Cicero (42 page)

Caesar spent the morning alone till one o'clock, apparently working on accounts with Balbus. Then he went for a walk on the beach and took a bath an hour later. Some bad news about his Prefect of Engineers was brought in, but the expression on Caesar's face did not change. Once his skin had been oiled at the end of his bath (as was the custom), he took his place at Cicero's dinner table. The occasion throws an attractive light on Caesar's personality; although, or possibly because, he was encumbered by the cares and paraphernalia of state, he wanted a short break from work, relaxing in good company and engaging in agreeable conversation. Cicero reluctantly conceded that he too had had a pleasant time.
“It really was a fine, elegantly served meal,” he reported to Atticus.

The year was ending on a modestly contented note. Not only was Cicero's relationship with Caesar ostensibly in good repair, but harmony of a
sort was breaking out on the domestic front. Some days after the Dictator's visit, young Quintus paid his uncle a visit. He intended to accompany Caesar on the Parthian expedition and wanted to mend some bridges.

Cicero noted the conversation for Atticus.

“Why do you have to go?” Cicero asked.

“Debt—I haven't even enough to pay my traveling expenses.”

Cicero, discreet for once, held his tongue.

“What upsets me most is my uncle, Atticus.”

“Why do you let him be annoyed—I prefer to say ‘let' rather than ‘make'?”

“I won't anymore. I'll get rid of the reason.”

“Excellent. But if you don't mind my asking, I would be interested to know what the reason is.”

“It's because I couldn't make up my mind whom to marry. My mother was cross with me, and so as a result was he. Now I don't care what I do to put things right. I'll do what they want.”

“Well, good luck, and congratulations on your decision.”

It seemed that the difficult, hostile teenager was beginning to settle down into an ordinary Roman young-man-about-town with debts, who realized that it would be in his interest to be on good terms again with his disappointed family. Whether or not Quintus acted as he said he would is unknown, but there is no subsequent reference to a wife in the fragmentary surviving documentation. One thing is certain, though: he did not accompany the legions to Parthia, for the expedition never took place. He must have found some alternative solution to the problem of his debts.

By now, Cicero had become less volatile than he had been in the past. He met the challenges and misfortunes that faced him with determination. In politics he made up his mind about the regime with fewer of his usual doubts and nervous questionings. Criticism did not bother him as much as it had once. He still reacted passionately to events and was no less self-absorbed, but he had learned to control himself. Family estrangements troubled him and he had nearly been broken by Tullia's death, but he had struggled with all his might to regain his emotional balance. Tempered by the fire, he seemed to have acquired a new, steely resolve.

Thoughts on the Nature of Things: 46–44
BC

O
ne explanation for Cicero's new maturity lay in his phenomenal productivity as a writer. In 46, at the age of sixty, he started work on a succession of books which, taken together, represent one of Rome's most valuable legacies to posterity. At their core is a summary of the philosophical issues that had concerned thinkers and moralists from Plato to Cicero's own day. He made no claim to originality. “I only supply the words, and I have plenty of those.” However, he was a popularizer of genius. With the disappearance of the Greek language in Europe during the Dark and Middle Ages, Cicero's compendium of classical thought had a huge influence on the continuing development of western philosophy.

Politics and war were the chief but not the only means by which a Roman could achieve status. Others were scholarship and literature. Leading figures such as Cicero's friend the jurist Sulpicius could maintain their prestige by achieving an unrivaled knowledge of the law. Antiquarian expertise was necessary in a polity that was heavily dependent on the interpretation of tradition; thus Atticus, who eschewed the hurly-burly of the Forum, was able to make a name for himself by writing the
Annals
(
Liber Annalis
), an authoritative chronology of Rome back to its foundation. The religious apparatus of priestly colleges demanded detailed knowledge
of the forms and procedures of ceremony and divination and it was necessary for some members of the elite to acquire it.

Cicero had already found poetry (when he was a young man), philosophy and research into the art of public speaking to be useful supports to his status as a public figure. A decade previously he had been able to pick up the threads of his political career after the end of his exile, but now advancing years and Caesar's autocracy seemed to him to mean that this time there could be no recovery.

So he set about reasserting his reputation as an author. Despite all his other preoccupations, he wrote “from morning to night” (as he told Atticus), producing a flood of books and essays during the next three years. Looking back near the end of his life, he observed: “I have written more in this short time since the collapse of the Republic than I did throughout the many years while the Republic stood.”
He hoped his books would be of use to the young but noticed that it was the older generation which took most comfort from them. He knew that his motives for writing were as much for his personal as for the public good. “I cannot easily say how useful I shall be to others: in any case, for my terrible sorrows and all the various troubles that assail me on every side no other consolation could be found.”

