Marcus Tullius Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero

For most of two thousand years, when a European reached for the words to think a philosophical thought, the words were Cicero's. Quality, essence, definition, reason, virtue, duty, moral, the very phrase common sense: the Latin vocabulary in which the whole Western tradition would carry on its reasoning for fifteen centuries was, to a startling degree, coined or fixed by one man, in his spare time, while he was locked out of the politics he loved. Cicero is usually filed as a great orator and a transmitter of other people's ideas, as though he were a translator and little more. But to build a language capable of holding philosophy is not translation; it is deciding what a civilization will be able to think, and in what terms. The Greeks invented philosophy. Cicero, very nearly single-handed, taught Latin to speak it, and for that the West has never stopped being in his debt, whether or not it remembers the loan.

The eighteen months. The astonishing part is how fast it happened. For most of his life Cicero was Rome's greatest courtroom orator and a leading politician, a self-made "new man" who had argued his way to the consulship without an aristocratic name to open the doors. Then the Republic he had spent his life defending collapsed into one man's dictatorship, and Cicero, shut out of power and sick with private grief, did the one thing still left to him: he sat down and, in a single concentrated burst of roughly a year and a half, wrote nearly the entire body of Latin philosophy. The dialogues on the gods, on the ends of human life, on knowledge, on duties, on friendship, on growing old, the five books of the Tusculan disputations, came pouring out one after another. It is among the most concentrated feats of writing in any language, and he managed it not as a scholar in a quiet library but as a wrecked statesman trying to salvage something permanent from the ruin of his public life.

Both sides of everything. Cicero called himself an Academic, an heir of the skeptical turn that Plato's old school had taken, and the label shaped everything he wrote. He did not believe certain knowledge was available to human beings, and he distrusted the dogmatists, Stoic and Epicurean alike, who insisted it was. So his characteristic method is not to hand you a doctrine but to stage a fair fight. In dialogue after dialogue he sets the Epicurean and the Stoic and the Academic each to argue his strongest case, gives every position its ablest advocate, and then often declines to announce a winner, leaving you to weigh the arguments and act on whichever proves most persuasive while keeping your mind open to changing it. This looks like evasion and is in fact a discipline, and a rare one. Cicero is exactly where later ages went to learn what each school of Hellenistic philosophy really held, precisely because he refused to let his own preference flatten the rest. And the method he modeled is as useful at a meeting today as it was in the Forum: put the view you oppose in its own strongest words before you decide; act on the most probable; and never mistake your conviction for certainty.

Duty, and the four virtues. His most-read book for a millennium and a half was De Officiis, On Duties, written as a long letter to his student son. Its frame is the four virtues he took from the Stoics, who had taken them from Plato, wisdom, justice, courage, and self-control, and which, through this one Latin text, became the "cardinal virtues" on which Ambrose and Augustine and Aquinas built Christian ethics and which the whole later European moral tradition simply assumed. Its deepest claim is one we have largely stopped believing and might do well to reconsider: that the honorable and the expedient never truly conflict, that what is genuinely good for you and what is right will always, in the end, turn out to be the same thing, and that whenever they appear to diverge you have miscounted the advantage. Voltaire, of all people, called it the best book on morality ever written by anyone, on any subject, anywhere. Coming from Voltaire, about a Roman politician, the verdict is worth sitting with.

True law is right reason. One Ciceronian idea outran all the others. In a surviving fragment of his book on the Republic he set down the doctrine of natural law in a sentence that has echoed for two thousand years: true law, he wrote, is right reason in agreement with nature, universal, unchanging, and everlasting. There is, he argued, a standard of justice that no senate and no king invents but that reason discovers, the same in Rome as in Athens, binding on every human being because it follows from the kind of thing a rational creature is, and any decree that violates it does not deserve the name of law. The line runs straight from here: through Aquinas's natural law, through Grotius and Locke and the whole tradition of natural rights, into the Declaration of Independence and the modern idea of human rights. When people now appeal to a justice higher than the statutes of any single state, to a right that a government may trample but cannot repeal, they are speaking, whether they know it or not, in Cicero's voice.

Friendship and old age. The room reads Cicero in the old public-domain translations, cited by Latin work and section; several of the major dialogues, the chat will tell you, are not yet in the corpus and are discussed from the wider record. Two of his shortest works are the most loved. The dialogue on friendship argues that the genuine article is a bond between equals built on shared goodness rather than on usefulness or pleasure; the dialogue on old age defends the later years as a season with goods of their own, the active life giving way to the reflective. People have read both without a break for two thousand years, and they show the side of Cicero that the caricature of the vain politician misses entirely: a man who thought hard and warmly about how to be a good friend and how to grow old well, and who wrote about each with a gentleness the rest of his combative career rarely left room for.

Everything downstream ran through him. The young Augustine picked up a now-lost dialogue of Cicero's called the Hortensius and was so set alight by it that he turned his whole life toward philosophy; without that book there might be no Confessions. Petrarch, stumbling on a forgotten cache of Cicero's letters in a cathedral library in 1345, helped strike the spark of the Renaissance; Erasmus and the humanists made his prose the model of how educated Europe ought to write; the American founders copied him out by the page. For most of Western history, to be educated simply was, in large part, to have read Cicero, and to think in Latin was to think in words that he had made. He doubted that anyone could be certain of the truth, and he may well have been right. But he was sure of one thing worth being sure of: that a civilization needs the words to argue well, the patience to hear the other side all the way out, and a justice it must answer to above its own laws. He built the words, modeled the patience, and named the justice, and the West has been living inside that achievement ever since.