in itself separately,” as he has said before (I.53). Each has its means of winning consent: “Kings captivate us by affection” (the fascination of today’s Americans with the English monarchy being a case in point); aristocrats captivate us by “judgment” (as Tocqueville much later sees, an aristocracy is a prudent man who never dies); democracies captivate us by “liberty” (I.55). Kings win our hearts; aristocrats win our heads, our ‘better judgment’; democracies should win our heads, too, but democrats seldom keep them, descending instead to following their desires.
Specifically, kings win our hearts through the sentiment of piety. Many nations favor kingship, Scipio observes, “because they think that all gods are ruled by the majesty of one royal [god],” which a human king resembles more than the few or the many (I.56). But if, thanks to the natural philosophy the conversation began by considering, some of us reject the belief that Jupiter rules as “the error of the ignorant,” a matter of hearsay, we should consider the teachings of those who learn by seeing—Thales, Archimedes—who say that “this entire universe [is ruled] by a mind” (I.56). If so, the rightly ordered human soul resembles the rightly ordered cosmos; human nature resembles cosmic nature. Scipio affirms the opinion of “the famous Archytas of Tarentum,” who “rightly regarded anger as a certain sedition of the mind—that is, in opposition to reason” (I.59-60). If the cosmic regime is a kingship, if the rightly ordered soul is, too, and so is the rightly ordered household, then why not the city? Democracy suffices for survival when the republic is “in peace and leisure” (“you may be lascivious while you fear nothing”). But just “as both he who sails when the sea suddenly begins to grow rough and he who is ill with a worsening sickness implore the assistance of one man,” so our people readily obey those same magistrates as if they were royals, when war erupts. In Rome, under such circumstances, the people even consent to the rule of the dictator, safety being “worth more than lust” (I.63).
What if the dictator prefers not to relinquish his ruler, once the crisis has passed? And even when there is no crisis, “from this uncontrolled or rather monstrous people someone is usually chosen as leader against those leading men,” the aristocrats, “who have already been struck and driven from their place” by the licentious many. The popular leader is typically “someone daring, vile, often impudently hunting those who have deserved well of the republic, someone making presents to the people of both others’ things and its own.” Such men “emerge as tyrants over the same men who brought them forth” (I.68). This is how the liberty of the democratic republic, having declined into licentiousness, leads to tyranny “born from this excessive licentiousness” (I.68). And this kind of thing is true of all the simple regimes; although each has its characteristic excess, “all excesses” in one regime cause it to change into its opposite (I.68). “The form of the republic, as if it were a ball, is seized from kings by tyrants, then from them by leading men or peoples, then from them by either factions or tyrants. The same mode of republic is never maintained very long.” (I.69).
Although he began by claiming that the democratic republic is best, Scipio finally answers Laelius’ question about the best of the simple regimes the way Aristotle answers it, although not exactly on Aristotelian grounds. “The kingly one excels the others by far” because, as a product of human art, and indeed of the master art, the architectonic art, politics, it rules the same way as the cosmos, the soul, and the family are rightly ruled (I.69). But, as Aristotle maintains, the mixed regime “exel[s] the kingly one itself” (I.69). “It seems good for there to be something preeminent and regal in the republic, for something else to be shared with and assigned to the authority of leading men, for certain things to be saved for the judgment and will of the multitude” (I.69). The mixed regime features the civil equality or liberty “which free men can scarcely be without for very long,” along with “a firmness” that none of the simple types can achieve (I.69). “For there is no cause for a revolution where each man has been firmly placed in his own station and there is nothing beneath him into which he may plunge and sink” (I.70).
