The Roman statesman, orator, and philosopher who naturalized Greek philosophy into Latin, fixed the vocabulary that Western thought would use to discuss ethics and politics, and transmitted Hellenistic philosophical schools to every century that followed.
cicero
Roman statesman and orator (106–43 BCE) whose philosophical dialogues — De Officiis, De Finibus, De Natura Deorum, Tusculan Disputations — created a Latin philosophical vocabulary, preserved the systems of Hellenistic schools otherwise lost, and shaped every subsequent Western reception of Greek thought.
Life
Marcus Tullius Cicero was born on 3 January 106 BCE in Arpinum, a hill town some seventy miles southeast of Rome. His family belonged to the equestrian order — wealthy by provincial standards, but lacking the senatorial pedigree that ordinarily opened the path to high office in Rome. His father, recognizing the boys' promise, moved the family to Rome and arranged training under the leading legal, rhetorical, and philosophical teachers of the day.
Cicero studied under the orator Lucius Licinius Crassus, the augur Quintus Mucius Scaevola, and the philosophers Philo of Larissa (who brought Academic Skepticism to Rome after fleeing Athens in 88 BCE) and Diodotus the Stoic. He spent the years 79–77 BCE in Greece and Asia Minor, training in rhetoric at Rhodes under Apollonius Molon and in philosophy at Athens with Antiochus of Ascalon and the Epicurean Phaedrus.
The political career came first. Cicero rose through the cursus honorum without family connections — quaestor in 75, aedile in 69, praetor in 66, consul in 63 BCE, the first new man (novus homo) elected consul in thirty years. His consulship was dominated by the suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy, an episode he subsequently used as a touchstone for his self-presentation as savior of the Republic. He was exiled in 58 BCE under pressure from Publius Clodius Pulcher, recalled in 57, governed Cilicia from 51 to 50, and supported Pompey in the civil war against Caesar. After Pompey's defeat at Pharsalus in 48, Caesar pardoned Cicero, who withdrew from political life to his estates.
The years 46–43 BCE were the period of the philosophical works. Caesar's dictatorship and the death of Cicero's beloved daughter Tullia in February 45 BCE drove him to systematic philosophical writing as both consolation and as a project to give Rome a literature in Latin equal to Greek philosophy. After Caesar's assassination in March 44 BCE, Cicero re-entered politics with the Philippics — fourteen orations against Mark Antony modeled on Demosthenes's speeches against Philip of Macedon. When Antony joined with Octavian and Lepidus in the Second Triumvirate, Cicero's name appeared on the proscription list. He was overtaken in flight near Formiae on 7 December 43 BCE and killed. His head and hands were nailed to the rostra in the Forum, where, according to Cassius Dio, Antony's wife Fulvia pierced his tongue with a hairpin.
The Philosophical Project
With the exception of the De Inventione and De Oratore — rhetorical works of the 80s and 50s BCE — Cicero's philosophical output dates almost entirely to the twenty months of forced withdrawal from politics following Caesar's victory. He stated the project explicitly in De Finibus I.1–6, De Natura Deorum I.7–8, and the preface to the second book of De Divinatione: to make Greek philosophy available in Latin to a Roman audience that had previously had to read in Greek or do without.
The project was not merely translation. Cicero invented Latin philosophical vocabulary — qualitas for the Greek poiotēs, moralis for ēthikos, essentia, evidentia, humanitas, officium for kathēkon, honestum for kalon. Many of these terms passed through Latin into every European philosophical language. Where Greek had a word for which Latin had none, Cicero coined; where Latin had a word with the right resonance, he repurposed. Pierre Hadot in Philosophy as a Way of Life and Alain Michel in Les rapports de la rhétorique et de la philosophie dans l'œuvre de Cicéron (Paris, 1960) trace the vocabulary's formation in detail.
The philosophical position Cicero adopts is the Academic Skepticism of Philo of Larissa, which he preferred to the dogmatic systems of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Peripatetics. The Academic, lacking certainty, suspends judgment but follows whichever view appears most probable (probabile). In ethics this generally led Cicero close to Stoic positions — virtue is the highest good, all virtues are connected, the wise man is sufficient for his own happiness — while preserving the right to argue both sides of any question. The method is on full display in the dialogues, where each major school is given its strongest spokesman and Cicero himself often plays the dialectical critic.
The Major Dialogues
De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (45 BCE)
The five-book On Ends surveys the three principal Hellenistic ethical positions: Epicurean hedonism (Books I–II, presented by L. Manlius Torquatus and answered by Cicero), Stoic ethics (Books III–IV, presented by Cato the Younger and answered by Cicero), and the Antiochean version of the Old Academy (Book V, presented by Marcus Piso). The work preserves the systematic Hellenistic ethical theories more completely than any surviving Greek source.