Atticus advised his friend to concentrate on historical subjects, but Cicero disagreed. A
S
he saw it, the first priority was to protect his name as an orator, which was now under some threat. A
S
early as the mid-50s members of the Catullan/Clodian counterculture had begun to react against the elaborate and ample manner of public speaking which Cicero and, even more so, his onetime rival Hortensius represented. A leading spokesman of this point of view was Catullus's closest friend, Caius Licinius Calvus. What he called the “Attic” tendency or school of oratory stressed grammatical correctness, simplicity of expression and restraint against the “Bacchic frenzy” of a speaker like Hortensius when he was in full flight. Cicero's young friend Caelius had probably been another Atticist.

Cicero felt that the time had come to rebut this fashion, partly because it contradicted his own views on oratory but also because he feared that if it got out of hand it would supersede his own achievements. In early 46 he wrote
Brutus
, a dialogue in which the speakers were Atticus, Brutus (who was an Atticist and to whom the book is dedicated) and himself. It was a history of Latin oratory with brief but telling critiques of Rome's leading
speakers, including an account of his own training and early career. It aimed to be evenhanded and, for example, was highly complimentary of Caesar's stylistic purity; referring to his histories of the Gallic campaigns and the civil war, Cicero compared them “to nude figures, straight and beautiful; stripped of all ornament of style as if they had stepped out of their clothes.”
However, he made it clear that, by definition, public speakers had to attract the interest of the public. Here the Atticists failed because, however correct their Latin, they bored the listener. In the law courts “they are deserted not only by the crowds of bystanders, which is humiliating enough, but by their client's witnesses and legal advisers.”
Brutus
was followed later in the year by the
Orator
, which took the form of a letter to Brutus. It is a technical work and is concerned with the minutiae of rhetorical theory; the focus is on diction and style, for Cicero was aiming his fire once more at the Attic style of oratory.

During the summer of 46 Cicero's mind turned to questions of philosophy. After producing a squib on the Stoic ethical system,
Stoic Paradoxes
(
Paradoxa stoicorum
), Cicero committed himself to a much more ambitious enterprise. This was nothing more nor less than an attempt to give a comprehensive account of Greek philosophy in the Latin language. For one hundred years or so there had been numerous references to Greek philosophers and their doctrines in Roman literature, but there had been few serious books on philosophical themes. Such as there were mainly concerned Epicureanism, a way of life directed at worldly happiness and associated with a materialistic explanation of reality. Cicero deeply disapproved, although he acknowledged that it had given rise to one of the masterpieces of Latin poetry, the epic
On the Nature of the Universe
(
De rerum natura
) by Titus Lucretius Carus, a younger contemporary.

In 44 when the series of books was largely complete, he set out a prospectus of what he felt he had achieved.

Cicero is explicit that this corpus was an alternative to the public life from which he was barred. In
Foretelling the Future
, he wrote: “it was through my books that I was addressing the Senate and the people. I took the view that philosophy was a substitute for political activity.”
He had always believed that philosophy was an essential ingredient of a training in the art of public speaking and the collapse of the Republic was evidence of the failure by statesmen to apply moral values to their conduct. To develop this long-standing theme was the last gift he could make to his country.

The purpose of the
Hortensius
, to judge from its surviving fragments, was to establish the uses of philosophy. It was cast as a debate set in the late 60s and the speakers were four leading personalities of the day, including Hortensius and Cicero himself. It contained defenses of poetry, history and oratory. Hortensius attacked the inadequacies of many philosophers and launched a vigorous onslaught on aspects of Epicureanism. Cicero responded with a powerful apologia for philosophy. The seeker after truth traveled hopefully, he said, but would never arrive. Cicero retained the skepticism about the possibility of knowledge that he acquired during his first visit to Athens. He closed with a hint of reincarnation, borrowed from the current revival of interest in the mystical ideas of the Greek sage Pythagoras. The purer a man's soul, the greater the possibility that it would escape the impending cycle of future lives.

The
Academic Treatises
(
Academica
) were started in autumn 46 and
Cicero was still working on them the following summer. They were an epistemological inquiry which examined in greater detail than the
Hortensius
different theories of knowledge. According to Pliny, writing in the following century, the dialogue was composed in Cicero's villa at Puteoli. The setting and characters were originally the same as in the
Hortensius
, but once the book was finished its author worried that “the matter did not fit the persons, who could not be supposed ever to have dreamed of such abstrusities.”
The problem was solved when he learned that his new friend Varro wanted a part in one of his dialogues, although he was not altogether sure he would take kindly to representing ideas that Cicero would go on to refute. So the work was brought up to the present day and he and Atticus were added as the other speakers. Only one volume of the first version survives (now called
Lucullus
), along with a fragment of the second.

The
Academic Treatises
gave an extended account of the evolution of the doctrines of the Academy, the school of philosophy founded by Plato and developed over the centuries by his successors. What was called the New Academy flourished in Cicero's time. In the second century
BC
, its leading figure, Carneades, adopted a skeptical position, which emphasized probability as against certainty. Cicero gave himself the task of defending this point of view.