By the end of Book I, it is clear why Scipio placed Laelius physically in the center of his dialogic circle. As a prudent, that is to say far-seeing, man, Scipio knew he could depend upon his old friend to keep the discussion down to earth, giving Scipio the chance to show what Socrates showed Plato’s readers—that philosophers must know that, and what, they do not know, and that they do not know as much as they would like to know about the cosmos, although they can know some things. What they can know better, and must know better, given their physical location in a political community or ‘republic,’ is how to use the reason that only takes them so far in their investigations into cosmic nature to better understand what they can come to know a lot about—human nature, its social and political character, and the way in which various regimes deflect and distort the reasoning power of the human mind, the preeminent or ruling power of the philosopher’s mind. If Socrates introduced political philosophy to Athens, Cicero assumes the role of Plato, with Scipio as his Socrates, in Rome, against the Epicureans and Stoics who either retreat to their gardens or imagine themselves swept up even beyond those (Aristophanic) clouds and into the stars. And by demanding, later on, that Scipio reveal which of the simple regimes he prefers, perhaps hoping that Scipio will argue in favor the aristocratic regime that both he and Scipio represent, Laelius gives his friend the opportunity to tie the argument into a knot that only Scipio can unweave, then re-weave into the mixed regime.
Aristotle claims that the mixed regime is the best practicable regime. The proof that it’s practicable is nearby: it is Rome itself. In Book II, the account of the second half of the conversation’s first day, Scipio turns to Rome—specifically, its political history. Whereas Socrates’ city in speech has one man as its real founder, a philosopher who extracts the best regime from his younger interlocutors, Scipio’s practicable regime in an existing, earthly city took much longer to perfect and was the work of many minds over time. This is why it is not only more practicable than the city in speech but superior to other mixed regimes in practice, regimes which had such lone founders as Minos of Crete and Lycurgus of Sparta. Prudent Cato the Elder told Scipio that “there had never been anyone at any time whose intellect had been so excellent that nothing escaped it, and that all the intellects at one time, brought together as one, could not foresee enough to comprehend everything without experience in things and the passage of time” (II.2). It’s as if Cato had read Edmund Burke.
When Romulus founded Rome, he exercised prudence in selecting its location. He avoided the seacoast, which would have made the city vulnerable to quick attacks, vulnerable to the corruption and destabilizing change of customs which a people engaged in maritime trade incline, importing new customs along with merchandise. Too, such citizens wander in search of goods—often luxury goods, the desire for which corrupts them. Scipio cites the example of the Greek islands, which “almost float [in the sea] along with the institutions and customs of [their] citizens” (II.8). True, such places enjoy “great convenience” in the transport of goods, compared with landlocked cities, which suffer from much higher carrying costs (II.9). Romulus’ solution was the same as Aristotle’s (Politics VII.6). He located Rome on a river with access to the sea, where access to it by marauders and traders alike could be controlled.
Having solved his geopolitical problem, he then addressed his population problem. There were too few Romans, so he invited Sabine “maidens” to a festival, had his young men seize them for wives, then made peace with the understandably indignant Sabine king by sharing rule of their joint territories with him (II.12). (The Sabine king later died, leaving Romulus, who had prudently not provided for joint Roman-Sabine rule into the future, in firm control of the expanded monarchic republic.) To accommodate the few, he founded the senate, adding the authority of “each excellent man” to his own (II.15). He also founded a civil religion with regular use of the auspices, giving prudent rulers a way of (as it were) sanctifying their foresight. In his penal system he used fines, not force, avoiding the sharper forms of resentment toward his policies. “Do you see,” Scipio asks, “that by means of the judgment of one man, not only did a new people arise, but it was already adult and almost of ripe age—not like one left crying in a cradle,” or under a fig tree as, the story goes, Romulus himself had been left (II.21). As a foundling as well as a founder, Romulus was free of the family ties that might have made him suspect to most of the families who joined together to found the ‘republic.’ His death enhanced his legend as much as his birth. Scipio notes that Romulus was deified in an age in which people were no longer as superstitious, no longer as unlearned, as in earlier times. This claim registered a sense that the mind of a great founder participates in the divine mind, the mind that organizes and rules the regime of the cosmos. The founder’s reason is in a sense divine, that is, part of the larger nature, the nature of the natural philosophers, while at the same time practical, reasoning about public things occurring on a real river leading out to a real sea.