Tusculan Disputations (45 BCE)
Five dialogues set at Cicero's Tusculan villa addressing five themes: the fear of death, the endurance of pain, the alleviation of distress, the analysis of the passions, and whether virtue suffices for happiness. The work is Cicero's most personal philosophical writing, composed in the months after Tullia's death, and the closest he came to a manual of consolation in the Stoic mode.
De Natura Deorum (45 BCE)
Three books on the philosophy of religion: the Epicurean theology (Book I, presented by C. Velleius), the Stoic (Book II, by Q. Lucilius Balbus), and the Academic skeptical critique of both (Book III, by C. Aurelius Cotta). The dialogue ends without resolution — characteristically Academic — though Cicero notes in his own voice that the Stoic position seemed to him more probable.
De Officiis (44 BCE)
The three-book On Duties, addressed to Cicero's son Marcus then studying philosophy in Athens, treats the obligations of public and private life. The framework is Stoic, drawn from the lost work Peri Kathēkontos of Panaetius of Rhodes (d. c. 109 BCE); Cicero adapts Panaetius's framework to the situation of the Roman aristocrat. The De Officiis became the most read of Cicero's works in the post-classical and modern periods — the second book printed in Europe after Gutenberg's Bible, taught in schools through the nineteenth century, cited by Adam Smith, Kant, and Hume.
Other Philosophical Works
The Academica, surviving only in fragments and partial revisions, treats the Academic skeptical epistemology. De Divinatione and De Fato address divination and determinism in dialogue form. De Senectute and De Amicitia — short essays on old age and friendship — became Latin school texts for two millennia. De Legibus and the surviving fragments of De Re Publica — including the Somnium Scipionis (Dream of Scipio), preserved by Macrobius's later commentary — adapt the Platonic political dialogue to Roman material.
The Letters
The survival of approximately 900 of Cicero's letters — to his friend Atticus, to his brother Quintus, and to a range of political and intellectual correspondents — preserves a window into late Republican Rome found for no other ancient figure. The letters were first collected and published by Cicero's secretary Tiro after his death. The corpus is the most direct ancient source on the politics, intellectual networks, and daily life of educated Romans of the period. Shackleton Bailey's Loeb edition (six volumes, 1999–2002) replaces the earlier Tyrrell and Purser edition as the standard scholarly text.
Reception
Cicero's posthumous influence is, by any reasonable measure, the most extensive of any Latin author. Augustine recounts in Confessions III.4 that reading Cicero's lost Hortensius at age nineteen turned him toward philosophy and ultimately toward Christianity. The medieval Latin tradition kept the De Officiis, Tusculans, De Senectute, and De Amicitia as standard school texts; the rhetorical works defined medieval Latin prose style.
The rediscovery of Cicero's letters by Petrarch in the Verona cathedral library in 1345 has been called the symbolic beginning of Renaissance humanism. The humanists — Petrarch, Salutati, Bruni, Erasmus — modeled their Latin on Cicero's; the De Officiis, in printings by the hundred, taught the political ethics of an educated public throughout the early modern centuries. Kant's ethics, particularly in the Doctrine of Virtue, develops in conscious dialogue with the Ciceronian-Stoic framework of the De Officiis. The American founders — Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton — were saturated in Cicero, whose De Re Publica and De Legibus helped shape their conception of republican government.
In modern scholarship, Cicero's standing as a philosophical thinker has recovered after a long nineteenth-century period in which he was treated as a mere transmitter of Greek thought. Malcolm Schofield, Julia Annas, Andrew Erskine, J. G. F. Powell, and Walter Nicgorski have made the case for Cicero as a serious philosopher in his own right — one whose Academic skepticism, integration of philosophical reflection with political action, and commitment to making philosophy publicly available in the language of his community deserve renewed attention.
Significance
Cicero's significance lies first in transmission. Without him, the systematic content of Hellenistic philosophy — particularly Stoic and Epicurean ethics — would be known only fragmentarily; the Stoic ethical system as taught by Panaetius would be largely lost. Second, he created the Latin philosophical vocabulary that every European language has inherited. Third, the integration of philosophical commitment with civic life that the dialogues exemplify — and that the Philippics and the final flight to Formiae enacted — became the model of philosophically informed citizenship from Petrarch through Jefferson to the present.
The Loeb Classical Library volumes covering the philosophical works are the most accessible English-Latin parallel texts; Cambridge University Press's Cicero on the Emotions (Margaret Graver, 2002), Cicero: On Moral Ends (Julia Annas and Raphael Woolf, 2001), and Cicero: On Duties (M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins, 1991) are the standard modern translations.