Laelius sees what Scipio is doing. “You have begun a new plan of arguing, which is nowhere in the books of the Greeks” (II.21). “That leading man [Plato], to whom no one was superior in writing, took a piece of ground for himself on which he built up a city according to his own choice—admittedly splendid, perhaps, but inappropriate for human life and customs,” a city fit for speech only, a regime in theory never to be brought into practice (II.21). The other political philosophers, if not Aristotle then his followers, the Peripatetics, “have discussed the types and principles of cities without any certain pattern and shape of republic” (II. 22). “You seem about to do both,” crediting the great founders and lawgivers “with what you find instead of fabricating as Socrates does in Plato’s work” while nonetheless “ascrib[ing] to reason those things concerning the site of the city that Romulus established by chance or necessity” (II.22). And unlike the Peripatetics, “you argue not in a roaming speech but about one fixed republic,” Rome (II.22). This is Cicero’s distinct contribution to political philosophy, an examination of one best regime but one that exists in practice. This is why he pretends from the beginning of his discourse that philosophers merely ‘follow’ lawgivers.
Continuing this way of interpreting Roman political history as if it were a collaboration of great minds over the centuries, Scipio announces that “this new people saw what had escaped the Spartan Lycurgus,” who had made the Spartan monarchy hereditary (II.24). “Those rustics of ours”—they are ‘our own,’ and so the republic they advanced deserves the attachment the natural love of one’s own brings to it—saw that “regal virtue and wisdom, not family, ought to be sought,” saw also that the true title to rule is the natural rule of reason, not the natural rule of bodies as points along a ‘royal line’ (II.24-25). The Roman aristocrats even took their next king from the Sabines, not from themselves; they did not love their own in a foolish way. Numa Pomilius saw that Romans “were kindled with eagerness for war because of Romulus’ instruction”—not the least of which was his scheme to seize by force the Sabine maidens (II.25). “He thought they should be turned back from that habit to a slight extent,” moderated (II.25).
Numa began by dividing among the citizens the lands Romulus had seized in war, teaching them “that by cultivating the fields they could abound in all conveniences without pillaging and booty” (II.26)—the same policies American commercial republicans would attempt, albeit with mixed success, with the warlike Amerindian nations and tribes. He thus gave them the economic foundation for “a love of leisure and peace, through which justice and trust most easily grow strong, and under the protection of which the cultivation of fields and the reaping of their fruits are maximally defended” (II.26). He established new and more elaborate religious rites befitting a people so relieved of warlike temperament and further “softened through religious ceremonies the spirits that were burning with the habit of, and the desire for, making war” (II.26). He designed marketplaces, games, and celebration—peaceful occasions for bringing the people together, away from the brotherhood of military camps. In sum, Numa “restored to humanity and tameness human spirits, which were then monstrous and wild with eagerness for making war,” reigning for thirty-nine years “in utmost peace and concord” (II.27).
Scipio refutes the legend that Numa was a Pythagorean. As Manilius understands, this betokens the fact that we Romans “are accomplished not in arts that have been imported from overseas but in native, domestic virtues” (II.29), a claim Scipio the philosopher-statesman says nothing to discourage. Indeed, he adds that “many things taken from somewhere else have been done much better by us,” likely including political philosophy (II.30). Prudence, practical wisdom, prevails here, as “the Roman people has been strengthened not by chance but by deliberation and training, yet not when fortune opposes” (II.30). As with the natural cycle of regimes, so with the course of events; prudential deliberation and habituation can meet what fortune dishes out, prevent a bad circumstance from worsening and sometimes reverse things. Scipio is neither a fatalist, like a Greek tragedian, nor a Florentine playwright, like Machiavelli, who supposes he can conquer Fortuna, beat her into submission.
The next king, Tullus Hostilius, excelled at war but also set down a law requiring all wars to be declared and condemning undeclared wars “unjust and impious” (II.31). Declaration of war were to be made by the people, showing “how wisely our kings even then saw that certain things should be granted to the people” (II.31). Scipio emphasizes how Roman political history is as Cato said it was, “not the work of one time or of one man,” but a succession of additions of “good and advantageous things…made with each successive king” (II.37). But he immediately presents a massive qualification to this lesson, already suggested by his earlier warnings about the weakness of kings, their propensity to tyrannize. The last three kings were the Tarquins, each worse than the next, ending with Tarquinius “Superbus”—superb indeed in his murderous tyrannizing. “No animal more horrid, foul, or hated by gods and human beings can be thought of” than a tyrant (II.48).
“At this point,” Scipio teaches, the cycle of regimes “will now come round—the natural motion and revolution of which you must learn to recognize from the beginning” (II.45). “The source of political prudence, with which this entire speech of ours deals, is to see the paths and bends of republics so that when you first know how each thing inclines, you can hold it back or run to meet it first” (II.45). Cicero never endorses anything like modern ‘historicism’ or ‘historical determinism.’ He speaks of natural cycles, not events determined by alleged historical laws, and while these cycles cannot be mastered, they can be foreseen and sometimes redirected by statesmen. And because “the fortune of the people is fragile when it depends on the will or habits of one man,” a sound regime will last longer if more men share rule (II.50). The succession of good kings in Rome amounts to such a regime when it is considered over time as the rule not of one but of several kings.
It was a consul, Publius Valerius, not a king, who prudently fortified the regime of the few that replaced the monarchic republic by giving “moderate liberty to the people” (II.55). Publius was the one who removed the axes symbolizing absolute rule over the people from the rods of the fasces. (A later Roman, Benito Mussolini, took care to replace them.) “Therefore, in those times the senate maintained the republic in this form, so that while the people was free few things were managed by the people, more things were managed through the authority of the senate by plan and by custom, and the consuls held only annual power that was royal in its very type and in its right” (II.56). No vote of the popular assembly could become law or policy unless the senators approved it. Rome had become an aristocratic republic, but one enjoying popular consent. It is true that in “the nature of things” the people began to take “to itself a somewhat greater measure of rights”; “reason was perhaps lacking in this, but the nature of republics itself often overcomes reason” (II.57). At best, a prudent ruler or rulers may direct the people as you and I, Laelius, saw in Africa, when a man would sit on an elephant, “a monstrous, immense beast,” ruling it “by a gentle command or touch” (II.68). It is with elephants and the people as it is in the passions of the soul. “The part of the spirit that is called the mind, bridles and tames not merely one beast or one easy to subdue,” but the many fierce passions (II.68). The prudent man has “almost only one” duty: to “never cease instructing and contemplating himself, that he call others to the emulation of himself, that he show himself to his fellow citizens as a mirror through the brilliance of his spirit and life” (II.69). In this, he can help to harmonize the city “in the agreement of very dissimilar persons through reason moderated by the intermingling of the highest, lowest, and middle orders,” as with the notes in a harmonious song (II.69). This well-ordered mixed regime is “the closest and best bond of safety in every republic,” impossible to sustain without justice, the thing Socrates and his interlocutors searched for in Plato’s Republic (II.69).
Book III apparently contained a conversation on justice conducted at the outset of the second day. Unfortunately, at this point, and for most of the remainder of the six books of Cicero’s On the Republic, the text becomes too fragmentary to understand, except if approached as a series of aphorisms. (Many of the fragments were preserved precisely because subsequent writers who did have the full text in front of them extracted lines that served as concise statements of points they wanted to make in their own books.)
Philus challenges the natural law theory of justice in two ways. He first cites the variety of “law, institutions, customs, and habits” not only across the nations but “in one city, even in this very one” (III.10). Does this undeniable phenomenon not suggest that justice is merely arbitrary and conventional? “Why shouldn’t a woman have property? why should she be heir to a Vestal Virgin but not to her own mother?” (III.10). He or another critic of natural law then deploys the argument made by Glaucon in Plato’s Republic: If a good man were falsely vilified as a criminal and a vicious man held to be a paragon, and if the good man were tortured and exiled while the bad man honored and heaped with wealth, “who in the world will be so mad as to doubt which man he would prefer to be?” (III.13). More, “what goes for individuals also goes for peoples: no city is so foolish that it does not prefer unjustly commanding to serving justly” (III.13). The analogy is inexact, inasmuch as the good man with the false bad reputation wasn’t merely serving his city but being abused by it; the right way to make the argument would be to say that it is better to command unjustly than to serve unjustly, to be subject to the injustices of an unjust commander. That is, the tortured and exiled man wasn’t serving the city justly, as his fellow citizens didn’t deserve his services. Plato’s Socrates stands firm, saying that a truly just man prefers bodily torture to the ruin of his soul, given the soul’s unquestioned superiority to the body. Aristotle in effect replies to Glaucon’s argument by citing the mitigating force of circumstances. A Christian would agree; Jesus’ torture and death on the Cross were not just but the supreme act of grace.
Scipio apparently prefers a different counterargument. A city ruled unjustly no longer deserves the name, ‘city.’ “Who would call that ‘a “thing” of a people” (that is, a republic) “at the moment when all together were oppressed by cruelty of one man, and there was neither the single bond of right nor the agreement and fellowship of an assemblage, which is a people?” (III.35). For example, Syracuse, “the greatest of the Greeks’ cities and the most beautiful of all” was no genuine republic when Dionysius ruled it (III.35). “Where there is a tyrant, there is not a defective republic…but, as reason now compels, it must be said that there is no republic at all” (III.35). This is true not only of place ruled by a tyrant but one ruled by any faction. It is no longer a political community, a public thing at all, but a thing ruled for the private interests of the one, the few, or the many. It has abandoned its status as a civitas. It no longer features ruling and being ruled, reciprocally; it is no longer a political thing.
In the second half of the dialogue’s second day, Scipio appears to be holding the conventions Philus had cited to the bar of the natural law as it concerns cities. He criticizes several Greek customs: the gymnastic training of youth encourages homosexual behavior; in Sparta, the custom of thievery is wrong and so is the custom of putting prefects in charge of women instead of husbands. Even Plato deserves censure, as he “orders everything to be in common, so that no citizen can say of anything that is special to him or his own” (IV.18). That is, yes, customs do vary from city to city and even in the same city, over time, but the natural law provides the standard for judging them because the natural law begins with a definition of human nature and, by logical deduction, the republics consistent with that nature. Like Socrates, Scipio doesn’t hesitate to censure “wicked, popular men in the republic who were seditious”—demagogues—along with scurrilous poets who defame decent citizens (IV.20b). “We ought to have life set up by the judgments of magistrates and legal rulings, not by the talents of poets, nor ought we listen to a reproach except from a law that one is allowed to respond to and to defend oneself against in a court of law” (IV.20c).
Like Socrates, Cicero would not ban all poets from the city. He prefaces Book V with a quote from the poet Ennius: “The Roman Republic stands upon ancient customs and men” (V.1). There is reason, and thus natural law, in this. “Neither men, unless the city had been so accustomed, nor customs, unless such men had been in charge, could have either founded or held for so long such a commanding republic and one so widely extended” (V.1). The problem with “our generation” of Romans is that, having “received the republic just like an extraordinary picture, but one already fading in the passage of time, not only did we neglect to renew it in the same colors in which it had existed, but we did not even take care of it so as to preserve at least its shape and, so to speak, its outlines” (V.1). Today, the customs are unknown, having “perished for lack of men” (V.1). This has nothing to do with chance, everything to do with “our own vices” (V.1). In the dialogue, now in its third and final day, Scipio reaffirms the natural justice of a city-sustaining custom of ancient Greece, brought to Rome by Numa: “no private man was an umpire or arbitrator of a lawsuit, but everything was accomplished by royal judgments” in the king’s court (V.3). “The long-lasting peace of Numa was the mother of law [ius] and religion in this city,” and peace could last because Numa had written such laws (V.3). Cicero has Scipio recur to his teaching about the priority of lawgivers to philosophers who explicate and statesmen who carry out conventional laws founded upon the natural law, laws shown to be natural by their endurance over time.
This passage provides a gateway to the second half of the dialogue’s last day. The lawgiver is the “guide” of the city, a man of “complete prudence,” the virtue animated by foresight (VI.1). The duty of the citizen is to follow the founding laws, “prepar[ing] himself so that he is always armed against things that upset the form of the city,” that is, its regime (VI.2). By contrast, sedition breaks the citizens apart, spoiling that form. Sedition acts in the city as lusts act in the soul. “Lusts are grave mistresses over thoughts,” “compel[ling] and command[ing] innumerable things” without limit and therefore without form (VI.5). Because lusts “cannot in any way be satisfied or satiated, they impel to every crime those whom they have kindled with their enticements” (VI.5). They render souls, and seditions render cities, formless—one no longer human, the other no longer public things. Nature sets down those limits or laws; lusts and seditions violate nature, ruining human beings and their republics.
Lawgivers or guides who are themselves guided by the natural law desire and deserve “not statues anchored in lead or triumphs with withering laurel leaves, but some more stable and more robust kinds of rewards” (VI.12). This impels Scipio to end this conversation in the same way as Plato’s Socrates did in his Republic, with a story upholding the immortality of the soul. In Socrates’ story, a man named Er dies in battle but returns to life with a report of the afterlife, in which just and unjust souls alike find their proper rewards, choosing their next life in accordance with the way they lived their most recent one. Scipio puts a similar lesson in terms of his own prophetic dream he experienced while in Africa, a dialogue within the dialogue in which he conversed with Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, victor over Hannibal at Zama in the Second Punic War. This first Scipio Africanus served as a priest of Mars and was renowned for his ability to foresee, which some take to be prophetic, others a matter of natural foresight or prudence—a ‘divine’ capacity in one or another sense of the word.
The first Africanus predicts the victory of the second: “you will finish a very great war” (VI.15). You will also return to a Roman republic in turmoil, threatened by exactly the sort of factional misrule that would end Rome as a true republic, the threatened rule of Africanus’ grandson, the populist Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. “Here, Africanus [as that will be the younger man’s title, by then], it will be proper for you to show to your fatherland the light of your mind, talent, and judgment” (VI.16). This you will do, as “the one man with whom the safety of the city rests,” the man who can rightly serve as dictator “to set the republic on firm footing” (VI.16). But only “if you escape the impious hands of your relatives,” the brothers Gracchi (VI.16). Your age, 56, consists of the number eight multiplied by the number seven. In Pythagorean terms, each of those numbers “is held to be complete for different reasons” (VI.16): eight is an auspicious number, seven a number denoting completion, an end. You may reach an auspicious end if you “recognize this: For all those who have preserved, assisted, increased their homeland, there is a certain place marked out in heaven where happy persons enjoy everlasting life. That is to say, nothing that happens on Earth is more welcome to the leading god, who rules the whole universe, than the assemblies and assemblages of human beings united in right, which are called cities.” (VI.17). That is, God loves ‘the political.’
“At this point,” Scipio tells his listeners, “I was thoroughly frightened not so much by fear of death as by fear of a plot by my own relatives” (VI.18); sedition within his family, sedition that threatened the Roman republic, concerned him more than his own demise. The death of a person ends the life of an individual, but the destruction of a family or of a republic ends a thing of lasting honor. What of my natural family, my father? Is he here with you, Africanus?
Yes, your relatives, including your father, still live, having “sprung out of the chains of their bodies as if out of prison. What is called life among you is truly death. Don’t you observe your father Paullus coming toward you?” (VI.18). After their tearful reunion, Scipio Aemilianus asks Paullus, if death is the portal to such a blessed life, why continue to live on earth, with its murderous betrayals and ruinous factions?
Paullus replies, “Until the god, whose sacred zone is everything you have sight of, frees you from the wardens of your body, the entrance to this place cannot be open to you” (VI.19). Under this law, which is the law of nature, the task of human beings is to “protect the globe you see in the middle of this sacred zone, which is called Earth” (VI.19). Given this “human task,” you must remain within your body to protect your family and, even more important, “your fatherland” (VI.20). Therefore, “you must not depart from human life without the order of him by whom your soul has been given to you, so that you will not seem to flee” that god-given, nature-given task (VI.19). Only if you take up that task, “cultivat[ing] justice and piety,” will you walk the “way to heaven and to this assemblage of those who have already lived” (VI.20). Yes, the majesty of the cosmic regime far surpasses that of the Roman Empire, but your duty is to fulfill your task as a father and as a citizen, first.
Scipio not only sees the eight cosmic spheres, the ever-circling domains of the stars and planets, above the immobile ninth sphere, Earth, but he also hears the music of the eight mobile spheres, which consists of seven sounds, as two of them emit he same sound. Eight and seven, again: the cosmic harmony parallels Scipio’s age at this moment.
The lesson taken from this cosmic view is simple to state, hard to enact. Earth is small, compared to the cosmos as a whole, but it is part of that cosmos. Human ambitions, even in the great Roman Empire, are also small. “What renown can you attain from the conversation of human beings, or what glory can you attain that should be desired?” (VI.24). Fame on Earth is limited in both in both its territorial and temporal extent. “Therefore, if you wish to look on high and consider attentively this seat and eternal home, if you will not give yourself to the conversations of the crowd nor put hope in human rewards for your deeds, virtue itself may properly draw you to true honor through its own enticements” (VI.29). To put human esteem in its rightful place is not to denigrate politics but to understand political life not as a field of vaunting ambition but as a just duty, here and now. Natural philosophers, along with Epicurean and Stoic moralizers, attempt to jump up to Heaven too soon, failing to recognize the place of Earth’s regimes within the cosmic regime, and failing to recognize the place of the regime of Earth within the cosmic regime. Neither ambition nor suicide can be just, given the natural law.
Scipio takes the lesson. “Truly, Africanus, if a lane, so to speak, opens an entrance to the heaven for those who have deserved well of their fatherland, although I have walked in your tracks and those of my father from boyhood and have not lacked your glory, nevertheless, ow that such a reward has been explained, I will exert myself much more vigilantly” (VI.30). Political virtue yields heavenly reward, being consonant with the regime of the cosmos.
Africanus approves. “The mind of each person is each person” (VI.30). In that sense, “you are a god,” inasmuch as the supreme god moves the cosmos even as your mind moves the other parts of your soul and, through them, your body (VI.30). The supreme god is the unmoved mover whose existence Aristotle deduced. Let your mind, your reason, be your unmoved mover. “This is the special nature of the soul” (VI.32). “You should employ it in the best matters! And the best cares are for the safety of the fatherland” (VI.33).
Cicero defends politics by putting it in its place, between the unthinking ambition of tyrants and demagogues, those who believe that ‘everything is political’ on earth, and the unthinking ‘intellectualism’ of many philosophers, who believe that what happens on earth, including politics, is trivial, no concern of an intelligent person. There is a larger, indeed comprehensive order or regime, the regime of nature and its law. In that regime, human politics has its rightful, lawfully delimited place.
Notes
- The translator helpfully indicates that the Latin mos denotes both manners and morals, rather in the way, more familiar to ‘we moderns’ and readers of Montesquieu and Tocqueville, of the French moeurs.
- ‘Our’ Scipio is Scipio Aemilianus Africanus, who crushed Carthage once and for all in the Third Punic War. His father was Aemilianus Paullus, but his adopted father was Cornelius Scipio, son of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus; he thus converses with his grandfather-by-adoption as a fellow-victor in a war against Carthage.
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